REMEMBER ME ---- BOOK I / Heroes of Olympus / Leo Valdez Fanfiction

clean hands, dirty equipment

ONCE HE'D DONE THE BEST HE COULD, he climbed back up to the dragon's head and started cleaning the wiring and gearboxes, getting himself filthy in the process.

"Clean hands, dirty equipment," he muttered, something his mother used to say. By the time he was through, his hands were black with grease and his clothes looked like he'd just lost a mud-wrestling contest, but the mechanisms looked a lot better. He slipped in the disk, connected the last wire, and sparks flew. The dragon shuddered. Its eyes began to glow.

"Better?" Leo asked.

The dragon made a sound like a high-speed drill. It opened its mouth and all its teeth rotated.

"I guess that's a yes." Penelope muttered

"Hold on, I'll free you."

Another thirty minutes to find the release clamps for the net and untangle the dragon, but finally it stood and shook the last bit of netting off its back. It roared triumphantly and shot fire at the sky.

"Seriously," Leo said. "Could you not show off?"

Creak? the dragon asked.

"You need a name," Leo decided. "I'm calling you Festus."

"What?" Penelope asked.

"Fes-tus" Leo broke out each syllable.

"You know it means Happy in Latin right?" Penelope asked.

"So?"

"You want us to go a world saving quest on Happy the dragon?"

"Yup!" Leo grinned.

The dragon whirred its teeth and grinned. At least Leo hoped it was a grin. Penelope slid down Festus with a smile on her face.

"Cool," Leo said. "But we still have a problem, because you don't have wings."

Festus tilted his head and snorted steam. Then he lowered his back in an unmistakable gesture. He wanted Leo to climb on.

"Where we going?" Leo asked.

But he was too excited to wait for an answer. He climbed onto the dragon's back, and pulled Penelope back up, and Festus bounded off into the woods.

Leo lost track of time and all sense of direction. It seemed impossible the woods could be so deep and wild, but the dragon traveled until the trees were like skyscrapers and the canopy of leaves completely blotted out the stars. Even the glowstick behind Leo wasn't enough, but the dragon's glowing red eyes acted like headlights.

Finally they crossed a stream and came to a dead end, a limestone cliff a hundred feet tall—a solid, sheer mass the dragon couldn't possibly climb.

Festus stopped at the base and lifted one leg like a dog pointing.

"What is it?" Leo slid to the ground. He walked up to the cliff—nothing but solid rock. The dragon kept pointing.

"It's not going to move out of your way," Leo told him.

The loose wire in the dragon's neck sparked, but otherwise he stayed still. Leo put his hand on the cliff. Suddenly his fingers smoldered. Lines of fire spread from his fingertips like ignited gunpowder, sizzling across the limestone. The burning lines raced across the cliff face until they had outlined a glowing red door five times as tall as Leo. He backed up and the door swung open, disturbingly silently for such a big slab of rock.

"Woah! This like a Disney movie." Penelope gasped.

"Perfectly balanced," he muttered. "That's some first-rate engineering."

The dragon unfroze and marched inside, as if he were coming home.

Leo stepped through, and the door began to close. He had a moment of panic, remembering that night in the machine shop long ago, when he'd been locked in. What if he got Penelope stuck in here? He could survive like he did years ago, but her?

But then lights flickered on—a combination of electric fluorescents and wall-mounted torches. When Leo saw the cavern, he forgot about leaving.

"Festus," he muttered. "What is this place?"

The dragon stomped to the center of the room, leaving tracks in the thick dust, and curled up on a large circular platform.

The cave was the size of an airplane hangar, with endless worktables and storage cages, rows of garage-sized doors along either wall, and staircases that led up to a network of catwalks high above. Equipment was everywhere—hydraulic lifts, welding torches, hazard suits, air-spades, forklifts, plus something that looked suspiciously like a nuclear reaction chamber. Bulletin boards were covered with tattered, faded blueprints. And weapons, armor, shields—war supplies all over the place, a lot of them only partially finished.

"What does that say?" Penelope asked. Hanging from chains far above the dragon's platform was an old tattered banner almost too faded to read. The letters were Greek, but Leo somehow knew what they said: BUNKER 9.

"Bunker 9."

"9 as in the Hephaestus cabin or as in there are 8 others." Leo shrugged at that question. Leo looked at Festus, still curled up on the platform, and it occurred to him that the dragon looked so content because it was home. It had probably been built on that pad.

"Do the other kids know ... ?" Leo's question died as he asked it. Clearly, this place had been abandoned for decades. Cobwebs and dust covered everything. The floor revealed no footprints except for his, and the huge paw prints of the dragon. He was the first one in this bunker since ... since a long time ago. Bunker 9 had been abandoned with a lot of projects half finished on the tables. Locked up and forgotten, but why?

Leo looked at a map on the wall—a battle map of camp, but the paper was as cracked and yellow as onionskin. A date at the bottom read, 1864.

"No way," he muttered.

Then he spotted a blueprint on a nearby bulletin board, and his heart almost leaped out of his throat. He ran to the worktable and stared up at a white-line drawing almost faded beyond recognition: a Greek ship from several different angles. Faintly scrawled words underneath it read: prophecy? unclear. flight?

It was the ship he'd seen in his dreams—the flying ship. Someone had tried to build it here, or at least sketched out the idea. Then it was left, forgotten ... a prophecy yet to come. And weirdest of all, the ship's masthead was exactly like the one Leo had drawn when he was five—the head of a dragon. "Looks like you, Festus," Penelope murmured. "That's creepy."

The masthead gave him an uneasy feeling, but Leo's mind spun with too many other questions to think about it for long. He touched the blueprint, hoping he could take it down to study, but the paper crackled at his touch, so he left it alone. He looked around for other clues. No boats. No pieces that looked like parts of this project, but there were so many doors and storerooms to explore.

Festus snorted like he was trying to get Leo's attention, reminding him they didn't have all night. It was true. Leo figured it would be morning in a few hours, and he'd gotten completely sidetracked. He'd saved the dragon, but it wasn't going to help him on the quest. He needed something that would fly.

"Festus, what-what's that?" Penelope whispered. The dragon switched on his glowing red eye beams and turned them toward the ceiling.

Leo looked up to where the spotlights were pointing, and yelped when he recognized the shapes hanging above them in the darkness.

"Festus," he said in a small voice. "We've got work to do."