The Burning Maze

  I looked around at the desert hillside. ‘You mean here? Now?’

  ‘Yep. It’s time.’

  How could she know that? I also didn’t see how planting a few seeds would make a difference when Caligula’s maze was causing half of California to burn.

  On the other hand, we were off on another quest today, hoping to find Caligula’s palace, with no guarantee we would come back alive. I supposed there was no time like the present. And if it made Meg feel better, why not?

  ‘How can I help?’ I asked.

  ‘Poke holes.’ Then she added, as if I might need extra guidance, ‘In the earth.’

  I accomplished this with an arrow tip, making seven small impressions in the barren, rocky soil. I couldn’t help thinking that these seed holes didn’t look like very comfortable places to grow.

  While Meg placed her green hexagons in their new homes, she directed me to get water from the Cistern’s well.

  ‘It has to be from there,’ she warned. ‘A big cupful.’

  A few minutes later I returned with a Big-Hombre-size plastic cup from Enchiladas del Rey. Meg drizzled the water over her newly planted friends.

  I waited for something dramatic to happen. In Meg’s presence, I’d got used to chia-seed explosions, demon peach babies and instant walls of strawberries.

  The soil did not move.

  ‘Guess we wait,’ Meg said.

  She hugged her knees and scanned the horizon.

  The morning sun blazed in the east. It had risen today, as always, but no thanks to me. It didn’t care if I was driving the sun chariot, or if Helios was raging in the tunnels under Los Angeles. No matter what humans believed, the cosmos kept turning, and the sun stayed on course. Under different circumstances, I would have found that reassuring. Now I found the sun’s indifference both cruel and insulting. In only a few days, Caligula might become a solar deity. Under such villainous leadership, you might think the sun would refuse to rise or set. But shockingly, disgustingly, day and night would continue as they always had.

  ‘Where is she?’ Meg asked.

  I blinked. ‘Who?’

  ‘If my family is so important to her, thousands of years of blessings, or whatever, why hasn’t she ever …?’

  She waved at the vast desert, as if to say, So much real estate, so little Demeter.

  She was asking why her mother had never appeared to her, why Demeter had allowed Caligula to destroy her father’s work, why she’d let Nero raise her in his poisonous imperial household in New York.

  I couldn’t answer Meg’s questions. Or rather, as a former god, I could think of several possible answers, but none that would make Meg feel better: Demeter was too busy watching the crop situation in Tanzania. Demeter got distracted inventing new breakfast cereals. Demeter forgot you existed.

  ‘I don’t know, Meg,’ I admitted. ‘But this …’ I pointed at the seven tiny wet circles in the earth. ‘This is the sort of thing your mother would be proud of. Growing plants in an impossible place. Stubbornly insisting on creating life. It’s ridiculously optimistic. Demeter would approve.’

  Meg studied me as if trying to decide whether to thank me or hit me. I’d got used to that look.

  ‘Let’s go,’ she decided. ‘Maybe the seeds will sprout while we’re gone.’

  The three of us piled into the Bedrossian-mobile: Meg, Piper and me.

  Grover had decided to stay behind – supposedly to rally the demoralized dryads, but I think he was simply exhausted from his series of near-death excursions with Meg and me. Coach Hedge volunteered to accompany us, but Mellie quickly un-volunteered him. As for the dryads, none seemed anxious to be our plant shields after what had happened to Money Maker and Agave. I couldn’t blame them.

  At least Piper agreed to drive. If we got pulled over for possession of a stolen vehicle, she could charmspeak her way out of being arrested. With my luck, I would spend all day in jail, and Lester’s face would not look good in a mug shot.

  We retraced our route from yesterday – the same heat-blasted terrain, the same smoke-stained skies, the same clogged traffic. Living the California dream.

  None of us felt much like talking. Piper kept her eyes fixed on the road, probably thinking about a reunion she did not want with an ex-boyfriend she had left on awkward terms. (Oh, boy, I could relate.)

  Meg traced the swirls on her teal camo pants. I imagined she was reflecting on her father’s final botany project and why Caligula had found it so threatening. It seemed unbelievable that Meg’s entire life had been altered by seven green seeds. Then again, she was a child of Demeter. With the goddess of plants, insignificant-looking things could be very significant.

  The smallest seedlings, Demeter often told me, grow into century oaks.

  As for me, I had no shortage of problems to think about.

  Python awaited. I knew instinctively that I would have to face him one day. If by some miracle I survived the emperors’ various plots on my life, if I defeated the Triumvirate and freed the four other Oracles and single-handedly set everything right in the mortal world, I would still have to find a way to wrest control of Delphi from my most ancient enemy. Only then might Zeus let me become a god again. Because Zeus was just that awesome. Thanks, Dad.

  In the meantime, I had to deal with Caligula. I would have to foil his plan to make me the secret ingredient in his sun-god soup. And I would have to do this while having no godly powers at my disposal. My archery skills had deteriorated. My singing and playing weren’t worth olive stones. Divine strength? Charisma? Light? Fire power? All gauges read EMPTY.

  My most humiliating thought: Medea would capture me, try to strip away my divine power and find I didn’t have any left.

  What is this? she would scream. There’s nothing here but Lester!

  Then she would kill me anyway.

  As I contemplated these happy possibilities, we wound our way through the Pasadena Valley.

  ‘I’ve never liked this city,’ I murmured. ‘It makes me think of game shows, tawdry parades and drunk washed-up starlets with spray-on tans.’

  Piper coughed. ‘FYI, Jason’s mom was from here. She died here, in a car accident.’

  ‘I’m sorry. What did she do?’

  ‘She was a drunk washed-up starlet with a spray-on tan.’

  ‘Ah.’ I waited for the sting of embarrassment to fade. It took several miles. ‘So why would Jason want to go to school here?’

  Piper gripped the wheel. ‘After we broke up, he transferred to an all-boys boarding school up in the hills. You’ll see. I guess he wanted something different, something quiet and out-of-the-way. No drama.’

  ‘He’ll be happy to see us, then,’ Meg muttered, staring out of the window.

  We made our way into the hills above town, the houses getting more and more impressive as we gained altitude. Even in Mansion Land, though, trees had started to die. Manicured lawns were turning brown around the edges. When water shortages and above-average temperatures affected the upmarket neighbourhoods, you knew things were serious. The rich and the gods were always the last to suffer.

  At the crest of a hill stood Jason’s school – a sprawling campus of blond-brick buildings interlaced with garden courtyards and walkways shaded by acacia trees. The sign in front, done in subtle bronze letters on a low brick wall, read: EDGARTON DAY AND BOARDING SCHOOL.

  We parked the Escalade on a nearby residential street, using the Piper McLean if-it’s-towed-we’ll-just-borrow-another-car strategy.

  A security guard stood at the front gates of the school, but Piper told him that we were allowed to go inside, and the guard, with a look of great confusion, agreed that we were allowed to go inside.

  The classrooms all opened onto the courtyards. Student lockers lined the open walkways. It was not a school design that would have worked in, say, Milwaukee during blizzard season, but in Southern California it spoke to just how much the locals took their mild, consistent weather for granted. I doubted the buildings even had air-condit
ioning. If Caligula continued cooking gods in his Burning Maze, the Edgarton school board might have to rethink that.

  Despite Piper’s insistence that she had distanced herself from Jason’s life, she had his schedule memorized. She led us right to his fourth-period classroom. Peering through the windows, I saw a dozen students – all young men in blue blazers, white shirts, red ties, grey trousers and shiny shoes, like junior business executives. At the front of the class, in a director’s chair, a bearded teacher in a tweed suit was reading from a paperback copy of Julius Caesar.

  Ugh. Bill Shakespeare. I mean, yes, he was good. But even he would’ve been horrified at the number of hours mortals spent drilling his plays into the heads of bored teenagers, and the sheer number of pipes, tweed jackets, marble busts and bad dissertations even his least favourite plays had inspired. Meanwhile, Christopher Marlowe got the short end of the Elizabethan stick. Kit had been much more gorgeous.

  But I digress.

  Piper knocked on the door and poked her head in. Suddenly the young men no longer looked bored. Piper said something to the teacher, who blinked a few times, then waved go ahead to a young man in the middle row.

  A moment later, Jason Grace joined us in the walkway.

  I had only seen him a few times before – once when he was a praetor at Camp Jupiter; once when he had visited Delos; then shortly afterwards, when we had fought side by side against the giants at the Parthenon.

  He’d fought well enough, but I can’t say I’d paid him any special attention. In those days, I was still a god. Jason was just another hero in the Argo II’s demigod crew.

  Now, in his school uniform, he looked quite impressive. His blond hair was cropped short. His blue eyes flashed behind a pair of black-rimmed glasses. Jason closed the classroom door behind him, tucked his books under his arm and forced a smile, a little white scar twitching at the corner of his lip. ‘Piper. Hey.’

  I wondered how Piper managed to look so calm. I’d gone through many complicated break-ups. They never got easier, and Piper didn’t have the advantage of being able to turn her ex into a tree or simply wait until his short mortal life was over before returning to earth.

  ‘Hey, yourself,’ she said, just a hint of strain in her voice. ‘This is –’

  ‘Meg McCaffrey,’ Jason said. ‘And Apollo. I’ve been waiting for you guys.’

  He didn’t sound terribly excited about it. He said it the way someone might say, I’ve been waiting for the results from my emergency brain scan.

  Meg sized up Jason as if she found his glasses far inferior to her own. ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Jason peered down the walkway in each direction. ‘Let’s go back to my dorm room. We’re not safe out here.’

  22

  For my school project

  I made this pagan temple

  Monopoly board

  We had to get past a teacher and two hall monitors, but, thanks to Piper’s charmspeak, they all agreed that it was perfectly normal for the four of us (including two females) to stroll into the dormitory during classroom hours.

  Once we reached Jason’s room, Piper stopped at the door. ‘Define not safe.’

  Jason peered over her shoulder. ‘Monsters have infiltrated the faculty. I’m keeping an eye on the humanities teacher. Pretty sure she’s an empousa. I already had to slay my AP Calculus teacher, because he was a blemmyae.’

  Coming from a mortal, such talk would have been labelled homicidally paranoid. Coming from a demigod, it was a description of an average week.

  ‘Blemmyae, huh?’ Meg reappraised Jason, as if deciding that his glasses might not be so bad. ‘I hate blemmyae.’

  Jason smirked. ‘Come on in.’

  I would’ve called his room spartan, but I had seen the bedrooms of actual Spartans. They would have found Jason’s dorm ridiculously comfortable.

  The fifty-foot-square space had a bookcase, a bed, a desk and a wardrobe. The only luxury was an open window that looked out across the canyons, filling the room with the warm scent of hyacinth. (Did it have to be hyacinth? My heart always breaks when I smell that fragrance, even after thousands of years.)

  On Jason’s wall hung a framed picture of his sister Thalia smiling at the camera, a bow slung across her back, her short dark hair blown sideways by the wind. Except for her dazzling blue eyes, she looked nothing like her brother.

  Then again, neither of them looked anything like me and, as the son of Zeus, I was technically their brother. And I had flirted with Thalia, which … Eww. Curse you, Father, for having so many children! It made dating a true minefield over the millennia.

  ‘Your sister says hello, by the way,’ I said.

  Jason’s eyes brightened. ‘You saw her?’

  I launched into an explanation of our time in Indianapolis: the Waystation, the emperor Commodus, the Hunters of Artemis rappelling into the football stadium to rescue us. Then I backed up and explained the Triumvirate, and all the miserable things that had happened to me since emerging from that Manhattan dumpster.

  Meanwhile, Piper sat cross-legged on the floor, her back against the wall, as far as possible from the more comfortable sitting option of the bed. Meg stood at Jason’s desk, examining some sort of school project – foam core studded with little plastic boxes, perhaps to represent buildings.

  When I casually mentioned that Leo was alive and well and presently on a mission to Camp Jupiter, all the electrical outlets in the room sparked. Jason looked at Piper, stunned.

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘After all we went through.’

  ‘I can’t even …’ Jason sat heavily on his bed. ‘I don’t know whether to laugh or yell.’

  ‘Don’t limit yourself,’ grumbled Piper. ‘Do both.’

  Meg called from the desk, ‘Hey, what is this?’

  Jason flushed. ‘A personal project.’

  ‘It’s Temple Hill,’ Piper offered, her tone carefully neutral. ‘At Camp Jupiter.’

  I took a closer look. Piper was right. I recognized the layout of the temples and shrines where Camp Jupiter demigods honoured the ancient deities. Each building was represented by a small plastic box glued to the board, the names of the shrines hand-labelled on the foam core. Jason had even marked lines of elevation, showing the hill’s topographical levels.

  I found my temple: APOLLO, symbolized by a red plastic building. It was not nearly as nice as the real thing, with its golden roof and platinum filigree designs, but I didn’t want to be critical.

  ‘Are these Monopoly houses?’ Meg asked.

  Jason shrugged. ‘I kinda used whatever I had – the green houses and red hotels.’

  I squinted at the board. I hadn’t descended in glory to Temple Hill for quite some time, but the display seemed more crowded than the actual hill. There were at least twenty small tokens I didn’t recognize.

  I leaned in and read some of the handwritten labels. ‘Kymopoleia? My goodness, I haven’t thought about her in centuries! Why did the Romans build her a shrine?’

  ‘They haven’t yet,’ Jason said. ‘But I made her a promise. She … helped us out on our voyage to Athens.’

  The way he said that, I decided he meant she agreed not to kill us, which was much more in keeping with Kymopoleia’s character.

  ‘I told her I’d make sure none of the gods and goddesses were forgotten,’ Jason continued, ‘either at Camp Jupiter or Camp Half-Blood. I’d see to it they all had some sort of shrine at both camps.’

  Piper glanced at me. ‘He’s done a ton of work on his designs. You should see his sketchbook.’

  Jason frowned, clearly unsure whether Piper was praising him or criticizing him. The smell of burning electricity thickened in the air.

  ‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘the designs won’t win any awards. I’ll need Annabeth to help with the actual blueprints.’

  ‘Honouring the gods is a noble endeavour,’ I said. ‘You should be proud.’

  Jason did not look proud. He looked worried. I remembered what Medea had said a
bout the Oracle’s news: The truth was enough to break Jason Grace. He did not appear to be broken. Then again, I did not appear to be Apollo.

  Meg leaned closer to the display. ‘How come Potina gets a house but Quirinus gets a hotel?’

  ‘There’s not really any logic to it,’ Jason admitted. ‘I just used the tokens to mark positions.’

  I frowned. I’d been fairly sure I’d got a hotel, as opposed to Ares’s house, because I was more important.

  Meg tapped her mother’s token. ‘Demeter is cool. You should put the cool gods next to her.’

  ‘Meg,’ I chided, ‘we can’t arrange the gods by coolness. That would lead to too many fights.’

  Besides, I thought, everyone would want to be next to me. Then I wondered bitterly if that would still be true when and if I made it back to Olympus. Would my time as Lester mark me forever as an immortal dweeb?

  ‘Anyway,’ Piper interrupted. ‘The reason we came: the Burning Maze.’

  She didn’t accuse Jason of holding back information. She didn’t tell him what Medea had said. She simply studied his face, waiting to see how he would respond.

  Jason laced his fingers. He stared at the sheathed gladius propped against the wall next to a lacrosse stick and a tennis racket. (These fancy boarding schools really offered the full range of extracurricular options.)

  ‘I didn’t tell you everything,’ he admitted.

  Piper’s silence felt more powerful than her charmspeaking.

  ‘I – I reached the Sibyl,’ Jason continued. ‘I can’t even explain how. I just stumbled into this big room with a pool of fire. The Sibyl was … standing across from me, on this stone platform, her arms chained with some fiery shackles.’

  ‘Herophile,’ I said. ‘Her name is Herophile.’

  Jason blinked, as if he could still feel the heat and cinders of the room.

  ‘I wanted to free her,’ he said. ‘Obviously. But she told me it wasn’t possible. It had to be …’ He gestured at me. ‘She told me it was a trap. The whole maze. For Apollo. She told me you’d eventually come find me. You and her – Meg. Herophile said there was nothing I could do except give you help if you asked for it. She said to tell you, Apollo – you have to rescue her.’