The Tower of Nero (The Trials of Apollo #5) - Rick Riordan Page 0,35

From the cabin’s store of musical instruments, I picked a new ukulele—not as nice or durable as the bronze combat ukulele I had lost, but still a fearsome stringed instrument. I made sure I had plenty of medical supplies in my backpack, along with food and drink and the usual change of clothes and clean underwear. (I apologize, underwear!)

I moved through the afternoon hours in a daze, feeling as if I were preparing for a funeral…specifically my own. Austin and Kayla hovered nearby, trying to be helpful when they could, but without invading my space.

“We talked with Sherman and Malcolm,” Kayla told me. “We’ll be on standby.”

“If there is any chance we can help,” Austin said, “we’ll be ready to roll at a moment’s notice.”

Words were not sufficient to thank them, but I hope they saw the gratitude in my teary, bruised, acne-pocked face.

That night we had the usual singalong at the campfire. No one mentioned our quest. No one offered a going-away good-luck speech. The first-time campers were still so new to the demigod experience, so amazed by it all, I doubted they would even notice we were gone. Perhaps that was for the best.

They didn’t need to know how much was at stake: not just the burning of New York, but whether the Oracle of Delphi would ever be able to give them prophecies and offer them quests, or whether the future would be controlled and predetermined by an evil emperor and a giant reptile.

If I failed, these young demigods would grow up in a world where Nero’s tyranny was the norm and there were only eleven Olympians.

I tried to shove those thoughts to the back of my mind. Austin and I played a duet for saxophone and guitar. Then Kayla joined us to lead the camp in a rousing version of “The Wheels on the Chariot Go ’Round and ’Round.” We roasted marshmallows, and Meg and I tried to enjoy our final hours among our friends.

Small mercies: that night I had no dreams.

At dawn, Will shook me awake. He and Nico had returned from wherever they had been “gathering supplies,” but he didn’t want to talk about it.

Together, he and I met Meg and Nico on the road along the far side of Half-Blood Hill, where the camp’s shuttle bus waited to take us to Rachel Elizabeth Dare’s house in Brooklyn, and—one way or another—the final few days of my mortal life.

BROOKLYN.

Normally, the greatest dangers there are congested traffic, expensive poke bowls, and not enough tables at the local coffee shops for all the aspiring screenwriters. That morning, however, I could tell that our shuttle driver, Argus the giant, was keeping his eyes open for trouble.

This was a big deal for Argus, since he had a hundred sets of eyes all over his body. (I had not actually counted them, nor had I asked if he ever got black eyes on his posterior from sitting too long.)

As we drove down Flushing Avenue, his blue peepers blinked and twitched along his arms, around his neck, and on his cheeks and chin, trying to look in every direction at once.

Clearly, he sensed that something was wrong. I felt it, too. There was an electric heaviness in the air, like just before Zeus hurled a massive lightning bolt or Beyoncé dropped a new album. The world was holding its breath.

Argus pulled over a block from the Dare house as if he feared to get any closer.

The harbor-front area had once been working docklands for local fishermen, if I recalled correctly from the 1800s. Then it had been populated mostly by railyards and factories. You could still see the pilings of decayed piers jutting out of the water. Redbrick shells and concrete smokestacks of old workhouses sat dark and abandoned like temple ruins. One open stretch of railyard was still in operation, with a few heavily graffitied freight cars on the tracks.

But, like the rest of Brooklyn, the neighborhood was rapidly becoming gentrified. Across the street, a building that looked like a onetime machine shop now housed a café promising avocado bagels and pineapple matcha. Two blocks down, cranes loomed from the pit of a construction site. Signs on the fences read HARD HAT AREA, KEEP OUT!, and LUXURY RENTALS COMING SOON! I wondered if the construction workers were required to wear luxury hard hats.

The Dare compound itself was a former industrial warehouse transformed into an ultramodern estate. It occupied an acre of waterfront, making it approximately five billion times larger