by Rick Riordan
As he dissolved into mist, I called after him. “And Paulie? I’d give the Woods at Camp Half-Blood a ten for customer satisfaction.”
Paulie beamed with gratitude. He tried to hug me again, but he was already ninety percent steam. All I got was a humid waft of mud-scented air. Then he was gone.
The five demigods gathered around me.
Miranda looked past me at the grove of Dodona. Her eyes were still puffy from crying, but she had beautiful irises the color of new foliage. “So, the voices I heard from that grove…It’s really an oracle? Those trees can give us prophecies?”
I shivered, thinking of the oak trees’ limerick. “Perhaps.”
“Can I see—?”
“No,” I said. “Not until we understand the place better.”
I had already lost one daughter of Demeter today. I didn’t intend to lose another.
“I don’t get it,” Ellis grumbled. “You’re Apollo? Like, the Apollo.”
“I’m afraid so. It’s a long story.”
“Oh, gods…” Kayla scanned the clearing. “I thought I heard Meg’s voice earlier. Did I dream that? Was she with you? Is she okay?”
The others looked at me for an explanation. Their expressions were so fragile and tentative, I decided I couldn’t break down in front of them.
“She’s…alive,” I managed. “She had to leave.”
“What?” Kayla asked. “Why?”
“Nero,” I said. “She…she went after Nero.”
“Hold up.” Austin raised his fingers like goalposts. “When you say Nero…”
I did my best to explain how the mad emperor had captured them. They deserved to know. As I recounted the story, Nero’s words kept replaying in my mind: My wrecking crew will be here any minute. Once Camp Half-Blood is destroyed, I’ll make it my new front lawn!
I wanted to think this was just bluster. Nero had always loved threats and grandiose statements. Unlike me, he was a terrible poet. He used flowery language like…well, like every sentence was a pungent bouquet of metaphors. (Oh, that’s another good one. Jotting that down.)
Why had he kept checking his watch? And what wrecking crew could he have been talking about? I had a flashback to my dream of the sun bus careening toward a giant bronze face.
I felt like I was free-falling again. Nero’s plan became horribly clear. After dividing the few demigods defending the camp, he had meant to burn this grove. But that was only part of his attack….
“Oh, gods,” I said. “The Colossus.”
The five demigods shifted uneasily.
“What Colossus?” Kayla asked. “You mean the Colossus of Rhodes?”
“No,” I said. “The Colossus Neronis.”
Cecil scratched his head. “The Colossus Neurotic?”
Ellis Wakefield snorted. “You’re a Colossus Neurotic, Markowitz. Apollo’s talking about the big replica of Nero that stood outside the amphitheater in Rome, right?”
“I’m afraid so,” I said. “While we’re standing here, Nero is going to try to destroy Camp Half-Blood. And the Colossus will be his wrecking crew.”
Miranda flinched. “You mean a giant statue is about to stomp on camp? I thought the Colossus was destroyed centuries ago.”
Ellis frowned. “Supposedly, so was the Athena Parthenos. Now it’s sitting on top of Half-Blood Hill.”
The others’ expressions turned grim. When a child of Ares makes a valid point, you know the situation is serious.
“Speaking of Athena…” Austin picked some incendiary fluff off his shoulder. “Won’t the statue protect us? I mean, that’s what she’s there for, right?”
“She will try,” I guessed. “But you must understand, the Athena Parthenos draws her power from her followers. The more demigods under her care, the more formidable her magic. And right now—”
“The camp is practically empty,” Miranda finished.
“Not only that,” I said, “but the Athena Parthenos is roughly forty feet tall. If memory serves, Nero’s Colossus was more than twice that.”
Ellis grunted. “So they’re not in the same weight class. It’s an uneven match.”
Cecil Markowitz stood a little straighter. “Guys…did you feel that?”
I thought he might be playing one of his Hermes pranks. Then the ground shook again, ever so slightly. From somewhere in the distance came a rumbling sound like a battleship scraping over a sandbar.
“Please tell me that was thunder,” Kayla said.
Ellis cocked his head, listening. “It’s a war machine. A big automaton wading ashore about half a klick from here. We need to get to camp right now.”
No one argued with Ellis’s assessment. I supposed he could distinguish between the sounds of war machines the same way I could pick out an off-tune violin in a Rachmaninoff symphony.
To their credit, the demigods rose to the challenge. Despite the fact that they’d been recently bound, doused in flammable substances, and staked like human tiki torches, they closed ranks and faced me with determination in their eyes.
“How do we get out of here?” Austin asked. “The myrmekes’ lair?”
I felt suddenly suffocated, partly because I had five people looking at me as if I knew what to do. I didn’t. In fact, if you want to know a secret, we gods usually don’t. When confronted for answers, we usually say something Rhea-like: You will have to find out for yourself! Or True wisdom must be earned! But I didn’t think that would fly in this situation.
Also, I had no desire to plunge back into the ants’ nest. Even if we made it through alive, it would take much too long. Then we would have to run perhaps half the length of the forest.
I stared at the Vince-shaped hole in the canopy. “I don’t suppose any of you can fly?”
They shook their heads.
“I can cook,” Cecil offered.
Ellis smacked him on the shoulder.
I looked back at the myrmekes’ tunnel. The solution came to me like a voice whispering in my ear: You know someone who can fly, stupid.
It was a risky idea. Then again, rushing off to fight a giant automaton was also not the safest plan of action.
“I think there’s a way,” I said. “But I’ll need your help.”
Austin balled his fists. “Anything you need. We’re ready to fight.”
“Actually…I don’t need you to fight. I need you to lay down a beat.”
My next important discovery: Children of Hermes cannot rap. At all.
Bless his conniving little heart, Cecil Markowitz tried his best, but he kept throwing off my rhythm section with his spastic clapping and terrible air mic noises. After a few trial runs, I demoted him to dancer. His job would be to shimmy back and forth and wave his hands, which he did with the enthusiasm of a tent-revival preacher.
The others managed to keep up. They still looked like half-plucked, highly combustible chickens, but they bopped with the proper amount of soul.
I launched into “Mama,” my throat reinforced with water and cough drops from Kayla’s belt pack. (Ingenious girl! Who brings cough drops on a three-legged death race?)
I sang directly into the mouth of the myrmekes’ tunnel, trusting the acoustics to carry my message. We did not have to wait long. The earth began to rumble beneath our feet. I kept singing. I had warned my comrades not to stop laying down the righteous beat until the song was over.
Still, I almost lost it when the ground exploded. I had been watching the tunnel, but Mama did not use tunnels. She exited wherever she wanted—in this case, straight out of the earth twenty yards away, spraying dirt, grass, and small boulders in all directions. She scuttled forward, mandibles clacking, wings buzzing, dark Teflon eyes focused on me. Her abdomen was no longer swollen, so I assumed she had finished depositing her most recent batch of killer-ant larvae. I hoped this meant she would be in a good mood, not a hungry mood.
Behind her, two winged soldiers clambered out of the earth. I had not been expecting bonus ants. (Really, bonus ants is not a term mos
t people would like to hear.) They flanked the queen, their antennae quivering.
I finished my ode, then dropped to one knee, spreading my arms as I had before.
“Mama,” I said, “we need a ride.”
My logic was this: Mothers were used to giving rides. With thousands upon thousands of offspring, I assumed the queen ant would be the ultimate soccer mom. And indeed, Mama grabbed me with her mandibles and tossed me over her head.
Despite what the demigods may tell you, I did not flail, scream, or land in a way that damaged my sensitive parts. I landed heroically, straddling the queen’s neck, which was no larger than the back of an average warhorse. I shouted to my comrades, “Join me! It’s perfectly safe!”
For some reason, they hesitated. The ants did not. The queen tossed Kayla just behind me. The soldier ants followed Mama’s lead—snapping up two demigods each and throwing them aboard.
The three myrmekes revved their wings with a noise like radiator fan blades. Kayla grabbed my waist.
“Is this really safe?” she yelled.
“Perfectly!” I hoped I was right. “Perhaps even safer than the sun chariot!”
“Didn’t the sun chariot almost destroy the world once?”
“Well, twice,” I said. “Three times, if you count the day I let Thalia Grace drive, but—”
“Forget I asked!”
Mama launched herself into the sky. The canopy of twisted branches blocked our path, but Mama didn’t pay any more attention to them than she had to the ton of solid earth she’d plowed through.
I yelled, “Duck!”
We flattened ourselves against Mama’s armored head as she smashed through the trees, leaving a thousand wooden splinters embedded in my back. It felt so good to fly again, I didn’t care. We soared above the woods and banked to the east.
For two or three seconds, I was exhilarated.
Then I heard the screaming from Camp Half-Blood.
Buck-naked statue
A Neurotic Colossus
Where art thy undies?
EVEN MY SUPERNATURAL POWERS of description fail me.
Imagine seeing yourself as a hundred-foot-tall bronze statue—a replica of your own magnificence, gleaming in the late afternoon light.
Now imagine that this ridiculously handsome statue is wading out of Long Island Sound onto the North Shore. In his hand is a ship’s rudder—a blade the size of a stealth bomber, fixed to a fifty-foot-long pole—and Mr. Gorgeous is raising said rudder to smash the crud out of Camp Half-Blood.
This was the sight that greeted us as we flew in from the woods.
“How is that thing alive?” Kayla demanded. “What did Nero do—order it online?”
“The Triumvirate has vast resources,” I told her. “They’ve had centuries to prepare. Once they reconstructed the statue, all they had to do was fill it with some animating magic—usually the harnessed life forces of wind or water spirits. I’m not sure. That’s really more of Hephaestus’s specialty.”
“So how do we kill it?”
“I’m…I’m working on that.”
All across the valley, campers screamed and ran for their weapons. Nico and Will were floundering in the lake, apparently having been capsized in the middle of a canoe ride. Chiron galloped through the dunes, harrying the Colossus with his arrows. Even by my standards, Chiron was a very fine archer. He targeted the statue’s joints and seams, yet his shots did not seem to bother the automaton at all. Already dozens of missiles stuck from the Colossus’s armpits and neck like unruly hair.
“More quivers!” Chiron shouted. “Quickly!”
Rachel Dare stumbled from the armory carrying half a dozen, and she ran to resupply him.
The Colossus brought down his rudder to smash the dining pavilion, but his blade bounced off the camp’s magical barrier, sparking as if it had hit solid metal. Mr. Gorgeous took another step inland, but the barrier resisted him, pushing him back with the force of a wind tunnel.
On Half-Blood Hill, a silver aura surrounded the Athena Parthenos. I wasn’t sure the demigods could see it, but every so often a beam of ultraviolet light shot from Athena’s helmet like a search lamp, hitting the Colossus’s chest and pushing back the invader. Next to her, in the tall pine tree, the Golden Fleece blazed with fiery energy. The dragon Peleus hissed and paced around the trunk, ready to defend his turf.
These were powerful forces, but I did not need godly sight to tell me that they would soon fail. The camp’s defensive barriers were designed to turn away the occasional stray monster, to confuse mortals and prevent them from detecting the valley, and to provide a first line of defense against invading forces. A criminally beautiful hundred-foot-tall Celestial bronze giant was another thing entirely. Soon the Colossus would break through and destroy everything in its path.
“Apollo!” Kayla nudged me in the ribs. “What do we do?”
I stirred, again with the unpleasant realization that I was expected to have answers. My first instinct was to order a seasoned demigod to take charge. Wasn’t it the weekend yet? Where was Percy Jackson? Or those Roman praetors Frank Zhang and Reyna Ramírez-Arellano? Yes, they would have done nicely.
My second instinct was to turn to Meg McCaffrey. How quickly I had grown used to her annoying yet strangely endearing presence! Alas, she was gone. Her absence felt like a Colossus stomping upon my heart. (This was an easy metaphor to summon, since the Colossus was presently stomping on a great many things.)
Flanking us on either side, the soldier ants flew in formation, awaiting the queen’s orders. The demigods watched me anxiously, random bits of bandage fluff swirling from their bodies as we sped through the air.
I leaned forward and spoke to Mama in a soothing tone, “I know I cannot ask you to risk your life for us.”
Mama hummed as if to say, You’re darn right!
“Just give us one pass around that statue’s head?” I asked. “Enough to distract it. Then set us down on the beach?”
She clicked her mandibles doubtfully.
“You’re the best mama in the whole world,” I added, “and you look lovely today.”
That line always worked with Leto. It did the trick with Mama Ant, too. She twitched her antennae, perhaps sending a high-frequency signal to her soldiers, and all three ants banked hard to the right.
Below us, more campers joined the battle. Sherman Yang had harnessed two pegasi to a chariot and was now circling the statue’s legs, while Julia and Alice threw electric javelins at the Colossus’s knees. The missiles stuck in his joints, discharging tendrils of blue lightning, but the statue barely seemed to notice. Meanwhile, at his feet, Connor Stoll and Harley used twin flamethrowers to give the Colossus a molten pedicure, while the Nike twins manned a catapult, lobbing boulders at the Colossus’s Celestial bronze crotch.
Malcolm Pace, a true child of Athena, was coordinating the attacks from a hastily organized command post on the green. He and Nyssa had spread war maps across a card table and were shouting targeting coordinates, while Chiara, Damien, Paolo, and Billie rushed to set up ballistae around the communal hearth.
Malcolm looked like the perfect battlefield commander, except for the fact that he’d forgotten his pants. His red briefs made quite a statement with his sword and leather cuirass.
Mama dove toward the Colossus, leaving my stomach at a higher altitude.
I had a moment to appreciate the statue’s regal features, its metal brow rimmed with a spiky crown meant to represent the beams of the sun. The Colossus was supposed to be Nero as the sun god, but the emperor had wisely made the face resemble mine more closely than his. Only the line of its nose and its ghastly neck beard suggested Nero’s trademark ugliness.
Also…did I mention that the hundred-foot statue was entirely nude? Well, of course it was. Gods are almost always depicted as nude, because we are flawless beings. Why would you cover up perfection? Still, it was a little disconcerting to see my buck-naked self stomping around, slamming a ship’s rudder at Camp Half-Bl
ood.
As we approached the Colossus, I bellowed loudly, “IMPOSTER! I AM THE REAL APOLLO! YOU’RE UGLY!”
Oh, dear reader, it was hard to yell such words at my own handsome visage, but I did. Such was my courage.
The Colossus did not like being insulted. As Mama and her soldiers veered away, the statue swung its rudder upward.
Have you ever collided with a bomber? I had a sudden flashback to Dresden in 1945, when the planes were so thick in the air, I literally could not find a safe lane to drive in. The axle on the sun chariot was out of alignment for weeks after that.
I realized the ants were not fast enough fliers to escape the rudder’s reach. I saw catastrophe approaching in slow motion. At the last possible moment, I yelled, “Dive!”
We plunged straight down. The rudder only clipped the ants’ wings—but it was enough to send us spiraling toward the beach.
I was grateful for soft sand.
I ate quite a bit of it when we crash-landed.
By sheer luck, none of us died, though Kayla and Austin had to pull me to my feet.
“Are you okay?” Austin asked.
“Fine,” I said. “We must hurry.”
The Colossus stared down at us, perhaps trying to discern whether we were dying in agony yet or needed some additional pain. I had wanted to get his attention, and I had succeeded. Huzzah.
I glanced at Mama and her soldiers, who were shaking the sand off their carapaces. “Thank you. Now save yourselves. Fly!”
They did not need to be told twice. I suppose ants have a natural fear of large humanoids looming over them, about to squash them with a heavy foot. Mama and her guards buzzed into the sky.
Miranda looked after them. “I never thought I’d say this about bugs, but I’m going to miss those guys.”
“Hey!” called Nico di Angelo. He and Will scrambled over the dunes, still dripping from their swim in the canoe lake.
“What’s the plan?” Will seemed calm, but I knew him well enough by now to tell that inside he was as charged as a bare electrical wire.
BOOM.