A/N: Same drill (about not owning much of anything), sorry it's taken a while to post/get anywhere in this story—I promise to get on that!
Chapter 9
"Archie, what are we doing out here?" Odie ask, swatting away the mosquitos.
"Yeah, you want to face off with Nessus or something?" Herry asked.
"No," Archie said, rolling his eyes, but he didn't offer an answer either. Odie and Herry's opinions of Harper were just like everyone else's. Telling them that they were going to check out her alibi would probably result in a serious lack of help.
Odie sighed, glancing around at the forest trail, wondering if they'd be here past dinner. Athena would have their heads. The boys followed what little there was of a trail until they reached a clearing. In the center there were the remains of a small log cabin.
"I guess she wasn't lying," Archie muttered to himself, recognizing the scorch marks on a few pieces of intact logs. "Cronus was here."
"Yeah," Odie said, nodding in agreement as he stared around the wreckage. Then he looked at Archie. "And, where's here?"
"I'm guessing this was Harper's hideout," Archie said, not facing his friend as he sifted through some of the rubble.
Odie and Herry blinked as the realization dawned on them and both of them frowned. "You mean you dragged us all the way out here because you're paranoid?" Herry demanded.
"Hey, I have my reasons," Archie said, tossing aside some splintered wood.
"Like maybe because Chiron said that she's related to water gods?" Odie pointed out, folding his arms and sitting on what might have been part of the door frame at one point.
Archie didn't respond. Instead he continued searching the remains for any other signs that this was really where Harper had been staying. She could have just seen this in the woods on her way to them, after all.
Eventually Odie joined his inspections—purely out of curiosity. He really didn't like being in the dark on anything, even if it was a new hero. Herry joined out of boredom.
"Hey," Odie called to the others as he searched the area by the fireplace. "I found something."
Archie quickly got to his side. "What is it?"
Odie sighed impatiently and so tossed him a broken photo frame. Inside the frame was a picture of two kids, a boy and a girl, and a couple that looked like their parents. All of them had wildly curly hair, though the girl had her hair in a braid and was smiling at them with a playfully mischievous twinkle in her eyes.
"Her family?" Herry asked.
"I'm guessing so," Odie said. "Granted, this is an old picture—."
"So it could be somebody else," Archie said.
Odie and Herry frowned at him.
"Yeah, it could be," Odie said, then pocketed the picture. "And to disprove your paranoia, I'll run an aging program on it and show you it's her."
They only spent another half an hour at the cabin—even though it was summer, the surrounding trees were great at blocking out light. But they were able to find at least four more pictures (each one containing at least one girl who looked something like Harper) and a old teddy bear, which Herry insisted on taking with them.
As he begrudgingly followed his teammates, Archie mulled over what they'd found and everything it could imply. When it came down to it, though, he was torn between being relieved that she might be telling the truth, annoyed that his friends wouldn't let him stay later to check further into the wreck, and angry that he hadn't been right.
...
"So you mean there's probably charts like this on us in there?" Atlanta asked, sitting on Teresa's desktop with one of the team folders. "Isaac—aka Ike—is now seventeen... descendant of Icarus—didn't Icarus die as a kid?"
"It was never really confirmed," Odie's voice cut in as he entered with a dust covered box. "Some people said he died when he fell into the sea, but others say he was rescued and eventually became king of one of the islands. And judging by what Dedalus did with his life, I wouldn't be surprised if he lived."
"There ya go!" Teresa said, gesturing toward Odie with a smile from near where she leaned on her pillows.
"Hey! Where've you been?" Atlanta asked.
"Proving Archie wrong," he answered with a sigh as he dropped the box in front of her weapons closet.
"Cuz that's hard to do," Atlanta laughed, her eyes going back to the file in her hands.
"About what this time?" Teresa asked, glancing at Atlanta with a smirk.
Odie hesitated, shifting aside some of the files to sit on the low bed. "Archie dragged us back to Wyoming to do some fact checking on Harper."
"He's that unhinged? What was he expecting to find?" Atlanta asked making a noise of disgust.
Odie shrugged. "She wasn't lying," he said, glancing at the folder titles. "The cabin was in ruins, and you could definitely see that Cronus had been there—Why are we going through random old files?"
"I guess we're fact checking too, trying to fill in the blanks," Teresa said, lifting the file that was resting against her knees. It was the file for the boy she'd seen pictured with his motorcycle. She'd been absorbing it for the past twenty minutes, but Atlanta hadn't noticed so it didn't matter.
"Inventor, pyromaniac, drummer of the Ambrosia Flight," Atlanta read off.
"Ambrosia Flight?" Teresa repeated, glancing back at the chart. "That's mentioned in this one too—Pierce is the lead singer and guitarist."
Atlanta dropped Ike's folder and picked up another. "Ophelia," she read. "Eighteen, Orpheus... bass guitarist for Ambrosia Flight."
"They formed a rock group?" Odie asked, raising an eyebrow as he reached for a chart. "Phoebe, eighteen, Phineas,... yeah, here it is, keyboard, flute, violin and manager of Ambrosia Flight."
"So they were all musical," Atlanta said. "That's pretty cool."
"And they had a lot of missions around the globe," Teresa said.
"Ok, so why did you leave a note for me to bring this box up?" Odie asked, nudging the old cardboard with his foot.
"Earlier, when we were swimming with Harper, she found a box with all sorts of equipment," Teresa explained. "All these things that had helped them the first time they'd gone after the stones."
"Awesome! Work's halfway done already," Atlanta said happily, jumping down from the desk to join Teresa and Odie on the bed.
"I don't think so," Teresa said slowly. "According to Harper, that Ike kid designed everything to be specifically suited to its owner. And the box Harper found only had a few things that were her's."
Odie nodded slowly, already wanting to get his hands on this new technology. The box sitting a few feet from him had been strangely in his closet back when they'd first moved in. He hadn't gone through the box then, assuming it was just something Athena needed out of the way, and completely forgotten about it. The fact that Teresa had remembered it was even more incredible, but now his curiosity was burning.
"But why hide the wrong pieces together?" Atlanta asked. "That doesn't help anybody."
Teresa didn't answer, she'd ducked behind the main case folder again. Each of the reports had been filled out by the team members. She wasn't sure what she was looking for as her eyes skimmed each of the pages for the fifth time that day, but she knew she'd know when she found it—which she didn't.
Meanwhile, Odie's curiosity got the better of him and he pulled the box tabs open. Both he and Atlanta coughed on the disrupted dust, but leaned forward to look inside. There were all sorts of things inside, specifically power cords and coils of wire along with a wide assortment of tools, but there were also data cds, memory boards, and folded Chinese lanterns and a strip of firecrackers.
"Well, Ike's chart did say 'pyro'," Atlanta said with a shrug when Odie held up the firecrackers with a raised eyebrow. "This must be his stuff."
"The box Harper found was a fancy clay one, though," Teresa said, scooting over to join them at the end of the bed.
Odie shrugged and tried to shift the contents so he could see to the bottom of the box, only to find even more stuff beneath it. "That's impossible," he mumbled. "The box can't be that deep..."
"What are you guys doing?"
All three jumped to see Harper standing in the doorway. The girl looked at them curiously with sleepiness still in her eyes, but Teresa could easily see the sleepy look getting replaced with a mixture of panic and surprise. "What's that doing here?"
The guilty trio looked back at the box.
