❝In a fight, they're lethal. Around each other, they melt❞
"I'm fine." I said, trying to hide the frown and tears that threatened to spill.
Percy looked at me once.
"I'm not going anywhere, unless you tell me what's wrong," he declared and I would h...
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Jumping out a window five hundred feet above ground is not usually my idea of fun. Especially when my best friends, brothers and a mortal are wearing bronze wings and flapping their arms like a duck.
I laughed as Percy plummeted toward the valley and red rocks below. I swooped down next to him as Annabeth yelled from somewhere above us, "Spread your arms! Keep them extended."
Somehow Percy managed to hear her and his arms responded. As soon as he spread them out, the wings stiffened, caught the wind, and his descent slowed. He soared downward, but at a controlled angle, like a kite in a dive.
Experimentally, he flapped his arms once. We arced into the sky, the wind whistling in our ears.
"See why I love this?" I asked him, grinning as I soared, doing flips every once in a while.
"Yeah!" Percy yelled. The feeling was always unbelievable. I could soar and swoop and dive anywhere I wanted to.
I turned and saw my friends and brother, sadly plus the mortal—Caelan Annabeth, and Nico—spiraling above me, glinting in the sunlight. Behind them, smoke billowed from the windows of Daedalus's workshop.
"Land!" Annabeth yelled. "These wings won't last forever."
"How long?" Rachel asked.
"I don't want to find out!" Annabeth said.
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 could see Annabeth was right. The self-adhesive seals that bound the wings to their backs were already melting, and they 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 trash bins 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 into 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 seemed like a pretty horrible way to die.
