Like lunch, dinner was a casual affair. As darkness fell, we ate on picnic blankets around the hearth, which blazed with Hestia’s warmth and kept away the winter chill. Festus the dragon sniffed around the perimeter of the cabins, occasionally blowing fire into the sky for no apparent reason.

“He got a little dinged up in Corsica,” Leo explained. “Sometimes he spews randomly like that.”

“He hasn’t blowtorched anyone important yet,” Calypso added, her eyebrow arched. “We’ll see how he likes you.”

Festus’s red jewel eyes gleamed in the darkness. After driving the sun chariot for so long, I wasn’t nervous about riding a metal dragon, but when I thought about what we’d be riding toward, geraniums bloomed in my stomach.

“I had planned to go alone,” I told them. “The prophecy from Dodona speaks of the bronze fire-eater, but…it feels wrong for me to ask you to risk your lives. You have been through so much just to get here.”

Calypso tilted her head. “Perhaps you have changed. That does not sound like the Apollo I remember. You definitely are not as handsome.”

“I am still quite handsome,” I protested. “I just need to clear up this acne.”

She smirked. “So you haven’t completely lost your big head.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Guys,” Leo interrupted, “if we’re going to travel together, let’s try to keep it friendly.” He pressed an ice pack to his bruised bicep. “Besides, we were planning to head west anyway. I got to find my peeps Jason and Piper and Frank and Hazel and…well, pretty much everybody at Camp Jupiter, I guess. It’ll be fun.”

“Fun?” I asked. “The Oracle of Trophonius will supposedly swallow me in death and madness. Even if I survive that, my other trials will no doubt be long, harrowing, and quite possibly fatal.”

“Exactly,” Leo said. “Fun. I don’t know about calling the whole quest thing Apollo’s trials, though. I think we should call it Leo Valdez’s Victory Lap World Tour.”

Calypso laughed and laced her fingers in Leo’s. She may not have been immortal anymore, but she still had a grace and easiness about her that I could not fathom. Perhaps she missed her powers, but she seemed genuinely happy to be with Valdez—to be young and mortal, even if it meant she could die at any moment.

Unlike me, she had chosen to become mortal. She knew that leaving Ogygia was a risk, but she had done it willingly. I didn’t know how she’d found the courage.

“Hey, man,” Leo told me. “Don’t look so glum. We’ll find her.”

I stirred. “What?”

“Your friend Meg. We’ll find her. Don’t worry.”

A bubble of darkness burst inside me. For once, I hadn’t been thinking of Meg. I’d been thinking about myself, and that made me feel guilty. Perhaps Calypso was right to question whether or not I’d changed.

I gazed at the silent forest. I remembered Meg dragging me to safety when I was cold and soaked and delirious. I remembered how fearlessly she fought the myrmekes, and how she’d ordered Peaches to extinguish the match when Nero wanted to burn his hostages, despite her fear of unleashing the Beast. I had to make her realize how evil Nero was. I had to find her. But how?

“Meg knows the prophecy,” I said. “If she tells Nero, he will know our plans as well.”

Calypso took a bite of her apple. “I missed the whole Roman Empire. How bad can one emperor be?”

“Bad,” I assured her. “And he is allied with two others. We don’t know which ones, but it’s safe to assume they are equally cutthroat. They’ve had centuries to amass fortunes, acquire property, build armies…Who knows what they are capable of?”

“Eh,” Leo said. “We took down Gaea in, like, forty seconds. This’ll be easy squeezy.”

I seemed to recall that the lead-up to the fight with Gaea had involved months of suffering and near misses with death. Leo, in fact, had died. I also wanted to remind him that the Triumvirate might well have orchestrated all our previous troubles with the Titans and giants, which would make them more powerful than anything Leo had ever faced.

I decided that mentioning these things might affect group morale.

“We’ll succeed,” Calypso said. “We must. So we will. I have been trapped on an island for thousands of years. I don’t know how long this mortal life will be, but I intend to live fully and without fear.”

“That’s my mamacita,” Leo said.