by Rick Riordan
“Just tell us what happened,” Piper urged.
Thank goodness they’d answered his distress call so quickly. Leo couldn’t turn to anyone else. Having his best friends at his side made him feel better, though he wasn’t sure they could stop the disaster.
Jason looked cool and confident as usual—all surfer-dude handsome with his blond hair and sky-blue eyes. The scar on his mouth and the sword at his side gave him a rugged appearance, like he could handle anything.
Piper stood next to him in her jeans and orange camp T-shirt.
Her long brown hair was braided on one side. Her dagger Katoptris gleamed at her belt. Despite the situation, her multicolored eyes sparkled like she was trying to suppress a smile. Now that Jason and she were officially together, Piper looked like that a lot.
Leo took a deep breath. “Okay, guys. This is serious. Buford’s gone. If we don’t get him back, this whole place is going to explode.”
Piper’s eyes lost some of that smiley sparkle. “Explode? Um…okay. Just calm down and tell us who Buford is.”
She probably didn’t do it on purpose, but Piper had this child-of-Aphrodite power called charmspeak that made her voice hard to ignore. Leo felt his muscles relaxing. His mind cleared a little.
“Fine,” he said. “Come here.”
He led them across the hangar floor, carefully skirting some of his more dangerous projects. In his two months at Camp Half-Blood, Leo had spent most of his time at Bunker 9. After all, he’d rediscovered the secret workshop. Now it was like a second home to him. But he knew his friends still felt uncomfortable here.
He couldn’t blame them. Built into the side of a limestone cliff deep in the woods, the bunker was part weapons depot, part machine shop, and part underground safe house, with a little bit of Area 51–style craziness thrown in for good measure. Rows of workbenches stretched into the darkness. Tool cabinets, storage closets, cages full of welding equipment, and stacks of construction material made a labyrinth of aisles so vast, Leo figured he’d only explored about ten percent of it so far. Overhead ran a series of catwalks and pneumatic tubes for delivering supplies, plus a high-tech lighting and sound system that Leo was just starting to figure out.
A large magical banner hung over the center of the production floor. Leo had recently discovered how to change the display, like the Times Square JumboTron, so now the banner read: Merry Christmas! All your presents belong to Leo!
He ushered his friends to the central staging area. Decades ago, Leo’s metallic friend Festus the bronze dragon had been created here. Now, Leo was slowly assembling his pride and joy—the Argo II.
At the moment, it didn’t look like much. The keel was laid—a length of Celestial bronze curved like an archer’s bow, two hundred feet from bow to stern. The lowest hull planks had been set in place, forming a shallow bowl held together by scaffolding. Masts lay to one side, ready for positioning. The bronze dragon figurehead—formerly the head of Festus—sat nearby, carefully wrapped in velvet, waiting to be installed in its place of honor.
Most of Leo’s time had been spent in the middle of the ship, at the base of the hull, where he was building the engine that would run the warship.
He climbed the scaffolding and jumped into the hull. Jason and Piper followed.
“See?” Leo said.
Fixed to the keel, the engine apparatus looked like a high-tech jungle gym made from pipes, pistons, bronze gears, magical disks, steam vents, electric wires, and a million other magical and mechanical pieces. Leo slid inside and pointed out the combustion chamber.
It was a thing of beauty, a bronze sphere the size of a basketball, its surface bristling with glass cylinders so it looked like a mechanical starburst. Gold wires ran from the ends of the cylinders, connecting to various parts of the engine. Each cylinder was filled with a different magical and highly dangerous substance. The central sphere had a digital clock display that read 66:21. The maintenance panel was open. Inside, the core was empty.
“There’s your problem,” Leo announced.
Jason scratched his head. “Uh…what are we looking at?”
Leo thought it was pretty obvious, but Piper looked confused too.
“Okay,” Leo sighed, “you want the full explanation or the short explanation?”
“Short,” Piper and Jason said in unison.
Leo gestured to the empty core. “The syncopator goes here. It’s a multi-access gyro-valve to regulate flow. The dozen glass tubes on the outside? Those are filled with powerful, dangerous stuff. That glowing red one is Lemnos fire from my dad’s forges. This murky stuff here? That’s water from the River Styx. The stuff in the tubes is going to power the ship, right? Like radioactive rods in a nuclear reactor. But the mix ratio has to be controlled, and the timer is already operational.”
Leo tapped the digital clock, which now read 65:15. “That means without the syncopator, this stuff is all going to vent into the chamber at the same time, in sixty-five minutes. At that point, we’ll get a very nasty reaction.”
Jason and Piper stared at him. Leo wondered if he’d been speaking English. Sometimes when he was agitated he slipped into Spanish, like his mom used to do in her workshop. But he was pretty sure he’d used English.
“Um…” Piper cleared her throat. “Could you make the short explanation shorter?”
Leo palm-smacked his forehead. “Fine. One hour. Fluids mix. Bunker goes ka-boom. One square mile of forest turns into a smoking crater.”
“Oh,” Piper said in a small voice. “Can’t you just…turn it off?”
“Gee, I didn’t think of that!” Leo said. “Let me just hit this switch and—No, Piper. I can’t turn it off. This is a tricky piece of machinery. Everything has to be assembled in a certain order in a certain amount of time. Once the combustion chamber is rigged, like this, you can’t just leave all those tubes sitting there. The engine has to be put into motion. The countdown clock started automatically, and I’ve got to install the syncopator before the fuel goes critical. Which would be fine except…well, I lost the syncopator.”
Jason folded his arms. “You lost it. Don’t you have an extra? Can’t you pull one out of your tool belt?”
Leo shook his head. His magic tool belt could produce a lot of great stuff. Any kind of common tool—hammers, screwdrivers, bolt cutters, whatever—Leo could pull out of the pockets just by thinking about it. But the belt couldn’t fabricate complicated devices or magic items.
“The syncopator took me a week to make,” he said. “And yes, I made a spare. I always do. But that’s lost too. They were both in Buford’s drawers.”
“Who is Buford?” Piper asked. “And why are you storing syncopators in his drawers?”
Leo rolled his eyes. “Buford is a table.”
“A table,” Jason repeated. “Named Buford.”
“Yes, a table.” Leo wondered if his friends were losing their hearing. “A magic walking table. About three feet high, mahogany top, bronze base, three movable legs. I saved him from one of the supply closets and got him in working order. He’s just like the tables my dad has in his workshop. Awesome helper; carries all my important machine parts.”
“So what happened to him?” Piper asked.
Leo felt a lump rising in his throat. The guilt was almost too much. “I—I got careless. I polished him with Windex, and…he ran away.”
Jason looked like he was trying to figure out an equation. “Let me get this straight. Your table ran away…because you polished him with Windex.”
“I know, I’m an idiot!” Leo moaned. “A brilliant idiot, but still an idiot. Buford hates being polished with Windex. It has to be Lemon Pledge with extra-moisturizing formula. I was distracted. I thought maybe just once he wouldn’t notice. Then I turned around for a while to install the combustion tubes, and when I looked for Buford…”
Leo pointed to the giant open doors of the bunker. “He was gone. Little trail of oil and bolts leading outside. He could be anywhere by now, and he’s go
t both syncopators!”
Piper glanced at the digital clock. “So…we have exactly one hour to find your runaway table, get back your synco-whatsit, and install it in this engine, or the Argo II explodes, destroying Bunker Nine and most of the woods.”
“Basically,” Leo said.
Jason frowned. “We should alert the other campers. We might have to evacuate them.”
“No!” Leo’s voice broke. “Look, the explosion won’t destroy the whole camp. Just the woods. I’m pretty sure. Like sixty-five percent sure.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” Piper muttered.
“Besides,” Leo said, “we don’t have time, and I—I can’t tell the others. If they find out how badly I’ve messed up…”
Jason and Piper looked at each other. The clock display changed to 59:00.
“Fine,” Jason said. “But we’d better hurry.”
As they trudged through the woods, the sun started to set. The camp’s weather was magically controlled, so it wasn’t freezing and snowing like it was in the rest of Long Island, but still Leo could tell it was late December. In the shadows of the huge oak trees, the air was cold and damp. The mossy ground squished under their feet.
Leo was tempted to summon fire in his hand. He’d gotten better at that since coming to camp, but he knew the nature spirits in the woods didn’t like fire. He didn’t want to be yelled at by any more dryads.
Christmas Eve. Leo couldn’t believe it was here already. He’d been working so hard in Bunker 9, he’d hardly noticed the weeks passing. Usually around the holidays he would be goofing around, pranking his friends, dressing up like Taco Claus (his personal invention), and leaving carne asada tacos in people’s socks and sleeping bags, or pouring eggnog down his friends’ shirts, or making up inappropriate lyrics to Christmas carols. This year, he was all serious and hardworking. Any teacher he’d ever had would laugh if Leo described himself that way.
Thing was, Leo had never cared so much about a project before. The Argo II had to be ready by June if they were going to start their big quest on time. And while June seemed a long way away, Leo knew he’d barely have time to make the deadline. Even with the entire Hephaestus cabin helping him, constructing a magic flying warship was a huge task. It made launching a NASA spaceship look easy. They’d had so many setbacks, but all Leo could think about was getting the ship finished. It would be his masterpiece.
Also, he wanted to get the dragon figurehead installed. He missed his old friend Festus, who’d literally crashed and burned on their last quest. Even if Festus would never be the same again, Leo hoped he could reactivate his brain by using the ship’s engines. If Leo could give Festus a second life, he wouldn’t feel so bad.
But none of that would happen if the combustion chamber exploded. It would be game over. No ship. No Festus. No quest. Leo would have no one to blame but himself. He really hated Windex.
Jason knelt at the banks of a stream. He pointed to some marks in the mud. “Do those look like table tracks?”
“Or a raccoon,” Leo suggested.
Jason frowned. “With no toes?”
“Piper?” Leo asked. “What do you think?”
She sighed. “Just because I’m Native American doesn’t mean I can track furniture through the wilderness.” She deepened her voice: “‘Yes, kemosabe. A three-legged table passed this way an hour ago.’ Heck, I don’t know.”
“Okay, jeez,” Leo said.
Piper was half Cherokee, half Greek goddess. Some days it was hard to tell which side of her family she was more sensitive about.
“It’s probably a table,” Jason decided. “Which means Buford went across this stream.”
Suddenly the water gurgled. A girl in a shimmering blue dress rose to the surface. She had stringy green hair, blue lips, and pale skin, so she looked like a drowning victim. Her eyes were wide with alarm.
“Could you be any louder?” she hissed. “They’ll hear you!”
Leo blinked. He never got used to this—nature spirits just popping up out of trees and streams and whatnot.
“Are you a naiad?” he asked.
“Shh! They’ll kill us all! They’re right over there!” She pointed behind her, into the trees on the other side of the stream. Unfortunately, that was the direction Buford seemed to have walked.
“Okay,” Piper said gently, kneeling next to the water. “We appreciate the warning. What’s your name?”
The naiad looked like she wanted to bolt, but Piper’s voice was hard to resist.
“Brooke,” the blue girl said reluctantly.
“Brooke the brook?” Jason asked.
Piper swatted his leg. “Okay, Brooke. I’m Piper. We won’t let anyone harm you. Just tell us who you’re afraid of.”
The naiad’s face became more agitated. The water boiled around her. “My crazy cousins. You can’t stop them. They’ll tear you apart. None of us is safe! Now go away. I have to hide!”
Brooke melted into water.
Piper stood. “Crazy cousins?” She frowned at Jason. “Any idea what she was talking about?”
Jason shook his head. “Maybe we should keep our voices down.”
Leo stared at the stream. He was trying to figure what was so horrible that it could tear apart a river spirit. How do you tear up water? Whatever it was, he didn’t want to meet it.
Yet he could see Buford’s tracks on the opposite bank—little square prints in the mud, leading in the direction the naiad had warned them about.
“We have to follow the trail, right?” he said, mostly to convince himself. “I mean…we’re heroes and stuff. We can handle whatever it is. Right?”
Jason drew his sword—a wicked Roman-style gladius with an Imperial gold blade. “Right. Of course.”
Piper unsheathed her dagger. She stared into the blade as if hoping Katoptris would show her a helpful vision. Sometimes the dagger did that. But if she saw anything important, she didn’t say.
“Crazy cousins,” she muttered. “Here we come.”
There was no more talking as they followed the table tracks deeper into the woods. The birds were silent. No monsters growled. It was as if all the other living creatures in the woods had been smart enough to leave.
Finally they came to a clearing the size of a mall parking lot. The sky overhead was heavy and gray. The grass was dry yellow, and the ground was scarred with pits and trenches as if someone had done some crazy driving with construction equipment. In the center of the clearing stood a pile of boulders about thirty feet tall.
“Oh,” Piper said. “This isn’t good.”
“Why?” Leo asked.
“It’s bad luck to be here,” Jason said. “This is the battle site.”
Leo scowled. “What battle?”
Piper raised her eyebrows. “How can you not know about it? The other campers talk about this place all the time.”
“Been a little busy,” Leo said.
He tried not to feel bitter about it, but he’d missed out on a lot of regular camp stuff—the trireme fights, the chariot races, flirting with the girls. That was the worst part. Leo finally had an “in” with the hottest girls at camp, since Piper was the senior counselor for Aphrodite cabin, and he was too busy for her to fix him up. Sad.
“The Battle of the Labyrinth.” Piper kept her voice down, but she explained to Leo how the pile of rocks used to be called Zeus’s Fist, back when it looked like something, not just a pile of rocks. There’d been an entrance to a magical labyrinth here, and a big army of monsters had come through it to invade camp. The campers won—obviously, since camp was still here—but it had been a hard battle. Several demigods had died. The clearing was still considered cursed.
“Great,” Leo grumbled. “Buford has to run to the most dangerous part of the woods. He couldn’t just, like, run to the beach or a burger shop.”
“Speaking of which…” Jason studied the ground. “How are we going to track him? There’s no trail here.”
Though Leo would’ve pref
erred to stay in the cover of the trees, he followed his friends into the clearing. They searched for table tracks, but as they made their way to the pile of boulders they found nothing. Leo pulled a watch from his tool belt and strapped it to his wrist. Roughly forty minutes until the big ka-boom.
“If I had more time,” he said, “I could make a tracking device, but—”
“Does Buford have a round tabletop?” Piper interrupted. “With little steam vents sticking up on one side?”
Leo stared at her. “How did you know?”
“Because he’s right over there.” She pointed.
Sure enough, Buford was waddling toward the far end of the clearing, steam puffing from his vents. As they watched, he disappeared into the trees.
“That was easy.” Jason started to follow, but Leo held him back.
The hairs on the back of Leo’s neck stood up. He wasn’t sure why. Then he realized he could hear voices from the woods on their left. “Someone’s coming!”
He pulled his friends behind the boulders.
Jason whispered, “Leo—”
“Shh!”
A dozen barefoot girls skipped into the clearing. They were teenagers with tunic-style dresses of loose purple and red silk. Their hair was tangled with leaves, and most wore laurel wreaths. Some carried strange staffs that looked like torches. The girls laughed and swung each other around, tumbling in the grass and spinning like they were dizzy. They were all really gorgeous, but Leo wasn’t tempted to flirt.
Piper sighed. “They’re just nymphs, Leo.”
Leo gestured frantically at her to stay down. He whispered, “Crazy cousins!”
Piper’s eyes widened.
As the nymphs got closer, Leo started to notice odd details about them. Their staffs weren’t torches. They were twisted wooden branches, each topped with a giant pinecone, and some were wrapped with living snakes. The girls’ laurel wreaths weren’t wreaths, either. Their hair was braided with tiny vipers. The girls smiled and laughed and sang in Ancient Greek as they stumbled around the glade. They appeared to be having a great time, but their voices were tinged with a sort of wild ferocity. If leopards could sing, Leo thought they would sound like this.
