by Rick Riordan
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 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 upscale neighborhoods, 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 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 breezeways. 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-conditioning. 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, dress shirts, red ties, gray slacks, 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 favorite 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 breezeway.
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 afterward, when we had fought side by side against the giants at the Parthenon.
He’d fought well enough, but I can’t say that 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 breakups. 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 breezeway in each direction. “Let’s go back to my dorm room. We’re not safe out here.”
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 labeled 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 closet. 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 honored the ancient deities. Each building was represented by a small plastic box glued to the board, the names of the shrines hand-labeled 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.”
“Honoring the gods is a noble endeavor,” I said. “You should be proud.”
Jason did not look proud. He looked worried. I remembered what Medea had said about 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 gotten 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.”
I knew all this, of course. I had seen and heard as much in my dreams. But hearing it from Jason, in the waking world, made it worse.
Piper rested her head against the wall. She stared at a water stain on the ceiling. “What else did Herophile say?”
Jason’s face tightened. “Pipes—Piper, look, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. It’s just—”
“What else did she say?” Piper repeated.
Jason looked at Meg, then at me, maybe for moral support.
“The Sibyl told me where I could find the emperor,” he said. “Well, more or less. She said Apollo would need the information. He would need…a pair of shoes. I know that doesn’t make much sense.”
“I’m afraid it does,” I said.
Meg ran her fingers along the plastic rooftops of the map. “Can we kill the emperor while we’re stealing his shoes? Did the Sibyl say anything about that?”
Jason shook his head. “She just said that Piper and I…we couldn’t do anything more by ourselves. It had to be Apollo. If we tried…it would be too dangerous.”
Piper laughed drily. She raised her hands as if making an offering to the water stain.
“Jason, we’ve been through literally everything together. I can’t even count how many dangers we’ve faced, how many times we’ve almost died. Now you’re telling me you lied to me to, what, protect me? To keep me from going after Caligula?”
“I knew you would have done it,” he murmured. “No matter what the Sibyl said.”
“Then that would’ve been my choice,” Piper said. “Not yours.”
He nodded miserably. “And I would’ve insisted on going with you, no matter the risk. But the way things have been between us…” He shrugged. “Working as a team has been hard. I thought—I decided to wait until Apollo found me. I messed up, not telling you. I’m sorry.”
He stared at his Temple Hill display, as if trying to figure out where to place a shrine to the god of feeling horrible about failed relationships. (Oh, wait. He already had one. It was for Aphrodite, Piper’s mom.)
Piper took a deep breath. “This isn’t about you and me, Jason. Satyrs and dryads are dying. Caligula’s planning to turn himself into a new sun god. Tonight’s the new moon, and Camp Jupiter is facing some kind of huge threat. Meanwhile, Medea is in that maze, throwing around Titan fire—”
“Medea?” Jason sat up straight. The lightbulb in his desk lamp burst, raining glass across his diorama. “Back up. What’s Medea got to do with this? What do you mean about the new moon and Camp Jupiter?”
I thought Piper might refuse to share the information, just for spite, but she didn’t. She gave Jason the lowdown about the Indiana prophecy that predicted bodies filling the Tiber. Then she explained Medea’s cooking project with her grandfather.
Jason looked like our father had just hit him with a thunderbolt. “I had no idea.”
Meg crossed her arms. “So, you going to help us or what?”
Jason studied her, no doubt unsure what to make of this scary little girl in teal camouflage.
“Of—of course,” he said. “We’ll need a car. And I’ll need an excuse to leave campus.” He looked hopefully at Piper.
She got to her feet. “Fine. I’ll go talk to the office. Meg, come with me, just in case we run into that empousa. We’ll meet you boys at the front gate. And Jason—?”
“Yeah?”
“If you’re holding anything else back—”
“Right. I—I get it.”
Pip
er turned and marched out of the room. Meg gave me a look like You sure about this?
“Go on,” I told her. “I’ll help Jason get ready.”
Once the girls had left, I turned to confront Jason Grace, one son of Zeus/Jupiter to another.
“All right,” I said. “What did the Sibyl really tell you?”
JASON took his time responding.
He removed his jacket, hung it in the closet. He undid his tie and folded it over the coat hook. I had a flashback to my old friend Fred Rogers, the children’s television host, who radiated the same calm centeredness when hanging up his work clothes. Fred used to let me crash on his sofa whenever I’d had a hard day of poetry-godding. He’d offer me a plate of cookies and a glass of milk, then serenade me with his songs until I felt better. I was especially fond of “It’s You I Like.” Oh, I missed that mortal!
Finally, Jason strapped on his gladius. With his glasses, dress shirt, slacks, loafers, and sword, he looked less like Mister Rogers and more like a well-armed paralegal.
“What makes you think I’m holding back?” he asked.
“Please,” I said. “Don’t try to be evasively prophetic with the god of evasive prophecies.”
Jason sighed. He rolled up his shirtsleeves, revealing the Roman tattoo on the inside of his forearm—the lightning bolt emblem of our father. “First of all, it wasn’t exactly a prophecy. It was more like a series of quiz show questions.”
“Yes. Herophile delivers information that way.”
“And you know how prophecies are. Even when the Oracle is friendly, they can be hard to interpret.”
“Jason…”
“Fine,” he relented. “The Sibyl said…She told me if Piper and I went after the emperor, one of us would die.”
Die. The word landed between us with a thud, like a large, gutted fish.
I waited for an explanation. Jason stared at his foam core Temple Hill as if trying to bring it to life by sheer force of will.