by Rick Riordan
My other friends all seemed to understand, too.
Will did some last-minute bandaging. Nico handed me my weapons. Rachel gave me a new pack stuffed with supplies. But none of them offered any lingering good-byes. They knew every minute counted now. They wished me luck and let me go.
As I passed, Screech-Bling and the troglodyte lieutenants stood at attention and removed their headwear—all six hundred and twenty hats. I recognized the honor. I nodded my thanks and forged on across the broken threshold before I could melt into another fit of ugly sobbing.
I passed Austin and Kayla in the antechamber, tending to more wounded and directing younger demigods in clean-up efforts. They both gave me weary smiles, acknowledging the million things we didn’t have time to say. I pushed onward.
I ran into Chiron by the elevators, on his way to deliver more medical supplies.
“You came to our rescue,” I said. “Thank you.”
He looked down at me benevolently, his head nearly scraping the ceiling, which had not been designed to accommodate centaurs. “We all have a duty to rescue each other, wouldn’t you say?”
I nodded, wondering how the centaur had become so wise over the centuries, and why that same wisdom had escaped me until I had been Lesterized. “And did your…joint task force meeting go well?” I asked, trying to remember what Dionysus had told us about why Chiron had been away. It seemed like so long ago. “Something about a severed cat’s head?”
Chiron chuckled. “A severed head. And a cat. Two different…uh, people. Acquaintances of mine from other pantheons. We were discussing a mutual problem.”
He just threw that information out there as if it wasn’t a brain-exploding grenade. Chiron had acquaintances from other pantheons? Of course he did. And a mutual problem…?
“Do I want to know?” I asked.
“No,” he said gravely. “You really don’t.” He offered his hand. “Good luck, Apollo.”
We shook, and off I went.
I found the stairs and took them. I didn’t trust the elevators. During my dream in the cell, I’d seen myself sweeping down the stairwells of the tower when I fell to Delphi. I was determined to take the same path in real life. Maybe it wouldn’t matter, but I would’ve felt silly if I took a wrong turn on my way to confront Python and ended up getting arrested by the NYPD in the Triumvirate Holdings lobby.
My bow and quiver jostled against my back, clanging against my ukulele strings. My new supply pack felt cold and heavy. I held on to the railing so my wobbly legs wouldn’t collapse under me. My ribs felt like they’d been newly tattooed with lava, but considering everything I’d been through, I felt remarkably whole. Maybe my mortal body was giving me one last push. Maybe my godly constitution was kicking in to help. Maybe it was the nectar-and-Mountain-Dew cocktail coursing through my bloodstream. Whatever it was, I would take all the help I could get.
Ten floors. Twenty floors. I lost track. Stairwells are horrible, disorienting places. I was alone with the sound of my breathing and the pounding of my feet against the steps.
A few more floors, and I began to smell smoke. The hazy air stung my eyes.
Apparently, part of the building was still on fire. Awesome.
The smoke got thicker as I continued to descend. I began to cough and gag. I pressed my forearm over my nose and mouth and found that this did not make a very good filter.
My consciousness swam. I considered opening a side door and trying to find fresh air, but I couldn’t see any exits. Weren’t stairwells supposed to have those? My lungs screamed. My oxygen-deprived brain felt like it was about to pop out of my skull, sprout wings, and fly away.
I realized I might be starting to hallucinate. Brains with wings. Cool!
I trudged forward. Wait.…What happened to the stairs? When had I reached a level surface? I could see nothing through the smoke. The ceiling got lower and lower. I stretched out my hands, searching for any kind of support. On either side of me, my fingers brushed against warm, solid rock.
The passageway continued to shrink. Ultimately I was forced to crawl, sandwiched between two horizontal sheets of stone with barely enough room to raise my head. My ukulele wedged itself in my armpit. My quiver scraped against the ceiling.
I began to squirm and hyperventilate from claustrophobia, but I forced myself to calm down. I was not stuck. I could breathe, strangely enough. The smoke had changed to volcanic gas, which tasted terrible and smelled worse, but my burning lungs somehow continued to process it. My respiratory system might melt later, but right now, I was still sucking in the sulfur.
I knew this smell. I was somewhere in the tunnels beneath Delphi. Thanks to the magic of the Labyrinth and/or some strange sorcerous high-speed link that connected Nero’s tower to the reptile’s lair, I had climbed, walked, stumbled, and crawled halfway across the world in a few minutes. My aching legs felt every mile.
I wriggled onward toward a dim light in the distance.
Rumbling noises echoed through a much larger space ahead. Something huge and heavy was breathing.
The crawlspace ended abruptly. I found myself peering down from the lip of a small crevice, like an air vent. Below me spread an enormous cavern—the lair of Python.
When I had fought Python before, thousands of years ago, I hadn’t needed to seek out this place. I had lured him into the upper world and fought him in the fresh air and sunlight, which had been much better.
Now, looking down from my crawlspace, I wished I could be anywhere else. The floor stretched for several football fields, punctuated by stalagmites and split by a web of glowing volcanic fissures that spewed plumes of gas. The uneven rock surface was covered with a shag carpet of horror: centuries of discarded snakeskins, bones, and the desiccated carcasses of…I didn’t want to know. Python had all those volcanic crevices right there, and he couldn’t be bothered to incinerate his trash?
The monster himself, roughly the size of a dozen jackknifed cargo trucks, took up the back quarter of the cavern. His body was a mountain of reptilian coils, rippling with muscle, but he was more than simply a big snake. Python shifted and changed as it suited him—sprouting clawed feet, or vestigial bat wings, or extra hissing heads along the side of his body, all of which withered and dropped off as rapidly as they formed. He was the reptilian conglomeration of everything that mammals feared in their deepest, most primal nightmares.
I’d suppressed the memory of just how hideous he was. I preferred him when he’d been obscured in poisonous fumes. His cab-size head rested on one of his coils. His eyes were closed, but that did not fool me. The monster never really slept. He only waited…for his hunger to swell, for his chance at world domination, for small, foolish Lesters to jump into his cave.
At the moment, a shimmering haze seemed to be settling over him, like the embers of a spectacular fireworks show. With nauseating certainty, I realized I was watching Python absorb the last remnants of the fallen Triumvirate’s power. The reptile looked blissful, soaking in all that warm, Nero-y goodness.
I had to hurry. I had one shot at defeating my old enemy.
I was not ready. I was not rested. I was definitely not bringing my A-game. In fact, I had been so far below my A-game for so long, I could barely remember any letters north of LMNOP.
Yet somehow I’d gotten this far. I felt a tingly sensation of power building just under my skin—perhaps my divine self, trying to reassert itself in the proximity of my old archenemy. I hoped it was that and not just my mortal body combusting.
I managed to maneuver my bow into my hands, draw an arrow, and nock it—no easy task while lying flat on your belly in a crawlspace. I even managed to avoid whanging my ukulele against the rocks and giving away my position with a rousing open chord.
So far, so good.
Deep breath. This was for Meg. This was for Jason. This was for everyone who had fought and sacrificed to drag my sorry mortal butt from quest to quest for the last six months, just to get me this chance at redemption.
&n
bsp; I kicked forward, spilling headfirst out of the crack in the ceiling. I flipped in midair, aimed…and fired my arrow at Python’s head.
I MISSED.
Don’t even pretend you’re surprised.
Rather than piercing the monster’s skull as I’d hoped, my arrow shattered on the rocks a few feet from his head. Splinters skittered harmlessly across the cavern floor. Python’s lamp-like eyes snapped open.
I landed in the center of the room, ankle-deep in a bed of old snakeskin. At least I didn’t break my legs on impact. I could save that disaster for my big finale.
Python studied me, his gaze cutting like headlights through the volcanic fumes. The shimmering haze that surrounded him was snuffed out. Whether he had finished digesting its power, or whether I had interrupted him, I couldn’t be sure.
I hoped he might roar in frustration. Instead, he laughed—a deep rumble that liquefied my courage. It’s unnerving to watch a reptile laugh. Their faces are simply not designed for showing humor. Python didn’t smile, per se, but he bared his fangs, pulled back his Tootsie-roll-segmented lips and let his forked tongue lash the air, probably savoring the scent of my fear.
“And here we are.” His voice came from all around me, each word a drill bit set against my joints. “I have not quite finished digesting Nero’s power, but I suppose it will have to do. He tastes like dried rat anyway.”
I was relieved to hear I’d interrupted Python’s emperor-tasting. Perhaps this would make him slightly less impossible to defeat. On the other hand, I didn’t like how unperturbed he sounded, how utterly confident.
Of course, I didn’t look like much of a threat.
I nocked another arrow. “Slither away, snake. While you still can.”
Python’s eyes gleamed with amusement. “Amazing. You still haven’t learned humility? I wonder how you will taste. Like rat? Like god? They are similar enough, I suppose.”
He was so wrong. Not about gods tasting like rats…I wouldn’t know. But I had learned plenty of humility. So much humility that now, facing my old nemesis, I was racked with self-doubt. I could not do this. What had I been thinking?
And yet, along with humility, I’d learned something else: getting humiliated is only the beginning, not the end. Sometimes you need a second shot, and a third, and a fourth.
I fired my arrow. This one hit Python in the face, skittering across his left eyelid and making him blink.
He hissed, raising his head until it towered twenty feet above me. “Stop embarrassing yourself, Lester. I control Delphi. I would have been content to rule the world through my puppets, the emperors, but you have helpfully cut out the middlemen. I have digested the power of the Triumvirate! Now I will digest—”
My third shot throat-punched him. It didn’t pierce the skin. That would’ve been too much to hope for. But it hit with sufficient force to make him gag.
I sidestepped around piles of scales and bones. I jumped a narrow fissure so hot it steam-baked my crotch. I nocked another arrow as Python’s form began to change. Rows of tiny leathery wings sprouted from his back. Two massive legs grew from his belly, lifting him up until he resembled a giant Komodo dragon.
“I see,” he grumbled. “Won’t go quietly. That’s fine. We can make this hurt.”
He tilted his head, like a dog listening—an image that made me never want to own a dog. “Ah…Delphi speaks. Would you like to know your future, Lester? It’s very short.”
Green luminescent fumes thickened and swirled around him, filling the air with the acrid scent of rot. I watched, too horrified to move, as Python breathed in the spirit of Delphi, twisting and poisoning its ancient power until he spoke in a booming voice, his words carrying the inescapable weight of destiny: “Apollo will fall—”
“NO!” Rage filled my body. My arms steamed. My hands glowed. I fired my fourth arrow and pierced Python’s hide just above his new right leg.
The monster stumbled, his concentration broken. Clouds of gas dissipated around him.
He hissed in pain, stomping his legs to make sure they still worked.
He roared, “NEVER INTERRUPT A PROPHECY!”
Then he barreled toward me like a hungry freight train.
I leaped to one side, somersaulting through a pile of carcasses as Python bit a chunk out of the cave floor where I’d been standing. Baseball-size debris rained down around me. One chunk hit the back of my head and nearly knocked me unconscious.
Python struck again. I’d been trying to string another shaft, but he was too fast. I jumped out of the way, landing on my bow and shattering my arrow in the process.
The cave was now a whirring factory of snake flesh—conveyor belts, shredder apparatuses, compactors, and pistons, all made of Python’s writhing body, every component ready to grind me into pulp. I scrambled to my feet and leaped over a section of the monster’s body, narrowly avoiding a newly grown head that snapped at me from Python’s side.
Given Python’s strength and my own frailty, I should have died several times over. The only thing keeping me alive was my small size. Python was a bazooka; I was a housefly. He could easily kill me with one shot, but he had to catch me first.
“You heard your fate!” Python boomed. I could feel the cold presence of his massive head looming above me. “Apollo will fall. It’s not much, but it’s enough!”
He almost caught me in a coil of flesh, but I hopped out of the snare. My tap-dancing friend Lavinia Asimov would have been proud of my fancy footwork.
“You cannot escape your destiny!” Python gloated. “I have spoken, so must it be!”
This demanded a witty comeback, but I was too busy gasping and wheezing.
I leaped onto Python’s trunk and used it as a bridge to cross one of the fissures. I thought I was being clever until a random lizard foot sprouted next to me and raked my ankle with its claws. I screamed and stumbled, desperately grasping for any handhold as I slipped off the side of the reptile. I managed to grab a leathery wing, which flapped in protest, trying to shake me off. I got one foot on the rim of the fissure, then somehow hauled myself back to solid ground.
Bad news: My bow tumbled into the void.
I couldn’t stop to mourn. My leg was on fire. My shoe was wet with my own blood. Naturally, those claws would be venomous. I’d probably just reduced my life span from a few minutes to a few fewer minutes. I limped toward the cavern wall and squeezed myself into a vertical crack no bigger than a coffin. (Oh, why did I have to make that comparison?)
I’d lost my best weapon. I had arrows but nothing to shoot them with. Whatever fits of godly power I was experiencing, they weren’t consistent and they weren’t enough. That left me with an out-of-tune ukulele and a rapidly deteriorating human body.
I wished my friends were here. I would have given anything for Meg’s exploding tomato plants, or Nico’s Stygian iron blade, or even a team of fast-running troglodytes to carry me around the cavern and screech insults at the giant tasty reptile.
But I was alone.
Wait. A faint tingle of hope ran through me. Not quite alone. I fumbled in my quiver and drew out Ye Olde Arrow of Dodona.
HOW DOETH WE, SIRRAH? The arrow’s voice buzzed in my head.
“Doething great,” I wheezed. “I gotteth him right where I wanteth him.”
THAT BAD? ZOUNDS!
“Where are you, Apollo?” Python roared. “I can smell your blood!”
“Hear that, arrow?” I wheezed, delirious from exhaustion and the venom coursing through my veins. “I forced him to call me Apollo!”
A GREAT VICTORY, intoned the arrow. ’TWOULD SEEM ’TIS ALMOST TIME.
“What?” I asked. Its voice sounded unusually subdued, almost sad.
I SAID NOTHING.
“You did too.”
I DIDST NOT! WE MUST NEEDS FORMULATE A NEW PLAN. I SHALL GO RIGHT. THOU SHALT GO LEFT.
“Okay,” I agreed. “Wait. That won’t work. You don’t have legs.”
“YOU CAN’T HIDE!” Python bellowe
d. “YOU ARE NO GOD!”
This pronouncement hit me like a bucket of ice water. It didn’t carry the weight of prophecy, but it was true nonetheless. At the moment, I wasn’t sure what I was. I certainly wasn’t my old godly self. I wasn’t exactly Lester Papadopoulos, either. My flesh steamed. Pulses of light flickered under my skin, like the sun trying to break through storm clouds. When had that started?
I was between states, morphing as rapidly as Python himself. I was no god. I would never be the same old Apollo again. But in this moment, I had the chance to decide what I would become, even if that new existence only lasted a few seconds.
The realization burned away my delirium.
“I won’t hide,” I muttered. “I won’t cower. That’s not who I will be.”
The arrow buzzed uneasily. SO…WHAT IS THY PLAN?
I grasped my ukulele by the fret board and held it aloft like a club. I raised the Arrow of Dodona in my other hand and burst from my hiding place. “CHARGE!”
At the time, this seemed like a completely sane course of action.
If nothing else, it surprised Python.
I imagined what I must have looked like from his perspective: a raggedy teenaged boy with ripped clothes and cuts and contusions everywhere, limping along with one bloody foot, waving a stick and a four-stringed instrument and screaming like a lunatic.
I ran straight at his massive head, which was too high for me to reach. I started smashing my ukulele against his throat. “Die!” CLANG! “Die!” TWANG! “Die!” CRACK-SPROING!
On the third strike, my ukulele shattered.
Python’s flesh convulsed, but rather than dying like a good snake, he wrapped a coil around my waist, almost gently, and raised me to the level of his face.
His lamp-like eyes were as large as I was. His fangs glistened. His breath smelled of long-decayed flesh.
“Enough now.” His voice turned calm and soothing. His eyes pulsed in synch with my heartbeat. “You fought well. You should be proud. Now you can relax.”
I knew he was doing that old reptile hypnosis trick—paralyzing the small mammal so it would be easier to swallow and digest. And in the back of my mind, some cowardly part of me (Lester? Apollo? Was there a difference?) whispered, Yes, relaxing would feel really good right now.