The Tower of Nero (The Trials of Apollo #5)(84)

“I…” My voice failed me. “Meg, I have to—”

“I know.” She looked away long enough to wipe her cheek, knocking her glasses cockeyed in the process. “You have to do this next part on your own, huh?”

I thought about the last time I’d physically stood in the depths of Delphi, when Meg and I had inadvertently wandered there through the Labyrinth during a three-legged race. (Ah, those were simpler times.) The situation now was different. Python had grown too powerful. Having seen his lair in my dreams, I knew that no demigod could survive that place. The poisonous air alone would burn away flesh and melt lungs. I did not expect to survive there long myself, but in my heart, I had always known this would be a one-way trip.

“I must do this alone,” I agreed.

“How?”

Leave it to Meg to distill the most important crisis of my four-thousand-year-plus life into a single unanswerable question.

I shook my head, wishing I had an unquestionable answer. “I guess I have to trust that…that I won’t screw up.”

“Hmm.”

“Oh, shut it, McCaffrey.”

She forced a smile. After a few more moments of putting salve on my wounds, she said, “So…this is good-bye?” She swallowed that last word.

I tried to find my voice. I seemed to have lost it somewhere down in my intestines. “I—I will find you, Meg. Afterward. Assuming…”

“No screw-ups.”

I made a sound between a laugh and a sob. “Yes. But either way…”

She nodded. Even if I survived, I would not be the same. The best I could hope for was to emerge from Delphi with my godhood restored, which was what I had wanted and dreamed about for the past half a year. So why did I feel so reluctant about leaving behind the broken, battered form of Lester Papadopoulos?

“Just come back to me, dummy. That’s an order.” Meg gave me a gentle hug, conscious of my injuries. Then she got to her feet and ran off to check on the imperial demigods—her former family, and possibly her family yet to be.

My other friends all seemed to understand, too.

Will did some last-minute bandaging. Nico handed me my weapons. Rachel gave me a new pack stuffed with supplies. But none of them offered any lingering good-byes. They knew every minute counted now. They wished me luck and let me go.

As I passed, Screech-Bling and the troglodyte lieutenants stood at attention and removed their headwear—all six hundred and twenty hats. I recognized the honor. I nodded my thanks and forged on across the broken threshold before I could melt into another fit of ugly sobbing.

I passed Austin and Kayla in the antechamber, tending to more wounded and directing younger demigods in clean-up efforts. They both gave me weary smiles, acknowledging the million things we didn’t have time to say. I pushed onward.

I ran into Chiron by the elevators, on his way to deliver more medical supplies.

“You came to our rescue,” I said. “Thank you.”

He looked down at me benevolently, his head nearly scraping the ceiling, which had not been designed to accommodate centaurs. “We all have a duty to rescue each other, wouldn’t you say?”

I nodded, wondering how the centaur had become so wise over the centuries, and why that same wisdom had escaped me until I had been Lesterized. “And did your…joint task force meeting go well?” I asked, trying to remember what Dionysus had told us about why Chiron had been away. It seemed like so long ago. “Something about a severed cat’s head?”

Chiron chuckled. “A severed head. And a cat. Two different…uh, people. Acquaintances of mine from other pantheons. We were discussing a mutual problem.”

He just threw that information out there as if it wasn’t a brain-exploding grenade. Chiron had acquaintances from other pantheons? Of course he did. And a mutual problem…?

“Do I want to know?” I asked.

“No,” he said gravely. “You really don’t.” He offered his hand. “Good luck, Apollo.”

We shook, and off I went.

I found the stairs and took them. I didn’t trust the elevators. During my dream in the cell, I’d seen myself sweeping down the stairwells of the tower when I fell to Delphi. I was determined to take the same path in real life. Maybe it wouldn’t matter, but I would’ve felt silly if I took a wrong turn on my way to confront Python and ended up getting arrested by the NYPD in the Triumvirate Holdings lobby.

My bow and quiver jostled against my back, clanging against my ukulele strings. My new supply pack felt cold and heavy. I held on to the railing so my wobbly legs wouldn’t collapse under me. My ribs felt like they’d been newly tattooed with lava, but considering everything I’d been through, I felt remarkably whole. Maybe my mortal body was giving me one last push. Maybe my godly constitution was kicking in to help. Maybe it was the nectar-and-Mountain-Dew cocktail coursing through my bloodstream. Whatever it was, I would take all the help I could get.

Ten floors. Twenty floors. I lost track. Stairwells are horrible, disorienting places. I was alone with the sound of my breathing and the pounding of my feet against the steps.

A few more floors, and I began to smell smoke. The hazy air stung my eyes.

Apparently, part of the building was still on fire. Awesome.

The smoke got thicker as I continued to descend. I began to cough and gag. I pressed my forearm over my nose and mouth and found that this did not make a very good filter.