فصل 08

Lovebirds arguing

Trouble in Elysium?

I’ll just scrub these plates

THE ORDER TO sit tight seemed clear enough to me.

Leo and Calypso, however, decided that the least we could do was clean up the lunch dishes. (See my previous comment re: the dumbness of productivity.) I scrubbed. Calypso rinsed. Leo dried, which wasn’t even work for him, since all he had to do was heat his hands a little.

“So,” Calypso said, “what’s this throne Emmie mentioned?”

I scowled at my foamy stack of bread pans. “The Throne of Memory. It’s a chair carved by the goddess Mnemosyne herself.”

Leo leered at me over the top of a steaming salad plate. “You forgot the Throne of Memory? Isn’t that a mortal sin or something?”

“The only mortal sin,” I said, “would be failing to incinerate you as soon as I become a god again.”

“You could try,” Leo said. “But then how would you learn those secret scales on the Valdezinator?”

I accidentally sprayed myself in the face. “What secret scales?”

“Both of you, stop,” Calypso ordered. “Apollo, why is this Throne of Memory important?”

I wiped the water off my face. Talking about the Throne of Memory had jogged loose a few more pieces of information from my mind, but I didn’t like what I’d remembered.

“Before a petitioner went into the Cave of Trophonius,” I said, “he or she was supposed to drink from two magical springs: Forgetfulness and Memory.”

Leo picked up another plate. Steam curled from the porcelain. “Wouldn’t the two springs, like, cancel each other out?”

I shook my head. “Assuming the experience didn’t kill you, it would prepare your mind for the Oracle. You would then descend into the cave and experience…untold horrors.”

“Such as?” Calypso asked.

“I just said they were untold. I do know that Trophonius would fill your mind with bits of nightmarish verse that, if assembled properly, became a prophecy. Once you stumbled out of the cave—assuming you lived and weren’t driven permanently insane—the priests would sit you down on the Throne of Memory. The verses would come spilling out of your mouth. A priest would write them down, and voilà! There’s your prophecy. With any luck, your mind would return to normal.”

Leo whistled. “That is one messed-up Oracle. I like the singing trees better.”

I suppressed a shudder. Leo hadn’t been with me in the Grove of Dodona. He didn’t appreciate just how terrible those clashing voices were. But he had a point. There was a reason few people remembered the Cave of Trophonius. It wasn’t a place that got rave write-ups in the yearly “Hot Oracles to Visit Now” articles.

Calypso took a bread pan from me and began to wash it. She seemed to know what she was doing, though her hands were so lovely I couldn’t imagine she often did her own dishes. I would have to ask her which moisturizer she used.

“What if the petitioner couldn’t use the throne?” she asked.

Leo snickered. “Use the throne.”

Calypso glared at him.

“Sorry.” Leo tried to look serious, which for him was always a losing battle.

“If the petitioner couldn’t use the throne,” I said, “there would be no way to extract the bits of verse from his or her mind. The petitioner would be stuck with those horrors from the cave—forever.”

Calypso rinsed the pan. “Georgina…that poor child. What do you think happened to her?”

I didn’t want to think about that. The possibilities made my skin crawl. “Somehow she must have made it into the cave. She survived the Oracle. She made it back here, but…not in good shape.” I recalled the frowny-faced knife-wielding stick figures on her bedroom wall. “My guess is that the emperor subsequently seized control of the Throne of Memory. Without that, Georgina would never be able to recover fully. Perhaps she left again and went looking for it…and was captured.”

Leo muttered a curse in Spanish. “I keep thinking about my little bro Harley back at camp. If somebody tried to hurt him…” He shook his head. “Who is this emperor and how soon can we stomp him?”

I scrubbed the last of the pans. At least this was one epic quest I had successfully completed. I stared at the bubbles fizzing on my hands.

“I have a pretty good idea who the emperor is,” I admitted. “Josephine started to say his name. But Emmie is right—it’s best not to speak it aloud. The New Hercules…” I swallowed. In my stomach, salad and bread seemed to be holding a mud-wrestling contest. “He was not a nice person.”

In fact, if I had the right emperor, this quest could be personally awkward. I hoped I was wrong. Perhaps I could stay at the Waystation and direct operations while Calypso and Leo did the actual fighting. That seemed only fair, since I’d had to scrub the dishes.

Leo put away the dinner plates. His eyes scanned side to side as if reading invisible equations.

“This project Josephine is working on,” he said. “She’s building some kind of tracking device. I didn’t ask, but…she must be trying to find Georgina.”

“Of course.” Calypso’s voice took on a sharper edge. “Can you imagine losing your child?”

Leo’s ears reddened. “Yeah. But I was thinking, if we can get back to Festus, I could run some numbers, maybe reprogram his Archimedes sphere—”

Calypso threw in the towel, quite literally. It landed in the sink with a damp flop. “Leo, you can’t reduce everything to a program.”

He blinked. “I’m not. I just—”

“You’re trying to fix it,” Calypso said. “As if every problem is a machine. Jo and Emmie are in serious pain. Emmie told me they’re thinking about abandoning the Waystation, giving themselves up to the emperor if it’ll save their daughter. They don’t need gadgets or jokes or fixes. Try listening.”

Leo held out his hands. For once, he didn’t seem to know what to do with them. “Look, babe—”

“Don’t babe me,” she snapped. “Don’t—”

“APOLLO?” Josephine’s voice boomed from the main hall. She didn’t sound panicked exactly, but definitely tense—somewhat like the atmosphere in the kitchen.

I stepped away from the happy couple. Calypso’s outburst had taken me by surprise, but as I thought about it, I recalled half a dozen other spats between her and Leo as we had traveled west. I simply hadn’t thought much about them because…well, the fights weren’t about me. Also, compared to godly lovers’ quarrels, Leo and Calypso’s were nothing.

I pointed over my shoulder. “I think I’ll just, uh…”

I left the kitchen.

In the middle of the main hall, Emmie and Josephine stood with their weapons at their sides. I couldn’t quite read their expressions—expectant, on edge, the way Zeus’s cupbearer Ganymede looked whenever he gave Zeus a new wine to try.

“Apollo.” Emmie pointed over my head, where griffin nests lined the edge of the ceiling. “You have a visitor.”

In order to see who Emmie was pointing at, I had to step forward onto the rug and turn around. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have done that. As soon as I placed my foot on the rug, I thought, Wait, was this rug here before?

Which was followed closely by the thought: Why does this rug look like a tightly woven net?

Followed by: This is a net.

Followed by: YIKES!

The net enmeshed me and rocketed me into the air. I regained the power of flight. For a microsecond, I imagined I was being recalled to Olympus—ascending in glory to sit at the right hand of my father. (Well, three thrones down on Zeus’s right, anyway.)

Then gravity took hold. I bounced like a yo-yo. One moment I was eye-level with Leo and Calypso, who were gaping at me from the kitchen entrance. The next moment I was even with the griffins’ nests, staring into the face of a goddess I knew all too well.

You’re probably thinking: It was Artemis. This net trap was just a little sibling prank. Surely no loving sister would let her brother suffer so much for so long. She has finally come to rescue our hero, Apollo!

No. It was not Artemis.

The young woman sat on the molding ledge, playfully swinging her legs. I recognized her elaborately laced sandals, her dress made from layers of mesh in forest-colored camouflage. Her braided auburn hair made a ponytail so long it wrapped around her neck like a scarf or a noose. Her fierce dark eyes reminded me of a panther watching its prey from the shadows of the underbrush—a panther with a twisted sense of humor.

A goddess, yes. But not the one I had hoped for.

“You,” I snarled. It was difficult to sound menacing while bobbing up and down in a net.

“Hello, Apollo.” Britomartis, the goddess of nets, smiled coyly. “I hear you’re human now. This is going to be fun.”