Chapter Text
On the last day of Saturnalia, when the whole of New Rome will be at their drunkest, Leo prepares to steal Ariadne’s String from the Senate’s treasury. “I should probably feel guilty about this,” he tells Frank, who stands as a little field mouse on his shoulder, “but I don’t. Like, at all. The only thing I regret is not trying that wine Dakota made. You know, before it was drugged.”
Frank, in mouse form, squeaks at him. It’s a very disapproving squeak, not one of agreement, because Frank is just Such A Good Boy. When Leo spares a second to glance at him and smile, Frank folds his little mousey arms (forelegs?). His eyes don’t catch the moonlight like a real animal’s would. For anyone who knows to look, it’s a major tell, but mostly everyone outside the Fifth Cohort overlooks Frank, so Leo is confident his friend’ll be fine. This is because, with the exception of Reyna, everyone outside the Fifth Cohort is, Leo firmly believes, an absolute idiot.
If they weren’t all dumb as doornails, then someone might have considered, somewhere down the line, asking one of Vulcan’s kids to design a halfway decent lock. Sure, they can’t all be as brilliant as Leo himself, who might be bad at most everything else in life, but is just a masterclass when it comes to building or taking apart anything with parts—but still. The quick work he makes of the imperial gold mechanism keeping the treasury locked is just stupid; disabling the alarm system before it can blare is even easier (one snipped wire? seriously?), since the cold’s already forcing it to work on a delay. Is it because the Senate of Camp Jupiter just expects that none of their legionaries will ever partake in common naughtiness? Maybe. Sometimes, it feels like everyone at camp has two modes: blameless rule-following or Let’s Help Destroy the World.
Again, the Fifth Cohort seems to be the exception. While Leo would love to take the credit for acting as their bad influence, he’s really pretty sure Jason started it.
Jason, who somehow manages to be both Such A Good Boy and a bad influence, is the look out. No one will spot him, because he’s invisible; last time they made it out to the City, Annabeth, who was with her family, had the inspired idea to hand off her baseball cap to him to make this exact job easier. Whether it’s even necessary is debatable, but that depends on how many legates drink Dakota’s wine.
Carefully, Leo shuts the door behind them. It doesn’t lock automatically, nor do any motion-sensored lights click on. Unfortunately, neither does the heat, so it’s just frigid in here as it is outside (last winter hadn’t been nearly this cold, and he’s massively unhappy about it). Immediately, Frank shifts into an owl with LED-bright yellow eyes to strengthen his night vision and flutters into the air. Leo summons a palmful of fire, the power coming to him easily even after the months he’s gone without calling on it. For the most part, he’s been trying to call as little attention to himself as possible during his time here. Easy enough to do in camp, where there’s not a whole lot he needs to read, and he’s far from the only person with ADHD. Much harder to pull off in school.
He’s searching the wall closest to the door, where there are a series of small cases like the sort found at post offices for PO boxes labelled just with numbers, when Frank hoots softly from across the room. By the light of his fire, Leo picks his way across, weaving between the full-on piles of the modern version of Ancient Roman currency, until he joins Frank by the far wall. Still in owl form, his friend perches on the dial of a safe, which is bigger than the boxes. There’s another label on it, which is even harder to read by firelight than it would be normally, so he doesn’t bother. If Frank says this is right, then Leo trusts that this is right.
“Can you turn back into a human?” he says, as he removes the toolkit his dad left under his pillow from his pocket. This toolkit is the best. No matter what he’s doing, and even though it’s only pocket-sized, it always has exactly what he needs. Better yet, Terminus never confiscates it because it doesn’t count as a weapon. “I need you to hold the flashlight.”
Before Frank can react, Jason’s voice says, “I’ll do it—sorry—” The apology is necessary, because Leo jumps so badly he knocks into the wall. The hat comes off. There is Jason in the firelight, looking, as ever, like a Roman statue of some long-forgotten hero. By now, Leo’s stopped being jealous. Every time he is, he reminds himself that Jason is worse at math than Leo was when he was eight-years-old. “Frank,” Jason’s saying, “spook the unicorns. I’ll shut the door behind you. We need a distraction.”
“Fuck,” Leo says, as Frank gives an owlish nod. His bright eyes bob in the mostly-dark. “We’ve been found out?”
“No,” Jason says, “but I heard Octavian and Bryce. They sounded way too sober. Be right back. Start without me.”
As he and Frank head off, Leo flicks on the flashlight to hold in his mouth, and focuses on the alarm system he can sense is laced around the perimeter of the safe. He’s still not 100% certain how he can do this, but he knows from his siblings in both camps that it’s normal. The parts of any machine they bother to examine just sort of…float there, existing in their subconscious. Problem usually is figuring out what to do with them.
Nine out of ten times, Leo knows what to do.
The alarm system is not the exception. By the time Jason makes it back to take the (now wet) flashlight from him, Leo’s already moved on to the locking mechanism. Though this is his first time ever breaking into a safe, he can tell this one is boring. There aren’t even any biometrics he needs to bypass. He’s never had cause to do that before, but he is interested to see if he can figure it out.
But maybe that would be a bad thing to try out right now anyway. Boring equals easy equals safe. “Don’t talk for a sec,” he says, cutting off Jason before he can offer an explanation. Dutifully, he keeps his mouth shut. Feeling like the criminal in some old spy film, Leo presses his ear to the cold metal of the safe and listens to the tell-tale clicks. Stupidly easy, he thinks. It’s not that different from breaking into lockers in normal high schools or middle schools. He made a habit of it, back before CPS got sick of chasing after him and threw him into the nightmare that was Wilderness School. Early on, he figured out it was easier to let the bullies have what they wanted, then steal it back between periods.
Click. The safe opens. He backs away as the door swings toward them. Flashing Jason a grin, Leo says, “Come on. I’m the best.”
“Yeah,” Jason says distractedly, as he shifts to shine the light inside. “Hurry up. They’re checking something in the Senate, but they’ll have to walk past—gods, is that it?”
In the back of the safe, atop papers that seem to date back so long they’re fraying, not torn, at the edges, is a white skein of yarn. “Whose is this?” Leo asks as he sticks his arm in. It’s deeper than expected. He really has to reach.
Just as Jason’s saying, “Octavian’s family’s,” Leo’s fingers make contact, and the yarn lashes out at him like a living thing. He can’t stop the yelp that escapes him, as it feels it twine under the sleeves of his coat and sweater, twisting over the tattoo that marks as a full member of the New Roman legion. When he jerks back, Jason catches him around the shoulders. “What’s wrong? Are you—where is—”
With a shaking hand, Leo tugs up his sleeves. “Uh,” he says, trying to ignore how his voice has gone up in pitch, “it’s here. I think.”
Like another tattoo, or maybe the world’s most uniform scar, are white, slightly raised lines twisting around his forearm down to his palm. “What in—” Jason starts, but cuts himself off when they hear the first of the shouting. “That’s our cue.”
As freaked as Leo is, he switches his focus to the disaster at hand, and runs after Jason out of the treasury, following the beam of the flashlight. They’re barely out the door when Frank comes barrelling into them—or into Leo anyway, literally. “Stampeding this way,” Frank says, gasping out swirls of condensation, as he grabs Leo and Jason by the arms and starts tugging them downhill, their only option in this stretch of New Rome. “Sorry. Couldn’t stop them.”
“They’ll see us,” Leo says. Already, he can hear the first notes of panic fraying his voice. The fact that both Octavian and Bryce’s shouting, and the pounding of hooves, is growing louder isn’t helping. That Leo and his friends are gaining momentum doesn’t seem to matter.
“Then we only have one option,” says Jason, as they follow a bend toward the boundary, the only way off this road. There aren’t even alleys; some architect with zero forward-planning way back when decided to build everything on this stretch to be pressed right against each other. “Back to the Labyrinth.”
With the String somehow embedded in Leo’s arm, it’s not like tonight was going to end any other way. Even so, it would’ve been nice to think things through. At the very least, he thinks, as he hears Octavian shout something that’s probably “thieves!” or “there!” he won’t be alone. There’s a lot Leo can handle, but navigating the Labyrinth by himself? The String wouldn’t be enough to stop him from dying, or at the very least, going mad.
They pelt over the boundary. As Terminus cries out in alarm, Jason snatches his coin from the weapon’s tray. “Sorry!” he calls over his shoulder, as they jump a low wall into the grotto posing as a nymphaeum, which, bizarrely, lacks any actual nymphs. The device Leo finished six months ago to search out the entrance to the Labyrinth had led them here, though no one’s been back since they checked to make sure the door existed; before he can even finish formulating the prayer please let it still be in the same place, the white lines on his still-exposed forearm suddenly glow. It’s like the knowledge just comes to him. Yes, it’s right there, tucked behind a secret door under the statue of a forgotten nymph holding bridal flowers because for some reason, people really like to get married here.
Together, they slip around the geometric mosaic, round the fountain, crouch in front of the statue, and open the door. Then, without a word, they drop in.
Of all the places Piper expected the hunt for the Athena Parthenos to lead, the rez, she has to admit, was the absolute last.
“Still not hot,” Annabeth says, as she turns the coin over in her gloved hand. It’s not as cold as New York had been when they left, but they, Agi, and Nico are still as bundled as they can manage to stave off the chill. At least there’s no snow. In fact, it’s downright sunny. “Why did Rachel send us here?”
Two days ago, Rachel spit out an unusually specific, unusually short prophecy at breakfast that led to the four of them following the rez’s roads toward Piper’s grandpa’s cabin on foot. Or at least they’d assumed it was specific. Helen’s heir returns to her roots seemed obvious at the time: Piper, with Helen of Troy’s knife, returning to her place of birth(ish). For the Searcher, Rachel used the female pronoun, so it seemed unlikely she meant a satyr; Death and the Sea spoke for themselves, even if everyone still is politely ignoring the fact that Nico is Hades’ son, not Persephone’s. But could the prophecy have meant Sparta? Like, actual Sparta?
In retrospect, that seems more than a random town with a population of twenty-three people in the foothills of the Ozarks. It doesn’t make sense that the answer to any sort of Greek demigod problem would be lurking amongst the Cherokee Nation.
“Didn’t the Confederates have control of Oklahoma during the Civil War?” Annabeth says, slipping the coin back into her pocket. “The Romans sided with them. Maybe they stashed it here. Or a clue. Is there anywhere to hide an enormous statue?”
Motioning generally to the landscape of leafless maples and hickories with the equally leaf pawpaws underneath, Piper says, “Where isn’t there somewhere to hide a giant statue?” As if in agreement, a few dead huckleberry bushes rattle their twigs together on either side of the unpaved road. They’re walking, because the car rental place in the town over (with its population five hundred people) that they’d assumed would be open was closed (their fault; they’d forgotten about Christmas). “Go up just a little bit higher in the hills and there are caves filled with nothing but endangered bats.”
From the way Agi scrunches her nose, Piper can guess her feelings about that—probably more because of the caves than the bats. “Wouldn’t the tetradrachm be hotter if it was here though?” she says, because she never just uses the word coin.
“Maybe it’s something we need to get to it,” Nico says. “You know, like the String.”
As Rachel hasn’t provided any prophecy on that yet, there hasn’t been a formal quest issued to anyone to look for it. Still, Piper doesn’t think so. Every time she tried to check in the knife’s reflection for a hint, all she saw was Agi falling through ice in a snowstorm.
Though she knows she should, Piper has yet to mention this to her friend.
“Hey, that doesn’t look like English,” Agi says, before Piper or Annabeth can respond. When Piper turns to see where Agi is pointing, she finds it’s the sign to the road leading to the cabin. “What is that?”
“Cherokee syllabary,” Piper answers, “which I can’t read, but my grandpa painted a snake on the sign so I’d always know which one it is. See?”
It’s a typical cartoon snake done in red paint. The first time she ever saw it was at his funeral, but he’d painted it when he heard she was dyslexic, because he hoped she would come. One of the women at the ceremony told her that, and looked pointedly at Dad when she did.
As they near, everyone tips their head back to look at it. Even with the dirt encrusting the white of the rest of the sign, the snake sticks out like a beacon. Gesturing to it, Annabeth says, “Why a snake? Are there a lot around here?”
She sounds less happy about that prospect than Agi did about the bats. Beside her, Nico shifts and looks side to side, like he expects a rattlesnake to lunge at any moment. As the windchill is currently below freezing, Piper suspects cold blooded reptiles have better things to do than attack a few demigods. “It’s a legend,” she says. “The Rattlesnack Prayer Song. It’s supposed to be that if a Cherokee is ever bitten by a rattlesnake, all they have to do is sing the song and they’ll be healed. Or something.”
As a kid, she thought this sounded ridiculous. Now, though, she knows Lee, who can only heal if he’s singing. Not her though. She might be named with the legend in mind, but she never learnt the song. She’s never even seen a rattlesnake in real life before.
“Why’s that?” asks Agi, as they start the trek up the road, which is dotted with shallow potholes now frozen over with thin layers of ice. Piper tries not to think of her vision in the knife.
They separate into pairs as they weave around a particularly long one. “A woman killed a rattlesnake once,” Piper says. A few years ago, she’d have dodged this question, but a few years ago, she hadn’t realised she was straight out of a myth herself. Besides, Agi said she met a spirit that wasn’t Greek or Roman, so maybe the Cherokee ones are still around too. Their storm spirits are already pretty interchangeable. “I think he scared her kids or something. I don’t remember. My dad told me this when I was a kid.” Here, actually. He told her here. “Anyway, so her husband wasn’t home—he was out hunting, I think. If there’s a husband in a Cherokee story, he’s usually hunting. And this other rattlesnake, he found the husband who was out hunting, and was all, ‘hey, your wife just killed the chief of the rattlesnakes!’ So then the husband was like, ‘Okay, I take responsibility,’ but instead of the new rattlesnake being like, ‘Great, then I guess we’ll be killing you in your wife’s place,’ he was like, ‘If you’re telling the truth, then you’ll go home and tell your wife to go outside so we can kill her and get our justice.’ So the husband did it. And in thanks for securing them justice by letting his wife be killed, the rattlesnake taught the man the Rattlesnake Prayer Song to teach all other Cherokees so no would ever die from another rattlesnake bite again, the end.”
Though she’s expecting her friends’ moment of startled silence, she’s not expecting it when a round of sarcastic clapping sounds from behind them, startling roosting birds from the trees. At once, they all whip around so fast that Agi nearly slips; only Nico’s quick reflexes save her from a bad tumble. Certainly, they could never rely on Mr D for providing any aid, and of all the gods to be lounging on a lawn chair under the spreading branches of a leafless oak, it just has to be him.
Yet, Piper’s relieved to see him. And worried? Yeah, definitely worried. He looks like his “real” self, not the form he usually takes on to express his annoyance at being relegated to camp director, all apple-cheeked and golden-haired, but his eyes are two different colours, and he’s half dressed in the sort of tunic Roman statues wear paired with his everyday bermuda shorts. Of all the gods she’s seen since Olympus closed, he’s the first one that she looks at and thinks split.
At least he sounds like himself when says, almost boredly, “A plus, Miss McKenzie. Truly, you are a master storyteller. I must say, you forgot a few details, such as the husband tricking the wife outside. My favourite part, other than the death.”
“Typical,” Annabeth mutters dryly, as Agi says, “Mr D?” and Nico asks, “Why are you blonde?” like that’s the most important part of all of this. Piper sort of wants to ask why a Greek god knows Cherokee legends, but stops herself in time. The answer is obvious. A god, especially a god of drama, probably knows oral histories from everywhere.
“I am blonde, Nicander,” Mr D says, as he leans back into the lawn chair he must have conjured from thin air himself, “because my mother, Semele, was blonde when she was born a human, and that’s simply how human genetics work. There were never many blondes in that region, so it was her hair that caught my father’s eye. Armenia now, humans call it. Where I first blessed humanity with knowledge of proper viticulture, say, six or so thousand years ago by your chronology? But I’m getting off topic. Not that I care, but why, children, are you in Oklahoma?”
The better question is why is Dionysus, but none of them point that out when they all answer at once. It’s variations on the same theme: oddly specific prophecy, no idea what they’re looking for, pretty sure Oklahoma’s meant to be where ‘it’ is. No one mentions the Athena Parthenos, though Piper can’t say why. Throughout the conversation, Mr D’s left eye turns the same purplish colour as his right, which is the one Piper’s familiar with, and his Romanish top flickers back and forth between that and a tshirt advertising The Globe Theatre.
It’s dizzying.
When the last of Piper’s “and…yeah” peters off, Mr D nods. “I see,” he says, which is more than the four of them can say for themselves. Also, just standing here without moving is making the cold worse. By now, she can’t feel her nose. “My wife just sneaked off to your camp to wish the twins a happy birthday, and I thought I was answering a call for aid from…someone. My other half might know who. We’ve left Naxos undefended, is the point. I should get back before Drusilla and her people can do anything of note. But try the Labyrinth, if you’re looking for something out of the ordinary,” he adds, as he stands to go, vanishing the lawn chair along with him. By the time he says, “You’ll find the entrance in one of those caves up there,” he’s nothing but a voice on the wind.
This time, the moment of startled silence sits. Some of the roosting birds return, mostly of the corvid variety, along with one lonely hawk. Then Annabeth says, “So they are going after the roots of the gods,” in the satisfied tone she adopts when she confirms she was right, at the same time Piper, feeling a little weak at the knees, says, “There’s an entrance to the Labyrinth behind my grandpa’s house?”
“If it makes you feel any better,” Agi says, as she wraps her arms around herself, “a beach had to shut down in Agistri a few times because of a vrykolakas infestation. That was basically behind my house.”
“Both are better than Nazis,” adds Nico, the boy from 1940s Venice, which, well, fair.
Piper inhales deeply, and exhales slowly, expelling the air from her lungs in a cloud. “The point also could’ve just been to run into Mr D,” she says. It makes sense; he clearly hadn’t been there for them. “You know, so we could hear that about Naxos. Rachel said the thing about meeting an old friend.” If Mr D could be called a friend.
“No,” Nico says. “She used the plural form. Friends.”
“Whatever the answer,” Annabeth says, “we can’t just stand here and wait for it to come to us. I can’t even feel my knees.”
As she makes an excellent point, they resume their trek. There’s probably a quicker way to the caves by cutting through the forest, but Dad told her not to enter there without a trail to follow and someone who knew what they were doing with her. Of course, that was when she was little and had zero experience with forests, not to mention it was summer, where the wildlife (particularly the bitey kind) was out in force, so she might be fine now. Still, the warning sticks in her head. It’s right up there with every parent’s favourite: don’t talk to strangers.
Three thirds of the way up to the cabin, a game trail opens up to the left. It’s even helpfully marked with a symbol for the caves. She hesitates for a moment, debating on asking the others to continue on then double back, but ultimately stops herself. Last time she was here, she was nine. Her dad was fixing up the cabin for sale, though he never actually got around to selling it. Six years later, with the cabin having stood empty all this time, she’s sure it doesn’t look the same as in her memory. If kids haven’t discovered it as the ideal den for drinking, then wild animals have made it their home. Either way, she thinks she’s better keeping the memory she has of it preserved, of that glorious week where it was just her and her father and no WiFi or cell service, so there was nothing else for him to do by sundown but sit on a blanket under the stars and tell her stories and teach her random words in Tsalagi, the Cherokee language. Winter was gola, she remembers. There was Aniyvdaqualosgi for the Thunderers, the storm spirits. Agidoba: father. Aginishi: paternal grandfather. Agitsi: mother.
She remembers asking about Mom. She remembers him saying, “I never saw her again,” and she remembers thinking for the first time, oh, so she’s missing, and that missing meant dead.
No, Piper does not need to return to the cabin. “This way,” she says instead, and leads her friends up the path.
Though time’s hard to tell in the Labyrinth, the level of Jason’s exhaustion insists it’s been less than twenty-four hours when he, Leo, and Frank follow the String’s cues out and into a cave. Another cave. Clearly, the Labyrinth has a thing for caves.
For a moment, they all just collapse on the dirty, hard stone ground and try to catch their breath. It’s a long moment. Even for three members of New Rome’s legion with excellent cardio, the seemingly endless, weirdly skinny stairs they climbed to reach the exit was asking a lot of their bodies. Already, Jason wants to forget the experience was one he had, so he can’t help but resent it a bit when Frank has the audacity to say, “Seven hundred forty-two steps. I counted.”
Leo laughs breathlessly. “How the hell did you have the brain power for that?” he asks, as Jason removes his phone from jeans’ pocket. He stops before he can power it on when Leo says, “Don’t. Wait until we get somewhere where I can scatter the signal.”
Reluctantly, Jason puts it away. He understands why Leo made such a big deal about all of them turning off their phones—odds are, even a legacy of Vulcan can figure out how to trace a signal—but Jason still doesn’t get how turning it on for just a second to check their location would be enough to alert anyone. “Then we’ll have to figure out where we are the old fashioned way,” he says, pushing himself into sitting position. His eyes are starting to adjust to the darkness, since there’s a little bit of light coming from what must be the cave entrance. It’s wide, like it was meant to be shallow. Stalagmites and stalactites shoot up and down from the ceiling and floor. Water drips, though he can’t see from where. Something scuttles, unseen, along a wall. Above them, dark shapes nestle in the crevices in the ceiling. Bats.
There’s no real back; it’s just a second, yawning opening leading into the blackness of the Labyrinth and all its dangers. Jason wonders how many bats it swallows per day.
Beyond the mouth of the cave, he can see daylight. If it’s really been less than twenty-four hours, then today should be Christmas Eve. Depending on where they are, they might mean businesses are closed. Right now, Jason would kill for some food. He’s so hungry his head is ringing.
Maybe pasta. Pasta makes everything better.
They’re barely on their feet when they hear a familiar voice say something in Greek, followed by three slightly less familiar but still not unknown laughs. “Was that Piper?” Leo says, amazed. “But we aren’t at their camp. And why’re they talking about snakes?”
“Maybe they’re looking for us,” Jason says, not joking. He wouldn’t put it past Reyna to have texted to them, and for Piper to have used her knife, though he hadn’t known it could be this specific. “Come on.”
“Uh, guys,” Frank says, as he backs away and walks right into Leo, who knocks into Jason. “That’s a snake.”
The ringing, Jason realises, was not in his head. It also wasn’t ringing. It was rattling. “Okay,” he says, his body flooding with adrenaline. All he can make out in the gloom is a brownish, coiled shape, the swish of its paler, rattling tail, and its gleaming yellow eyes. “We’re just going to back away slowly.”
“But that’s back into the Labyrinth,” Leo says, sounding more than a little hysterical, even as he starts to back away in time with Frank and Jason. In the distance, but growing closer, Jason can still hear Nico and the girls talking as if nothing’s amiss. “Oh fuck, they’ll miss us.”
“I’ll get them,” Frank says, and because he can, turns into a hawk to dart out of the cave.
Hawks can kill snakes. It would’ve been nice if he’d taken care of their adversary first.
Though the rattling stops when Jason and Leo reach the entrance to the Labyrinth, it continues to watch them with its gleaming eyes, daring them to try and get closer. “Should I just kill it?” Jason says, as he avoids eye contact. He doesn’t know if snakes follow the same principles as mammalian predators, but he doesn’t want it to think he’s challenging it.
“If you miss and it bites you, we’re fucked,” Leo says. Outside, Jason hears the girls exclaim Frank’s name. “Let Mr Shapeshifter distract it as a mongoose or something. Or who knows? Maybe Agi can bloodbend it.”
“Bloodbend?”
“Avatar,” Leo says, sighing. “Man, we have to find the show. Together, the two of us make up one whole firebender. Hey! Do you think fire—”
“Don’t light any rattlesnakes on fire,” says Piper from the mouth of the cave. Jason looks over to find the five of them there, silhouetted in weak sunshine: Piper, Frank, Annabeth, Agi and Nico. As ever, not a single Greek demigod looks like they went shopping with the idea of being stealthy on a quest in mind. “I literally just finished telling these guys about how rattlesnakes are sacred. You have the String?”
Leo holds up his arm, though only his palm is visible now that his coat sleeve’s down. The criss-cross of the yarn is noticeably glowing. “Yeah,” he says. “It’s super weird. Do you have any food? What day is it?”
“Christmas,” Nico says, which means that in the Labyrinth, Jason can’t trust the measure of his body’s limits to guess how much time has passed. “We have food.”
“And ambrosia,” Annabeth adds. “Considering Piper’s about to get herself bitten, that’s going to come out in a minute.”
With a shrug, Piper says, “I was bitten by a pit scorpion and survived. How much worse can a rattlesnake be?”
“I’m freezing it if this doesn’t work,” Agi says, holding up an open water bottle. It’s bright blue with smiling dolphin decals on it. Because of course it is. “I mean it.”
Though this seems like a catastrophically bad idea, Jason doesn’t have a better one to propose, especially now that Piper nixed all the chances of snake murder. To make it worse, when Leo asks, “Wait, are we going to you, or are you coming to us?” Nico answers, “We’re going to you.”
Which means back into the Labyrinth. Great.
Warily, Jason watches Piper walk down the centre of the cave toward the snake, who starts rattling its tail in earnest before she’s even in striking distance (he assumes). Agi looks ready to throw the water at that, but Piper just drops down like she might in front of a particularly ornery cat or dog, and starts talking to it. He hadn’t known her Charmspeak could work on animals, but it just—stops. No more rattling. No more raised head. If it were a dog, it would’ve rolled over and shown its belly.
She does it all in Greek, so he can’t understand a word of it, but the others do; abruptly, Nico grabs Frank by the sleeve and pulls him along to scurry past, with Annabeth right behind. Agi follows. Piper joins a moment later, with an expression on her face that’s hard to read, but Jason thinks means she’s upset.
“Thanks,” Jason says, as Leo drops another pop culture reference he doesn’t understand, but he assumes involves talking to animals, even if it sounds like it means talking to packages. Whatever it is, everyone else seems to get what he means, including Nico the Time Traveller. “I’m glad that worked. Why are we going through the Labyrinth?”
“Because we took a couple trains and buses to get down here,” Annabeth says, “with the intention of renting a car down here, but the rental place was closed and none of the buses are running and we don’t have anywhere to stay. Our original plan was camping, but Piper can’t sweet-talk every venomous animal we encounter into standing down.”
Unfortunately, that makes sense. Damn Christmas. “Okay,” he says, resigned. “Oh, here’s your cap,” he adds, handing it back. “It saved us. Octavian would’ve spotted me if I hadn’t been wearing it.”
With a smile, she says, “Good. Thanks,” and turns her attention to the yawning darkness before them. Only the top two stairs are visible.
Already, Agi has her pen that’s a sword in her hand. Nico draws a truly wicked-looking black sword; Annabeth unsheaths her knife. Piper, though, is kind enough to pull brown paper lunch bags instead of weapons out of her rucksack instead. “Psyche’s a total mom,” she says, as Jason and his equally starving friends accept them. “She connected these with the dining pavilion, so you’ll be able to eat whatever you want. So, back into the Labyrinth?”
They all follow Annabeth’s gaze. Jason can feel it, the way it’s pulling them in. “Yeah,” he says, and steps back inside.