Do nothing! The thought was mine, a violent exclamation.

A last-second gamble, only because I had no hand to play. I felt him get close enough that his power swept over me. Everything that wasn’t automatic was stolen from me. My ability to reach for my power, my ability to move my body, my ability to think. I couldn’t put a single coherent word together in my mind’s eye.

I was all disorganized thoughts and dull terror as momentum carried me through the air, heels over head, wind catching at my coat, whipping at my face and hood.

I followed the instruction to myself, staying limp, not trying to move or use my power.

The Nemean Titan stopped at the edge of the crack. I hurtled in a loose arc over the hole between realities, to the far side, where shattered concrete and rubble awaited me. Harder than a landing on hard ground.

I passed out of his range. My senses were slow to return to me. My sense of my own power was among them.

Wait, I thought, glad I could articulate at least a single syllable.

Wait.

Fly.

I took the last possible moment to pick up with flight, and found my grasp of it wobbly. A half-moment of uncoordinated flying that moved me laterally. Then upward flying, breaking my momentum. The air pushed hard against me as I hit the ground, gilded kneepads, boot-toes, and gloves scraping against icy road as I landed on the far side of the crack.

He loomed on the far side, head bent, while I panted for breath, because I hadn’t been able to breathe while doing that.

Something below had his attention. I was worried he was about to dive in, and I had no fucking idea what to do if he tried it.

Hesitantly, halfways hoping I’d get his attention in the course of it, I inched closer to the edge.

We’d picked an entry point where the highest point of the crystal landscape met the lowest point of our landscape. The crystals were close to the surface, and it felt almost like they were putting individual, smaller scenes together to create the shadows and paler sections to pull the larger images together, because the Titan was large enough to warrant something huge.

A boy, blond with a cut on his chapped lips, boot on the side of a girl’s face. Boy and girl because they weren’t any older than Roman or Juliette. He held a narrow pair of scissors inside the girl’s ear canal, his boot hiding her expression, though her hands reached up to grip at his ankle and the toe of his boot as he leaned on her.