Cruel Summer. ¹

75. i was in the alley, surrounded on all sides

𖡼.𖤣𖥧𖡼.𖤣𖥧

chapter seventy-five. ☄︎. *. ⋆

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JUMPING OUT OF A WINDOW five hundred feet aboveground is not usually my idea of fun. Especially when I'm wearing bronze wings and flapping my arms like a duck.

     I plummeted toward the valley and the red rocks below. I was pretty sure I was going to become a grease spot in the Garden of the Gods, but Nico yelled from somewhere above me, "Spread your arms! Keep them extended."

     The small part of my brain that wasn't engulfed in panic heard him, and my arms responded. As soon as I spread them out, the wings stiffened, caught the wind, and my descent slowed. I soared downward, but at a controlled angle, like a kite in a dive. Experimentally, I flapped my arms once. I arced into the sky, the wind whistling in my ears.

     The feeling was unbelievable. After getting the hang of it, I felt like the wings were part of my body. I could soar and swoop and dive anywhere I wanted to.

     I turned and saw my friends—Rachel, Percy, and Nico—spiraling above me, glinting in the sunlight. Behind them, smoke billowed from the windows of Daedalus's workshop.

     "Land!" I yelled up to them. "These wings won't last forever."

     "How long?" Rachel cried.

     "I don't want to find out!" I replied.

     We swooped down toward the Garden of the Gods. I did a complete circle around one of the rock spires and freaked out a couple of climbers. Then the four of us soared across the valley, over a road, and landed on the terrace of the visitor center. It was late afternoon and the place looked pretty empty, but we ripped off our wings as quickly as we could. Looking at them, I figured I'd called it in the nick of time. The self-adhesive seals that bound the wings to our backs were already melting, and we were shedding bronze feathers. It seemed a shame, but we couldn't fix them, and couldn't leave them around for the mortals, so we stashed the wings in the trash bin outside the cafeteria.

     I used the tourist binocular camera to look up at the hill where Daedalus's workshop had been, but it had vanished. No more smoke. No broken windows. Just the side of a hill. "The workshop moved," I figured. "There's no telling where."

     "So what do we do now?" Percy asked. "How do we get back in the maze?"

     I gazed at the summit of Pikes Peak in the distance. "Maybe we can't. If Daedalus died... he said his life force was tied to the Labyrinth. The whole thing could have been destroyed. Maybe that will stop Luke's invasion."

     But I knew it was a slim chance.

     I thought about Grover and Tyson, still down there somewhere. And Daedalus... even though he'd done some terrible things and put everybody I cared about at risk, it still seemed like a pretty horrible way to die.