The Tower of Nero Read online

  “These guys are awesome,” Meg decided. “They eat snakes.”

  I knew several snakes, including Hermes’s companions, George and Martha, who would have been uncomfortable with Meg’s definition of awesomeness. Since we were now in the midst of the trogs’ encampment, I decided not to bring that up.

  At first glance, the troglodytes’ corporate headquarters resembled an abandoned subway station. The wide platform was lined with columns holding up a barreled ceiling of black tiles that drank in the dim light from pots of bioluminescent mushrooms scattered around the cavern. Along the left side of the platform, instead of a rail bed, was the sunken, packed-earth roadway that the trogs had used to bring us here. And at the speeds they ran, who needed a train?

  Along the right side of the platform flowed a swift subterranean river. The trogs filled their gourds and cauldrons from this source, and also emptied their chamber pots into it—though being a civilized, hat-wearing people, they dumped the chamber pots downstream from where they drew their drinking water.

  Unlike in a subway station, there were no obvious stairways leading up, no clearly marked exits. Just the river and the road we’d arrived on.

  The platform buzzed with activity. Dozens of trogs rushed here and there, miraculously managing their daily chores without losing the stacks of hats on their heads. Some tended cooking pots on tripods over fire pits. Others—possibly merchants?—haggled over bins of rocks. Trog children, no bigger than human babies, frolicked around, playing catch with spheres of solid crystal.

  Their dwellings were tents. Most had been appropriated from the human world, which gave me unpleasant flashbacks of the camping display at Macro’s Military Madness in Palm Springs. Others appeared to be of trog design, carefully stitched from the shaggy red hides of the tauri silvestres. I had no idea how the trogs had managed to skin and stitch the impervious hides, but clearly, as the ancestral enemies of the forest bulls, they had found a way.

  I wondered about that rivalry, too. How had a subterranean frog people in love with hats and lizards become mortal enemies to a breed of bright-red devil bulls? Perhaps at the beginning of time, the elder gods had told the first trogs, You may now pick your nemesis! And the first trogs had pointed across the newly made fields of creation and yelled, We hate those cows!

  Whatever the case, I was comforted to know that even if the trogs were not yet our friends, at least we had a mutual enemy.

  Screech-Bling had given us a guest tent and a cold fire pit and told us to make ourselves at home while he saw to dinner preparations. Or rather, he’d told Nico to make himself at home. The CEO kept eyeing Rachel, Meg, and me like we were sides of beef hanging in a shop window. As for Will, the troglodytes seemed to ignore him. My best guess: because Will glowed, they considered him simply a moveable light source, as if Nico had brought along his own pot of luminous mushrooms. Judging from Will’s scowl, he did not appreciate this.

  It would’ve been easier to relax if Rachel hadn’t kept checking her watch—reminding us that it was now four in the afternoon, then four thirty, and that Meg and I were supposed to surrender by sundown. I could only hope the troglodytes were like senior citizens and ate supper early.

  Meg busied herself collecting spores from the nearby mushroom pots, which she seemed to consider the coolest thing since snake-eating. Will and Nico sat on the other side of the fire pit having a tense discussion. I couldn’t hear the words, but from their facial expressions and hand gestures, I got the gist:

  Will: Worry, worry, worry.

  Nico: Calm down, probably won’t die.

  Will: Worry. Trogs. Dangerous. Yikes.

  Nico: Trogs good. Nice hats.

  Or something along those lines.

  After a while, the trog with the chef’s hat materialized at our campsite. In his hand was a steaming ladle. “Screech-Bling will talk to you now,” he said in heavily Troglodytish-laced English.

  We all began to rise, but the chef stopped us with a sweep of his ladle. “Only Nico, the Italian wall lizard—um, SQUEAK—I mean the Italian son of Hades. The rest of you will wait here until dinner.”

  His gleaming eyes seemed to add, When you may or may not be on the menu!

  Nico squeezed Will’s hand. “It’ll be fine. Back soon.”

  Then he and the chef were gone. In exasperation, Will threw himself down on his fireside mat and put his backpack over his face, reducing our Will-glow illumination by about fifty percent.

  Rachel scanned the encampment, her eyes glittering in the gloom.

  I wondered what she saw with her ultra-clear vision. Perhaps the troglodytes looked even scarier than I realized. Perhaps their hats were even more magnificent. Whatever the case, her shoulders curved as tense as a drawn bow. Her fingers traced the soot-stained floor as if she were itching for her paintbrushes.

  “When you surrender to Nero,” she told me, “the first thing you’ll need to do is buy us time.”

  Her tone disturbed me almost as much as her words: when I surrendered, not if. Rachel had accepted that it was the only way. The reality of my predicament curled up and nestled in my throat like a five-lined skink.

  I nodded. “B-buy time. Yes.”

  “Nero will want to burn down New York as soon as he has you,” she said. “Why would he wait? Unless you give him a reason…”

  I had a feeling I would not like Rachel’s next suggestion. I didn’t have a clear understanding of what Nero intended to do to me once I surrendered—other than the obvious torture and death. Luguselwa seemed to believe the emperor would keep Meg and me alive at least for a while, though she had been vague about what she knew of Nero’s plans.

  Commodus had wanted to make a public spectacle out of my death. Caligula had wanted to extract what remained of my godhood and add it to his own power with the help of Medea’s sorcery. Nero might have similar ideas. Or—and I feared this was most likely—once he finished torturing me, he might surrender me to Python to seal their alliance. No doubt my old reptilian enemy would enjoy swallowing me whole, letting me die in his belly over the course of many excruciating days of digestion. So, there was that to look forward to.

  “Wh-what reason would make Nero wait?” I asked.

  Apparently, I was picking up Troglodytish, because my voice was punctuated by clicks and squeaks.

  Rachel traced curlicues in the soot—waves, perhaps, or a line of people’s heads. “You said Camp Half-Blood was standing by to help?”

  “Yes…Kayla and Austin told me they would remain on alert. Chiron should be back at camp soon as well. But an attack on Nero’s tower would be doomed. The whole point of our surrender—”

  “Is to distract the emperor from what Nico, Will, and I will be doing, hopefully, with the trogs’ help: disabling the Greek-fire vats. But you’ll need to give Nero another incentive to keep him from pushing that button the minute you surrender. Otherwise we’ll never have time to sabotage his doomsday weapon, no matter how fast the trogs can run or dig.”

  I understood what she was suggesting. The five-lined skink of reality began its slow, painful slide down my esophagus.

  “You want to alert Camp Half-Blood,” I said. “Have them initiate an attack anyway. Despite the risks.”

  “I don’t want any of this,” she said. “But it’s the only way. It’ll have to be carefully timed. You and Meg surrender. We get to work with the troglodytes. Camp Half-Blood musters for an attack. But if Nero thinks the entire camp is coming to him—”

  “That would be worth waiting for. To take out the entire population of Camp Half-Blood while he destroys the city, all in one terrible firestorm.” I swallowed. “I could just bluff. I could claim reinforcements are coming.”

  “No,” Rachel said. “It has to be real. Nero has Python on his side. Python would know.”

  I didn’t bother asking her how. The monster might not have been able to see through Rachel’s eyes yet, but I remembered all too well how his voice had sounded speaking through her mouth. They were c
onnected. And that connection was getting stronger.

  I was reluctant to consider the details of such an insane plan, but I found myself asking, “How would you alert the camp?”

  Rachel gave me a thin smile. “I can use cell phones. I don’t normally carry one, but I’m not a demigod. Assuming I make it back to the surface, where cell phones actually, you know, work, I can buy a cheap one. Chiron has a crappy old computer in the Big House. He hardly ever uses it, but he knows to look for messages or e-mails in emergency situations. I’m pretty sure I can get his attention. Assuming he’s there.”

  She sounded so calm, which just made me feel more agitated.

  “Rachel, I’m scared,” I admitted. “It was one thing thinking about putting myself in danger. But the entire camp? Everyone?”

  Strangely, this comment seemed to please her.

  She took my hand. “I know, Apollo. And the fact that you’re worried about other people? That’s beautiful. But you’ll have to trust me. That secret path to the throne…the thing I am supposed to show you? I’m pretty sure this is it. This is how we make things right.”

  Make things right.

  What would such an ending even look like?

  Six months ago, when I first plummeted to Manhattan, the answer had seemed obvious. I would return to Mount Olympus, my immortality restored, and everything would be great. After being Lester for a few more months, I might have added that destroying the Triumvirate and freeing the ancient Oracles would also be good…but mostly because that was the path back to my godhood. Now, after all the sacrifices I had seen, the pain suffered by so many…what could possibly make things right?

  No amount of success would bring back Jason, or Dakota, or Don, or Crest, or Money Maker, or Heloise, or the many other heroes who had fallen. We could not undo those tragedies.

  Mortals and gods had one thing in common: we were notoriously nostalgic for “the good old days.” We were always looking back to some magical golden time before everything went bad. I remembered sitting with Socrates, back around 425 BCE, and griping to each other about how the younger generations were ruining civilization.

  As an immortal, of course, I should have known that there never were any “good old days.” The problems humans face never really change, because mortals bring their own baggage with them. The same is true of gods.

  I wanted to go back to a time before all the sacrifices had been made. Before I had experienced so much pain. But making things right could not mean rewinding the clock. Even Kronos hadn’t had that much power over time.

  I suspected that wasn’t what Jason Grace would want, either.

  When he’d told me to remember being human, he’d meant building on pain and tragedy, overcoming it, learning from it. That was something gods never did. We just complained.

  To be human is to move forward, to adapt, to believe in your ability to make things better. That is the only way to make the pain and sacrifice mean something.

  I met Rachel’s gaze. “I trust you. I’ll make things right. Or I will die trying.”

  The strange thing was, I meant it. A world in which the future was controlled by a giant reptile, where hope was suffocated, where heroes sacrificed their lives for nothing, and pain and hardship could not yield a better life…that seemed much worse than a world without Apollo.

  Rachel kissed my cheek—a sisterly gesture, except it was hard to imagine my actual sister Artemis doing that.

  “I’m proud of you,” Rachel said. “Whatever happens. Remember that.”

  I was tongue-tied.

  Meg turned toward us, her hands full of lichen and mushrooms. “Rachel, did you just kiss him? Ew. Why?”

  Before Rachel could answer, the chef reappeared at our campsite, his apron and hat splattered with steaming broth. He still had that hungry glint in his eyes. “VISITORS—SQUEAK—come with me! We are ready for the feast!”

  MY ADVICE: IF YOU’RE EVER GIVEN A CHOICE between drinking skink soup or serving yourself up as the troglodytes’ main course, just flip a coin. Neither option is survivable.

  We sat on cushions around a communal mushroom pit with a hundred or so troglodytes. As barbarian guests, we were each given headwear, so as not to offend our hosts’ sensibilities. Meg wore a beekeeper’s hat. Rachel got a pith helmet. I was given a New York Mets cap because, I was told, no one else wanted it. I found this insulting both to me and the franchise.

  Nico and Will sat on Screech-Bling’s right. Nico sported a top hat, which worked well with his black-and-white aesthetic. Will, my poor boy, had been given a lampshade. No respect for the light-bringers of the world.

  Sitting to my left was the chef, who introduced himself as Click-Wrong (pronounce the W). His name made me wonder if he’d been an impulse buy for his parents on Cyber Monday, but I thought it would be rude to inquire.

  The trog children had the job of serving. A tiny boy in a propeller beanie offered me a black stone cup filled to the brim, then ran away giggling. The soup bubbled a rich golden brown.

  “The secret is lots of turmeric,” Click-Wrong confided.

  “Ah.” I raised my cup, as everyone else was doing. The trogs began slurping with blissful expressions and many clicks, grrs, and yummy sounds.

  The smell was not bad: like tangy chicken broth. Then I spotted a lizard foot floating in the foam, and I just couldn’t.

  I pressed my lips to the rim and pretended to sip. I waited for what I thought was a credible amount of time, allowing most of the trogs to finish their portions.

  “Mmm!” I said. “Click-Wrong, your culinary skills astound me! Partaking in this soup is a great honor. In fact, having any more of it would be too much of an honor. May I give the rest to someone who can better appreciate the succulent flavors?”

  “Me!” shouted a nearby trog.

  “Me!” shouted another.

  I passed the cup down the circle, where it was soon drained by happy troglodytes.

  Click-Wrong did not appear insulted. He patted my shoulder sympathetically. “I remember my first skink. It is a potent soup! You will be able to handle more next time.”

  I was glad to hear he thought there would be a next time. It implied we would not be killed this time. Rachel, looking relieved, announced that she, too, was overwhelmed with honor and would be happy to share her portion.

  I looked at Meg’s bowl, which was already empty. “Did you actually—?”

  “What?” Her expression was unreadable behind the netting of her beekeeper’s hat.

  “Nothing.”

  My stomach convulsed with a combination of nausea and hunger. I wondered if we would be honored with a second course. Perhaps some breadsticks. Or really anything that wasn’t garnished with skink feet.

  Screech-Bling raised his hands and click-click-clicked for attention. “Friends! Shareholders! I see you all!”

  The troglodytes tapped their spoons against their stone cups, making a sound like a thousand clattering bones.

  “Out of courtesy for our uncivilized guests,” Screech-Bling continued, “I shall speak in the barbaric language of the crust-dwellers.”

  Nico tipped his fine top hat. “I see the honor you give us. Thank you, CEO Screech-Bling, for not eating us, and also speaking in our tongue.”

  Screech-Bling nodded with a smug expression that said, No problem, kid. We’re just awesome that way. “The Italian wall lizard has told us many things!”

  A board member standing behind him, the one with the cowboy hat, whispered in his ear.

  “I mean the Italian son of Hades!” Screech-Bling corrected. “He has explained the evil plans of Emperor Nero!”

  The trogs muttered and hissed. Apparently, Nero’s infamy had spread even to the deepest-dwelling corporations of hat-wearers. Screech-Bling pronounced the name Nee-ACK-row, with a sound in the middle like a cat being strangled, which seemed appropriate.

  “The son of Hades wishes our help!” said Screech-Bling. “The emperor has vats of fire-liquid. Many of you know the
ones I speak of. Loud and clumsy was the digging when they installed those vats. Shoddy the workmanship!”

  “Shoddy!” agreed many of the trogs.

  “Soon,” said the CEO, “Nee-ACK-row will unleash burning death across the Crusty Crust. The son of Hades has asked our help to dig to these vats and eat them!”

  “You mean disable them?” Nico suggested.

  “Yes, that!” Screech-Bling agreed. “Your language is crude and difficult!”

  On the opposite side of the circle, the board member with the police hat made a small notice-me sort of growl. “O Screech-Bling, these fires will not reach us. We are too deep! Should we not let the Crusty Crust burn?”

  “Hey!” Will spoke for the first time, looking about as serious as someone can while wearing a lampshade. “We’re talking about millions of innocent lives.”

  Police Hat snarled. “We trogs are only hundreds. We do not breed and breed and choke the world with our waste. Our lives are rare and precious. You crust-dwellers? No. Besides, you are blind to our existence. You would not help us.”

  “Grr-Fred speaks the truth,” said Cowboy Hat. “No offense to our guests.”

  The child with the propeller beanie chose this moment to appear at my side, grinning and offering me a wicker basket covered by a napkin. “Breadsticks?”

  I was so upset I declined.

  “—assure our guests,” Screech-Bling was saying. “We have welcomed you to our table. We see you as intelligent beings. You must not think we are against your kind. We bear you no ill will! We simply do not care whether you live or die.”

  There was a general muttering of agreement. Click-Wrong gave me a kindly glance that implied, You can’t argue with that logic!

  The scary thing was, back when I was a god, I might have agreed with the trogs. I’d destroyed a few cities myself in the old days. Humans always popped up again like weeds. Why fret about one little fiery apocalypse in New York?

  Now, though, one of those “not-so-rare” lives was Estelle Blofis’s, giggler and future ruler of the Crusty Crust. And her parents, Sally and Paul…In fact, there wasn’t a single mortal I considered expendable. Not one deserved to be snuffed out by Nero’s cruelty. The revelation stunned me. I had become a human-life hoarder!