She used to have a plan.

It was a good plan. She had been refining it for three years, adjusting the variables, saving the right documentation, cultivating the right contacts. Finish the degree. Wait for the birthday. Access the trust fund. Bribe the right person to get through the barrier. Start over in California. PhD in environmentalbstudies. A life her mother hadn't designed for her.

She was ninety days away when her mother sold her to Zeus at a party in front of the Thirteen and every variable she had been carefully managing became ash.

She ran. Not because she had a plan — she had just watched her plan die in real time — but because the alternative was worse, and because her body made the decision before her mind caught up, and because there was a bridge and she crossed it, and there was a man on the other side and she looked at him in the dark and said the truest thing she had said out loud in years: I think we can help each other.

He said no. She explained why he was wrong. He listened.

He said yes.

She has been in the lower city for four months. She has not called her contacts about the barrier. She has not asked anyone about the crossing. She has the trust fund now — her birthday came in April, the money arrived, the path she had been planning toward for three years is clear and funded and available.

She has not taken it.

She is not examining this.

What she is examining, carefully, from a slight distance, the way you examine something you are afraid to look at directly: the specific quality of what it feels like to be in the lower city.

To be somewhere that is hers in a way the upper city never was.

To be known by someone who didn't have to know her and chose to anyway, without asking her to perform anything in return.

She crossed the River Styx with nothing but nerve and desperation and arrived at the first honest thing she had ever found.

She keeps waiting to want to leave.

She is still waiting.