“Lift!” I yelled. “Whistle!”

Grover joined in our desperate Joplin performance. Finally, the loading-bay door began to budge, creaking in protest as we raised it a few inches off the floor.

Macro’s shrieking became unintelligible. The humming and heat reminded me of that moment just before my sun chariot would take off, blasting into the sky in a triumph of solar power.

“Go!” I yelled to the satyrs. “Both of you, roll under!”

I thought that was quite heroic of me—though to be honest, I half expected them to insist Oh, no, please! Gods first!

No such courtesy. The satyrs shimmied under the door, then held it from the other side while I tried to wriggle through the gap. Alas, I found myself stymied by my own accursed love handles. In short, I got stuck.

“Apollo, come on!” Grover yelled.

“I’m trying!”

“Suck it in, boy!” screamed the coach.

I’d never had a personal trainer before. Gods simply don’t need someone yelling at them, shaming them into working harder. And honestly, who would want that job, knowing you could get zapped by lightning the first time you chided your client into doing an extra five push-ups?

This time, however, I was glad to be yelled at. The coach’s exhortations gave me the extra burst of motivation I needed to squeeze my flabby mortal body through the gap.

No sooner had I gotten to my feet than Grover yelled, “Dive!”

We leaped off the edge of the loading dock as the steel door—which was apparently not bombproof—exploded behind us.

OH, villainy!

Please explain to me why I always end up falling into dumpsters.

I must confess, however, that this dumpster saved my life. Macro’s Military Madness went up in a chain of explosions that shook the desert, rattling the flaps of the foul-smelling metal box that sheltered us. Sweating and shivering, barely able to breathe, the two satyrs and I huddled amid trash bags and listened to the pitter-patter of debris raining from the sky—an unexpected downpour of wood, plaster, glass, and sporting equipment.

After what seemed like years, I was about to risk speaking—something like Get me out of here or I’m going to vomit—when Grover clamped his hand over my mouth. I could barely see him in the dark, but he shook his head urgently, his eyes wide with alarm. Coach Hedge also looked tense. His nose quivered as if he smelled something even worse than the garbage.

Then I heard the clop, clop, clop of hooves against asphalt as they approached our hiding place.

A deep voice grumbled, “Well, this is just perfect.”

An animal’s muzzle snuffled the rim of our dumpster, perhaps smelling for survivors. For us.

I tried not to weep or wet my pants. I succeeded at one of those. I’ll let you decide which.

The flaps of the dumpster remained closed. Perhaps the garbage and the burning warehouse masked our scent.

“Hey, Big C?” said the same deep voice. “Yeah. It’s me.”

From the lack of audible response, I guessed the newcomer was talking on the phone.

“Nah, the place is gone. I don’t know. Macro must have—” He paused, as if the person on the other end had launched into a tirade.

“I know,” said the newcomer. “Could’ve been a false alarm, but…Ah, nuts. Human police are on the way.”

A moment after he said that, I heard the faint sound of sirens in the distance.

“I could search the area,” the newcomer suggested. “Maybe check those ruins up the hill.”

Hedge and Grover exchanged a worried look. Surely the ruins meant our sanctuary, currently housing Mellie, Baby Hedge, and Meg.

“I know you think you took care of it,” said the newcomer. “But, look, that place is still dangerous. I’m telling you—” This time I could hear a faint, tinny voice raging on the other end of the line.

“Okay, C,” said the newcomer. “Yes. Jupiter’s jumpers, calm down! I’ll just—Fine. Fine. I’m on my way back.”

His exasperated sigh told me the call must have ended.

“Kid’s gonna give me colic,” the speaker grumbled aloud to himself.

Something slammed into the side of our dumpster, right next to my face. Then the hooves galloped away.

Several minutes passed before I felt safe enough even to look at the two satyrs. We silently agreed that we had to get out of the dumpster before we died of suffocation, heatstroke, or the smell of my pants.

Outside, the alley was littered with smoking chunks of twisted metal and plastic. The warehouse itself was a blackened shell, flames still swirling within, adding more columns of smoke to the ash-choked night sky.

“W-who was that?” Grover asked. “He smelled like a guy on a horse, but…”

Coach Hedge’s nunchaku clattered in his hands. “Maybe a centaur?”

“No.” I put my hand on the dented metal side of the dumpster—which now bore the unmistakable impression of a shod hoof. “He was a horse. A talking horse.”

The satyrs stared at me.

“All horses talk,” Grover said. “They just talk in Horse.”

“Wait.” Hedge frowned at me. “You mean you understood the horse?”

“Yes,” I said. “That horse spoke in English.”

They waited for me to explain, but I couldn’t make myself say more. Now that we were out of immediate danger, now that my adrenaline was ebbing, I found myself gripped by a cold, heavy despair. If I’d harbored any last hopes that I might be wrong about the enemy we were facing, those hopes had been torpedoed.

Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus…strangely enough, that name could have applied to several famous ancient Romans. But the master of Naevius Sutorius Macro? Big C? Neos Helios? The only Roman emperor ever to possess a talking horse? That could mean only one person. One terrible person.

The flashing lights of emergency vehicles pulsed against the fronds of the nearest palm trees.

“We need to get out of here,” I said.

Gleeson stared at the wreckage of the surplus store. “Yeah. Let’s go around front, see if my car survived. I just wish I got some camping supplies out of this deal.”

“We got something much worse.” I took a shaky breath. “We got the identity of the third emperor.”

The explosion hadn’t scathed the coach’s yellow 1979 Ford Pinto. Of course it hadn’t. Such a hideous car couldn’t be destroyed by anything less than a worldwide apocalypse. I sat in back, wearing a new pair of hot-pink camo pants we’d salvaged from the army surplus wreckage. I was in such a stupor, I barely remember going through the drive-through lane of Enchiladas del Rey and picking up enough combo plates to feed several dozen nature spirits.

Back at the hilltop ruins, we convened a council of the cacti.

The Cistern was packed with desert-plant dryads: Joshua Tree, Prickly Pear, Aloe Vera, and many more, all dressed in bristly clothes and doing their best not to poke each other.

Mellie fussed over Gleeson, one minute showering him with kisses and telling him how brave he was, the next minute punching him and accusing him of wanting her to raise Baby Hedge by herself as a widow. The infant—whose name, I learned, was Chuck—was awake and none too happy, kicking his little hooves into his father’s stomach as Gleeson tried to hold him, tugging Hedge’s goatee with his chubby little fists.