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{ 🔮 } · no one makes rational decision anymore. . ݁ ٬٬ ࣪
JUMPING OUT A WINDOW five hundred feet above ground is not usually Percy's idea of fun. Especially when he's wearing bronze wings and flapping his arms like a duck. He plummeted toward the valley and the red rocks below. Annabeth yelled from somewhere above the boy, "Spread your arms! Keep them extended."
The small part of Percy's brain that wasn't engulfed in panic heard her, and his arms responded. As soon as he spread them out, the wings stiffened, caught the wind, and his descent slowed. Percy soared downward, but at a controlled angle, like a kite in a dive. Experimentally, he flapped his arms once. The boy arced into the sky, the wind whistling in his ears. "Yeah!"
The feeling was unbelievable. After getting the hang of it, Percy felt like the wings were part of his body. He could soar and swoop and dive anywhere he wanted to. Son of Poseidon turned and saw his friends ─ Endora, Rachel, Annabeth, and Nico ─ spiraling above him, glinting in the sunlight. Behind them, smoke billowed from the windows of Daedalus's workshop.
"Land!" Annabeth yelled. "These wings won't last forever."
"How long?" Rachel cried.
"I don't want to find out!" Annabeth said.
They swooped down toward the Garden of the Gods. The five of them soared across the valley, over a road, and landed on the terrace of the visitor center. It was late afternoon and the place looked pretty empty, but they ripped off our wings as quickly as they could. Looking at them, Percy could see Annabeth was right. The self-adhesive seals that bound the wings to their backs were already melting, and were shedding bronze feathers. It seemed a shame, but they couldn't fix them, and couldn't leave them around for the mortals, so the group stuffed the wings in the trash bin outside the cafeteria and Endora set it on fire.
Percy used the tourist binocular camera to look up at the hill where Daedalus's workshop had been, but it had vanished. No more smoke. No broken windows. Just the side of a hill.
"The workshop moved," Annabeth guessed. "There's no telling where."
"So what do we do now?" Percy asked. "How do we get back in the maze?"
Annabeth gazed at the summit of Pikes Peak in the distance. "Maybe we can't. If Daedalus died. . . he said his life force was tied to the Labyrinth. The whole thing might've been destroyed. Maybe that will stop Luke's invasion."
Percy thought about Grover and Tyson, still down there somewhere. And Daedalus. . . even though he'd done some terrible things and put everybody Percy cared about at risk, it still seemed like a pretty horrible way to die. And still, the boy wanted to make sure he was not hallucinating when he saw the girl from his dreams among Luke's army, staring right into his soul.
