That maroon square was the Waystation in Indianapolis. Those swirls were griffins in flight. A second canvas showed flames engulfing the Burning Maze and, floating in the upper right quadrant, a string of hazy glowing ships—the fleet of Caligula. A third painting…I began to get misty-eyed all over again. It was a funeral pyre—the last rites of Jason Grace.

“You’ve started having visions again,” I said.

She looked at me with a kind of resentful yearning, as if she were on a sugar detox and I was waving around a chocolate bar. “Only glimpses. Every time you free an Oracle, I get a few moments of clarity. Then the fog settles again.” She pressed her fingertips against her forehead. “It’s like Python is inside my brain, toying with me. Sometimes I think…” She faltered, as if the idea were too disturbing to say aloud. “Just tell me you’re going to take him down. Soon.”

I nodded, not trusting myself to speak. It was one thing for Python to squat in my sacred caverns of Delphi. It was another for him to invade the mind of my chosen Pythia, the priestess of my prophecies. I had accepted Rachel Elizabeth Dare as my most important Oracle. I was responsible for her. If I failed to defeat Python, he would continue to grow stronger. He would eventually control the very flow of the future. And since Rachel was inextricably linked to the Delphic…No. I couldn’t bear to think what that might mean for her.

“Whoa.” Meg surfaced from Rachel’s refrigerator like a diver with gold doubloons. In her hand was a Yoo-hoo chocolate drink. “Can I have one?”

Rachel managed a smile. “Help yourself, Meg. And, hey, di Angelo”—she pushed him playfully away from the canvas he’d been ogling—“don’t brush against the art! I don’t care about the paintings, but if you get any color on you, you’ll ruin that whole black-and-white aesthetic you’ve got going.”

“Hmph,” said Nico.

“Now what were we talking about…?” Rachel mused.

Over at the window, Will tapped his knuckles against the glass. “Are those the cattle?”

“Oh, right!” Rachel steered us in that direction.

About a hundred yards away, between us and the river, a line of three cattle cars sat on the railway tracks. Each car was occupied, as evidenced by the bovine snouts that occasionally poked out between the bars.

“Seems wrong to just leave them parked there,” Will said. “It’s going to get hot today.”

Rachel nodded. “They’ve been there since yesterday. The cars just kind of appeared overnight. I’ve called the freight company, and the animal cruelty hotline. It’s like the cars don’t exist. Nobody has any record of them. Nobody will come out to check on them. Nobody’s brought the animals any food or water—”

“We should free them,” Meg said.

“That would be a very bad idea,” Nico said.

Meg frowned. “Do you hate cows?”

“I don’t hate—” Nico paused. “Well, okay, I’m not super fond of cows. But that’s not the point. Those can’t be ordinary animals.” He glanced at Rachel. “You said they just appeared. People don’t recognize they exist. You said the cattle were watching?”

Rachel edged away from the window. “Sometimes I can see their eyes between the bars. They’ll be looking right at me. And just about the time you arrived, they went crazy, rocking the cars like they were trying to get out. That’s when I checked the security cameras and saw you guys at the front gate. Normally, I am not paranoid about cattle. But these…I don’t know. Something doesn’t feel right. At first, I thought it might have something to do with our neighbors.…”

She gestured north along the waterfront to an unremarkable cluster of old residential towers. “They do strange things sometimes.”

“In the housing project?” I asked.

She arched her eyebrows. “You don’t see the big mansion?”

“What mansion?”

She glanced at Will, Nico, Meg, who all shook their heads.

“Well,” Rachel said, “you’ll have to take my word for it. There’s a big mansion over there. Lots of weird goings-on.”

We didn’t argue with her. Though fully mortal, Rachel had the rare gift of clear sight. She could see through the Mist and other magical barriers better than most demigods, and apparently better than most Lesters.

She muttered, “Once I saw a penguin waddling around their back deck—”

“A what-now?” Nico asked.

“But leaving cows in boxes like that for days without food or water, that seems like something different,” she said. “Crueler. Those cows must be bad news.”

Meg scowled. “They seem peaceful enough now. I still say we free them.”

“And then what?” Nico asked. “Even if they’re not dangerous, we just let three carloads of cattle wander around Brooklyn? I’m with Rachel. Something about this…” He looked like he was trying to dredge something from his memory with no luck—another feeling I knew well. “I say we leave them alone.”

“That’s mean!” said Meg. “We can’t—”

“Friends, please.” I stepped between Nico and Meg before things escalated into the biggest Hades/Demeter smackdown since Persephone’s wedding shower. “Since the cattle seem to be calm at the moment, let’s circle back to that subject after we’ve discussed what we came here to discuss, yes?”

“The Tower of Nero,” Rachel surmised.

Will’s eyes widened. “Have you seen the future?”

“No, William, I used simple logic. But I do have some information that might help you. Everybody grab a Yoo-hoo and a beanbag, and let’s chat about our least-favorite emperor.”

WE CIRCLED UP OUR BEANBAGS.

Rachel spread blueprints across the floor between us. “You guys know about the emperor’s fasces?”

Meg and I shared a look that meant I wish we didn’t.

“We’re familiar,” I said. “In San Francisco, we destroyed the fasces of Commodus and Caligula, which made them vulnerable enough to kill. I assume you’re suggesting we do the same with Nero?”

Rachel pouted. “That killed my big reveal. It took me a long time to figure this out.”

“You did great,” Meg assured her. “Apollo just likes to hear himself talk.”

“I beg your pardon—”

“Did you find the exact location of Nero’s fasces?” Nico interrupted. “Because that would be really useful.”

Rachel straightened a bit. “I think so, yeah. These are the original designs for Nero’s tower. They were not easy to get.”

Will whistled appreciatively. “I bet many Bothans died to bring us this information.”

Rachel stared at him. “What?”

Nico sighed. “I’m guessing that was a Star Wars reference. My boyfriend is a Star Wars geek of the worst kind.”

“Okay, Signor Myth-o-magic. If you would just watch the original trilogy…” Will looked at the rest of us for support and found nothing but blank expressions. “Nobody? Oh, my gods. You people are hopeless.”