The Burning Maze (The Trials of Apollo #3)(8)

With impossible speed, the strawberries spread across the walls in a tide of green.

I was just thinking, Wow, imagine what the plants could do with sunlight! when the domed ceiling cracked like an eggshell. Brilliant rays stabbed through the darkness. Chunks of rock rained down, smashing into the birds, punching through strawberry vines (which, unlike the strixes, grew back almost immediately).

As soon as the sunlight hit the birds, they screamed and dissolved into dust.

Grover lowered his panpipes. I set down my ukulele. We watched in amazement as the plants continued to grow, interlacing until a strawberry-runner trampoline stretched across the entire area of the room at our feet.

The ceiling had disintegrated, revealing a brilliant blue sky. Hot dry air wafted down like the breath from an open oven.

Grover raised his face to the light. He sniffled, tears glistening on his cheeks.

‘Are you hurt?’ I asked.

He stared at me. The heartbreak on his face was more painful to look at than the sunlight.

‘The smell of warm strawberries,’ he said. ‘Like Camp Half-Blood. It’s been so long …’

I felt an unfamiliar twinge in my chest. I patted Grover’s knee. I had not spent much time at Camp Half-Blood, the training ground for Greek demigods on Long Island, but I understood how he felt. I wondered how my children were doing there: Kayla, Will, Austin. I remembered sitting with them at the campfire, singing ‘My Mother Was a Minotaur’ as we ate burnt marshmallows off a stick. Such perfect camaraderie is rare, even in an immortal life.

Meg leaned against the wall. Her complexion was pasty, her breathing ragged.

I dug through my pockets and found a broken square of ambrosia in a napkin. I did not keep the stuff for myself. In my mortal state, eating the food of the gods might cause me to spontaneously combust. But Meg, I had found, was not always good about taking her ambrosia.

‘Eat.’ I pressed the napkin into her hand. ‘It’ll help the paralysis pass more quickly.’

She clenched her jaw, as if about to yell, I DON’T WANNA!, then apparently decided she liked the idea of having working legs again. She began nibbling on the ambrosia.

‘What’s up there?’ she asked, frowning at the blue sky.

Grover brushed the tears from his face. ‘We’ve made it. The Labyrinth brought us right to our base.’

‘Our base?’ I was delighted to learn we had a base. I hoped that meant security, a soft bed and perhaps an espresso machine.

‘Yeah.’ Grover swallowed nervously. ‘Assuming anything is left of it. Let’s find out.’





4


Welcome to my base

We have rocks, sand and ruins

Did I mention rocks?





They tell me I reached the surface.

I don’t remember.

Meg was partially paralysed, and Grover had already carried me halfway up the ramp, so it seems wrong that I was the one who passed out, but what can I say? That Fm7 chord on ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ must have taken more out of me than I realized.

I do remember feverish dreams.

Before me rose a graceful olive-skinned woman, her long auburn hair gathered up in a doughnut braid, her sleeveless dress as light and grey as moth’s wings. She looked about twenty, but her eyes were black pearls – their hard lustre formed over centuries, a defensive shell hiding untold sorrow and disappointment. They were the eyes of an immortal who had seen great civilizations fall.

We stood together on a stone platform, at the edge of what looked like an indoor swimming pool filled with lava. The air shimmered with heat. Ashes stung my eyes.

The woman raised her arms in a supplicating gesture. Glowing red iron cuffs shackled her wrists. Molten chains anchored her to the platform, though the hot metal did not seem to burn her.

‘I am sorry,’ she said.

Somehow, I knew she wasn’t speaking to me. I was only observing this scene through the eyes of someone else. She’d just delivered bad news to this other person, crushing news, though I had no idea what it was.

‘I would spare you if I could,’ she continued. ‘I would spare her. But I cannot. Tell Apollo he must come. Only he can release me, though it is a …’ She choked as if a shard of glass had wedged in her throat. ‘Four letters,’ she croaked. ‘Starts with T.’

Trap, I thought. The answer is trap!

I felt briefly thrilled, the way you do when you’re watching a game show and you know the answer. If only I were the contestant, you think, I’d win all the prizes!

Then I realized I didn’t like this game show. Especially if the answer was trap. Especially if that trap was the grand prize waiting for me.

The woman’s image dissolved into flames.

I found myself in a different place – a covered terrace overlooking a moonlit bay. In the distance, shrouded in mist, rose the familiar dark profile of Mount Vesuvius, but Vesuvius as it had been before the eruption of 79 CE blew its summit to pieces, destroying Pompeii and wiping out thousands of Romans. (You can blame Vulcan for that. He was having a bad week.)

The evening sky was bruised purple, the coastline lit only by firelight, the moon and the stars. Under my feet, the terrace’s mosaic floor glittered with gold and silver tiles, the sort of artwork very few Romans could afford. On the walls, multicoloured frescoes were framed in silk draperies that had to have cost hundreds of thousands of denarii. I knew where I must be: an imperial villa, one of the many pleasure palaces that lined the Gulf of Naples in the early days of the empire. Normally such a place would have blazed with light throughout the night, as a show of power and opulence, but the torches on this terrace were dark, wrapped in black cloth.