He turned and froze, seeing Meg at his desk. A spasm crossed his face—his expression shifting from anger to fear to concern, then settling into a forced cheerfulness. He slipped his phone into his pocket.

“Hey, sweetheart,” he said, his voice stretched thin. “Couldn’t sleep, huh? Yeah, me neither.”

He walked to the desk, swept the dandelion-yellow papers into a tree hollow, and offered Meg his hand. “Want to check the greenhouses?”

The scene changed again.

A jumbled, fragmentary memory: Meg was wearing her favorite outfit, a green dress and yellow leggings. She liked it because Daddy said it made her look like one of their greenhouse friends—a beautiful, growing thing. She stumbled down the driveway in the dark, following Daddy, her backpack stuffed with her favorite blanket because Daddy said they had to hurry. They could only take what they could carry.

They were halfway to the car when Meg stopped, noticing that the lights were on in the greenhouses.

“Meg,” her father said, his voice as broken as the gravel under their feet. “Come on, sweetheart.”

“But Er-klees,” she said. “And the others.”

“We can’t bring them,” Daddy said, swallowing back a sob.

Meg had never heard her father cry before. It made her feel like the earth was dropping out from underneath her.

“The magic seeds?” she asked. “We can plant them—where we’re going?”

The idea of going somewhere else seemed impossible, scary. She’d never known any home but Aeithales.

“We can’t, Meg.” Daddy sounded like he could barely talk. “They have to grow here. And now…”

He looked back at the house, floating on its massive stone supports, its windows ablaze with gold light. But something was wrong. Dark shapes moved across the hillside—men, or something like men, dressed in black, encircling the property. And more dark shapes swirling overhead, wings blotting out the stars.

Daddy grabbed her hand. “No time, sweetheart. We have to leave. Now.”

Meg’s last memory of Aeithales: She sat in the back of her father’s station wagon, her face and hands pressed against the rear window, trying to keep the lights of the house in view as long as possible. They’d driven only halfway down the hill when their home erupted in a blossom of fire.

I gasped, my senses suddenly yanked back to the present. Meg removed her hand from my wrist.

I stared at her in amazement, my sense of reality wobbling so much I was afraid I might fall into the strawberry pit. “Meg, how did you…?”

She picked at a callus on her palm. “Dunno. Just needed to.”

Such a very Meg answer. Still, the memories had been so painful and vivid they made my chest hurt, as if I’d been hit with a defibrillator.

How had Meg shared her past with me? I knew satyrs could create an empathy link with their closest friends. Grover Underwood had one with Percy Jackson, which he said explained why he sometimes got an inexplicable craving for blueberry pancakes. Did Meg have a similar talent, perhaps because we were linked as master and servant?

I didn’t know.

I did know that Meg was hurting, much more than she expressed. The tragedies of her short life had started before her father’s death. They had started here. These ruins were all that remained of a life that could have been.

I wanted to hug her. And believe me, that was not a feeling I had often. It was liable to result in an elbow to my rib cage or a sword hilt to my nose.

“Did you…?” I faltered. “Did you have these memories all along? Do you know what your father was trying to do here?”

A listless shrug. She grabbed a handful of dust and trickled it into the pit as if sowing seeds.

“Phillip,” Meg said, as if the name had just occurred to her. “My dad’s name was Phillip McCaffrey.”

The name made me think of the Macedonian king, father of Alexander. A good fighter, but no fun at all. Never any interest in music or poetry or even archery. With Philip it was all phalanxes, all the time. Boring.

“Phillip McCaffrey was a very good father,” I said, trying to keep the bitterness out of my voice. I myself did not have much experience with good fathers.

“He smelled like mulch,” Meg remembered. “In a good way.”

I didn’t know the difference between a good mulch smell and a bad mulch smell, but I nodded respectfully.

I gazed at the row of greenhouses—their silhouettes barely visible against the red-black night sky. Phillip McCaffrey had obviously been a talented man. Perhaps a botanist? Definitely a mortal favored by the goddess Demeter. How else could he have created a house like Aeithales, in a place with such natural power? What had he been working on, and what had he meant when he said his family had been doing the same research for thousands of years? Humans rarely thought in terms of millennia. They were lucky if they even knew the names of their great-grandparents.

Most important, what had happened to Aeithales, and why? Who had driven the McCaffreys from their home and forced them east to New York? That last question, unfortunately, was the only one I felt I could answer.

“Caligula did this,” I said, gesturing at the ruined cylinders on the hillside. “That’s what Incitatus meant when he said the emperor took care of this place.”

Meg turned toward me, her face like stone. “We’re going to find out. Tomorrow. You, me, Grover. We’ll find these people, Piper and Jason.”

Arrows rattled in my quiver, but I couldn’t be sure if it was the Arrow of Dodona buzzing for attention, or my own body trembling. “And if Piper and Jason don’t know anything helpful?”

Meg brushed the dust from her hands. “They’re part of the seven, right? Percy Jackson’s friends?”

“Well…yes.”

“Then they’ll know. They’ll help. We’ll find Caligula. We’ll explore this mazy place and free the Sibyl and stop the fires and whatever.”

I admired her ability to summarize our quest in such eloquent terms.

On the other hand, I was not excited about exploring the mazy place, even if we had the help of two more powerful demigods. Ancient Rome had had powerful demigods too. Many of them tried to overthrow Caligula. All of them had died.

I kept coming back to my vision of the Sibyl, apologizing for her terrible news. Since when did an Oracle apologize?

I would spare you if I could. I would spare her.

The Sibyl had insisted I come to her rescue. Only I could free her, though it was a trap.

I never liked traps. They reminded me of my old crush Britomartis. Ugh, the number of Burmese tiger pits I’d fallen into for the sake of that goddess.

Meg swung her legs around. “I’m going to sleep. You should too.”

She hopped off the wall and picked her way across the hillside, heading back toward the Cistern. Since she had not actually ordered me to go to sleep, I stayed on the ledge for a long time, staring down into the strawberry-clogged chasm below, listening for the fluttering wings of ill omen.

GODS of Olympus, had I not suffered enough?

Driving from Palm Springs to Malibu with Meg and Grover would have been bad enough. Skirting wildfire evacuation zones and the LA morning rush hour made it worse. But did we have to make the journey in Gleeson Hedge’s mustard-colored 1979 Ford Pinto coupe?