NOT FRIENDS ━━━━━ p. mclean²

021.

Isa held her hands up. "She did."

Leo led them to the limestone cliff in the forest. Isa didn't know what he had planned, but he said he had something important to show them. As of instinct, when the two girls arrived, Isa stood next to Piper, who was beside Jason and Freya walked to stand next to the blonde. Isa looped her hand with daughter of Aphrodite. Piper looked down at her and smiled softly.

Leo turned to the group and smiled nervously. "Here we go."

He willed his hand to catch fire, and set it against the door. His cabinmates gasped.

"Leo!" Nyssa cried. "You're a fire user!"

"Yeah, thanks," he said. "I know."

Jake Mason, who was out of his body cast but still on crutches, said, "Holy Hephaestus. That means ─ it's so fucking rare that ─ "

The massive stone door swung open, and everyone's mouth dropped. Leo's flaming hand seemed insignificant now. Isa gasped; even Piper and Jason looked stunned, and they'd seen enough amazing things lately. Only Chiron didn't look surprised. The centaur knit his bushy eyebrows and stroked his beard, as if the group was about to walk through a minefield.

"Welcome to Bunker Nine," Leo said, as confidently as he could. "C'mon in."

The group was silent as they toured the facility. There were giant machines, worktables, old maps and schematics. There was one thing that caught Isa's eye. Festus's head was sitting on the central table, still battered and scorched from his final crash in Omaha. Leo went over to it, a bitter taste in his mouth, and stroked the dragon's forehead.

"I'm sorry, Festus. But I won't forget you"

Jason put a hand on Leo's shoulder. "Hephaestus brought it here for you?"

Leo nodded.

"But you can't repair him," Jason guessed.

"No way," Leo said. "But the head is going to be reused. Festus will be going with us."

Piper came over and frowned. "What do you mean?"

Before Leo could answer, Nyssa cried out, "Guys, look at this!"

She was standing at one of the worktables, flipping through a sketchbook ─ diagrams for hundreds of different machines and weapons.

"I've never seen anything like these," Nyssa said. "There are more amazing ideas here than in Daedalus's workshop. It would take a century just to prototype them all."

"Who built this place?" Jake Mason said. "And why?"

Chiron stayed silent, but Isa watched as Leo focused on the wall map. It showed Camp Half-Blood with a line of triremes in the Sound, catapults mounted in the hills around the valley, and spots marked for traps, trenches, and ambush sites.

"It's a wartime command center," he said. "The camp was attacked once, wasn't it?"

"In the Titan War?" Piper asked.

Nyssa shook her head. "No. Besides, that map looks really old. The date. . . does that say 1864?"

They all turned to Chiron. The centaur's tail swished fretfully. "This camp has been attacked many times," he admitted. "That map is from the last Civil War."

"Civil War. . ." Piper said. "You mean the American Civil War, like a hundred and fifty years ago?"

"Yes and no," Chiron said. "The two conflicts ─ mortal and demigod ─ mirrored each other, as they usually do in Western history. Look at any civil war or revolution from the fall of Rome onward, and it marks a time when demigods also fought one another. But that Civil War was particularly horrible. For American mortals, it is still their bloodiest conflict of all time — worse than their casualties in the two World Wars. For demigods, it was equally devastating. Even back then, this valley was Camp Half-Blood. There was a horrible battle in these woods lasting for days, with terrible losses on both sides."