Chapter 30

Victoria Tells a Bedtime Story

Four hours after Victoria woke up shouting just like she predicted she would, I grabbed Bianca and dragged her to a certain workshop.

"Anybody here?" I called as we entered.

It was incredible over the course of just two weeks the mess Daedalus had managed to make. The tables that had been clear and tidy at our first training session had sunk beneath piles of gears, cogs, and stranger hunks of metal I couldn't even name. It had gotten to the point that when we trained, Daedalus took me to a separate room just to have some space.

A couple gears tumbled noisily to the floor as a hand stabbed out from the largest pile.

"Over here, Percy. Give me a second."

One second for Daedalus usually meant at least five minutes, which gave us plenty of time to amble across the room and admire the cocoon he'd built for himself.

It had originally been a chair, and probably still was somewhere deep inside. But every mechanical part anyone could ever need had started a ring around the base and grown six feet up. Whenever Daedalus needed something the clicking of laptop keys would pause, and his hand would snag the part from the multitude in arms reach.

"Uh, Percy?" Bianca eyed the mound with trepidation. "Is that junk pile talking?"

I chuckled. "Don't worry. Someone's inside there."

If anything, that made her worry more. "By choice?"

"Yes. If he could, he'd walk everywhere like this. He calls it—"

"Optimal Configuration."

Metal cascaded down as the man rose from the mess, tucking his laptop under his arm.

"The art," he said eagerly, "is in the proximity of the parts. By removing the need to stand up, I improve efficiency by over 25% percent." He held out his hand. "Daedalus, young lady. I assume Percy has mentioned me?"

When they shook Bianca's hand came away smudged with oil, and she hastily wiped it on her pants.

"So," Daedalus said, stepping past us to grab an entire pot of coffee like a mug. "To what do I owe the sudden visit?"

I poured out everything from the night before— the Feat, that we'd been nominated, and what was on the line if we failed.

When I'd finished, Daedalus took a swig from the pot. "How serious."

I blinked. "That's it? I thought you would be a little more, I don't know, surprised?"

"Well, there is the fact Luke informed me last night, though he took greater pains to beat around the bush. But also, I expected something like this."

"You did?" Here I was thinking something crazy had happened, and Daedalus was playing it like I'd told him the coffee ran out.

Actually, scratch that. Coffee got him much more worked up.

"Of course," Daedalus said. "In fact, I think it high time you knew something I should have told you earlier."

He clapped three times, against his wrist since he was still holding the coffee and laptop in his other arm. The door we'd entered from slammed shut, followed by an electric whine. The lights dimmed, and new ones began to glow softly across the floor.

"I made a few adjustments," Daedalus said, like that explained James Bond-esque shift. "No workshop of mine will be without defensive measures." He shivered. "Or escape routes."

"What about our old one?" I asked.

He gave me a deadpan stare. "It was buried in The Labyrinth, Percy. What defenses could be better than that?"

"Point."

"Uh, hello?" Bianca raised her hand, glancing worriedly at the altered room. "Sorry if I'm overreacting here, but are you about to kidnap us and chop us up or something?"

Daedalus laughed. "Quite the opposite. These defenses are to keep meddlers out, not to hold anybody in. By my estimates, this is the third most secure room in the entire base."

"What's ahead of it?" I asked.

"Well that planning room has some wonderful defensive enchantments, and then there's the— ah! I'm getting distracted. Before anyone begins to notice this little meeting, what do the two of you know of prophecies?"

—-

Over the next five minutes Daedalus told us a story of Oracles, world war, and bone-chilling predictions. All the suspicions I'd been harboring but were just that, suspicions, grew into something more.

No wonder Kronos was desperate enough to offer my mom's soul. Daedelus wasn't privy to the prophecy's actual wording, but the gist of it was clear.

The next child of The Big Three to hit sixteen would find the fate of the gods sitting in their lap.

"You never once thought to mention this until now?"

If I expected Daedalus to look guilty, I was disappointed.

"Knowing would have placed immense pressure on you," he said. "Especially when it's still uncertain who the child of the prophecy will be. At one point I was convinced you were the only option, and then you returned ranting about a daughter of Zeus."

Bianca looked curious as I shook my head. "We saw how that one turned out, didn't we?"

"The point is that you never know who else might be out there. The world is a large place, and the gods are not known for restraint. After a couple decades, you never know which of them might forget an old promise…"

He turned to Bianca, and something clicked in my head. He was telling all of this to her along with me. It could have just been coincidence that I brought her along when he planned to spill everything. But that wasn't how Daedalus worked. If he wanted me to be the only one hearing this, he would've found a way.

"You don't think…"

Daedalus smiled. "Throwing off the touch of Melinoe. Calling on shadows. Important enough that Kronos would take great risk to abduct her alive just a few hours North of Olympus. Nothing is certain, but were I forced to guess… you, my girl, are a daughter of Hades, ruler of the underworld, king of ghosts."

—-

Daedalus gave us some snacks and chatted a while longer, but neither of our heads were in it. Words like "Prophecy" and "Hades" were rattling around them distracting us, and about an hour after arriving we let him get back to work.

As we picked our way back through the halls I asked Bianca, "What do you think about all this?"

Her eyes were set straight down the hall. "What should I think? So my dad might be important. Since I've never met him, that doesn't mean much to me."

"So it might be true?"

"No idea. Maybe? I don't…" She rubbed her face. "Drop it. Instead, I'd rather talk about how you let me meet Kronos looking like a clown!"

I absolutely was not giggling as I said, "It's fine, right? He looks pretty goofy right now himself."

"That's true," Bianca said. "How he's a blank silhouette except for that one eye."

"Huh? Eye?"

I was so distracted by talk of an eye that I forgot to use my own. I didn't notice the person coming around the corner until our heads smashed together. We stumbled, falling in opposite directions.

"Oww," they said, rubbing their head. "Do you even try to watch where you're going?"

My vision swam back from fuzzy and I said, "It's you!"

The demigod Bianca and I had chatted with after The Competition's first round shook his head, pushing curly brown hair out of his face. "My name's Kai."

"Are you alright, Kai?" Bianca helped him up. We made eye contact, and I held out my arms to show I was on the ground too. She mouthed, 'Karma'.

I helped myself up. "Well, sorry about that Kai. If I knock you over again, I'll make sure it's on purpose."

I stepped around him, and we started down the hall.

"Wait."

Just before Kai was out of view, I stopped. "What is it?"

I thought maybe I'd given him a concussion or something, because his face looked pretty goofy. His eyes were flitting around the hall, and his mouth was set in a line.

"I wasn't going to say anything but shoot, running into you here feels like a sign."

"I'm glad smacking my skull could help you out. Usually, my hard head only gives people problems."

"Cut the jokes a minute," he said. "I'm serious about this. Somebody is after you."

That did sound serious.

"Why?" Bianca asked.

He shook his head. "Couldn't tell you."

"Who?" I asked.

"No clue." He saw both of us about to snap, and held up his hands. "I don't know much alright. But before The Competition, things got pretty weird. Nera went crazy."

"Anybody that'll kill because she didn't get the imaginary brother she wanted is already crazy in my book," I told him.

"That's just it!" Kai snapped his fingers. "She's always whining about the brother thing, sure. But killing over it? She never goes that far. The nightmares suck, but they're her form of pranks. I've never seen her get any more extreme than that."

I felt a draft down my back. It might've sounded like a guy making excuses for his friend, but with how he talked about her during The Competition that didn't seem likely. Besides, it matched a little too well with her escape from elimination.

"That's not all. I… saw something, something I don't think I was supposed to. About a week ago, right after you beat the Silver Regiment, I was having trouble sleeping. Wandered down to take a walk, and all of a sudden I'm hearing voices. Nera talking to some guy. I couldn't tell what they were saying, but I peaked down to try and see who it was, you know. The guy was all wrapped up in a cloak, no skin showing. What's even weirder? The second I look at him his head snaps toward me, like he knew exactly where I was. I ducked and ran to bed. I was sure I was going to get dragged away in the middle of the night but it never happened. The next day, Nera seemed crazier than ever."

"How do we know you're telling the truth?" Bianca asked.

"You don't I guess. But if I disappear, at least now somebody will know why."

He looked like he might say more, but just then a Laistrygonian lumbered into the hall and Kai darted off like a frightened rodent. Bianca and I shared a look.

"He seemed less crazy last night," she said.

But I had already committed everything to memory. Better safe than sorry, and I had a feeling choosing sorry here might mean getting us killed.

—

Word came that night by Arke Message: tomorrow was the day of departure. That meant it was time to get packing, but more importantly to dive into the question we'd been putting off. Who would go as a third?

We would be choosing in-regiment. No way I was bringing someone I hardly knew to watch our backs. I still hardly knew some of the Bronze Regiment, but at least with them they'd done it before.

Right off the bat, Vera took herself out of the running.

"It's only one spot, right? I'm not leaving Aurora." She patted her sleeping friend, who had been comatose since her heroics in The Competition. Not that that was anything unusual. "Besides, I doubt we'd be much help. It was hard enough for us to travel without trying to get somewhere."

"I, uh—" Alyssa studied the mat she was sitting on. "I don't really have a good reason, but I don't want to go. Sounds scary."

"What about Victoria?" I asked, remembering how excited she got when Luke first mentioned a Feat. "You don't want to go?"

The already tense atmosphere thickened to unbearable levels. Nobody would look me in the eye except Bianca, who seemed equally confused, and Victoria, who smiled but shook her head.

"Sorry, but the leader can't exactly pack up and leave. I've got too much to do. Besides, Feats and I don't go well together."

"Ah," I said. "Sure. Makes sense."

Thankfully the awkward atmosphere didn't last. Lucas leaned forward, creasing his trenchoat's collar.

"This task sounds thoroughly terrifying," he said. "I would gladly go, if you would have me."

"Me too." John rubbed the back of his head, blushing slightly. "Like Vera, I'm not sure I'd be much help. But if you want me I'm willing. Us children of Lethe don't get many chances to be remembered."

"I too volunteer my services," said Po. "Tough contracts are no more than a challenge to a Shinobi."

Only Emmitt hadn't said one way or another, and he didn't seem like he was about to, looking down playing with his thumbs. Sitting there under the expectant looks, I realized it was my turn to make a decision.

But who the hell did I pick? Everyone had their own strengths, but that wasn't the only thing I had to think about. There was no guarantee any of us would be coming back, let alone all of us.

Picking someone here might turn out to be a death sentence.

"We need a second to choose." I stood up, grabbing Bianca's wrist and dragging her from the room.

—

For a couple minutes Bianca and I stood on the bridge that connected the main room to the boys bunks, feeling the chilly night air.

"Alright." Out of nowhere, Bianca turned back to the room we'd come from. "It's cold out here. I'm going back in."

"Huh? Come on, we have to make a decision!"

Bianca stopped halfway and gave me a look. "No, Percy, you have to make a decision. You know what to expect out there. You know how to plan for a fight. Whatever you said I would just be going along with, anyway."

She grabbed the door handle, started to open it, and paused. "Besides, there's somebody much better than me to help you choose."

Before she went inside she held the door open, stepping out of the way for the person that had been waiting to come outside when she got there.

"Try not to let him mope too much, Victoria. I hate the face he makes when he does, it's even dopier than usual."

With that Bianca disappeared into the warm, well-lit room leaving us alone.

Victoria walked quietly to my side.

"It's hard, isn't it?"

I looked at her in surprise. "You've had to choose for a Feat before?"

"Well, no, this is a little more extreme. But I know the feeling. Anything can go wrong at any time, Percy. I knew a girl last year that went out for patrol and came back missing an arm."

I rapped on my shoulder. "I can relate."

She ignored me. "The point is, every time you give someone a mission, the idea is there. What if they don't come back? Is it my fault? The answer, as much as I try to convince myself otherwise, is yes."

"But that doesn't give me the right not to choose." She faced me. "It's because it's awful that I need to be the one making the choice. I won't allow that sort of guilt to tear up anybody else."

"Feel like making it for me then?" I joked.

She snorted. "Call it a prediction, but I get the feeling you'll be making much bigger decisions than I ever will. Look at The Competition. I might be the regiment leader, but it was you giving orders firing everybody up."

I winced. "Sorry about that."

Her eyes widened. "No! I'm not complaining, just trying to show you something. You're a leader Percy, like it or not. Hard decisions will come with that."

It's hard to keep burying your head in the sand when someone goes and makes good points like that. I sighed. She was right, of course. I knew I had to choose, and I knew at the end of the day I would. I just… wanted to run away a bit longer.

She broke eye-contact, resting her elbows on the guardrail. The ocean breeze blowing up the mountain scoured our faces, smelling of salt and pine.

"My mom is Nike," she said. "I'm not sure I ever actually, you know, told you that."

"Any connection to the company?"

"Yes, actually. Hilarious story. But mom has always had a bit of a… special relationship with her kids."

I wasn't sure there was a god-mortal relationship that qualified as normal, but I asked, "Special how?"

"You see her once a year as soon as you turn five. At least, that's how it was for me. She would show up, always on my birthday, and ask a simple question: 'What have you won?'"

"She already knows the answer. One time when I was seven, I lied and told her my soccer team won a tournament after we lost the final. She frowned at me. The very next game, I snapped my ankle. But what's really bad is if you don't win anything. Then she just disappears. Unless you win something huge to make up for it, you never see her again."

I held the guardrail a little tighter than was probably good for it or my fingers. "Jeez. You would think she'd try a bit harder to win some mom of the year awards."

Victoria snorted despite herself. "I guess they don't make her bucket list." Then her eyes went faraway. She chewed her bottom lip. "Believe it or not, I actually joined the titans with someone else."

"Seriously?"

"Seriously," she said. "We were at Camp Half-Blood together, both stuck in the Hermes Cabin because our parents didn't have their own. When we got word about this place, we ran away. This son of Zelus."

"No way," I said, because there was only one son of Zelus I knew. "You can't seriously be telling me…"

"That Justin and I joined together?" Victoria smirked. "We were even dating."

I started laughing. "Alright, you got me. I bet my face will look hilarious on video. So, where's the camera?"

"No prank. Our parents were so similar — victory and rivalry are sides of the same coin — and we were both stuck in Cabin Eleven… At the time he was so cute and supportive."

"I don't even have words to describe the ew."

"Everyone has cringey teenage memories, Percy." She patted my head. "You'll understand when you're older."

"I'm fourteen!"

"Exactly, and I'm seventeen. Just wait, immature little tadpole."

I decided to do the mature thing, just to prove her wrong, and stuck out my tongue.

She gave me a little elbow to the side, and I gave her one back. We spent a minute nudging each other before settling back down.

"It didn't last. Obviously."

"What happened?" I asked.

Her eyes fixed on an incomplete portion of the wall, staring into the swirling black mist like it was a portal into the past. "It started with a Feat. The first one, actually. They say Luke did one, but whatever he did was long before there was a system or a name or anything like that. This was the first proper Feat."

"There was only one Regiment back in those days. We had no leader. Honestly it was just a couple of kids that had run away from Camp or been picked up like strays. Then Kronos sent word: we were getting the chance to prove ourselves."

"Turned out, some grunt Dracaena had stumbled onto a seriously important item. The crown of their original queen who mated with Hercules."

I pulled a face. "Hercules really looked at a woman with snakes from the waist down and said she's the one?"

"It was to get his cows back. Don't underestimate what that does to a man. But this was no queen that found the crown, at least she wasn't beforehand. As soon as she realized what she had she took over the main Everglades colony and began throwing her weight around, threatening to pull support from the titans if they didn't send her rats and young men. Stuff like that."

"Let me guess," I said. "It was your job to go steal that crown."

"And kill the fake queen, if we could. It wasn't easy. Our third… he didn't make it out of the swamp. Justin and I did by the skin of our teeth. It was when we were limping back to the car we'd, erm, borrowed, that things got even worse."

"Our parents appeared in front of us. Nike and Zelus in all their armored, tracksuited glory."

"Tracksuited?"

"We were thrilled at first. Thought they had come down to congratulate us on a job well done, maybe snap their fingers and teleport us into some clean clothes." Victoria shook her head— not so much actively angry. More like a veteran reminiscing on decade-old memories. "There was only one thing they cared about. Who had won?"

I cocked my head. "Both of you, right?"

"Try telling that to them. 'There is no room on a podium for two,' my mom says." Victoria looked to the sky and shouted, "There's room for three, idiot!" Then she sighed and shook her head. "What came next is simple: they handed us swords and told us to fight. The loser would be branded a coward that tried to run, and the winner would be the hero who dragged them back and finished Feat on their own."

I had a long history of hating my dad. It was hard not to when I'd never even met him and still managed to lose the only family I had to his mistakes. But standing there on that bridge, I felt my estimation of him rise— from worst parent in the world, all the way up to third from bottom.

"Did you fight?"

Victoria shook her head. "I threw down my sword. Told them they were crazy. If they wanted a fight so bad, they could do it themselves instead of appearing in front of us like Vultures. I got so fired up, I hardly noticed the sword that had stabbed me."

She lifted her shirt above the ribs, revealing a tall, thin white scar stark against her tan skin. An image of a laurel wreath with wings coming out the sides and a sideways sandal at the base had been burned onto the skin around the scar, as if with a cattle brand.

"My mother's mark," Victoria explained, lowering her shirt. "She left it there before the sword was even out of my stomach. Said it would keep me from forgetting, and I haven't seen her since."

Aelia was practically singing to transform. I might not have been able to find Nike, but I had a pretty good idea where Justin was, and I had the urge to show him exactly what a sword through the stomach felt like. "And you never mentioned this before The Competition why?" "Because if I brought it up before, it wouldn't have been his collar that I cut last night. I don't want to kill him. For a person like that, getting embarrassed is a hundred times more painful."

I thought both sounded pretty good, but I grit my teeth. It was her choice.

"After we arrived back I was shunned. Nobody questioned the story, not with my own mothers mark as proof. Justin was made leader, and I drifted to the periphery. He must've felt guilty, because he went out of his way to keep me down. When the regiments finally split up, I volunteered to take over the third and got the job. The rest is history."

I wasn't sure which was worse: what had happened to her, or that even after all that she still saw the side she was on as the better one. Her words from The Competition came back to me. At least the Titan's care a little that we exist, even if it's just because we're useful.

Did two terrible options even count as a choice?

Thinking of The Competition reminded me of something else, though.

"Somebody was helping the Gold Regiment," I said. "They visited Nera and got her extra fired up. And when we were fighting, the magic stopped working for a second, just long enough to give her a second shot at me."

Victoria pursed her lips. "Percy, I don't know. There are a lot of groups working for the titans, and not all of them get along. Maybe somebody hates demigods and wanted to see more of them die. Maybe they have a grudge against us personally. But there are so many things it could be, I can't even guess. Just watch your back." She patted her shirt above the scar. "Take it from me, who already learned her lesson."

We both went quiet. The hoots of the first couple owls echoed from the woods below the base, dampened by the distance. In a way, standing on the suspension bridge so high up felt peaceful, like being secluded from the real world. Above it all. I tried not to think of it as the calm before a storm.

"So…" I started after a few minutes. "Who do you think I should bring along?"

"I think you already made your mind up a while ago," Victoria said.

"Do you think he'll go?"

"If you're the one asking, he would jump off this bridge. He's pretty convinced you're the coolest person on the planet."

I stared over the Point Reyes Peninsula, out to the ocean stretching away. Somewhere hundreds of miles across those waves lay Alaska. I would see it soon, or I wouldn't be seeing anything ever again.

"I really hope this goes well," I said.

Victoria patted my shoulder. "We always do, Percy. We always do."

(-)

The response was that weekly chapters would be preferred, so say no more (3:1 votes in favor across AO3 and ). Going forward, there'll be a chapter up every Sunday. Or, Sunday in the Pacific US anyway, but the point is it'll be consistent.

Next chapter we'll be hitting the road. It feels good to change the setting up after a while.