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Nine days.
She was flying through hot, damp air, plummeting from the dingy underground of mortal earth to somewhere even lower, somewhere even worse. There was no way to how long they had been falling, but somewhere in the back of her mind, she remembered a Greek poet—his name, she couldn't even pretend to remember—who had speculated that it would take nine days to fall from earth to Tartarus.
"Speculated," because it had never been done before.
Theo didn't know if she and Percy were disproving or solidifying this poet's nine-days theory, because she had no idea how long they'd been falling for. Hours? A day? It felt like an eternity. Somewhere far from where she was, she felt the sun's presence in the sky—not on her skin, obviously, but in her soul, like she was the driving force that brought it up.
At least she knew it was daytime. She just didn't know what day.
Wind whistled in Theo's ears like a morose white noise machine. Her foot throbbed in white-hot pain. But her arms were wrapped around Percy, and his head was in the crook of her neck. She could feel his heartbeat beneath her left hand's fingertips. For possibly the millionth time, she choked back a sob, squeezing her eyes shut tight so no tears leaked out.
She had never expected her life to be easy. Most demigods died at young ages, defeated by monsters or even the gods themselves. Theo was familiar with death, too, after living to see so many of her half-siblings demises in the war with Kronos. They were all so young, so innocent—Theo always wondered why it had been them to go and not herself. But that was the way it had been since ancient times; the Greeks invented tragedy and chaos. All her life, Theo had known broken promises and hearts like it was her second nature, and she had always accepted the fact that she invited disaster. No part of her had ever been convinced that she could make it to grow old like Roman demigods could. It just wasn't in the stars for her to live in New Rome with Percy.
But The Fates must have really had it out for her. Sending her falling into the pit of Tartarus, dragging her boyfriend along with her because she was too weak to do anything else? She could have wailed at the unfairness of it all. Even the gods couldn't have devised an ending so twisted—so perfectly curated to her fatal flaw that it was almost laughable.
Theo pressed her lips to Percy's ear. "I love you."
She didn't know if he could hear her over the wind, but she wanted those to be her last words. To whoever was listening.
Just as she was beginning to question whether the truth of Tartarus was that its purgatory was just an eternity of falling, Theo's skin began to flare, like a thousand hot knives were striking her all at once. She curled her head away from Percy's shoulder to take in their surroundings. The darkness took on a grayish-red tinge. She realized she could see Percy's hair; his perfect, messy, jet-black hair. The whistling in her ears turned to a furious roar. Suddenly, the tunnel they had been falling through opened into a vast cavern—because Theo hadn't had enough of caverns in the past week. Maybe a half a mile below herself, Theo could make out a ground. The entirety of Manhattan could have fit comfortably in this cavern, and she couldn't even see its full extent.
