“These guys are awesome,” Meg decided. “They eat snakes.”

I knew several snakes, including Hermes’s companions, George and Martha, who would have been uncomfortable with Meg’s definition of awesomeness. Since we were now in the midst of the trogs’ encampment, I decided not to bring that up.

At first glance, the troglodytes’ corporate headquarters resembled an abandoned subway station. The wide platform was lined with columns holding up a barreled ceiling of black tiles that drank in the dim light from pots of bioluminescent mushrooms scattered around the cavern. Along the left side of the platform, instead of a rail bed, was the sunken, packed-earth roadway that the trogs had used to bring us here. And at the speeds they ran, who needed a train?

Along the right side of the platform flowed a swift subterranean river. The trogs filled their gourds and cauldrons from this source, and also emptied their chamber pots into it—though being a civilized, hat-wearing people, they dumped the chamber pots downstream from where they drew their drinking water.

Unlike in a subway station, there were no obvious stairways leading up, no clearly marked exits. Just the river and the road we’d arrived on.

The platform buzzed with activity. Dozens of trogs rushed here and there, miraculously managing their daily chores without losing the stacks of hats on their heads. Some tended cooking pots on tripods over fire pits. Others—possibly merchants?—haggled over bins of rocks. Trog children, no bigger than human babies, frolicked around, playing catch with spheres of solid crystal.

Their dwellings were tents. Most had been appropriated from the human world, which gave me unpleasant flashbacks of the camping display at Macro’s Military Madness in Palm Springs. Others appeared to be of trog design, carefully stitched from the shaggy red hides of the tauri silvestres. I had no idea how the trogs had managed to skin and stitch the impervious hides, but clearly, as the ancestral enemies of the forest bulls, they had found a way.

I wondered about that rivalry, too. How had a subterranean frog people in love with hats and lizards become mortal enemies to a breed of bright-red devil bulls? Perhaps at the beginning of time, the elder gods had told the first trogs, You may now pick your nemesis! And the first trogs had pointed across the newly made fields of creation and yelled, We hate those cows!

Whatever the case, I was comforted to know that even if the trogs were not yet our friends, at least we had a mutual enemy.

Screech-Bling had given us a guest tent and a cold fire pit and told us to make ourselves at home while he saw to dinner preparations. Or rather, he’d told Nico to make himself at home. The CEO kept eyeing Rachel, Meg, and me like we were sides of beef hanging in a shop window. As for Will, the troglodytes seemed to ignore him. My best guess: because Will glowed, they considered him simply a moveable light source, as if Nico had brought along his own pot of luminous mushrooms. Judging from Will’s scowl, he did not appreciate this.

It would’ve been easier to relax if Rachel hadn’t kept checking her watch—reminding us that it was now four in the afternoon, then four thirty, and that Meg and I were supposed to surrender by sundown. I could only hope the troglodytes were like senior citizens and ate supper early.

Meg busied herself collecting spores from the nearby mushroom pots, which she seemed to consider the coolest thing since snake-eating. Will and Nico sat on the other side of the fire pit having a tense discussion. I couldn’t hear the words, but from their facial expressions and hand gestures, I got the gist:

Will: Worry, worry, worry.

Nico: Calm down, probably won’t die.

Will: Worry. Trogs. Dangerous. Yikes.

Nico: Trogs good. Nice hats.

Or something along those lines.

After a while, the trog with the chef’s hat materialized at our campsite. In his hand was a steaming ladle. “Screech-Bling will talk to you now,” he said in heavily Troglodytish-laced English.

We all began to rise, but the chef stopped us with a sweep of his ladle. “Only Nico, the Italian wall lizard—um, SQUEAK—I mean the Italian son of Hades. The rest of you will wait here until dinner.”

His gleaming eyes seemed to add, When you may or may not be on the menu!

Nico squeezed Will’s hand. “It’ll be fine. Back soon.”

Then he and the chef were gone. In exasperation, Will threw himself down on his fireside mat and put his backpack over his face, reducing our Will-glow illumination by about fifty percent.

Rachel scanned the encampment, her eyes glittering in the gloom.

I wondered what she saw with her ultra-clear vision. Perhaps the troglodytes looked even scarier than I realized. Perhaps their hats were even more magnificent. Whatever the case, her shoulders curved as tense as a drawn bow. Her fingers traced the soot-stained floor as if she were itching for her paintbrushes.

“When you surrender to Nero,” she told me, “the first thing you’ll need to do is buy us time.”

Her tone disturbed me almost as much as her words: when I surrendered, not if. Rachel had accepted that it was the only way. The reality of my predicament curled up and nestled in my throat like a five-lined skink.

I nodded. “B-buy time. Yes.”

“Nero will want to burn down New York as soon as he has you,” she said. “Why would he wait? Unless you give him a reason…”

I had a feeling I would not like Rachel’s next suggestion. I didn’t have a clear understanding of what Nero intended to do to me once I surrendered—other than the obvious torture and death. Luguselwa seemed to believe the emperor would keep Meg and me alive at least for a while, though she had been vague about what she knew of Nero’s plans.

Commodus had wanted to make a public spectacle out of my death. Caligula had wanted to extract what remained of my godhood and add it to his own power with the help of Medea’s sorcery. Nero might have similar ideas. Or—and I feared this was most likely—once he finished torturing me, he might surrender me to Python to seal their alliance. No doubt my old reptilian enemy would enjoy swallowing me whole, letting me die in his belly over the course of many excruciating days of digestion. So, there was that to look forward to.

“Wh-what reason would make Nero wait?” I asked.

Apparently, I was picking up Troglodytish, because my voice was punctuated by clicks and squeaks.

Rachel traced curlicues in the soot—waves, perhaps, or a line of people’s heads. “You said Camp Half-Blood was standing by to help?”

“Yes…Kayla and Austin told me they would remain on alert. Chiron should be back at camp soon as well. But an attack on Nero’s tower would be doomed. The whole point of our surrender—”

“Is to distract the emperor from what Nico, Will, and I will be doing, hopefully, with the trogs’ help: disabling the Greek-fire vats. But you’ll need to give Nero another incentive to keep him from pushing that button the minute you surrender. Otherwise we’ll never have time to sabotage his doomsday weapon, no matter how fast the trogs can run or dig.”

I understood what she was suggesting. The five-lined skink of reality began its slow, painful slide down my esophagus.

“You want to alert Camp Half-Blood,” I said. “Have them initiate an attack anyway. Despite the risks.”

“I don’t want any of this,” she said. “But it’s the only way. It’ll have to be carefully timed. You and Meg surrender. We get to work with the troglodytes. Camp Half-Blood musters for an attack. But if Nero thinks the entire camp is coming to him—”