The Tower of Nero (The Trials of Apollo #5)(26)

I shuddered. “I hope not. Usually the last stanza would include a closing couplet, but we haven’t heard one yet.”

“Which means,” Nico said, “that there are more stanzas to come.”

“Yippee.” Meg shoved more pancake in her mouth.

Dionysus matched her with a mouthful of his own, as if they were engaged in a competition to see who could devour the most and enjoy it the least.

“Well, then,” Will said with forced cheerfulness, “let’s discuss the stanzas we have. What was it—The tow’r of Nero two alone ascend? That part is obvious enough. It must mean Apollo and Meg, right?”

“We surrender,” Meg said. “That’s Luguselwa’s plan.”

Dionysus snorted. “Apollo, please tell me you’re not going to trust a Gaul. You haven’t gotten that addle-brained, have you?”

“Hey!” Meg said. “We can trust Lu. She let Lester throw her off a roof.”

Dionysus narrowed his eyes. “Did she survive?”

Meg looked flustered. “I mean—”

“Yes,” I interrupted. “She did.”

I told them what I had seen in my dreams: the broken Gaul brought before Nero’s throne, the emperor’s ultimatum, then my plunge into the caverns beneath Delphi, where Python blessed my tiny brain.

Dionysus nodded thoughtfully. “Ah, yes, Python. If you survive Nero, you have that to look forward to.”

I didn’t appreciate the reminder. Stopping a power-mad emperor from taking over the world and destroying a city…that was one thing. Python was a more nebulous threat, harder to quantify, but potentially a thousand times more dangerous.

Meg and I had freed four Oracles from the grasp of the Triumvirate, but Delphi still remained firmly under Python’s control. That meant the world’s main source of prophecy was being slowly choked off, poisoned, manipulated. In ancient times, Delphi had been called the omphalos, the navel of the world. Unless I managed to defeat Python and retake the Oracle, the entire fate of humanity was at risk. Delphic prophecies were not simply glimpses into the future. They shaped the future. And you did not want an enormous malevolent monster controlling a wellspring of power like that, calling the shots for all human civilization.

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.