The Tower of Nero (The Trials of Apollo #5)(63)

LU WAS RIGHT.

I hated her plan, but since time was short and Gunther might show up any minute with our party hats and various torture devices, I agreed to do my part.

Full disclosure: I also hated my plan. I explained to Lu what the leontocephaline would demand in exchange for the fasces.

Lu glowered like an angry water buffalo. “You’re sure?”

“I’m afraid so. He guards immortality, so—”

“He expects a sacrifice of immortality.”

The words hung in the air like cigar smoke—cloying and suffocating. This was what all my trials had led to—this choice. This was why Python had been laughing at me for months in my dreams. Nero had made the cost of his destruction giving up the one thing I wanted most. To destroy him, I’d have to forfeit my own godhood forever.

Lu scratched her chin with her fork hand. “We must help Meg, whatever the cost.”

“Agreed.”

She nodded grimly. “Okay, then that’s what we’ll do.”

I swallowed the coppery taste in my mouth. I was ready to pay the price. If it meant freeing Meg from the Beast, freeing the world, freeing Delphi…then I would. But it would’ve been nice if Lu had protested just a little on my behalf. Oh, no, Apollo! You can’t!

I suppose our relationship was past the point of sugarcoating, though. Lu was too practical for that. She was the sort of woman who didn’t whine about getting her hands cut off. She just taped silverware to her stumps and got on with business. She wasn’t going to give me a pat on the back for doing the right thing, however painful it was.

Still…I wondered if I was missing something. I wondered if we were really on the same page. Lu had a faraway look in her eyes, like she was calculating losses on a battlefield.

Maybe what I sensed was her worry about Meg.

We both knew that, under most circumstances, Meg was fully capable of rescuing herself. But with Nero…I suspected Lu, like me, wanted Meg to be strong enough to save herself. We couldn’t make the hard choices for her. Yet it was excruciating to stand by while Meg’s sense of independence was tested. Lu and I were like nervous parents leaving our child at school for the first day of kindergarten…except in this case the kindergarten teacher was a homicidal megalomaniac emperor. Call us crazy, but we didn’t trust what Meg might learn in that classroom.

Lu met my eyes one last time. I imagined her packing away her doubts and fears in her mental saddlebags for later, when she had time for them, along with her cucumber-and-cream-cheese sandwiches.

“Let’s get to work,” she told me.

It wasn’t long before we heard the hallway door bang open and heavy footsteps approaching the cell.

“Look casual,” Lu ordered, reclining on her couch.

I leaned against the wall and whistled the tune to “Maneater.” Gunther appeared, a batch of neon-yellow zip-tie restraints in his hand.

I pointed a finger gun at him. “Hey, what’s up?”

He scowled. Then he looked at Lu with her new silverware attachments, and his face split into a grin. “What are you supposed to be? HA-HA-HA-HA-HA!”

Lu raised her fork and knife. “Thought I’d carve you up like the turkey you are.”

Gunther started to giggle, which was disturbing in a man of his size. “Stupid Lu. You have fork-and-knife hands.…HA-HA-HA-HA-HA!” He tossed the zip-ties through the cell’s bars. “You, ugly boy, tie her arms behind her back. Then I tie you.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

His mirth dissipated like foam on skink soup. “What you say?”

“You want to tie us up,” I said very slowly, “you’ll have to do it yourself.”

He frowned, trying to make sense of the fact that a teenaged boy was telling him what to do. Clearly, he’d never had children.

“I will call other guards.”

Lu snorted. “You do that. Can’t handle us yourself. I’m too dangerous.” She held up her knife hand in what could have been taken as a rude gesture.

Gunther’s face turned a mottled red. “You’re not the boss of me no more, Luguselwa.”

“Not the boss of me,” Lu mimicked. “Go on, get help. Tell them you couldn’t tie up a weakling boy and a no-handed woman by yourself. Or come in here, and I will tie you up.”

Her plan depended on Gunther taking the bait. He needed to come inside. With his barbarian manhood in question, and his honor insulted by a rude piece of silverware, he did not disappoint. The middle bars of the cell retracted into the floor. Gunther strode through. He didn’t notice the salve I’d slathered across the threshold—and let me assure you, Will Solace’s burn ointment is slippery stuff.

I’d been wondering which direction Gunther might fall. Turns out, backward. His heel shot out from under him, his legs crumpled, and his head slammed hard against the marble floor, leaving him flat on his back and groaning halfway inside the cell.

“Now!” Lu yelled.

I charged the door.

Lu had told me that the cell bars were motion sensitive. They snapped upward, determined to stop my escape, but they had not been designed to compensate for the weight of a Germanus lying across the threshold.

The bars smashed Gunther against the ceiling like a hyperactive forklift, then lowered him again, their hidden mechanisms whirring and creaking in protest. Gunther gurgled in pain. His eyes crossed. His armor was thoroughly crushed. His ribs probably weren’t in much better shape, but at least the bars hadn’t gone straight through him. I did not want to witness that kind of mess, nor step through it.