Annabeth felt the blood rise to her face. Normally she would’ve been the one giving the pep talk.
‘Yeah. Yeah, of course.’ She accepted Sadie’s hand. ‘Let’s go find a god.’
A chain-link fence ringed the building, but they squeezed through a gap and picked their way across a field of spear grass and broken concrete.
The enchanted gloop on Annabeth’s eyes seemed to be wearing off. The world no longer looked so multilayered and kaleidoscopic, but that was fine with her. She didn’t need special vision to know the tower was full of bad magic.
Up close, the red glow in the windows was even more radiant. The plywood rattled. The brick walls groaned. Hieroglyphic birds and stick figures formed in the air and floated inside. Even the graffiti seemed to vibrate on the walls, as if the symbols were trying to come alive.
Whatever was inside the building, its power tugged at Annabeth too, the same way Crabby had on the train.
She gripped her new bronze dagger, realizing it was too small and too short to provide much offensive power. But that’s why Annabeth liked daggers: they kept her focused. A child of Athena should never rely on a blade if she could use her wits instead. Intelligence won wars, not brute force.
Unfortunately, Annabeth’s wits weren’t working very well at the moment.
‘Wish I knew what we were dealing with,’ she muttered as they crept towards the building. ‘I like to do research first – arm myself with knowledge.’
Sadie grunted. ‘You sound like my brother. Tell me, how often do monsters give you the luxury of Googling them before they attack?’
‘Never,’ Annabeth admitted.
‘Well, there you are. Carter – he would love to spend hours in the library, reading up on every hostile demon we might face, highlighting the important bits and making flash cards for me to study. Sadly, when demons attack, they don’t give us any warning, and they rarely bother to identify themselves.’
‘So what’s your standard operating procedure?’
‘Forge ahead,’ Sadie said. ‘Think on my feet. When necessary, blast enemies into teeny-tiny bits.’
‘Great. You’d fit right in with my friends.’
‘I’ll take that as a compliment. That door, you think?’
A set of steps led to a basement entrance. A single two-by-four was nailed across the doorway in a half-hearted attempt to keep out trespassers, but the door itself was slightly ajar.
Annabeth was about to suggest scouting the perimeter. She didn’t trust such an easy way in, but Sadie didn’t wait. The young magician trotted down the steps and slipped inside.
Annabeth’s only choice was to follow.
As it turned out, if they’d come through any other door, they would have died.
The whole interior of the building was a cavernous shell, thirty storeys tall, swirling with a maelstrom of bricks, pipes, boards and other debris, along with glowing Greek symbols, hieroglyphs and red neon tufts of energy. The scene was both terrifying and beautiful – as if a tornado had been caught, illuminated from within and put on permanent display.
Because they’d entered on the basement level, Sadie and Annabeth were protected in a shallow stairwell – a kind of trench in the concrete. If they’d walked into the storm on ground level, they would’ve been ripped to shreds.
As Annabeth watched, a twisted steel girder flew overhead at race-car speed. Dozens of bricks sped by like a school of fish. A fiery red hieroglyph slammed into a flying sheet of plywood, and the wood ignited like tissue paper.
‘Up there,’ Sadie whispered.
She pointed to the top of the building, where part of the thirtieth floor was still intact – a crumbling ledge jutting out into the void. It was hard to see through the swirling rubble and red haze, but Annabeth could discern a bulky humanoid shape standing at the precipice, his arms spread as if welcoming the storm.
‘What’s he doing?’ Sadie murmured.
Annabeth flinched as a helix of copper pipes spun a few inches over her head. She stared into the debris and began noticing patterns like she had with the Duat: a swirl of boards and nails coming together to form a platform frame, a cluster of bricks assembling like Lego to make an arch.
‘He’s building something,’ she realized.
‘Building what, a disaster?’ Sadie asked. ‘This place reminds me of the Realm of Chaos. And, believe me, that was not my favourite holiday spot.’
Annabeth glanced over. She wondered if Chaos meant the same thing for Egyptians as it did for Greeks. Annabeth had had her own close call with Chaos, and if Sadie had been there, too … well, the magician must be even tougher than