crystal.
Their dwellings were tents. Most had been appropriated from the human world, which gave me unpleasant flashbacks of the camping display at Macro’s Military Madness in Palm Springs. Others appeared to be of trog design, carefully stitched from the shaggy red hides of the tauri silvestres. I had no idea how the trogs had managed to skin and stitch the impervious hides, but clearly, as the ancestral enemies of the forest bulls, they had found a way.
I wondered about that rivalry, too. How had a subterranean frog people in love with hats and lizards become mortal enemies to a breed of bright-red devil bulls? Perhaps at the beginning of time, the elder gods had told the first trogs, You may now pick your nemesis! And the first trogs had pointed across the newly made fields of creation and yelled, We hate those cows!
Whatever the case, I was comforted to know that even if the trogs were not yet our friends, at least we had a mutual enemy.
Screech-Bling had given us a guest tent and a cold fire pit and told us to make ourselves at home while he saw to dinner preparations. Or rather, he’d told Nico to make himself at home. The CEO kept eyeing Rachel, Meg, and me like we were sides of beef hanging in a shop window. As for Will, the troglodytes seemed to ignore him. My best guess: because Will glowed, they considered him simply a moveable light source, as if Nico had brought along his own pot of luminous mushrooms. Judging from Will’s scowl, he did not appreciate this.
It would’ve been easier to relax if Rachel hadn’t kept checking her watch—reminding us that it was now four in the afternoon, then four thirty, and that Meg and I were supposed to surrender by sundown. I could only hope the troglodytes were like senior citizens and ate supper early.
Meg busied herself collecting spores from the nearby mushroom pots, which she seemed to consider the coolest thing since snake-eating. Will and Nico sat on the other side of the fire pit having a tense discussion. I couldn’t hear the words, but from their facial expressions and hand gestures, I got the gist:
Will: Worry, worry, worry.
Nico: Calm down, probably won’t die.
Will: Worry. Trogs. Dangerous. Yikes.
Nico: Trogs good. Nice hats.
Or something along those lines.
After a while, the trog with the chef’s hat materialized at our campsite. In his hand was a steaming ladle. “Screech-Bling will talk to you now,” he said in heavily Troglodytish-laced English.
We all began to rise, but the chef stopped us with a sweep of his ladle. “Only Nico, the Italian wall lizard—um, SQUEAK—I mean the Italian son of Hades. The rest of you will wait here until dinner.”
His gleaming eyes seemed to add, When you may or may not be on the menu!
Nico squeezed Will’s hand. “It’ll be fine. Back soon.”
Then he and the chef were gone. In exasperation, Will threw himself down on his fireside mat and put his backpack over his face, reducing our Will-glow illumination by about fifty percent.
Rachel scanned the encampment, her eyes glittering in the gloom.
I wondered what she saw with her ultra-clear vision. Perhaps the troglodytes looked even scarier than I realized. Perhaps their hats were even more magnificent. Whatever the case, her shoulders curved as tense as a drawn bow. Her fingers traced the soot-stained floor as if she were itching for her paintbrushes.
“When you surrender to Nero,” she told me, “the first thing you’ll need to do is buy us time.”
Her tone disturbed me almost as much as her words: when I surrendered, not if. Rachel had accepted that it was the only way. The reality of my predicament curled up and nestled in my throat like a five-lined skink.
I nodded. “B-buy time. Yes.”
“Nero will want to burn down New York as soon as he has you,” she said. “Why would he wait? Unless you give him a reason…”
I had a feeling I would not like Rachel’s next suggestion. I didn’t have a clear understanding of what Nero intended to do to me once I surrendered—other than the obvious torture and death. Luguselwa seemed to believe the emperor would keep Meg and me alive at least for a while, though she had been vague about what she knew of Nero’s plans.
Commodus had wanted to make a public spectacle out of my death. Caligula had wanted to extract what remained of my godhood and add it to his own power with the help of Medea’s sorcery. Nero