¹Royal Cries, p. jackson

012.

ROYAL CRIES
━━ chapter twelve

━━ JUMPING OUT A window five hundred feet above the ground was never Elisa's idea of fun. She didn't hate heights, but soaring through the air with golden metal wings being the only thing keeping her in the air was making her pretty queasy.

The air was thin as Elisa took a long breath in, her nostril flaring. She kept her arms extended. Percy was flying lower to the ground and the daughter of Dionysus exchanged a nervous look with Annabeth.

The blonde yelled, "Spread your arms! Keep them extended."

Elisa did as told. She watched wearily as Percy flapped his arms once and soared away from the tips of the mountains rolling beneath them. Her stomach churned as the wind whistled in her ears. The brunette looked to her right, spotting Nico and Rachel with their glittering manmade wings. Behind them, smoke was billowing from the open windows of Daedalus's workshop.

"We need to land!" Elisa yelled, her voice being carried by the wind. "I don't want to try and see how long these will last."

If Elisa was recalling the story of Icarus and his father correctly, she knew the wings wouldn't last them any time at all.

The redhead looked at her quickly. "How long?"

"I don't know and I don't want to know!" said Elisa.

They swooped down towards the Garden of the Gods. Elisa rolled her eyes as Percy did a complete circle around one of the rock spires and scared a couple of climbers. Then the five of them 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 they ripped off the wings as quickly as possible. Looking at them, Elisa was right—the lifespan of the wings had quickly deteriorated. The self-adhesive seals that bound the wings to their backs were already melting, and they were shedding bronze feathers. There was no way they could leave them around for the mortals, so the wings were stuffed in the bin outside the cafeteria.

Elisa swiveled the tourist binocular camera to look up at the hill, where she had last seen the Daedaelus's workshop, but it had vanished; no more smoke, no more broken windows, all it was now was a regular hill.

"It moved. The workshop, I mean," she said. "There's no way to know where, though."

"So what do we do now?" Percy 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 to the Labyrinth. The whole thing might've been destroyed. Maybe that will stop Luke's invasion."

Elisa's brows furrowed. She thought about Grover and Tyson, still down there somewhere. Dying down there, being crushed to death or worse ...

"We'd know if he died, wouldn't we?" said the daughter of madness. "If, as Daedalus said, the Labyrinth is tied to his life force, wouldn't it—y'know—crumble?"

Nico said, "He isn't dead."

Percy's brows furrowed. "How can you be sure?" he asked.

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

Elisa avoided the son of Hades's gaze. She looked to the Pikes Peak behind her. She didn't want to think about what Nico had gone through the moments after Bianca had died.