Other things I would have liked: my godly powers back, the entire firearms department of Macro’s Military Madness locked and loaded in the hands of a demigod army, an apology letter from my father, Zeus, promising never again to turn me into a human, and a bath. But, as they say, Lesters can’t be choosers.

“That brings us back to where we started,” Joshua said. “You need the Oracle freed. We need the fires shut off. To do that, we need to get through the maze, but nobody knows how.”

Gleeson Hedge cleared his throat. “Maybe somebody does.”

Never before had so many cacti stared at a satyr.

Cholla stroked her wispy white beard. “Who is this somebody?”

Hedge turned to his wife, as if to say All you, sweetie.

Mellie spent a few more microseconds pondering the night sky, and possibly her former life as a nebulous bachelorette.

“Most of you know we’ve been living with the McLeans,” she said.

“As in Piper McLean,” I explained, “daughter of Aphrodite.”

I remembered her—one of the seven demigods who had sailed aboard the Argo II. In fact, I’d been hoping to call on her and her boyfriend, Jason Grace, while I was in Southern California, to see if they would defeat the emperor and free the Oracle for me.

Wait. Scratch that. I meant, of course, that I hoped they would help me do those things.

Mellie nodded. “I was Mr. McLean’s personal assistant. Gleeson was a full-time stay-at-home father, doing a great job—”

“I was, wasn’t I?” Gleeson agreed, giving Baby Chuck the chain of his nunchaku to teethe on.

“Until everything went wrong,” Mellie said with a sigh.

Meg McCaffrey tilted her head. “What do you mean?”

“Long story,” said the cloud nymph, in a tone that implied I could tell you, but then I’d have to turn into a storm cloud and cry a lot and zap you with lightning and kill you. “The point is, a couple of weeks ago, Piper had a dream about the Burning Maze. She thought she’d found a way to reach the center. She went exploring with…that boy, Jason.”

That boy. My finely tuned senses told me Mellie was not happy with Jason Grace, son of Jupiter.

“When they came back…” Mellie paused, her lower half swirling in a corkscrew of cloud stuff. “They said they had failed. But I don’t think that’s the whole story. Piper hinted that they had encountered something down there that…rattled them.”

The stone walls of the Cistern seemed to creak and shift in the cooling night air, as if sympathetically vibrating with the word rattled. I thought of my dream about the Sibyl in fiery chains, apologizing to someone after delivering terrible news: I am sorry. I would spare you if I could. I would spare her.

Had she been addressing Jason, or Piper, or both of them? If so, and if they had actually found the Oracle…

“We need to talk to those demigods,” I decided.

Mellie lowered her head. “I can’t take you. Going back…it would break my heart.”

Hedge shifted Baby Chuck to his other arm. “Maybe I could—”

Mellie shot him a warning look.

“Yeah, I can’t go either,” Hedge muttered.

“I’ll take you,” Grover volunteered, though he looked more exhausted than ever. “I know where the McLean house is. Just, uh, maybe we can wait until the morning?”

A sense of relief washed over the assembled dryads. Their spikes relaxed. The chlorophyll came back into their complexions. Grover may not have solved their problems, but he had given them hope—at the very least, a sense that we could do something.

I gazed at the circle of hazy orange sky above the Cistern. I thought about the fires blazing to the west, and what might be going on up north at Camp Jupiter. Sitting at the bottom of a shaft in Palm Springs, unable to help the Roman demigods or even know what was happening to them, I could empathize with the dryads—rooted in place, watching in despair as the wildfires got closer and closer.

I didn’t want to quash the dryads’ newfound hopes, but I felt compelled to say, “There’s more. Your sanctuary might not be safe for much longer.”

I told them what Incitatus had said to Caligula on the phone. And no, I never thought I would be reporting on an eavesdropped conversation between a talking horse and a dead Roman emperor.

Aloe Vera trembled, shaking several highly medicinal triangle spikes from her hair. “H-how could they know about Aeithales? They’ve never bothered us here!”

Grover winced. “I don’t know, guys. But…the horse did seem to imply that Caligula was the one who had destroyed it years ago. He said something like I know you think you took care of it. But that place is still dangerous.”

Joshua’s bark-brown face turned even darker. “Doesn’t make sense. Even we don’t know what this place was.”

“A house,” Meg said. “A big house on stilts. These cisterns…they were support columns, geothermal cooling, water supply.”

The dryads bristled all over again. They said nothing, waiting for Meg to continue.

She drew in her wet feet, making her look even more like a nervous squirrel ready to spring away. I remembered how she’d wanted to leave here as soon as we arrived, how she’d warned it wasn’t safe. I recalled one line of the prophecy we hadn’t yet discussed: Demeter’s daughter finds her ancient roots.

“Meg,” I said, as gently as I could, “how do you know this place?”

Her expression turned tense but defiant, as if she wasn’t sure whether to burst into tears or fight me.

“Because it was my home,” she said. “My dad built Aeithales.”

YOU don’t do that.

You don’t just announce that your dad built a mysterious house on a sacred spot for dryads, then get up and leave without an explanation.

So of course, that’s what Meg did.

“See you in the morning,” she announced to no one in particular.

She trudged up the ramp, still barefoot despite traipsing past twenty different species of cactus, and slipped into the dark.

Grover looked around at his assembled comrades. “Um, well, good meeting, everybody.”

He promptly fell over, snoring before he hit the ground.

Aloe Vera gave me a concerned glance. “Should I go after Meg? She might need more aloe goo.”

“I’ll check on her,” I promised.

The nature spirits began cleaning up their dinner trash (dryads are very conscientious about that sort of thing), while I went in search of Meg McCaffrey.

I found her five feet off the ground, perched on the rim of the farthest brick cylinder, facing inward and staring into the shaft below. Judging from the warm strawberry fragrance wafting from the cracks in the stone, I guessed this was the same well we’d used to exit the Labyrinth.

“You’re making me nervous,” I said. “Would you come down?”

“No,” she said.

“Of course not,” I muttered.

I climbed up, despite the fact that scaling walls really wasn’t in my skill set. (Oh, who am I kidding? In my present state, I didn’t have a skill set.)

I joined Meg on the edge, dangling my feet over the abyss from which we’d escaped….Had it really been only this morning? I couldn’t see the net of strawberry plants below in the shadows, but their smell was powerful and exotic in the desert setting. Strange how a common thing can become uncommon in a new environment. Or in my case, how an uncommonly amazing god can become so very common.