The Tower of Nero Read online

  I moved through the afternoon hours in a daze, feeling as if I were preparing for a funeral…specifically my own. Austin and Kayla hovered nearby, trying to be helpful when they could, but without invading my space.

  “We talked with Sherman and Malcolm,” Kayla told me. “We’ll be on standby.”

  “If there is any chance we can help,” Austin said, “we’ll be ready to roll at a moment’s notice.”

  Words were not sufficient to thank them, but I hope they saw the gratitude in my teary, bruised, acne-pocked face.

  That night we had the usual singalong at the campfire. No one mentioned our quest. No one offered a going-away good-luck speech. The first-time campers were still so new to the demigod experience, so amazed by it all, I doubted they would even notice we were gone. Perhaps that was for the best.

  They didn’t need to know how much was at stake: not just the burning of New York, but whether the Oracle of Delphi would ever be able to give them prophecies and offer them quests, or whether the future would be controlled and predetermined by an evil emperor and a giant reptile.

  If I failed, these young demigods would grow up in a world where Nero’s tyranny was the norm and there were only eleven Olympians.

  I tried to shove those thoughts to the back of my mind. Austin and I played a duet for saxophone and guitar. Then Kayla joined us to lead the camp in a rousing version of “The Wheels on the Chariot Go ’Round and ’Round.” We roasted marshmallows, and Meg and I tried to enjoy our final hours among our friends.

  Small mercies: that night I had no dreams.

  At dawn, Will shook me awake. He and Nico had returned from wherever they had been “gathering supplies,” but he didn’t want to talk about it.

  Together, he and I met Meg and Nico on the road along the far side of Half-Blood Hill, where the camp’s shuttle bus waited to take us to Rachel Elizabeth Dare’s house in Brooklyn, and—one way or another—the final few days of my mortal life.

  BROOKLYN.

  Normally, the greatest dangers there are congested traffic, expensive poke bowls, and not enough tables at the local coffee shops for all the aspiring screenwriters. That morning, however, I could tell that our shuttle driver, Argus the giant, was keeping his eyes open for trouble.

  This was a big deal for Argus, since he had a hundred sets of eyes all over his body. (I had not actually counted them, nor had I asked if he ever got black eyes on his posterior from sitting too long.)

  As we drove down Flushing Avenue, his blue peepers blinked and twitched along his arms, around his neck, and on his cheeks and chin, trying to look in every direction at once.

  Clearly, he sensed that something was wrong. I felt it, too. There was an electric heaviness in the air, like just before Zeus hurled a massive lightning bolt or Beyoncé dropped a new album. The world was holding its breath.

  Argus pulled over a block from the Dare house as if he feared to get any closer.

  The harbor-front area had once been working docklands for local fishermen, if I recalled correctly from the 1800s. Then it had been populated mostly by railyards and factories. You could still see the pilings of decayed piers jutting out of the water. Redbrick shells and concrete smokestacks of old workhouses sat dark and abandoned like temple ruins. One open stretch of railyard was still in operation, with a few heavily graffitied freight cars on the tracks.

  But, like the rest of Brooklyn, the neighborhood was rapidly becoming gentrified. Across the street, a building that looked like a onetime machine shop now housed a café promising avocado bagels and pineapple matcha. Two blocks down, cranes loomed from the pit of a construction site. Signs on the fences read HARD HAT AREA, KEEP OUT!, and LUXURY RENTALS COMING SOON! I wondered if the construction workers were required to wear luxury hard hats.

  The Dare compound itself was a former industrial warehouse transformed into an ultramodern estate. It occupied an acre of waterfront, making it approximately five billion times larger than the average New York City home. The facade was concrete and steel—like a combination art museum and bombproof bunker.

  I had never met Mr. Dare, the real-estate mogul, but I felt I didn’t need to. I understood gods and their palaces. Mr. Dare was operating along the same principles: Look at me, look at my massive pad, spread word of my greatness. You may leave your burnt offerings on the welcome mat.

  As soon as we were out of the van, Argus floored the accelerator. He sped off in a cloud of exhaust and premium gravel.

  Will and Nico exchanged looks.

  “I guess he figured we won’t need a ride back,” Will said.

  “We won’t,” Nico said darkly. “Come on.”

  He led us to the main gates—huge panels of corrugated steel without any obvious opening mechanism or even an intercom. I suppose if you had to ask, you couldn’t afford to go in.

  Nico stood there and waited.

  Meg cleared her throat. “Uh, so—?”

  The gates rolled open of their own accord. Standing before us was Rachel Elizabeth Dare.

  Like all great artists, she was barefoot. (Leonardo would simply never put his sandals on.) Her jeans were covered in marker doodles that had gotten more complex and colorful over the years. Her white tank top was splattered with paint. Across her face, competing for attention with her orange freckles, were streaks of what looked like acrylic ultramarine blue. Some of it dotted her red hair like confetti.

  “Come in quickly,” she said, as if she’d been expecting us for hours. “The cattle are watching.”

  “Yes, I said cattle,” she told me, preempting my question as we walked through the house. “And, no, I’m not crazy. Hi, Meg. Will, Nico. Follow me. We’ve got the place to ourselves.”

  This was like saying we had Yankee Stadium to ourselves. Great, I guess, but I wasn’t sure what to do with it.

  The mansion was organized around a central atrium—Roman style, looking inward, so peons outside the walls couldn’t ruin your view. But at least the Romans had gardens. Mr. Dare seemed to believe only in concrete, metal, and gravel. His atrium featured a giant stack of iron and stone that was either a brilliant avant-garde sculpture or a pile of leftover building materials.

  We followed Rachel down a wide hall of painted cement, then up a floating stairway into the second level, which I would’ve called the living quarters, except that nothing about the mansion felt very alive. Rachel herself seemed small and out of place here, a warm, colorful aberration padding in her bare feet through an architectural mausoleum.

  At least her room had floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked the neighboring railyard and the river beyond. Sunlight flooded in, illuminating the oak floors, the speckled tarps that doubled as throw rugs, several beanbag chairs, some open cans of paint, and massive easels where Rachel had six different canvases going at once. Spread across the back part of the floor was another half-finished painting that Rachel seemed to be working on with drips and splashes à la Jackson Pollock. Shoved in one corner were a refrigerator and a simple futon, as if eating and sleeping were complete afterthoughts for her.

  “Wow.” Will moved to the windows to soak up the view and the sunshine.

  Meg made a beeline for the refrigerator.

  Nico drifted to the easels. “These are amazing.” He traced the air, following the swirls of Rachel’s paint across the canvas.

  “Eh, thanks,” Rachel said absently. “Just warm-ups, really.”

  They looked more like full aerobic workouts to me—huge, aggressive brushstrokes, thick wedges of color applied with a mason’s trowel, splashes so large she must have swung an entire can of paint to apply them. At first glance, the works appeared to be abstract. Then I stepped back, and the shapes resolved into scenes.

  That maroon square was the Waystation in Indianapolis. Those swirls were griffins in flight. A second canvas showed flames engulfing the Burning Maze and, floating in the upper right quadrant, a string of hazy glowing ships—the fleet of Caligula. A third painting…I began to get misty-eyed all over
again. It was a funeral pyre—the last rites of Jason Grace.

  “You’ve started having visions again,” I said.

  She looked at me with a kind of resentful yearning, as if she were on a sugar detox and I was waving around a chocolate bar. “Only glimpses. Every time you free an Oracle, I get a few moments of clarity. Then the fog settles again.” She pressed her fingertips against her forehead. “It’s like Python is inside my brain, toying with me. Sometimes I think…” She faltered, as if the idea were too disturbing to say aloud. “Just tell me you’re going to take him down. Soon.”

  I nodded, not trusting myself to speak. It was one thing for Python to squat in my sacred caverns of Delphi. It was another for him to invade the mind of my chosen Pythia, the priestess of my prophecies. I had accepted Rachel Elizabeth Dare as my most important Oracle. I was responsible for her. If I failed to defeat Python, he would continue to grow stronger. He would eventually control the very flow of the future. And since Rachel was inextricably linked to the Delphic…No. I couldn’t bear to think what that might mean for her.

  “Whoa.” Meg surfaced from Rachel’s refrigerator like a diver with gold doubloons. In her hand was a Yoo-hoo chocolate drink. “Can I have one?”

  Rachel managed a smile. “Help yourself, Meg. And, hey, di Angelo”—she pushed him playfully away from the canvas he’d been ogling—“don’t brush against the art! I don’t care about the paintings, but if you get any color on you, you’ll ruin that whole black-and-white aesthetic you’ve got going.”

  “Hmph,” said Nico.

  “Now what were we talking about…?” Rachel mused.

  Over at the window, Will tapped his knuckles against the glass. “Are those the cattle?”

  “Oh, right!” Rachel steered us in that direction.

  About a hundred yards away, between us and the river, a line of three cattle cars sat on the railway tracks. Each car was occupied, as evidenced by the bovine snouts that occasionally poked out between the bars.

  “Seems wrong to just leave them parked there,” Will said. “It’s going to get hot today.”

  Rachel nodded. “They’ve been there since yesterday. The cars just kind of appeared overnight. I’ve called the freight company, and the animal cruelty hotline. It’s like the cars don’t exist. Nobody has any record of them. Nobody will come out to check on them. Nobody’s brought the animals any food or water—”

  “We should free them,” Meg said.

  “That would be a very bad idea,” Nico said.

  Meg frowned. “Do you hate cows?”

  “I don’t hate—” Nico paused. “Well, okay, I’m not super fond of cows. But that’s not the point. Those can’t be ordinary animals.” He glanced at Rachel. “You said they just appeared. People don’t recognize they exist. You said the cattle were watching?”

  Rachel edged away from the window. “Sometimes I can see their eyes between the bars. They’ll be looking right at me. And just about the time you arrived, they went crazy, rocking the cars like they were trying to get out. That’s when I checked the security cameras and saw you guys at the front gate. Normally, I am not paranoid about cattle. But these…I don’t know. Something doesn’t feel right. At first, I thought it might have something to do with our neighbors.…”

  She gestured north along the waterfront to an unremarkable cluster of old residential towers. “They do strange things sometimes.”

  “In the housing project?” I asked.

  She arched her eyebrows. “You don’t see the big mansion?”

  “What mansion?”

  She glanced at Will, Nico, Meg, who all shook their heads.

  “Well,” Rachel said, “you’ll have to take my word for it. There’s a big mansion over there. Lots of weird goings-on.”

  We didn’t argue with her. Though fully mortal, Rachel had the rare gift of clear sight. She could see through the Mist and other magical barriers better than most demigods, and apparently better than most Lesters.

  She muttered, “Once I saw a penguin waddling around their back deck—”

  “A what-now?” Nico asked.

  “But leaving cows in boxes like that for days without food or water, that seems like something different,” she said. “Crueler. Those cows must be bad news.”

  Meg scowled. “They seem peaceful enough now. I still say we free them.”

  “And then what?” Nico asked. “Even if they’re not dangerous, we just let three carloads of cattle wander around Brooklyn? I’m with Rachel. Something about this…” He looked like he was trying to dredge something from his memory with no luck—another feeling I knew well. “I say we leave them alone.”

  “That’s mean!” said Meg. “We can’t—”

  “Friends, please.” I stepped between Nico and Meg before things escalated into the biggest Hades/Demeter smackdown since Persephone’s wedding shower. “Since the cattle seem to be calm at the moment, let’s circle back to that subject after we’ve discussed what we came here to discuss, yes?”

  “The Tower of Nero,” Rachel surmised.

  Will’s eyes widened. “Have you seen the future?”

  “No, William, I used simple logic. But I do have some information that might help you. Everybody grab a Yoo-hoo and a beanbag, and let’s chat about our least-favorite emperor.”

  WE CIRCLED UP OUR BEANBAGS.

  Rachel spread blueprints across the floor between us. “You guys know about the emperor’s fasces?”

  Meg and I shared a look that meant I wish we didn’t.

  “We’re familiar,” I said. “In San Francisco, we destroyed the fasces of Commodus and Caligula, which made them vulnerable enough to kill. I assume you’re suggesting we do the same with Nero?”

  Rachel pouted. “That killed my big reveal. It took me a long time to figure this out.”

  “You did great,” Meg assured her. “Apollo just likes to hear himself talk.”

  “I beg your pardon—”

  “Did you find the exact location of Nero’s fasces?” Nico interrupted. “Because that would be really useful.”

  Rachel straightened a bit. “I think so, yeah. These are the original designs for Nero’s tower. They were not easy to get.”

  Will whistled appreciatively. “I bet many Bothans died to bring us this information.”

  Rachel stared at him. “What?”

  Nico sighed. “I’m guessing that was a Star Wars reference. My boyfriend is a Star Wars geek of the worst kind.”

  “Okay, Signor Myth-o-magic. If you would just watch the original trilogy…” Will looked at the rest of us for support and found nothing but blank expressions. “Nobody? Oh, my gods. You people are hopeless.”

  “Anyway,” Rachel continued, “my theory is that Nero would keep his fasces here.” She tapped a point about halfway up the tower’s cross-section schematic. “Right in the middle of the building. It’s the only level with no exterior windows. Special-elevator access only. All doors are Celestial-bronze–reinforced. I mean, the whole building is a fortress, but this level would be impossible to break into.”

  Meg nodded. “I know the floor you mean. We were never allowed in there. Ever.”

  A chill settled over our little group. Goose bumps dotted Will’s arms. The idea of Meg, our Meg, stuck in that fortress of evil was more disturbing than any number of mysterious cows or penguins.

  Rachel flipped to another blueprint—a floor plan of the ultra-secure level. “Here. This vault has to be it. You could never get close, unless…” She pointed to a nearby room. “If I’m reading these designs correctly, this would be a holding cell for prisoners.” Her eyes were bright with excitement. “If you could get yourself captured, then convince someone on the inside to help you escape—”

  “Lu was right.” Meg looked at me triumphantly. “I told you.”

  Rachel frowned, bringing the blue paint spots on her forehead into a tighter cluster. “Who is Lu?”

  We told her about Luguselwa, and the special bonding time we’d sha
red before I threw her off a building.

  Rachel shook her head. “Okay…so if you’ve already thought of all my ideas, why am I even talking?”

  “No, no,” Will said. “You’re confirming. And we trust you more than…er, other sources.”

  I hoped he meant Lu and not me.

  “Besides,” Nico said, “you have actual blueprints.” He studied the floor plan. “Why would Nero keep his prisoners on the same level as his most valuable possession, though?”

  “Keep your fasces close,” I speculated, “and your enemies closer.”

  “Maybe,” Rachel said. “But the fasces is heavily protected, and not just by security features or regular guards. There’s something in that vault, something alive.…”

  It was my turn to get goose bumps. “How do you know this?”

  “A vision. Just a glimpse, almost like…like Python wanted me to see it. The figure looked like a man, but his head—”

  “A lion’s head,” I guessed.

  Rachel flinched. “Exactly. And slithering around his body—”

  “Snakes.”

  “So you know what it is?”

  I grasped for the memory. As usual, it was just out of reach. You may wonder why I didn’t have a better handle on my godly knowledge, but my mortal brain was an imperfect storage facility. I can only compare my frustration to how you might feel when taking a picky reading-comprehension quiz. You are assigned fifty pages. You actually read them. Then the teacher decides to test you by asking, Quick! What was the first word on page thirty-seven?

  “I’m not sure,” I admitted. “Some sort of powerful guardian, obviously. Our most recent prophecy stanza mentioned a lion, snake-entwined.” I filled Rachel in on our literally eye-popping ride with the Gray Sisters.

  Nico scowled at the blueprints, as if he might intimidate them into giving up their secrets. “So, whatever the guardian is, Nero trusts it with his life. Meg, I thought you said Luguselwa was this huge, mighty warrior?”