The Demigod Diaries (The Heroes of Olympus)(27)

He couldn’t blame them. Built into the side of a limestone cliff deep in the woods, the bunker was part weapons depot, part machine shop, and part underground safe house, with a little bit of Area 51–style craziness thrown in for good measure. Rows of workbenches stretched into the darkness. Tool cabinets, storage closets, cages full of welding equipment, and stacks of construction material made a labyrinth of aisles so vast, Leo figured he’d only explored about ten percent of it so far. Overhead ran a series of catwalks and pneumatic tubes for delivering supplies, plus a high-tech lighting and sound system that Leo was just starting to figure out.

A large magical banner hung over the center of the production floor. Leo had recently discovered how to change the display, like the Times Square JumboTron, so now the banner read: Merry Christmas! All your presents belong to Leo!

He ushered his friends to the central staging area. Decades ago, Leo’s metallic friend Festus the bronze dragon had been created here. Now, Leo was slowly assembling his pride and joy—the Argo II.

At the moment, it didn’t look like much. The keel was laid—a length of Celestial bronze curved like an archer’s bow, two hundred feet from bow to stern. The lowest hull planks had been set in place, forming a shallow bowl held together by scaffolding. Masts lay to one side, ready for positioning. The bronze dragon figurehead—formerly the head of Festus—sat nearby, carefully wrapped in velvet, waiting to be installed in its place of honor.

Most of Leo’s time had been spent in the middle of the ship, at the base of the hull, where he was building the engine that would run the warship.

He climbed the scaffolding and jumped into the hull. Jason and Piper followed.

“See?” Leo said.

Fixed to the keel, the engine apparatus looked like a high-tech jungle gym made from pipes, pistons, bronze gears, magical disks, steam vents, electric wires, and a million other magical and mechanical pieces. Leo slid inside and pointed out the combustion chamber.

It was a thing of beauty, a bronze sphere the size of a basketball, its surface bristling with glass cylinders so it looked like a mechanical starburst. Gold wires ran from the ends of the cylinders, connecting to various parts of the engine. Each cylinder was filled with a different magical and highly dangerous substance. The central sphere had a digital clock display that read 66:21. The maintenance panel was open. Inside, the core was empty.

“There’s your problem,” Leo announced.

Jason scratched his head. “Uh…what are we looking at?”

Leo thought it was pretty obvious, but Piper looked confused too.

“Okay,” Leo sighed, “you want the full explanation or the short explanation?”

“Short,” Piper and Jason said in unison.

Leo gestured to the empty core. “The syncopator goes here. It’s a multi-access gyro-valve to regulate flow. The dozen glass tubes on the outside? Those are filled with powerful, dangerous stuff. That glowing red one is Lemnos fire from my dad’s forges. This murky stuff here? That’s water from the River Styx. The stuff in the tubes is going to power the ship, right? Like radioactive rods in a nuclear reactor. But the mix ratio has to be controlled, and the timer is already operational.”

Leo tapped the digital clock, which now read 65:15. “That means without the syncopator, this stuff is all going to vent into the chamber at the same time, in sixty-five minutes. At that point, we’ll get a very nasty reaction.”

Jason and Piper stared at him. Leo wondered if he’d been speaking English. Sometimes when he was agitated he slipped into Spanish, like his mom used to do in her workshop. But he was pretty sure he’d used English.

“Um…” Piper cleared her throat. “Could you make the short explanation shorter?”

Leo palm-smacked his forehead. “Fine. One hour. Fluids mix. Bunker goes ka-boom. One square mile of forest turns into a smoking crater.”

“Oh,” Piper said in a small voice. “Can’t you just…turn it off?”

“Gee, I didn’t think of that!” Leo said. “Let me just hit this switch and—No, Piper. I can’t turn it off. This is a tricky piece of machinery. Everything has to be assembled in a certain order in a certain amount of time. Once the combustion chamber is rigged, like this, you can’t just leave all those tubes sitting there. The engine has to be put into motion. The countdown clock started automatically, and I’ve got to install the syncopator before the fuel goes critical. Which would be fine except…well, I lost the syncopator.”

Jason folded his arms. “You lost it. Don’t you have an extra? Can’t you pull one out of your tool belt?”

Leo shook his head. His magic tool belt could produce a lot of great stuff. Any kind of common tool—hammers, screwdrivers, bolt cutters, whatever—Leo could pull out of the pockets just by thinking about it. But the belt couldn’t fabricate complicated devices or magic items.

“The syncopator took me a week to make,” he said. “And yes, I made a spare. I always do. But that’s lost too. They were both in Buford’s drawers.”

“Who is Buford?” Piper asked. “And why are you storing syncopators in his drawers?”

Leo rolled his eyes. “Buford is a table.”

“A table,” Jason repeated. “Named Buford.”

“Yes, a table.” Leo wondered if his friends were losing their hearing. “A magic walking table. About three feet high, mahogany top, bronze base, three movable legs. I saved him from one of the supply closets and got him in working order. He’s just like the tables my dad has in his workshop. Awesome helper; carries all my important machine parts.”