again. Right after I figured out a way to let demigods use smartphones safely.
Across the street from Target stood a rack of canary-yellow Go-Glo bikes. Meg inserted a credit card into the kiosk (where she got the card, I had no idea), freed two cycles from the rack, and offered one to me.
Joy and happiness. Now we could pedal into battle like the neon-yellow warriors of old.
We took the side streets and sidewalks, using the columns of smoke in the hills to guide our way. With Highway 24 closed, traffic was snarled everywhere, angry drivers honking and yelling and threatening violence. I was tempted to tell them that if they really wanted a fight, they could just follow us. We could use a few thousand angry commuters on our side.
As we passed the Rockridge BART station, we spotted the first enemy troops. Pandai patrolled the elevated platform, with furry black ears folded around themselves like firefighter turnout coats, and flat-head axes in their hands. Fire trucks were parked along College Avenue, their lights strobing in the underpass. More faux-firefighter pandai guarded the station doors, turning away mortals. I hoped the real firefighters were okay, because firefighters are important and also because they are hot, and no, that wasn’t relevant right then.
“This way!” Meg veered up the steepest hill she could find, just to annoy me. I was forced to stand as I pedaled, pushing with all my weight to make progress against the incline.
At the summit, more bad news.
In front of us, arrayed across the higher hills, troops marched doggedly toward Camp Jupiter. There were squads of blemmyae, pandai, and even some six-armed Earthborn who had served Gaea in the Recent Unpleasantness, all fighting their way through flaming trenches, staked barricades, and Roman skirmishers trying to put my archery lessons to good use. In the early evening gloom, I could only see bits and pieces of the battle. Judging from the mass of glittering armor and the forest of battle pennants, the main part of the emperors’ army was concentrated on Highway 24, forcing its way toward the Caldecott Tunnel. Enemy catapults hurled projectiles toward the legion’s positions, but most disappeared in bursts of purple light as soon as they got close. I assumed that was the work of Terminus, doing his part to defend the camp’s borders.
Meanwhile, at the base of the tunnel, flashes of lightning pinpointed the location of the legion’s standard. Tendrils of electricity zigzagged down the hillsides, arcing through enemy lines and frying them to dust. Camp Jupiter’s ballistae launched giant flaming spears at the invaders, raking through their lines and starting more forest fires. The emperors’ troops kept coming.
The ones making the best progress were huddled behind large armored vehicles that crawled on eight legs and…Oh, gods. My guts felt like they’d gotten tangled in my bike chain. Those weren’t vehicles.
“Myrmekes,” I said. “Meg, those are myr—”
“I see them.” She didn’t even slow down. “It doesn’t change anything. Come on!”
How could it not change anything? We’d faced a nest of those giant ants at Camp Half-Blood and barely survived. Meg had nearly been pulped into Gerber’s larvae purée.
Now we were confronting myrmekes trained for war, snapping trees in half with their pincers and spraying acid to melt through the camp’s defensive pickets.
This was a brand-new flavor of horrible.
“We’ll never get through their lines!” I protested.
“Lavinia’s secret tunnel.”
“It collapsed!”
“Not that tunnel. A different secret tunnel.”
“How many does she have?”
“Dunno. A lot? C’mon.”
With that rousing oratory complete, Meg pedaled onward. I followed, having nothing better to do.
She led me up a dead-end street to a generator station at the base of an electrical tower. The area was ringed in barbed-wire fencing, but the gate stood wide open. If Meg had told me to climb the tower, I would have given up and made my peace with zombie eternity. Instead, she pointed to the side of the generator, where metal doors were set into the concrete like the entrance to a storm cellar or a bomb shelter.
“Hold my bike,” she said.
She jumped off and summoned one of her swords. With a single strike, she slashed through the padlocked chains, then pulled open the doors, revealing a dark shaft slanting downward at a precarious angle.
“Perfect,” she said. “It’s big enough to ride through.”
“What?”
She hopped back on her Go-Glo and plunged into the tunnel, the click, click, click of her bike chain echoing off the concrete walls.
“You have a very broad definition of perfect,” I muttered. Then I coasted in