“They’re fine!” he said. “At least, I assume they’re fine. I haven’t actually, um, seen them in a while, b-but I have an empathy link with Percy, so if he wasn’t fine, I think I’d know—”

“Apollo.” Meg knelt down. She picked up one of the fallen papers, her frown even more severe than Piper’s.

My stomach completed its turn inside out. Why had I not noticed the color of the documents sooner? All of the papers—envelopes, collated reports, business letters—were dandelion yellow.

“‘N.H. Financials,’” Meg read from the letterhead. “‘Division of Triumvirate—’”

“Hey!” Piper swiped the paper from her hand. “That’s private!” Then she faced me as if doing a mental rewind. “Wait. Did she just call you Apollo?”

“I’m afraid so.” I gave her an awkward bow. “Apollo, god of poetry, music, archery, and many other important things, at your service, though my learner’s permit reads Lester Papadopoulos.”

She blinked. “What?”

“Also, this is Meg McCaffrey,” I said. “Daughter of Demeter. She doesn’t mean to be nosy. It’s just that we’ve seen papers like these before.”

Piper’s gaze bounced from me to Meg to Grover. The satyr shrugged as if to say Welcome to my nightmare.

“You’re going to have to rewind,” Piper decided.

I did my best to give her the elevator-pitch summary: my fall to earth, my servitude to Meg, my two previous quests to free the Oracles of Dodona and Trophonius, my travels with Calypso and Leo Valdez….

“LEO?” Piper grabbed my arms so hard I feared she would leave bruises. “He’s alive?”

“Hurts,” I whimpered.

“Sorry.” She let go. “I need to know everything about Leo. Now.”

I did my best to comply, fearing that she might physically pull the information from my brain otherwise.

“That little fire-flicker,” she grumbled. “We search for months, and he just shows up at camp?”

“Yes,” I agreed. “There is a waiting list of people who would like to hit him. We can fit you in sometime next fall. But right now, we need your help. We have to free a Sibyl from the emperor Caligula.”

Piper’s expression reminded me of a juggler’s, trying to track fifteen different objects in the air at once.

“I knew it,” she muttered. “I knew Jason wasn’t telling me—”

Half a dozen movers suddenly lumbered through the front door, speaking in Russian.

Piper scowled. “Let’s talk on the terrace,” she said. “We can exchange bad news.”

OH, the scenic ocean vista! Oh, the waves crashing against the cliffs below, and the gulls whirling overhead! Oh, the large, sweaty mover in a lounge chair, checking his texts!

The man looked up when we arrived on the terrace. He scowled, grudgingly got to his feet, and lumbered inside, leaving a mover-shaped perspiration stain on the fabric of the chair.

“If I still had my cornucopia,” Piper said, “I’d shoot those guys with glazed hams.”

My abdominal muscles twitched. I’d once been hit in the gut by a roasted boar shot from a cornucopia, when Demeter was especially angry with me…but that’s another story.

Piper climbed the terrace fence and sat on top of it, facing us, her feet hooked around the rails. I supposed she’d perched there hundreds of times and no longer thought about the long drop. Far below, at the bottom of a zigzagging wooden stairway, a narrow strip of beach clung to the base of the cliffs. Waves crashed against jagged rocks. I decided not to join Piper on the railing. I wasn’t afraid of heights, but I was definitely afraid of my own poor sense of balance.

Grover peered at the sweaty lounge chair—the only piece of furniture left on the deck—and opted to remain standing. Meg strolled over to a built-in stainless-steel gas grill and began playing with the knobs. I estimated we had about five minutes before she blew us all to bits.

“So.” I leaned on the railing next to Piper. “You know of Caligula.”

Her eyes shifted from green to brown, like tree bark aging. “I knew someone was behind our problems—the maze, the fires, this.” She gestured through the glass doors at the empty mansion. “When we were closing the Doors of Death, we fought a lot of villains who’d come back from the Underworld. Makes sense an evil Roman emperor would be behind Triumvirate Holdings.”

I guessed Piper was about sixteen, the same age as…no, I couldn’t say the same age as me. If I thought in those terms, I would have to compare her perfect complexion to my own acne-scarred face, her finely chiseled nose to my bulbous wad of cartilage, her softly curved physique to mine, which was also softly curved but in all the wrong ways. Then I would have to scream I HATE YOU!

So young, yet she had seen so many battles. She said when we were closing the Doors of Death the way her high school peers might say when we were swimming at Kyle’s house.

“We knew there was a burning maze,” she continued. “Gleeson and Mellie told us about that. They said the satyrs and dryads…” She gestured at Grover. “Well, it’s no secret you guys have been having a bad time with the drought and fires. Then I had some dreams. You know.”

Grover and I nodded. Even Meg looked over from her dangerous experiments with outdoor cooking equipment and grunted sympathetically. We all knew that demigods couldn’t take a catnap without being plagued by omens and portents.

“Anyway,” Piper continued, “I thought we could find the heart of this maze. I figured whoever was responsible for making our lives miserable would be there, and we could send him or her back to the Underworld.”

“When you say we,” Grover asked, “you mean you and—?”

“Jason. Yes.”

Her voice dipped when she spoke his name, the same way mine did when I was forced to speak the names Hyacinthus or Daphne.

“Something happened between you,” I deduced.

She picked an invisible speck from her jeans. “It’s been a tough year.”

You’re telling me, I thought.

Meg activated one of the barbecue burners, which flared blue like a thruster engine. “You guys break up or what?”

Leave it to McCaffrey to be tactless about love with a child of Aphrodite, while simultaneously starting a fire in front of a satyr.

“Please don’t play with that,” Piper asked gently. “And, yes, we broke up.”

Grover bleated, “Really? But I heard—I thought—”

“You thought what?” Piper’s voice remained calm and even. “That we’d be together forever like Percy and Annabeth?” She stared into the empty house, not exactly as if she missed the old furniture, but as if she were imagining the space completely redone. “Things change. People change. Jason and me—we started out oddly. Hera kind of messed with our heads, made us think we shared a past we didn’t share.”

“Ah,” I said. “That sounds like Hera.”

“We fought the war against Gaia. Then we spent months searching for Leo. Then we tried to settle into school, and the moment I actually had some time to breathe…” She hesitated, searching each of our faces as if realizing she was about to share the real reasons, the deeper reasons, with people she barely knew. I remembered how Mellie had called Piper poor girl, and the way the cloud nymph had said Jason’s name with distaste.