“Whoa,” I said.

“Something tells me we’re not going to find a car rental here,” Thalia said. She looked at Grover. “I don’t suppose you got another wild boar up your sleeve?”

Grover was sniffing the wind, looking nervous. He fished out his acorns and threw them into the sand, then played his pipes. They rearranged themselves in a pattern that made no sense to me, but Grover looked concerned.

“That’s us,” he said. “Those five nuts right there.”

“Which one is me?” I asked.

“The little deformed one,” Zoë suggested.

“Oh, shut up.”

“That cluster right there,” Grover said, pointing to the left, “that’s trouble.”

“A monster?” Thalia asked.

Grover looked uneasy. “I don’t smell anything, which doesn’t make sense. But the acorns don’t lie. Our next challenge . . .”

He pointed straight toward the junkyard. With the sunlight almost gone now, the hills of metal looked like something on an alien planet.

We decided to camp for the night and try the junkyard in the morning. None of us wanted to go Dumpster-diving in the dark.

Zoë and Bianca produced five sleeping bags and foam mattresses out of their backpacks. I don’t know how they did it, because the packs were tiny, but must’ve been enchanted to hold so much stuff. I’d noticed their bows and quivers were also magic. I never really thought about it, but when the Hunters needed them, they just appeared slung over their backs. And when they didn’t, they were gone.

The night got chilly fast, so Grover and I collected old boards from the ruined house, and Thalia zapped them with an electric shock to start a campfire. Pretty soon we were about as comfy as you can get in a rundown ghost town in the middle of nowhere.

“The stars are out,” Zoë said.

She was right. There were millions of them, with no city lights to turn the sky orange.

“Amazing,” Bianca said. “I’ve never actually seen the Milky Way.”

“This is nothing,” Zoë said. “In the old days, there were more. Whole constellations have disappeared because of human light pollution.”

“You talk like you’re not human,” I said.

Zoë raised an eyebrow. “I am a Hunter. I care what happens to the wild places of the world. Can the same be said for thee?”

“For you,” Thalia corrected. “Not thee.”

“But you use you for the beginning of a sentence.”

“And for the end,” Thalia said. “No thou. No thee. Just you.”

Zoë threw up her hands in exasperation. “I hate this language. It changes too often!”

Grover sighed. He was still looking up at the stars like he was thinking about the light pollution problem. “If only Pan were here, he would set things right.”

Zoë nodded sadly.

“Maybe it was the coffee,” Grover said. “I was drinking coffee, and the wind came. Maybe if I drank more coffee . . .”

I was pretty sure coffee had nothing to do with what had happened in Cloudcroft, but I didn’t have the heart to tell Grover. I thought about the rubber rat and the tiny birds that had suddenly come alive when the wind blew. “Grover, do you really think that was Pan? I mean, I know you want it to be.”

“He sent us help,” Grover insisted. “I don’t know how or why. But it was his presence. After this quest is done, I’m going back to New Mexico and drinking a lot of coffee. It’s the best lead we’ve gotten in two thousand years. I was so close.”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t want to squash Grover’s hopes.

“What I want to know,” Thalia said, looking at Bianca, “is how you destroyed one of the zombies. There are a lot more out there somewhere. We need to figure out how to fight them.”

Bianca shook her head. “I don’t know. I just stabbed it and it went up in flames.”

“Maybe there’s something special about your knife,” I said.

“It is the same as mine,” Zoë said. “Celestial bronze, yes. But mine did not affect the warriors that way.”

“Maybe you have to hit the skeleton in a certain spot,” I said.

Bianca looked uncomfortable with everybody paying attention to her.

“Never mind,” Zoë told her. “We will find the answer. In the meantime, we should plan our next move. When we get through this junkyard, we must continue west. If we can find a road, we can hitchhike to the nearest city. I think that would be Las Vegas.”

I was about to protest that Grover and I had had bad experiences in that town, but Bianca beat us to it.

“No!” she said. “Not there!”

She looked really freaked out, like she’d just been dropped off the steep end of a roller coaster.

Zoë frowned. “Why?”

Bianca took a shaky breath. “I . . . I think we stayed there for a while. Nico and I. When we were traveling. And then, I can’t remember . . .”

Suddenly I had a really bad thought. I remembered what Bianca had told me about Nico and her staying in a hotel for a while. I met Grover’s eyes, and I got the feeling he was thinking the same thing.

“Bianca,” I said. “That hotel you stayed at. Was it possibly called the Lotus Hotel and Casino?”

Her eyes widened. “How could you know that?”

“Oh, great,” I said.

“Wait,” Thalia said. “What is the Lotus Casino?”

“A couple of years ago,” I said, “Grover, Annabeth, and I got trapped there. It’s designed so you never want to leave. We stayed for about an hour. When we came out, five days had passed. It makes time speed up.”

“No,” Bianca said. “No, that’s not possible.”

“You said somebody came and got you out,” I remembered.

“Yes.”

“What did he look like? What did he say?”

“I . . . I don’t remember. Please, I really don’t want to talk about this.”

Zoë sat forward, her eyebrows knit with concern. “You said that Washington, D.C., had changed when you went back last summer. You didn’t remember the subway being there.”

“Yes, but—”

“Bianca,” Zoë said, “can you tell me the name of the president of the United States right now?”

“Don’t be silly,” Bianca said. She told us the correct name of the president.

“And who was the president before that?” Zoë asked.

Bianca thought for a while. “Roosevelt.”

Zoë swallowed. “Theodore or Franklin?”

“Franklin,” Bianca said. “F.D.R.”

“Like FDR Drive?” I asked. Because seriously, that’s about all I knew about F.D.R.

“Bianca,” Zoë said. “F.D.R. was not the last president. That was about seventy years ago.”

“That’s impossible,” Bianca said. “I . . . I’m not that old.”

She stared at her hands as if to make sure they weren’t wrinkled.

Thalia’s eyes turned sad. I guess she knew what it was like to get pulled out of time for a while. “It’s okay, Bianca. The important thing is you and Nico are safe. You made it out.”

“But how?” I said. “We were only in there for an hour and we barely escaped. How could you have escaped after being there for so long?”

“I told you.” Bianca looked about ready to cry. “A man came and said it was time to leave. And—”

“But who? Why did he do it?”

Before she could answer, we were hit with a blazing light from down the road. The headlights of a car appeared out of nowhere. I was half hoping it was Apollo, come to give us a ride again, but the engine was way too silent for the sun chariot, and besides, it was nighttime. We grabbed our sleeping bags and got out of the way as a deathly white limousine slid to a stop in front of us.

* * *

The back door of the limo opened right next to me. Before I could step away, the point of a sword touched my throat.

I heard the sound of Zoë and Bianca drawing their bows. As the owner of the sword got out of the car, I moved back very slowly. I had to, because he was pushing the point under my chin.

He smiled cruelly. “Not so fast now, are you, punk?”

He was a big man with a crew cut, a black leather biker’s jacket, black jeans, a white muscle shirt, and combat boots. Wraparound shades hid his eyes, but I knew what was behind those glasses—hollow sockets filled with flames.