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The sky was brilliant blue, as if the stormy weather had never happened. The sun rose over the distant hills, so everything below them shone and sparkled like the entire city of Rome had just come out of the car wash.
Rory had seen big cities before. She spent months out of the year in New York, after all. But the sheer vastness of Rome grabbed her by the throat and made it hard to breathe. The city seemed to have no regard for the limits of geography. It spread through hills and valleys, jumped over the Tiber with dozens of bridges, and just kept sprawling to the horizon. Streets and alleys zigzagged with no rhyme or reason through quilts of neighborhoods. Glass office buildings stood next to excavation sites. A cathedral stood next to a line of Roman columns, which stood next to a modern soccer stadium. In some neighborhoods, old stucco villas with red tiled roofs crowded the cobblestone streets, so that if Rory concentrated just on those areas, she could imagine she was back in ancient times. Everywhere she looked, there were wide piazzas and traffic-clogged streets. Parks cut across the city with a crazy collection of palm trees, pines, junipers, and olive trees, as if Rome couldn't decide what part of the world it belonged to — or maybe it just believed all the world still belonged to Rome.
"We're setting down in that park," Leo announced, pointing to a wide green space dotted with palm trees. "Let's hope the Mist makes us look like a large pigeon or something."
Rory closed her eyes and tried to imagine what was happening from a mortal's point of view, except instead of a giant bronze trireme descending on their city in the middle of morning rush hour, it was a decently sized helicopter. And maybe underneath them was a landing pad with the Delphi Strawberry Service logo on it (because why not?).
It seemed to work. Rory didn't notice any cars veering off the road or Romans pointing to the sky and screaming, "Aliens!" The Argo II set down in the grassy field and the oars retracted.
The noise of traffic was all around them, but the park itself was peaceful and deserted. To their left, a green lawn sloped toward a line of woods. An old villa nestled in the shade of some weird looking pine trees with thin curvy trunks that shot up thirty or forty feet, then sprouted into puffy canopies.
To their right, snaking along the top of a hill, was a long brick wall with notches at the top for archers — maybe a medieval defensive line, maybe Ancient Roman.
To the north, about a mile away through the folds of the city, the top of the Colosseum rose above the rooftops, looking just like it did in travel photos. That's when Rory started to feel nauseous. She was actually here. She was in the heart of the old Roman Empire, enemy territory for a Greek demigod.
Jason pointed to the base of the archers' wall, where steps led down into some kind of tunnel.
"I think I know where we are," he said. "That's the Tomb of the Scipios."
