91

91

Athena’s Labor

“Welcome to your eleventh challenge, champions.”

Athena stands before us, beautiful and yet still martial in a white pantsuit with shoulder pads that the fashionistas of the 1980s would envy. Her smile is more scary than reassuring. Honestly, I find Athena intimidating as fuck. I can’t say that rejoining the Crucible on her round was what I would have picked. Hera’s with the stars-and-constellations thing definitely would have been better.

The other champions watched me warily when I arrived, Samuel included. He’s swaying a bit and ashen, but on his feet. No golden band around his one good wrist that I saw.

I nodded at them all, hoping they’d see that I understood why they couldn’t take me up on my offer. My allies, though… They apologized, and I had to stand there silently sending mental I’m sorrys to Boone even as I reassured my team that I understood.

Which I do. I really do. But now I have to beat them at this labor, because I’m still going to try to win. Which I hope they understand.

They’re standing beside me now, at least, which is something.

“Everyone believes Ares to be the bloodthirsty god,” Athena says.

Then she makes a fist, slamming it down through the air, and a spear appears in her grasp, hitting the stone floor with a ringing, metallic clang. Immediately, her white suit changes to armor, the same that she wore the day the champions had to earn our gifts.

That seems like eons ago. A lifetime lived between then and now.

On her silver breastplate, an olive tree grows with a snake winding up its trunk. Her helm is that of an owl’s head, the horned features forming slashes above her brow, and owl feathers emerge from the top and back in a warrior’s headdress.

Her face is painted in runes and glyphs of glittering white. She holds a simple spear in one hand, and around her neck dangles a pendant. I’m guessing it’s an image of the Gorgoneion for protection. She’s known to wear it.

The goddess of both knowledge and war stands before us.

The four Daemones, positioned in each corner of the platform, immediately drop to one knee, heads bowed, fists over their chests.

“Rise,” she says.

Um…weren’t they supposed to be neutral for the Labors? Judges? I can’t say I love this little byplay. The way the other champions shift on their feet, I’m pretty sure they’re thinking the same thing.

Athena snaps her fingers, and all our gods appear at our sides. Hades puts his hand on my shoulder, and we blink out. When we blink back in, we are no longer standing in Olympus. Before I can take a breath, Hades is gone again.

Which is when the roar of the crowds hits me like a freezing-cold wave cresting over my head and forcing me under.

I try not to stumble back as where we are sinks in.

The Roman Colosseum, only not like any picture I’ve ever seen of the ruins.

We are standing on a podium built into the stands where I suppose Caesars of old sat with their family and sycophants, and around us, the vestiges of the original building rise. The areas where rock has been weathered and crumbled away is now reformed or filled in by…opaque glass.

The entire structure has been rebuilt this way, forming stadium seating and completing the walls with their arched doorways and windows, and a rounded roof—all of frosted glass—I’m guessing to block mortal eyes while letting sunlight filter through.

The place is packed.

The stands are teeming, but not with mortals. Instead, it appears all the immortals of the ancient Greek world—gods, demigods, nymphs, satyrs, and more—are here to watch in person. They seem to me like a pit of vipers, ready to coil, strangle, and strike. Just like we’re at a football game, the immortals yell and scream our names. Some carry banners cheering on their favorite champion.

I don’t see a single one with my name or Hades’ butterfly on it.

Turquoise flags with Athena’s symbol of an owl fly overhead, but here, she goes by her Roman name—Minerva. Her flags are interspersed with flags of the other major Olympian gods and their Roman names: Jupiter, Neptune, Juno, Venus, Mercury, Apollo, Diana, Mars, Vulcan, Bacchus, Ceres. Even a single black flag for my god, Pluto.

I’m shocked Athena is allowed to hold this here. Mortals will know something is going on. Or maybe from the outside it’s enchanted to look and sound no different than usual?

You have bigger worries right now, Lyra.

The Colosseum floor, which is also glass but completely clear, allows us to see the tunnels underneath, where gladiators and prisoners used to be held before their trials and fights above. The rock columns are filled in with glass, too, making a flat surface here at the stadium level but allowing me to see what looks like several levels of floors descending into the pits that together create…

A maze.

Multiple levels of it.

I fucking have this! I’ve grown up living in a maze—the tunnels under my city. I spent my childhood exploring all the parts of it.

This, I can do.

This, I can win!

“No!” The cry comes from Trinica. Horror twists her features as she shrinks away from something behind me so fast, she slams into Zai and they both stumble. But that has the rest of us looking, and I have to clap a hand over my mouth to stop from vomiting up my toast and tea.

There, on spikes, are the heads of the champions we’ve lost, skin sallow, eyes cloudy with death, and mouths open as if they are screaming.

Neve. Isabel. But also Dae’s grandmother…and Boone.

His cold, dead eyes stare down at me.

“It’s an illusion,” Jackie says.

She knows because she sees past illusions and glamours. I found that out because apparently she used it more openly during Hera’s Labor, Deimos and Phobos having no effect on her.

I stare at the heads in revulsion. An illusion—like so many of the horrors we’ve endured—but the effect is no less real. Like the dragon’s fire. I know Athena is playing the mental game with this move. I know it, but I just can’t let it stand. Especially when Rima silently reaches for Dae’s trembling hand.

I whirl on Athena in a snarl that would do Hades proud. “You’re a monster.”

The entire stadium gasps and, I swear, shifts back as one. Because they know. That’s a statement that should get me cursed in a way only the gods and goddesses have a talent for.

“Kill her!” an immortal with a vile sense of justice yells from the now-silent crowd.

“What’s wrong with Dex?” I hear Jackie mutter to my right.

Next to her, Dex is bouncing on his toes, mumbling “kill her, kill her” in a singsongy voice until Rima elbows him.

No one else takes up the call.

Athena merely smiles. “War and knowledge are both hard-won, hard-fought, harsh realities that you mortals don’t seem to be able to stomach. And yet they still exist. Unavoidable, inescapable, and as necessary as breathing.”

“It doesn’t have to be that way,” I argue. I’ve screwed myself already, so what’s a little more? “Only monsters, fiends, the willfully ignorant, and demons make the world that way.”

She tilts her chin down just slightly, eyes molten gold. “Call me a monster one more time, little mortal.”

I’m pretty sure the “ignorant” part is what pissed her off most.

I manage to keep my mouth shut, but I don’t stop glaring at her, my hands curling and uncurling at my sides.

Her smile turns smug. A taunt.

One that makes me mentally take a step back. Does she want me to challenge her? Holy shit, I think she does. She wants me to give her a reason to punish me that the Daemones can’t say is interference. What she doesn’t want is me competing. That’s why Boone is up there.

Dex must have told her about the deal I offered…and about why.

I knew he’d be the godsdamned leak. Did he make some kind of deal with her? He is, after all, her champion.

When I say and do no more, she forms a disappointed pout before stalking past me and the others to the first of the spikes, where she picks up a large, clear, covered bowl filled with spiders. She takes the lid off and holds it under Boone’s head, catching the blood that’s dripping down as if he was only just killed minutes ago.

Revulsion is a slap to the face as the spiders immediately start growing. Athena dumps them into the glass maze below us, where they scuttle off, continuing to get bigger and bigger.

“Ooh, pretty,” Dex says, still in that odd voice.

I glance at his face, dark eyes glossy with fervor. What is going on with him?

Athena follows the spiders with a bowl of scorpions grown with Neve’s blood, then a bowl of bullet ants grown with Isabel’s blood, and finally a nest of hornets with Dae’s grandmother’s blood.

All these creatures go into the glass maze.

Athena doesn’t waste time with long explanations.

“Get out if you can. You may not use a relic of any kind to skip running the maze, just to survive it. If you can’t find your way out in an hour…” She points to a massive digital clock set to sixty minutes. “Then you’ll be left down there to suffocate or for the bugs to eat. The first champion out wins.”