{1} Princess - P. Jackson 🔱

"Raise your hand if you woke up the Titan. Perseus, I can see you hiding."

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Jumping out a window five hundred feet above ground is not usually my idea of fun. I couldn't help but think of that video of Kratos falling at the sound of Dream On. Did he feel like this?

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, as Annabeth yelled from somewhere above me, "Spread your arms! Keep them extended."

The small part of my brain that wasn't engulfed in panic heard her, and my arms responded, the right paining like hell. 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.

"Yeah!" Percy yelled. The feeling was unbelievable. After getting the hang of it, it felt like the wings were part of your body. You could soar and swoop and dive anywhere you wanted to. But I was so tense and my arm was bleeding so much that it was almost numb. I couldn't focus on anything else other than flying straight.

"Land!" Annabeth yelled. "These wings won't last forever."

"How long?" Rachel cried.

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

We swooped down toward the Garden of the Gods. Percy did a complete circle around one of the rock spires and freaked out a couple of climbers.

Then the five 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 could see Annabeth was right. 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 stuffed 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," Annabeth guessed. "There's no telling where."

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

Annabeth 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 might've been destroyed. Maybe that will stop Luke's invasion."

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.

"No," Nico said. "He isn't dead."

"How can you be sure?" Percy asked.

"I know when people die. It's this feeling I get, like a buzzing in my ears."

"What about Tyson and Grover, then?" I asked.

Nico shook his head. "That's harder. They're not humans or half- bloods. They don't have mortal souls."

"We have to get into town," Annabeth decided. "Our chances will be better of finding an entrance to the Labyrinth. We have to make it back to camp before Luke and his army."

"We could just take a plane," Rachel said.

Percy shuddered. "I don't fly."

"But you just did."