𐌙/𐌍 Ᏽ𐌵𐌀𐌋𐌄 & 𐌕𐋅𐌄 Ᏽ𐌐𐌄𐌀𐌕 𐌌𐌙𐌕𐋅𐌔 ¹

Chapter 16

Sixteen
ꕤ

I Open A Coffin

  Jumping out a window five hundred feet aboveground is not usually my idea of fun. Especially when I’m wearing bronze wings and flapping my arms like a duck.

  I was falling straight down, probably pointed at a sharp rock that would make me an instant skewered (y/n), knowing my luck. Something in my mind blew like a soft breeze through my head, and I reminded myself of the time I had flown as a bird when I was twelve.

  My memory acted on my instincts, and I shot my arms open, like I had done before. Instantly, the broze wings shifted and caught the wind, making me glide down slowly towards the ground.

  Experimentally, I flapped my arms once. I arced into the sky, the wind
whistling in my ears.

  "Yeah!" I yelled. The feeling was unbelievable. After getting the hang of it, I felt like the wings were part of my body. I could soar and swoop and dive anywhere I wanted to.

  I turned and saw my friends—Rachel, Annabeth, and Nico—spiraling above me, glinting in the sunlight. Behind them, smoke billowed from the windows of Daedalus’s workshop.

  "Land!" Annabeth yelled. "These wings won’t last forever."

  "How long?" Rachel asked.

  "I don’t want to find out!" Annabeth said.

  We swooped down toward the Garden of the Gods. I did a complete circle around one of the rock spires and freaked out a couple of climbers. Then the four of us soared across the valley, over a road, and landed on the terrace of the visitor center. It was late afternoon and the place looked pretty empty, but we ripped off our wings as quickly as we could. Looking at them, I could see Annabeth was right. The self-adhesive seals that bound the wings to our backs were already melting, and we were shedding bronze feathers. It seemed a shame, but we couldn’t fix them, and couldn’t leave them around for the mortals, so we stuffed the wings in trash bins outside the cafeteria.

  I used the tourist binocular camera to look up at the hill where Daedalus’s workshop had been, but it had vanished. No more smoke. No broken windows. Just the side of a hill.

  "The workshop moved," Annabeth guessed. "There’s no telling where."

  "So what do we do now?" I asked. "How do we get back in the maze?"

  Annabeth gazed at the summit of Pikes Peak in the distance. "Maybe we can’t. If Daedalus died…he said his life force was tied into the Labyrinth. The whole thing might’ve been destroyed. Maybe that will stop Luke’s invasion."

  I thought about Percy, Grover and Tyson, still down there somewhere. And Daedalus…even though he’d done some terrible things and put everybody I cared about at risk, it seemed like a pretty horrible way to die.

  "No," Nico said. "He isn’t dead."

  "How can you be sure?" I asked.

  "I know when people die. It’s this feeling I get, like a buzzing in my ears."

  "What about Tyson and Grover and Percy, then?"