I frowned at Dionysus. “You could always, oh, I don’t know, decide to help.”
He scoffed. “You know as well as I do, Apollo, that quests like this are demigod business. As for advising, guiding, helping…that’s really more Chiron’s job. He should be back from his meeting…oh, tomorrow night, I would think, but that will be too late for you.”
I wished he hadn’t put it that way: too late for you.
“What meeting?” Meg asked.
Dionysus waved the question away. “Some…joint task force, he called it? The world often has more than one crisis happening at a time. Perhaps you’ve noticed. He said he had an emergency meeting with a cat and a severed head, whatever that means.”
“So instead we get you,” Meg said.
“Believe me, child, I would rather not be here with you delightful rapscallions, either. After I was so helpful in the wars against Kronos and Gaea, I was hoping Zeus might grant me early parole from my servitude in this miserable place. But, as you can see, he sent me right back to complete my hundred years. Our father does love to punish his children.”
He gave me that smirk again—the one that meant at least you got it worse.
I wished Chiron were here, but there was no point in dwelling on that, or on whatever the old centaur might be up to at his emergency meeting. We had enough to worry about on our own.
Python’s words kept slithering around in my brain: You never look at the whole board.
The evil reptile was playing a game inside a game. No great surprise that he would be using the Triumvirate for his own purposes, but Python seemed to relish the idea that I might kill his last ally, Nero. And after that? A few hours, at most. That is all it will take once the last pawn falls.
I had no idea what that meant. Python was right that I couldn’t see the whole board. I didn’t understand the rules. I just wanted to sweep the pieces away and shout, I’m going home!
“Whatever.” Meg poured more syrup onto her plate in an effort to create Lake Pancake. “Point is—that other line says our lives depend on Nero’s own. That means we can trust Lu. We’ll surrender before the deadline, like she told us.”
Nico tilted his head. “Even if you do surrender, what makes you think Nero will honor his word? If he’s gone to all the trouble to rig enough Greek fire to burn down New York, why wouldn’t he just do it anyway?”
“He would,” I said. “Most definitely.”
Dionysus seemed to ponder this. “But these fires wouldn’t extend as far as, say, Camp Half-Blood.”
“Dude,” Will said.
“What?” the god asked. “I am only in charge of the safety of this camp.”
“Lu has a plan,” Meg insisted. “Once we’re captured, Nero will relax his guard. Lu will free us. We’ll destroy…” She hesitated. “We’ll destroy his fasces. Then he’ll be weak. We can beat him before he burns the city.”
I wondered if anyone else had caught her change of direction—the way she’d felt too uncomfortable to say We’ll destroy Nero.
At the other tables, campers continued eating breakfast, jostling each other good-naturedly, chatting about the day’s scheduled activities.
None of them paid much attention to our conversation. No one was glancing nervously at me and asking their cabinmates if I was really the god Apollo.
Why would they? This was a new generation of demigods, just starting their first summer at camp. For all they knew, I was a normal fixture of the landscape like Mr. D, the satyrs, and ritual yogurt-burnings. Mr. A? Oh, yeah. He used to be a god or something. Just ignore him.
Many times over the centuries, I had felt out-of-date and forgotten. Never more so than at that moment.
“If Lu is telling the truth,” Will was saying, “and if Nero still trusts her—”
“And if she can break you out,” Nico added, “and if you can destroy the fasces before Nero burns down the city…That’s a lot of ifs. I don’t like scenarios with more than one if.”
“Like I might take you out for pizza this weekend,” Will offered, “if you’re not too annoying.”
“Exactly.” Nico’s smile was a bit of winter sun breaking between snow flurries. “So assuming you guys go through with this crazy plan, what are we supposed to do?”
Meg belched. “It’s right there in the prophecy. The son-of-Hades thing.”
Nico’s face clouded over. “What son-of-Hades thing?”
Will developed a sudden interest in his bran muffin’s wrapper. Nico seemed to realize, at the same time I did, that Will hadn’t shared all the lines of the prophecy with him.
“William Andrew Solace,” Nico said, “do you have something to confess?”
“I was going to mention it.” Will looked at me pleadingly, as if he couldn’t make himself say the lines.
“The son of Hades, cavern-runners’ friend,” I recited. “Must show the secret way unto the throne.”
Nico scowled with such intensity I feared he might make Will wither like the apple. “You think that might have been good to mention sooner?”
“Hold on,” I said, partly to spare Will from Nico’s wrath, and partly because I had been racking my brain, trying to think who these “cavern-runners” might be, and I still had no clue. “Nico, do you know what those lines mean?”
Nico nodded. “The cavern-runners are…new friends of mine.”
“They’re hardly friends,” Will muttered.
“They’re experts on subterranean geography,” Nico said. “I’ve been talking to them about…other business.”
“Which is not good for your mental health,”
