by Rick Riordan
Alas, time makes bric-a-brac of everything, no matter how important. I wondered if such a fate awaited me. In a thousand years, somebody might find me in a toolshed and say Oh, look. Apollo, god of poetry. Maybe I can polish him up and use him.
“Does the blade still show visions?” I asked.
“You know about that, huh?” Piper shook her head. “The visions stopped last summer. That wouldn’t have anything to do with you getting kicked out of Olympus, would it, Mr. God of Prophecy?”
Meg sniffed. “Most things are his fault.”
“Hey!” I said. “Er, moving right along, Piper, where exactly are you taking us? If all your cars have been repossessed, I’m afraid we’re stuck with Coach Hedge’s Pinto.”
Piper smirked. “I think we can do better than that. Follow me.”
She led us to the driveway, where Mr. McLean had resumed his duties as a dazed wanderer. He meandered around the drive, head bowed as if he were looking for a dropped coin. His hair stuck up in ragged rows where his fingers had raked through it.
On the tailgate of a nearby truck, the movers were taking their lunch break, casually eating off china plates that had no doubt been in the McLeans’ kitchen not long before.
Mr. McLean looked up at Piper. He seemed unconcerned by her knife and blowgun. “Going out?”
“Just for a while.” Piper kissed her father on the cheek. “I’ll be back tonight. Don’t let them take the sleeping bags, okay? You and I can camp out on the terrace. It’ll be fun.”
“All right.” He patted her arm absently. “Good luck…studying?”
“Yep,” Piper said. “Studying.”
You have to love the Mist. You can stroll out of your house heavily armed, in the company of a satyr, a demigod, and a flabby former Olympian, and thanks to the Mist’s perception-bending magic, your mortal father assumes you’re going to a study group. That’s right, Dad. We need to go over some math problems that involve the trajectory of blowgun darts against moving targets.
Piper led us across the street to the nearest neighbor’s house—a Frankenstein’s mansion of Tuscan tiles, modern windows, and Victorian gables that screamed I have too much money and not enough taste! HELP!
In the wraparound driveway, a heavyset man in athleisure-wear was just getting out of his white Cadillac Escalade.
“Mr. Bedrossian!” Piper called.
The man jumped, facing Piper with a look of terror. Despite his workout shirt, his ill-advised yoga pants, and his flashy running shoes, he looked like he’d been more leisurely than athletic. He was neither sweaty nor out of breath. His thinning hair made a perfect brushstroke of black grease across his scalp. When he frowned, his features gravitated toward the center of his face as if circling the twin black holes of his nostrils.
“P-Piper,” he stammered. “What do you—?”
“I would love to borrow the Escalade, thank you!” Piper beamed.
“Uh, actually, this isn’t—”
“This isn’t a problem?” Piper supplied. “And you’d be delighted to lend it to me for the day? Fantastic!”
Bedrossian’s face convulsed. He forced out the words, “Yes. Of course.”
“Keys, please?”
Mr. Bedrossian tossed her the fob, then ran into his house as fast as his tight-fitting yoga pants would allow.
Meg whistled under her breath. “That was cool.”
“What was that?” Grover asked.
“That,” I said, “was charmspeaking.” I reappraised Piper McLean, not sure if I should be impressed or if I should run after Mr. Bedrossian in a panic. “A rare gift among Aphrodite’s children. Do you borrow Mr. Bedrossian’s car a lot?”
Piper shrugged. “He’s been an awful neighbor. He also has a dozen other cars. Believe me, we’re not causing him any hardship. Besides, I usually bring back what I borrow. Usually. Shall we go? Apollo, you can drive.”
“But—”
She smiled that sweetly scary I-could-make-you-do-it smile.
“I’ll drive,” I said.
We took the scenic coastal road south in the Bedrossian-mobile. Since the Escalade was only slightly smaller than Hephaestus’s fire-breathing hydra tank, I had to be careful to avoid sideswiping motorcycles, mailboxes, small children on tricycles, and other annoying obstacles.
“Are we going to pick up Jason?” I asked.
Next to me in the passenger’s seat, Piper loaded a dart into her blowgun. “No need. Besides, he’s in school.”
“You’re not.”
“I’m moving, remember? As of next Monday, I’m enrolled at Tahlequah High.” She raised her blowgun like a champagne glass. “Go, Tigers.”
Her words sounded strangely unironic. Again, I wondered how she could be so resigned to her fate, so ready to let Caligula expel her and her father from the life they had built here. But since she had a loaded weapon in her hand, I didn’t challenge her.
Meg’s head popped up between our seats. “We won’t need your ex-boyfriend?”
I swerved and almost ran over someone’s grandmother.
“Meg!” I chided. “Sit back and buckle up, please. Grover—” I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the satyr chewing on a strip of gray fabric. “Grover, stop eating your seat belt. You’re setting a bad example.”
He spat out the strap. “Sorry.”
Piper ruffled Meg’s hair, then playfully pushed her into the backseat. “To answer your question, no. We’ll be fine without Jason. I can show you the way into the maze. It was my dream, after all. This entrance is the one the emperor uses, so it should be the straightest shot to the center, where he’s keeping your Sibyl.”
“And when you went inside before,” I said, “what happened?”
Piper shrugged. “The usual Labyrinth stuff—traps, changing corridors. Also some strange creatures. Guards. Hard to describe. And fire. Lots of that.”
I remembered my vision of Herophile, raising her chained arms in the room of lava, apologizing to someone who wasn’t me.
“You didn’t actually find the Oracle?” I asked.
Piper was silent for half a block, gazing at flashes of ocean vista between houses. “I didn’t. But there was a short time when we got separated, Jason and me. Now…I’m wondering if he told me everything that happened to him. I’m pretty sure he didn’t.”
Grover refastened his mangled seat belt. “Why would he lie?”
“That,” Piper said, “is a very good question and a good reason to go back there without him. To see for myself.”
I had a sense that Piper was holding back quite a bit herself—doubts, guesses, personal feelings, maybe what had happened to her in the Labyrinth.
Hooray, I thought. Nothing spices up a dangerous quest like personal drama between formerly romantically involved heroes who may or may not be telling each other (and me) the whole truth.
Piper directed me into downtown Los Angeles.
I considered this a bad sign. “Downtown Los Angeles” had always struck me as an oxymoron, like “hot ice cream” or “military intelligence.” (Yes, Ares, that was an insult.)
Los Angeles was all about sprawl and suburbs. It wasn’t meant to have a downtown, any more than pizza was meant to have mango chunks. Oh, sure, here and there among the dull gray government buildings and closed-up storefronts, parts of downtown had been revitalized. As we zigzagged through the surface streets, I spotted plenty of new condos, hip stores, and swanky hotels. But to me, all those efforts seemed about as effective as putting makeup on a Roman legionnaire. (And believe me, I’d tried.)
We pulled over near Grand Park, which was neither grand nor much of a park. Across the street rose an eight-story honeycomb of concrete and glass. I seemed to recall going there once, decades before, to register my divorce from Greta Garbo. Or was it Liz Taylor? I couldn’t recall.
“The Hall of Records?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Piper said. “But we’re not going inside. Just park in the fifteen-minute loading zone over there.”
Grover leaned forward. “What if we’re not back in fifteen minutes?”
Piper smiled. “Then I’m sure the towing company will take good care of Mr. Bedrossian’s Escalade.”
Once on foot, we followed Piper to the side of the government complex, where she put her finger to her lips for quiet, then motioned for us to peek around the corner.
Running the length of the block was a twenty-foot-high concrete wall, punctuated by unremarkable metal doors that I assumed were service entrances. In front of one of those doors, about halfway down the block, stood a strange-looking guard.
Despite the warm day, he wore a black suit and tie. He was squat and burly, with unusually large hands. Wrapped around his head was something I couldn’t quite figure out, like an extra-large Arabic kaffiyeh made of white fuzzy terrycloth, which draped across his shoulders and hung halfway down his back. That alone might not have been so strange. He could have been a private security guard working for some Saudi oil tycoon. But why was he standing in an alley next to a nondescript metal door? And why was his face entirely covered in white fur—fur that exactly matched his headdress?
Grover sniffed the air, then pulled us back around the corner.
“That guy isn’t human,” he whispered.
“Give the satyr a prize,” Piper whispered back, though I wasn’t sure why we were being so quiet. We were half a block away, and there was plenty of street noise.
“What is he?” Meg asked.
Piper checked the dart in her blowgun. “That’s a good question. But they can be real trouble if you don’t take them by surprise.”
“They?” I asked.
“Yeah.” Piper frowned. “Last time, there were two. And they had black fur. Not sure how this one is different. But that door is the entrance to the maze, so we need to take him out.”
“Should I use my swords?” Meg asked.
“Only if I miss.” Piper took a few deep breaths. “Ready?”
I didn’t imagine she would accept no as an answer, so I nodded along with Grover and Meg.
Piper stepped out, raised her blowgun, and fired.
It was a fifty-foot shot, at the edge of what I consider practical blowgun range, but Piper hit her target. The dart pierced the man’s left trouser leg.
The guard looked down at the strange new accoutrement protruding from his thigh. The shaft’s fletching matched his white fur perfectly.
Oh, great, I thought. We just made him angry.
Meg summoned her golden swords.
Grover fumbled for his reed pipes.
I prepared to run away screaming.
“Wait,” Piper said.
The guard listed sideways, as if the whole city were tilting to starboard, then passed out cold on the sidewalk.
I raised my eyebrows. “Poison?”
“Grandpa Tom’s special recipe,” Piper said. “Now, come on. I’ll show you what’s really weird about Fuzz Face.”
“WHAT is he?” Meg asked again. “He’s fun.”
Fun would not have been my adjective of choice.
The guard lay sprawled on his back, his lips foaming, his half-lidded eyes twitching in a semiconscious state.
Each of his hands had eight fingers. That explained why they’d looked so large from a distance. Judging from the width of his black leather shoes, I guessed he had eight toes as well. He seemed young, no more than a teenager in human terms, but except for his forehead and cheeks, his whole face was covered in fine white fur that resembled the chest hair of a terrier.
The real conversation piece was his ears. What I had mistaken for a headdress had come unfurled, revealing two floppy ovals of cartilage, shaped like human ears but each the size of a beach towel, which told me immediately that the poor boy’s middle school nickname would have been Dumbo. His ear canals were wide enough to catch baseballs, and stuffed with so much hair that Piper could have used it to fletch an entire quiverful of darts.
“Big Ears,” I said.
“Duh,” said Meg.
“No, I mean this must be one of the Big Ears that Macro spoke of.”
Grover took a step back. “The creatures Caligula is using for his personal guard? Do they have to be so scary-looking?”
I walked a circle around the young humanoid. “Think how keen his hearing must be! And imagine all the guitar chords he could play with those hands. How have I never seen this species before? They would make the world’s best musicians!”
“Hmm,” Piper said. “I don’t know about music, but they fight like you wouldn’t believe. Two of them almost killed Jason and me, and we’ve fought a lot of different monsters.”
I saw no weapons on the guard, but I could believe he was a tough fighter. Those eight-fingered fists could have done some damage. Still, it seemed a waste to train these creatures for war….
“Unbelievable,” I murmured. “After four thousand years, I am still discovering new things.”
“Like how dumb you are,” Meg volunteered.
“No.”
“So you already knew that?”
“Guys,” Grover interrupted. “What do we do with Big Ears?”
“Kill him,” Meg said.
I frowned at her. “What happened to He’s fun? What happened to Everything alive deserves a chance to grow?”
“He works for the emperors,” she said. “He’s a monster. He’ll just dust back to Tartarus, right?”
Meg looked at Piper for confirmation, but she was busy scanning the street.
“Still seems odd there’s only one guard,” Piper mused. “And why is he so young? After we broke in once already, you’d think they’d put more guards on duty. Unless…”
She didn’t finish the thought, but I heard it loud and clear: Unless they want us to come in.
I studied the guard’s face, which was still twitching from the effects of the poison. Why did I have to think of his face as the fuzzy underside of a dog? It made killing him difficult.
“Piper, what does your poison do, exactly?”
She knelt and pulled out the dart. “Judging from how it worked on the other Big Ears, it will paralyze him for a long while but won’t kill him. It’s diluted coral-snake venom with a few special herbal ingredients.”
“Remind me never to drink your herbal tea,” Grover muttered.
Piper smirked. “We can just leave Big Ears. Doesn’t seem right to dust him to Tartarus.”
“Hmph.” Meg looked unconvinced, but she flicked her twin blades, instantly snapping them back into golden rings.
Piper walked to the metal door. She pulled it open, revealing a rusty freight elevator with a single control lever and no gate.
“Okay, just so we’re clear,” Piper said, “I’ll show you where Jason and I entered the maze, but I’m not doing the stereotypical Native American tracker thing. I don’t know tracking. I’m not your guide.”
We all readily agreed, as one does when delivered an ultimatum by a friend with strong opinions and poison darts.
“Also,” she continued, “if any of you find the need for spiritual guidance on this quest, I am not here to provide that service. I’m not going to dispense bits of ancient Cherokee wisdom.”
“Very well,” I said. “Though as a former prophecy god, I enjoy bits of spiritual wisdom.”
“Then you’ll have to ask the satyr,” Piper said.
Grover cleared his throat. “Um, recycling is good karma?”
“There you go,” Piper said. “Everybody good? All aboard.”
The interior of the elevator was poorly lit and smelled of sulfur. I recalled that Hades had an elevator in Los Angeles that led to the Underworld. I hoped Piper hadn’t gotten her quests mixed up.
“Are you sure this thing goes to the Burning Maze?” I asked. “Because I didn’t bring any rawhide chews for Cerberus.”
Grover whimpered. “You had to mention Cerberus. That’s bad karma.”
Piper threw the switch. The elevator rattled and began to sink at the same spee
d as my spirits.
“This first part is all mortal,” Piper assured us. “Downtown Los Angeles is riddled with abandoned subway tunnels, air-raid shelters, sewer lines….”
“All my favorite things,” Grover murmured.
“I don’t really know the history,” Piper said, “but Jason told me some of the tunnels were used by smugglers and partyers during Prohibition. Now you get taggers, runaways, homeless folks, monsters, government employees.”
Meg’s mouth twitched. “Government employees?”
“It’s true,” Piper said. “Some of the city workers use the tunnels to go from building to building.”
Grover shuddered. “When they could just walk in the sunlight with nature? Repulsive.”
Our rusty metal box rattled and creaked. Whatever was below would definitely hear us coming, especially if they had ears the size of beach towels.
After perhaps fifty feet, the elevator shuddered to a stop. Before us stretched a cement corridor, perfectly square and boring, lit by weak blue fluorescents.
“Doesn’t seem so scary,” said Meg.
“Just wait,” Piper said. “The fun stuff is up ahead.”
Grover fluttered his hands halfheartedly. “Yay.”
The square corridor opened into a larger round tunnel, its ceiling lined with ducts and pipes. The walls were so heavily tagged they might have been an undiscovered Jackson Pollock masterpiece. Empty cans, dirty clothes, and mildewed sleeping bags littered the floor, filling the air with the unmistakable odor of a homeless camp: sweat, urine, and utter despair.
None of us spoke. I tried to breathe as little as possible until we emerged into an even larger tunnel, this one lined with rusty train tracks. Along the walls, pitted metal signs read HIGH VOLTAGE, NO ENTRY, and THIS WAY OUT.
Railroad gravel crunched under our feet. Rats scurried along the tracks, chittering at Grover as they passed.
“Rats,” he whispered, “are so rude.”
After a hundred yards, Piper led us into a side hallway, this one tiled in linoleum. Half-burned-out banks of fluorescents flickered overhead. In the distance, barely visible in the dim light, two figures were slumped together on the floor. I assumed they were homeless people until Meg froze. “Are those dryads?”