The Hidden Oracle
“I have an idea.” I stood as straight as my injuries allowed. It wasn’t easy to look confident with a bloody nose and coffee grounds dripping off my clothes. “I know someone who might help. He lives on the Upper East Side. Take me to him, and I shall reward you.”
Meg made a sound between a sneeze and a laugh. “Reward me with what?” She danced around, plucking twenty-dollar bills from the trash. “I’m already taking all your money.”
“Hey!”
She tossed me my wallet, now empty except for Lester Papadopoulos’s junior driver’s license.
Meg sang, “I’ve got your money, I’ve got your money.”
I stifled a growl. “Listen, child, I won’t be mortal forever. Someday I will become a god again. Then I will reward those who helped me—and punish those who didn’t.”
She put her hands on her hips. “How do you know what will happen? Have you ever been mortal before?”
“Yes, actually. Twice! Both times, my punishment only lasted a few years at most!”
“Oh, yeah? And how did you get back to being all goddy or whatever?”
“Goddy is not a word,” I pointed out, though my poetic sensibilities were already thinking of ways I might use it. “Usually Zeus requires me to work as a slave for some important demigod. This fellow uptown I mentioned, for instance. He’d be perfect! I do whatever tasks my new master requires for a few years. As long as I behave, I am allowed back to Olympus. Right now I just have to recover my strength and figure out—”
“How do you know for sure which demigod?”
I blinked. “What?”
“Which demigod you’re supposed to serve, dummy.”
“I…uh. Well, it’s usually obvious. I just sort of run into them. That’s why I want to get to the Upper East Side. My new master will claim my service and—”
“I’m Meg McCaffrey!” Meg blew me a raspberry. “And I claim your service!”
Overhead, thunder rumbled in the gray sky. The sound echoed through the city canyons like divine laughter.
Whatever was left of my pride turned to ice water and trickled into my socks. “I walked right into that, didn’t I?”
“Yep!” Meg bounced up and down in her red sneakers. “We’re going to have fun!”
With great difficulty, I resisted the urge to weep. “Are you sure you’re not Artemis in disguise?”
“I’m that other thing,” Meg said, counting my money. “The thing you said before. A demigod.”
“How do you know?”
“Just do.” She gave me a smug smile. “And now I have a sidekick god named Lester!”
I raised my face to the heavens. “Please, Father, I get the point. Please, I can’t do this!”
Zeus did not answer. He was probably too busy recording my humiliation to share on Snapchat.
“Cheer up,” Meg told me. “Who’s that guy you wanted to see—the guy on the Upper East Side?”
“Another demigod,” I said. “He knows the way to a camp where I might find shelter, guidance, food—”
“Food?” Meg’s ears perked up almost as much as the points on her glasses. “Good food?”
“Well, normally I just eat ambrosia, but, yes, I suppose.”
“Then that’s my first order! We’re going to find this guy to take us to the camp place!”
I sighed miserably. It was going to be a very long servitude.
“As you wish,” I said. “Let’s find Percy Jackson.”
Used to be goddy
Now uptown feeling shoddy
Bah, haiku don’t rhyme
AS WE TRUDGED up Madison Avenue, my mind swirled with questions: Why hadn’t Zeus given me a winter coat? Why did Percy Jackson live so far uptown? Why did pedestrians keep staring at me?
I wondered if my divine radiance was starting to return. Perhaps the New Yorkers were awed by my obvious power and unearthly good looks.
Meg McCaffrey set me straight.
“You smell,” she said. “You look like you’ve just been mugged.”
“I have just been mugged. Also enslaved by a small child.”
“It’s not slavery.” She chewed off a piece of her thumb cuticle and spit it out. “It’s more like mutual cooperation.”
“Mutual in the sense that you give orders and I am forced to cooperate?”
“Yep.” She stopped in front of a storefront window. “See? You look gross.”
My reflection stared back at me, except it was not my reflection. It couldn’t be. The face was the same as on Lester Papadopoulos’s ID.
I looked about sixteen. My medium-length hair was dark and curly—a style I had rocked in Athenian times, and again in the 1970s. My eyes were blue. My face was pleasing enough in a dorkish way, but it was marred by a swollen eggplant-colored nose, which had dripped a gruesome mustache of blood down my upper lip. Even worse, my cheeks were covered with some sort of rash that looked suspiciously like…My heart climbed into my throat.
“Horrors!” I cried. “Is that—Is that acne?”
Immortal gods do not get acne. It is one of our inalienable rights. Yet I leaned closer to the glass and saw that my skin was indeed a scarred landscape of whiteheads and pustules.
I balled my fists and wailed to the cruel sky, “Zeus, what have I done to deserve this?”