Marcus stood on the porch of the Big House, closing his eyes as the wind picked up just enough to brush through his hair, the night air cool in his lungs.

"Marcus."

Guess that's one person I haven't managed to piss off to the point of not talking to me yet…

He didn't turn, content to make Chiron come to him for once. After the disaster that had been their last mission, he was shocked he hadn't been thoroughly punished by the acting head of Camp.

Though I suppose he probably thinks what we went through is enough…

"Marcus, we need to talk." Chiron's voice was tired, for once showing the millennia he'd lived, the lives he'd seen come and go...

"Then talk." Marcus pushed back against those thoughts. He didn't have the patience for them now.

He heard Chiron sigh. "I know you've all been through a lot these past few weeks but-"

"No. There's nothing else beyond that Chiron." Marcus finally turned to take in his mentor, refusing to acknowledge the tiredness of the figure in front of him. They come first… She comes first. "Not just one, but two of us didn't make it back from Boston. Both killed by Aaron, our Aaron."

"I understand that Marcus, but from what you've told me, you found a hope to fight back against them. The artifacts."

"Right. Artifacts that we have no idea where they are, what we'd be facing going after them, or hell, even what they are in the first place!" Marcus scoffed. "Another wild goose chase to keep us busy and give us hope. I won't let any more of my friends be hurt hunting for things that don't exist." I won't let anybody else get hurt because of me.

"That's what I'm here to discuss with you. We may have found some clues leading to artifacts of power that may help in our fight against these… New Olympians. Follow me." Without another word, Chiron turned and wheeled himself back into the Big House, leaving Marcus no real choice but to follow. As he did, he wondered how Maddie's nightly talk with the moon was going. This is the first time in a while I haven't even tried to be there… Not that she seemed to want me there anyway…

The group hadn't spent much time together since arriving back at Camp. Though, if Marcus was being honest with himself, it was more that he hadn't been around the group since returning to Camp. He still spent as much time with Maddie as he could, but he felt like he was walking on eggshells after what Aphrodite had told him. Jason and Joel seemed to be spending most of their time scheming still from what he had seen, but he'd been too distracted to try and nail that down. As for Chastity… Even I'm not brave enough to try to approach her after that last… conversation. As he thought of it, Marcus felt the sting on his cheek again before he could brush the thought aside.

"Here." Chiron had settled at the large table in the main conference room, files and papers strewn across it in no order that Marcus could decipher.

"Here… what? All I see is a mountain of paperwork."

"Ah yes well… Perhaps my organization has gotten a little haphazard since... " Chiron's voice trailed off, but he didn't need to finish for Marcus to get the gist of what he was saying.

"What did you find Chiron?" Marcus asked quietly, trying to bring his mentor back to the present. Keep moving forward… That's all we can do.

"I'm sure you know the tales of Daedalus and his Labyrinth." Chiron started, picking up aged documents and filing them together.

"Yeah, it even had an entrance here in Camp right? But the Labyrinth is destroyed."

"That is true, however, Annabeth Chase walked away from that adventure with a laptop computer, created by Daedalus himself."

"I'm… not exactly the best when it comes to computers, Chiron." Marcus crossed his arms, a scowl coming to his face. None of us are, now that I think about it… Hell, Phil isn't even from a century that had anything close to a computer, and Chastity would probably just use it to look up por-

"I'm well aware that technical skills are a bit beyond your group of half-bloods." Chiron continued. " My" group… doesn't feel like mine these days… "However, it isn't the laptop that's of interest to us. According to Annabeth, there were plans stored in the laptop's memory, plans that she used, along with her own improvements, to create a new pair of wings of the type used by Icarus."

This caught Marcus' attention. "What kind of improvements?"

"Well, for one thing according to this..." Chiron handed him a schematic that Marcus couldn't make heads or tails of. "And the records left behind by Annabeth, the wings were blessed by your father, and even Zeus granted a small bit of lightning to power them."

"So… what, they can control the wind and shoot bolts of lightning?" Marcus started to chuckle until he saw Chiron nodding.

"From what I can decipher here, that was the plan, yes. Whether or not they actually got them working or not remains to be seen, but from what I can tell they at least got them to fly by controlling the air currents directly around the wings themselves… This sounds like just such the creation Aphrodite was talking to you about."

Marcus still couldn't even hear her name without burning a little, but he had to admit Chiron had a point. An artifact of the past, remade for the modern era and improved upon… Either way, this is something we don't want the New Olympians getting their hands on.

"Where?" Marcus felt a spark of hope for the first time since Boston. Maybe… a chance to finally get ahead.

"What better place to test a pair of wings? The Adirondack Mountain Range."