Starcrossed

stomach down, on a lumpy raft, and her lips twitched in the faintest of grateful smiles. Something had broken her fall and was gently supporting her. She concentrated on that bit of good fortune as she divided her pain up into manageable little bits, one heartbeat at a time. After ten heartbeats she counted to twenty. At twenty she asked herself to get to forty, and so on. She heard another steady rhythm under her, and after a short time her heart was in sync with the sound coming from her life raft. They beat together, each encouraging the other. She kept very, very still.
    After what seemed like hours Helen was still immobile, but she could finally open her eyes and focus them. All she could see in the sweeping, blinding flashes sent out from some distant lighthouse were walls of sand. Under her right cheek was a warm T-shirt. After a few moments she realized there was a person in it. She was lying on top of a man. The lumpiness under her head was his chest and the bobbing sensation was him breathing. She gasped. The Delos boys had caught her.
    “Helen?” Lucas asked, his voice faint and breathy. “Make sound. If alive,” he barely managed to say. He didn’t sound like he was going to kill her so she answered.
    “Alive. Can’t move,” she whispered back. Every syllable sent threads of pain radiating out from her diaphragm.
    “Wait. Listen to waves. Calm,” he said, struggling with every word as her body weight tried to press the air out of him.
    Helen knew she couldn’t so much as raise her arm, so she relaxed like he told her to and just watched as the world swayed up and then back down with every breath he took. They waited in the intermittent light and dark of the lighthouse signal, listening to the surf fizzing in the sand.
    As the agony began to lessen into something semiendurable, Helen was able to notice more things about her body. From what she could see, her outward shape seemed mostly normal, but her insides felt gooey and soft, as if she were a freshly microwaved chocolate chip cookie. Her bones were barely supporting the muscles and tissue they were supposed to, and there was an itchy heat in her marrow. She recognized that sensation as being similar to the one she’d experienced once when she was learning to ride a scooter and accidentally flipped the thing. Some part of her knew at the time that she had broken her arm, but by the time she got it X-rayed it was as good as new. The itch meant she was healing.
    Somehow, she had fallen out of the sky and survived. She really was a monster. A freak. Maybe even a witch. She started to cry.
    “Don’t be scared,” Lucas managed to say in one try. “Pain will pass.”
    “Should be dead,” she whined quietly through her liquefied jaw. “What’s wrong with me?”
    “No. Not wrong. You’re one of us,” he said with a slightly stronger voice. He was healing just as fast as Helen was.
    “And what’s that?”
    “We call ourselves Scions,” he said.
    “Offspring?” Helen mumbled, remembering the definition from one of Hergie’s despised Word of the Day assignments. “Offspring of what?”
    Lucas answered her. Helen heard him, but she didn’t. The word demigod was so far from what she was expecting to hear she had to think about it for a second. She had prepared herself for it to be something horrific, possibly even evil, which made her the way she was.
    “Huh?” she blurted out stupidly, so confused she had stopped crying. Her view jiggled, and Helen realized that Lucas was laughing.
    “Ouch. Don’t make me. Laugh,” he said even though his chest kept bouncing up and down.
    It felt funny to have her head bobbing around like that so she started laughing, regretted it, but couldn’t seem to stop. It was almost as if the pain was so awful she had to laugh it off.
    “This really hurts,” he said as he started to get hold of himself.
    “If you stop, I’ll stop,” she said, her fit winding down as well.
    In between recurring snickers, they went back to quietly managing their pain and waiting for their bodies to knit themselves back together. Despite the pain, the time ticked by soothingly. Out of one ear, Helen could hear the steady thump of Lucas’s heart, and out of the other she could hear seagulls. Dawn was on its way, and she felt completely safe for the first time in weeks.
    “Why don’t I hate you anymore?” she asked when she felt like her head bones were solid enough to enunciate properly.
    “I was just wondering the