The Battle of the Labyrinth

widened. She gasped, “No . . . school . . . spirit . . .”
    And Annabeth took her knife out of the empousa’ s back. With an awful screech, Kelli dissolved into yellow vapor.
    Annabeth helped me up. I still felt dizzy, but we had no time to lose. Mrs. O’Leary and Daedalus were still locked in combat with the giants, and I could hear shouting in the tunnel. More monsters were coming toward the workshop.
    “We have to help Daedalus!” I said.
    “No time,” Rachel said. “Too many coming!”
    She’d already fitted herself with wings and was working on Nico, who looked pale and sweaty from his struggle with Minos. The wings grafted instantly to his back and arms.
    “Now you!” she told me.
    In seconds, Nico, Annabeth, Rachel, and I had fitted ourselves with coppery wings. Already I could feel myself being lifted by the wind coming through the window. Greek fire was burning the tables and furniture, spreading up the circular stairs.
    “Daedalus!” I yelled. “Come on!”
    He was cut in a hundred places—but he was bleeding golden oil instead of blood. He’d found his sword and was using part of a smashed table as a shield against the giants. “I won’t leave Mrs. O’Leary!” he said. “Go!”
    There was no time to argue. Even if we stayed, I wasn’t sure we could help.
    “None of us know how to fly!” Nico protested.
    “Great time to find out,” I said. And together, the four of us jumped out the window into open sky.

SIXTEEN

I OPEN A COFFIN
    Jumping out a window five hundred feet above ground is not usually my idea of fun. Especially when I’m wearing bronze wings and flapping my arms like a duck.
    I plummeted toward the valley and the red rocks below. I was pretty sure I was going to become a grease spot in the Garden of the Gods, as Annabeth yelled from somewhere above me, “Spread your arms! Keep them extended.”
    The small part of my brain that wasn’t engulfed in panic heard her, and my arms responded. As soon as I spread them out, the wings stiffened, caught the wind, and my descent slowed. I soared downward, but at a controlled angle, like a kite in a dive.
    Experimentally, I flapped my arms once. I arced into the sky, the wind whistling in my ears.
    “Yeah!” I yelled. The feeling was unbelievable. After getting the hang of it, I felt like the wings were part of my body. I could soar and swoop and dive anywhere I wanted to.
    I turned and saw my friends—Rachel, Annabeth, and Nico—spiraling above me, glinting in the sunlight. Behind them, smoke billowed from the windows of Daedalus’s workshop.
    “Land!” Annabeth yelled. “These wings won’t last forever.”
    “How long?” Rachel cried.
    “I don’t want to find out!” Annabeth said.
    We swooped down toward the Garden of the Gods. I did a complete circle around one of the rock spires and freaked out a couple of climbers. Then the four of us soared across the valley, over a road, and landed on the terrace of the visitor center. It was late afternoon and the place looked pretty empty, but we ripped off our wings as quickly as we could. Looking at them, I could see Annabeth was right. The self-adhesive seals that bound the wings to our backs were already melting, and we were shedding bronze feathers. It seemed a shame, but we couldn’t fix them, and couldn’t leave them around for the mortals, so we stuffed the wings in the trash bin outside the cafeteria.
    I used the tourist binocular camera to look up at the hill where Daedalus’s workshop had been, but it had vanished. No more smoke. No broken windows. Just the side of a hill.
    “The workshop moved,” Annabeth guessed. “There’s no telling where.”
    “So what do we do now?” I asked. “How do we get back in the maze?”
    Annabeth gazed at the summit of Pikes Peak in the distance. “Maybe we can’t. If Daedalus died . . . he said his life force was tied to the Labyrinth. The whole thing might’ve been destroyed. Maybe that will stop Luke’s invasion.”
    I thought about Grover and Tyson, still down there somewhere. And Daedalus . . . even though he’d done some terrible things and put everybody I cared about at risk, it still seemed like a pretty horrible way to die.
    “No,” Nico said. “He isn’t dead.”
    “How can you be sure?” I asked.
    “I know when people die. It’s this feeling I get, like a buzzing in my ears.”
    “What about Tyson and Grover, then?”
    Nico shook his head. “That’s harder. They’re not humans or half-bloods.