𐌙/𐌍 Ᏽ𐌵𐌀𐌋𐌄 & 𐌕𐋅𐌄 Ᏽ𐌐𐌄𐌀𐌕 𐌌𐌙𐌕𐋅𐌔 ¹

Chapter 20

I was about to decide this guy was just a regular mortal, and I'd better run for it before he called the straitjacket patrol, when he said, "No appointment, no audience, kiddo. Lord Zeus doesn't see anyone unannounced."

"Oh, I think he'll make an exception." I slipped off my backpack and unzipped the top.

The guard looked inside at the metal cylinder, not getting what it was for a few seconds. Then his face went pale. "That isn't..."

"Yes, it is," I promised. "You want me take it out and–"

"No! No!" He scrambled out of his seat, fumbled around his desk for a key card, then handed it to me.

"Insert this in the security slot. Make sure nobody else is in the ele-vator with you."

We did as he told me. As soon as the elevator doors closed, I slipped the key into the slot. The card disappeared and a new button appeared on the console, a red one that said 600.

I pressed it and waited, and waited.

Muzak played. "Raindrops keep falling on my head...."

Finally, ding. The doors slid open. I stepped out and almost felt my heart give out on me.

I was standing on a narrow stone walkway in the mid-dle of the air. Below me was Manhattan, from the height of an airplane. In front of me, white marble steps wound up the spine of a cloud, into the sky. "Oh, shit, we're high," I muttered at seeing everything.

From the top of the clouds rose the decapitated peak of a mountain, its summit covered with snow. Clinging to the mountainside were dozens of multileveled palaces-a city of mansions-all with white-columned porticos, gilded terraces, and bronze braziers glowing with a thousand fires. Roads wound crazily up to the peak, where the largest palace gleamed against the snow. Precariously perched gar-dens bloomed with olive trees and rosebushes. I could make out an open-air market filled with colorful tents, a stone amphitheater built on one side of the mountain, a hippo-drome and a coliseum on the other. It was an Ancient Greek city, except it wasn't in ruins. It was new, and clean, and col-orful, the way Athens must've looked twenty-five hundred years ago.

This place can't be here, I told myself. The tip of a mountain hanging over New York City like a billion-ton asteroid? How could something like that be anchored above the Empire State Building, in plain sight of millions of people, and not get noticed?

But here it was. And here I was.

Our trip through Olympus was a daze. I passed some giggling wood nymphs who threw olives at me from their garden. Hawkers in the market offered to sell me ambrosia-on-a-stick, and a new shield, and a genuine glitter-weave replica of the Golden Fleece, as seen on Hephaestus-TV The nine muses were tuning their instruments for a concert in the park while a small crowd gathered–satyrs and naiads and abunch of good-looking teenagers who might've been minor gods and goddesses. Nobody seemed worried about an impending civil war. In fact, everybody seemed in a fes-tive mood. Several of them turned to watch me pass, and whispered to themselves, like they just saw me beat someone up and now they were gossiping about it.

I climbed the main road, toward the big palace at the peak. It was a reverse copy of the palace in the Underworld.

There, everything had been black and bronze. Here, every-thing glittered white and silver.

I realized Hades must've built his palace to resemble this one. He wasn't welcomed in Olympus except on the winter solstice, so he'd built his own Olympus underground. Despite my bad experience with him, I felt a little sorry for the guy. To be banished from this place seemed really unfair. It would make anybody bitter.