The Tower of Nero (The Trials of Apollo, #5)

by Rick Riordan

She looked almost her age: a sixth grader entering the circle of hell known as puberty.

“The son of Hades, cavern-runners’ friend, Must show the secret way unto the throne. On Nero’s own your lives do now depend.”

O son of Zeus the final challenge face. The tow’r of Nero two alone ascend. Dislodge the beast that hast usurped thy place.

Outside, the illuminated billboards of New Jersey zipped by: ads for auto dealerships where you could buy an impractical race car; injury lawyers you could employ to blame the other drivers once you crashed that race car; casinos where you could gamble away the money you won from the injury lawsuits. The great circle of life.

Who went to the bathroom without their bow and quiver? That would be stupid.

SEEKEST THOU THE PLACE OF THE SEVEN-LAYER DIP. With that, the projectile fell silent. I groaned in misery. The arrow’s message was perfectly clear. Oh, for the yummy seven-layer dip of our hostess! Oh, for the comfort of that cozy apartment! But it wasn’t right. I couldn’t.… “What did it say?” Meg demanded. I tried to think of an alternative, but I was so tired I couldn’t even lie. “Fine,” I said. “We go to Percy Jackson’s place.”

She belched, long and deep, which in her culture was probably a sign of appreciation, or a sign that she had gas.

You know that meme with the honey bear and the caption honey, he gay? Yes, I created that. And in Ganymede’s case, it was hardly news.

You know the type. You’re a god. Your little brother pesters Dad to make him a god, too, even though being a god is supposed to be your thing. You have a nice chariot pulled by fiery horses. Your little brother insists on getting his own chariot pulled by leopards. You lay waste to the Greek armies at Troy. Your little brother decides to invade India. Pretty typical stuff.

He said he had an emergency meeting with a cat and a severed head, whatever that means.”

“William Andrew Solace,” Nico said, “do you have something to confess?”

But if you trust your friend Lululemon—”

Only a day at Camp Half-Blood before our final push toward destruction and death? That wasn’t nearly enough time to procrastinate!

“I told you, Apollo, the world has many crises. Just this morning, scientists released another study tying soda to hypertension. If they continue to disparage the name of Diet Coke, I will have to smite someone!” He stormed off to plot his revenge on the health industry.

Me with dr pepper

Nico sighed. “I’m guessing that was a Star Wars reference. My boyfriend is a Star Wars geek of the worst kind.” “Okay, Signor Myth-o-magic. If you would just watch the original trilogy…” Will looked at the rest of us for support and found nothing but blank expressions. “Nobody? Oh, my gods. You people are hopeless.”

You may wonder why I didn’t have a better handle on my godly knowledge, but my mortal brain was an imperfect storage facility. I can only compare my frustration to how you might feel when taking a picky reading-comprehension quiz. You are assigned fifty pages. You actually read them. Then the teacher decides to test you by asking, Quick! What was the first word on page thirty-seven?

Why did people always assume this? Why did they obsess about an Achilles’ heel? Just because one Greek hero had a vulnerable spot behind his foot, that didn’t mean every monster, demigod, and villain from ancient Greek times also had a podiatric problem. Most monsters, in fact, did not have a secret weakness. They were annoying that way.

There’s an old saying: The definition of insanity is shooting an invulnerable cow in the face over and over and expecting a different result. I went insane.

Given New York rental prices, I imagined a place like this could go for quite a bit. Running water. Privacy. Lots of space. Great bones—mouse bones, chicken bones, and some others I couldn’t identify. And did I mention the stench? The stench was included at no extra cost.

No doubt my old reptilian enemy would enjoy swallowing me whole, letting me die in his belly over the course of many excruciating days of digestion.

Vore core

Mortals and gods had one thing in common: we were notoriously nostalgic for “the good old days.” We were always looking back to some magical golden time before everything went bad.

As an immortal, of course, I should have known that there never were any “good old days.” The problems humans face never really change, because mortals bring their own baggage with them. The same is true of gods.

To be human is to move forward, to adapt, to believe in your ability to make things better. That is the only way to make the pain and sacrifice mean something.

I was given a New York Mets cap because, I was told, no one else wanted it. I found this insulting both to me and the franchise.

I had badly underestimated Nero’s megalomania.

SANS UNDERTALE?!

He frowned, trying to make sense of the fact that a teenaged boy was telling him what to do. Clearly, he’d never had children.

“STOP!” I sang out of instinct. “IN THE NAME OF LOVE!”

Mom? Is that you?

Mountain Dew is the equivalent of the enslaved servant who would ride behind the emperor during his triumphal parades, whispering, Remember, you are mortal, and you will die to keep him from getting a big head.

I’ve always thought you can judge the quality of a villain by his elevator music. Easy listening? Pedestrian villainy with no imagination. Smooth jazz? Devious villainy with an inferiority complex. Pop hits? Aging villainy trying desperately to be hip.

The third was split between Fox News and MSNBC, which side by side should have been enough to cause an antimatter explosion.

“No one hits my boyfriend,” Will thundered. “And no one kills my dad!”

Rachel pulled out a blue plastic hairbrush and threw it at the nearest barbarian, beaning him in the eye and making him howl. Sorry I underestimated you, Rachel, I thought distantly. You’re actually kind of a hairbrush ninja.

She was dressed in her usual armor and oversize helmet, which I’m pretty sure she stole from Marvin the Martian in Looney Tunes.

A flash of silver light, and I was dressed in a man’s white chiton. Come to think of it, that piece of clothing was pretty much identical to a Hunter’s gown. The sandals were the same. I seemed to be wearing a crown of laurels instead of a tiara, but those weren’t very different, either. Conventions of gender were strange.

It should have been a commercial. The camera zooms in on Athena, who smiles at the screen as the promotional slogan appears below her: Wisdom. It comes in handy.

Ugly weeping would not have been appropriate for a major Olympian god, so that’s exactly what I did.

ME RN

No story ever ends, does it? It just leads into others.”

“You don’t call a young lady mamacita. You got to have more respect, entiendes?”