Wildfires, Heroes of Olympus ₂

045, who the fuck is coco

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
SILVIANA         DUVALL

When Sylvie woke up again, her head pounded furiously. There was a blonde guy with a lip scar at her doorway, that took her a few minutes to register as Jason. The bruises on his face had faded and his blue eyes glittered with excitement.

"Hey, Sylvie," he had told her. "We're descending over Rome. You should really see this."

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.

Sylvie wasn't used to big cities. Or, at least she didn't think so. She couldn't really remember where she'd come from before the Argo II. 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 Sylvie concentrated just on those areas, she could imagine he 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.

It was ironic that such a beautiful place was about to bring Sylvie's death.

"We're setting down in that park," Leonardo? Leonidas? 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."

The whole time, Sylvie just kept thinking: Don't look at me, and hoped the Romans below would fail to notice the giant bronze trireme descending on their city in the middle of morning rush hour.

It seemed to work. Sylvie 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. Sylvie wasn't sure.

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 Sylvie's legs started shaking. She was actually here. She couldn't turn back now. And even if she could, she wouldn't know where to go home to. Her memory was quickly dwindling into nothing.