Songbird ━━ Heroes of Olympus

Introduction

I'll tell you where the real road lies
Between your ears, behind your eyes
That is the path to paradise,
Likewise, the road to ruin . . .

— HADESTOWN

KEEP YOUR HEAD LOW — that was what Winona Liu had told herself in order to survive at the Wilderness School, a boarding school for troubled kids. Her adoptive parents had left her on their doorstep months after the accident that left her with no recollection of who, what, or where she was. Winona had simply woken up from a hazy sleep one day in a hospital bed, bones aching and bloody gashes trailed across her body, to white lights and a couple crying in the chairs next to her. She couldn't remember anything, had no memory of the faces who claimed to be family, and knew nothing — nothing but a sweet voice that stirred a simmering rage deep down inside her, burning hotter than the infernos of hell.

Little songbird.

That was all Winona had been left with: two words from her birth mother — something in her gut was sure of — that, for some reason, meant more to her than anything else. But why? She asked herself a hundred times. Why were they so important to her, and why did they leave her feeling like a hollow shell of anger? What had happened before the accident? What were people not telling her?

But Winona's questions would get no answers. Or, at least, none that satisfied her. Her parents had recounted dozens of memories of their ordinary, happy, and uneventful life together but every fiber in her being screamed that something was wrong. And that made her act out in ways that left her parents no choice but to enroll her in the Wilderness School. There, at a school in the middle of nowhere filled with kids almost as bad as her, Winona tried to maintain a low profile in fear of repeating what had caused her to end up there in the first place. Though it seems that her profile wasn't low enough to avoid the attention of Leo Valdez since, after being paired together for a science project, the curly haired jokester has committed to being a thorn stuck in her side. Winona was begrudgingly pulled into his small group of friends where she met Jason Grace and Piper McLean, who, she had to admit, were at least more tolerable than Valdez.