When I opened my eyes the first thing I noticed, other than the gray sky above me, was my arm. It was healed and didn't hurt at all.

I rolled over, got to my hands and knees, and stood. It was cold like late fall and I was wearing what I'd worn to and from the hospital. Since the muggers had stolen my thrift-store coat, it wasn't enough.

I hugged my arms to myself and shivered. Ahead of me, as flat as glass, was a dead gray river. The grass on the banks and in the field surrounding me was the same dead color.

Ahead of me, thousands and thousands of people stood around, doing nothing.

Behind me, the empty field stretched clear to the horizon. Wherever I was, I was nowhere near home.

I began to smile. I turned back and headed toward the river, pushing through the crowd. I searched for a friendly face, but it was a crazy group. I didn't recognize most of the clothes or the language they spoke when they whispered to each other.

Most of the men eyed me, hungrily.

I stopped near an old woman. "Do you speak English?" I asked.

Gravely, she held out her cupped hands, as if begging for coins.

I pushed on. I found another old woman that was also dressed oddly, but in something more like a skirt. "Do you speak English?"

She too held out her hands. When I stared at her in silence, she raised a wrinkled hand to her face. She closed her eyes, one at a time, with her fingertip, then tapped the lids expectantly.

"What?"

She held out her hands again.

I pushed on. "Do you speak English? Do you speak English?"

Many people held out their hands in supplication. More stood still and blank as if petrified. Some of the men leered at me and offered wandering hands instead of an answer. When I turned to glare, they grinned back at me in smug contentment, as if their touches were the highest compliment.

Unintentionally, I reached the edge of the river. The crowd here was rush hour thick but stationary and territorial; everyone was fiercely possessive of their cubic foot of space. I had to fight to push through, and nobody liked it. People snarled at me, pointed, spat, and uttered what could only be insults.

I finally reached the end of them. There I saw the only thing in this landscape that wasn't gray: a little wooden pier, jutting out into the river, its boards dark and gleaming with no sunlight here to fade them.

Docked at the edge of the pier was a small boat. In the boat, holding a long pole topped with a rectangular paddle, stood a pale old man with fiery eyes.

He stared at me. His eyes dropped to my chest. They dropped further, to the skin above my low-rise jeans.

"Yes?" he asked me, in unaccented English.

"Thank God. Where am I?"

He finally looked up. He smiled at me slowly-as if I had asked him just what he'd hoped I'd ask. "You are on the shores of the Acheron."

I stepped out onto the empty pier. "Thanks, but that doesn't help."

His smile grew. His burning eyes flicked over me again. "I am the boatman. Do you have the fare?"

I started to remember something. From a high school history class, maybe, or an English class. "Wait a sec. The fare? Am I-is this-?"

His smile grew more. He had dark stains between his teeth, like blood or rot. "You are dead, miss. And unless you have the fare, you shall remain on the shore, forever."

"So?"

His smile flickered. "You don't want to remain on the shore. Here, there is nothing."

I looked around. "Oh?"

"Yes. This is a mere holding pen. And it grows more crowded with the ignorant and dishonorable by the hour."

"Sounds a lot like where I come from." I tried to see above the heads of the crowd, back toward that unknown and blank horizon.

"I doubt it," he said softly. "If you remain here, you will someday turn into that."

I followed his gesture. He pointed to a woman rooted to her little foot of space, her mouth left open and her eyes like dead black lakes.

I considered this.

His eyes ran over me again. Or maybe they never stopped. "They mostly deserve it, for their carelessness. There is little respect for the old ways."

"But..." he stared at my thighs and licked his thin lips. "If you have something, maybe, that approximates the value of an obol, I could spare you..."

I looked over my shoulder at the thousands of near-lifeless, staring strangers as the rest of them eyed me with suspicion and hate. I looked back at the boatman. I didn't like his eyes either, but none of the choices I'd ever had to make had been easy.

I had no idea what an obol was worth, but I reached into a pocket and hunted for the ring that my grandmother had given to me on my sixteenth birthday, a week before she died. I had nothing I valued more.

"Is my ring ok?"

The boatman watched me dig for it. He nodded even though he hadn't even seen it yet.

"Alright." I took it out and walked down the pier. The boatman flipped his pole over, stuck the oar in the water, and moved himself close to me. He extended a hand.

Instead of putting my hand in his before stepping down, I placed my ring in his palm.

He looked down at it, almost dumbfounded. I pretended like I didn't notice and got into his boat.

He cleared his throat and placed the ring somewhere in the folds of his muddy robe. The boatman lifted his paddle, set it against the pier, and paused. "What is your name?"

"Diana."

He laughed and pushed off.

"Diana," he said, feeling the name in his mouth. He paddled fast over the dead river. The shore with the waiting thousands promptly vanished in gray mist. "How funny."

I half-expected a line to follow that: 'I love that name'; 'I knew a Diana once'; 'I have your name tattooed on my...'

"Yeah?" I said, bracing myself for it.

He smiled at me again. His smile was a little painful, like he wasn't used to the expression. "Nevermind."

I looked back into the mist. From somewhere, a foghorn sounded. "Is that a foghorn?"

He shook his head in dismissal. "That's upriver. We're not going that way. No ... what you want ... is ahead."

I wrapped my arms around myself again and shivered. I tried to remember the stories from history (or English) class. "Charon, right?"

His smile grew wider in flattered pleasure. His leathery face looked like it would split. "Yes. Yes, that's my name."

"Yeah. What ... what's ahead?"

He laughed. "The afterlife, Diana."

I bit back my impatience. "But what does that involve? I think I remember something about Elysium, but I thought there was a hell, too, with Sisyphus. Or is it the version where all you do is stand around in the dark, doing nothing?"

Charon dipped his long paddle into the water, and the foghorn sounded again. Dead mist and dead water surrounded us on all sides, flat and endless.

"I can say nothing of what's ahead. I'm just the boatman."

I shrank into myself, shivering harder. I glanced at the bottom of the boat, at a pile of miscellaneous junk collected at my feet-rope, calipers, a small paddle, bottles of water stopped with cork, and a leather pouch-hoping to find a blanket. Nothing.

"Nothing?" I said. "Come on. You have to know something."

He chuckled. The sound was rusty and uncomfortable, like an old furnace banging as it warmed. "And if I don't?"

"But you do. How else can you know if you're taking me to the right place?"

His chuckle stopped. "The right place?"

I opened my mouth to say something more but Charon's expression hardened into a glare. Slowly, he pulled the paddle from the water and held the pose. For a moment we glided forward on momentum alone, water rippling into a muted "V" behind us.

"You fool."

Carefully, Charon folded his tall body down into the boat. He sat across from me and laid his paddle over the gunwales behind him. "Let me show you something, shall I?"

I tried to hold his ferocious gaze as he spoke. "I may only know the waterways, but I certainly know them well enough to know where I ought to leave my passengers." Still glaring, he leaned over and picked up some kind of scroll from the pile of junk. He shook it at me. "Your feeble mortal attempts to trick me will come to nothing. The only thing you have left to bargain with," his face creased with a sour smirk, "is something you seem too proud to offer."

I stared back in growing disbelief. His fiery eyes slipped down to my chest, scrutinizing the rise and fall of my breath.

I was a fool. Why else would he have let me board so easily?

Charon leaned forward closer to me, his moldy breath falling over my face. The foghorn moaned again; the note was muffled in the mist, like someone smothering a cry.

"You don't need me to tell you how lovely you are," he murmured. "You should be ashamed, choosing to deny someone else the chance to fully appreciate it."

I pulled back from him.

And the worst thing was, this scene was nothing new.

As I stared at his precarious hatred and hunger, my twenty years on Earth abruptly compressed into this one pathetic moment and choked me into silence. My father, unemployed for 15 years, stealing jewelry from my room to pawn for booze money. My sister, unable even to decide what shoes to wear in the morning on her own, calling me five times a day to wrap me up in her own indecisive misery. My first ex-boyfriend, professing endless love until I agreed to give him certain pictures, and the break-up one week later. Do you have any idea how sick I am of other people's greed?

"This could be your last chance to know pleasure," he whispered. "Have you even thought of that?"

Bitterly, I shook my head. But I did think of something else.

I'm dead now. And I have nothing to lose anymore-and nothing that can be taken.

I stood up fast and stamped my foot.

The little craft rolled on the dead calm. Charon yelped and fell over the seat, dropping his unopened scroll among the junk. I dove past him for the front of the boat. He lunged after me-eyes blazing, nails slashing the damp air I'd just left. "I made an exception for you, you arrogant harlot!"

I tried to dodge him but I wasn't quick enough; Charon fell on top of me, and a wooden seat rammed across my belly and knocked the breath from me as Charon's muddy filth pressed on my back. His clawed hands reached around and grabbed my chest. I wanted to throw myself over the edge and into the river to get away from him, but I had no idea how far we were from a shore or what those waters would do to me.

The foghorn rolled out another moan. I bit his hand, but he just laughed.

Then I bit off a finger.

He howled and pulled away, and while he was off of me I lunged for his long paddle still balanced on the gunwale, picked it up and flipped around. The paddle was so long and had so much momentum that I smacked him hard enough to send him flying overboard and into the Acheron.

He roared and thrashed like a drowning man. I stood up in the boat and paddled away from him with everything I had, while he howled and cursed and splashed and threatened.

In a few minutes, the smothering mist had swallowed him.

I pulled the paddle from the river and shook. My dead heart pounded, and my dead palms sweated against the wood. I sat down in the boat, set the paddle across the gunwale, and tried to figure out what the hell I was supposed to do now.

I noticed the scroll Charon had been holding. It was waiting on the bottom of the boat.

On impulse I picked it up and unfurled it.

It was several scrolls rolled up into one, a collection of maps. Vague maps of Hades, but with all the waterways clearly marked and noted. Cocytus, flowing into Acheron. Styx, the famous one, spiraling into the center and ending in a marsh, its path paralleled by Phlegethon, the river of fire. The lake of forgetfulness, Lethe, and the lake of remembrance, Mnemosyne.

And marked by a cluster of dangerous rocks upriver, Eridanos, the river that flows through all creation, running through and past Hades like a highway.

I started to smile. It didn't matter if greed stretched into the afterlife.

There were other states of existing, and maybe one of those-my own Elysium, somewhere along the Eridanos-held some kindness.

I took up the paddle again, stood, and headed toward the sound of the foghorn.