The Tower of Nero

“Cass.” Meg was weeping now. “Don’t. Don’t listen to him.”

The little boy blushed, but he kept working silently at the rings. He had pink stains around his lips from something he’d been drinking—juice, soda. His fluffy blond hair reminded me…No. No, I refused to think it. Argh. Too late! Curse my imagination! He reminded me of a young Jason Grace.

When he had tugged both rings free, Cassius hurried back to his stepfather.

“Good, good,” Nero said, with a hint of impatience. “Put them on. You’ve trained with scimitars, have you not?”

Cassius nodded, fumbling to comply.

Nero smiled at me, rather like the emcee of a show. Thank you for your patience. We’re experiencing technical difficulties.

“You know, Apollo,” he said, “there is one saying I like from the Christians. How does it go? If your hands offend you, cut them off.…Something like that.” He looked down at Lu. “Oh, Lu, I’m afraid your hands have offended me. Cassius, do the honors.”

Luguselwa struggled and screamed as the guards stretched her arms in front of her, but she was weak and already in pain. Cassius swallowed, his face a mixture of horror and hunger.

Nero’s hard eyes, the eyes of the Beast, bored into him. “Now, boy,” he said with chilling calm.

Cassius summoned the golden blades. As he brought them down on Lu’s wrists, the whole room seemed to tilt and blur. I could no longer tell who was screaming—Lu, or Meg, or me.

Through a fog of pain and nausea, I heard Nero snap, “Bind her wounds! She won’t get to die so easily!” Then he turned the eyes of the Beast on me. “Now, Apollo, let me tell you the new plan. You will be thrown into a cell with this traitor, Luguselwa. And Meg, dear Meg, we will begin your rehabilitation. Welcome home.”

NERO’S CELL WAS THE NICEST PLACE I’D ever been imprisoned in. I would have rated it five stars. Absolute luxury! Would die here again!

From the high ceiling hung a chandelier…a chandelier, much too far out of reach for a prisoner to grab. Crystal pendants danced in the LED lights, casting diamond-shaped reflections across the eggshell-white walls. In the back of the room sat a sink with gold fixtures and an automated toilet with a bidet, all shielded behind a privacy screen—what pampering! One of Nero’s Persian carpets covered the floor. Two plush Roman-style sofas were arranged in a V on either side of a coffee table overflowing with cheese, crackers, and fruit, plus a silver pitcher of water and two goblets, in case we prisoners wanted to toast our good luck. Only the front wall had a jailhouse look, since it was nothing but a row of thick metal bars, but even these were coated with—or perhaps made from—Imperial gold.

I spent the first twenty or thirty minutes alone in the cell. It was hard to measure time. I paced, I screamed, I demanded to see Meg. I banged a silver platter against the bars and howled into the empty corridor outside. Finally, as my fear and queasiness got the best of me, I discovered the joys of vomiting into a high-end toilet with a heated seat and multiple self-cleaning options.

I was beginning to think Luguselwa must have died. Why else was she not in the cell with me, as Nero had promised? How could she have survived the shock of double amputation when she was already so badly injured?

Just as I was convincing myself I would die alone in this cell, with no one to help me eat the cheese and crackers, a door banged open somewhere down the hall, followed by heavy footsteps and lots of grunting. Gunther and another Germanus came into view, dragging Luguselwa between them. The middle three bars of the cell entrance fell away, retracting into the floor as fast as sheathed blades. The guards pushed Lu inside, and the bars snapped closed again.

I rushed to Lu’s side. She curled on the Persian carpet, her body shivering and splattered with blood. Her leg braces had been removed. Her face was paler than the walls. Her wrists had been bandaged, but the wrappings were already soaked through. Her brow burned with fever.

“She needs a doctor!” I yelled.

Gunther leered at me. “Ain’t you a healing god?”

His friend snorted, then the two of them lumbered back down the hall.

“Erggh,” Lu muttered.

“Hold on,” I said. Then I winced, realizing that probably wasn’t a sensitive thing to say given her condition. I scrambled back to my comfy sofa and rummaged through my pack. The guards had taken my bow and quivers, including the Arrow of Dodona, but they’d left me everything that wasn’t obviously a weapon—my waterlogged ukulele and my backpack, including some med supplies Will had given me: bandages, ointments, pills, nectar, ambrosia. Could Gauls take ambrosia? Could they take aspirin? I had no time to worry about that.

I soaked some linen napkins in the ice-water pitcher and wrapped them across Lu’s head and neck to lower her temperature. I crushed some painkillers together with ambrosia and nectar and fed her some of the mush, though she could barely swallow. Her eyes were unfocused. Her shivering was getting worse.

She croaked, “Meg—?”

“Hush,” I said, trying not to cry. “We’ll save her, I swear. But first you have to heal.”

She whimpered, then made a high-pitched noise like a scream with no energy behind it. She had to be in unbelievable pain. She should have been dead already, but the Gaul was tough.

“You need to be asleep for what comes next,” I warned. “I—I’m sorry. But I have to check your wrists. I have to clean the wounds and re-bandage them or you’ll die from sepsis.”

I had no idea how I was going to accomplish this without her dying from blood loss or shock, but I had to try. The guards had tied off her wrists sloppily. I doubted they’d bothered with sterilization. They had slowed the bleeding, but Lu would still die unless I intervened.

I grabbed another napkin and a vial of chloroform—one of Will’s more dangerous med-kit components. Using it was a huge risk, but the desperate circumstances left me little choice, unless I wanted to knock Lu over the head with a cheese platter.

I moved the soaked napkin over her face.

“No,” she said feebly. “Can’t…”

“It’s either this or pass out from the pain as soon as I touch those wrists.”

She grimaced, then nodded.

I pressed the cloth against her nose and mouth. Two breaths, and her body went limp. For her own sake, I prayed she would stay unconscious.

I worked as fast as I could. My hands were surprisingly steady. The medical knowledge came back out of instinct. I didn’t think about the grave injuries I was looking at, nor the amount of blood…I just did the work. Tourniquet. Sterilize. I would’ve tried to reattach her hands, despite the hopeless odds, but they hadn’t bothered to bring them. Sure, give me a chandelier and a selection of fruit, but no hands.

“Cauterize,” I mumbled to myself. “I need—”

My right hand burst into flame.

At the time, I didn’t find this strange. A little spark of my old sun-god power? Sure, why not? I sealed the stumps of Lu’s poor wrists, slathered them with healing ointment, then re-bandaged them properly, leaving her with two stubby Q-tips instead of hands.

“I’m so sorry,” I said.

Guilt weighed me down like a suit of armor. I had been so suspicious of Lu, when all the time she’d been risking her life trying to help. Her only crime was underestimating Nero, just as we all had. And the price she’d paid…