Wildfires, Heroes of Olympus ₂

050, the girl dad agenda

CHAPTER   FIFTY
FINLEY   BRIGGS

Finn was tired of wine.

If she said that loud, she would probably get kicked out of Bacchus's Junior Party Scouts, but she didn't care.

She didn't want to be covered in dried wine, her hair a mess and her clothes stained. She didn't want to keep envisioning Jason in her mind, almost drowning from suffocating on the substance—the substance that was known to be all that Finn was. Above all, she didn't want to be here at all. She wanted to go back to the surface.

Hence why she was absolutely not a fan of the morals this quest was giving her.

If it was up to who she was only three weeks ago, Finn would have succumbed to her urges. But they didn't know where Sylvie was. Frank, Hazel, Annabeth, and Leo were missing in action. They still had to save Nico di Angelo, assuming the guy wasn't already dead. And there was that little matter of the giants destroying Rome, waking Gaea, and taking over the world.

Percy took the lead as they crawled down the drainage pipe. After thirty feet, it opened into a wider tunnel. Several hundred feet later, they reached a turn. 

The corridor opened into a vast room with twenty-foot ceilings and rows of support columns. Gears and pulley systems raised and lowered sections of the floor. Water flowed through open trenches, powering waterwheels that turned some of the machines. Other machines were connected to huge hamster wheels with hellhounds inside.

Suspended from the ceiling were cages of live animals—a lion, several zebras, a whole pack of hyenas, and even an eight-headed hydra. Ancient-looking bronze and leather conveyor belts trundled along with stacks of weapons and armor in a disorganized manner. 

Leo would love it, Finn thought. The whole room was like one massive, scary, unreliable machine.

About twenty feet inside the doorway, a life-size wooden cutout of a gladiator popped up from the floor. It clicked and whirred along a conveyor belt, got hooked on a rope, and ascended through a slot in the room.

Jason murmured, "What the heck?"

"Language," Piper teased. Finn snorted.

They stepped inside. Finn scanned the room. There were several thousand things to look at, most of them in motion, but fortunately, Finn was a daughter of Bacchus, so she was comfortable with chaos. About a hundred yards away, she spotted a raised dais with two empty oversized praetor chairs. Standing between them was a bronze jar big enough to hold a person.

"Look." She pointed it out to her friends.

Piper frowned. "That's too easy."

"Of course," Percy said.

"But we have no choice," Jason said. "We've got to save Nico."

"Yeah." Percy started across the room, picking his way around conveyor belts and moving platforms.

Finn tried to watch out for traps, but everything here looked like a trap. She really wished Hazel were here so she could help with her underground skills.