The Tyrant's Tomb

The scroll burst into flames, which was not what my crotch needed at
that particular moment.
I swatted the cinders off my pants as Meg woke, yawning and blinking.
“What’d you do?” she demanded.
“Nothing! I didn’t know the message would self-destruct!”
“Bad connection,” Reyna guessed. “The silence must be breaking up
slowly—like, working its way outward from the epicenter at Sutro Tower.
We overheated the scroll.”
“That’s possible.” I stomped out the last bits of smoldering vellum.
“Hopefully we’ll be able to send an Iris-message once we reach camp.”
“If we reach camp,” Reyna grumbled. “This traffic…Oh.”
She pointed to a blinking road sign ahead of us: HWY 24E CLOSED AT
CALDECOTT TUNL FOR EMERG MAINTENANCE. SEEK ALT ROUTES.
“Emergency maintenance?” said Meg. “You think it’s the Mist again,
clearing people out?”
“Maybe.” Reyna frowned at the lines of cars in front of us. “No wonder
everything’s backed up. What was Frank doing in the tunnel? We didn’t
discuss any…” She knit her eyebrows, as if an unpleasant thought had
occurred to her. “We have to get back. Fast.”
“The emperors will need time to organize their ground assault,” I said.
“They won’t launch their ballistae until after they’ve tried to take the camp
intact. Maybe…maybe the traffic will slow them down, too. They’ll have to
seek alternate routes.”
“They’re on boats, dummy,” said Meg.
She was right. And once the assault forces landed, they’d be marching on
foot, not driving. Still, I liked the image of the emperors and their army
approaching the Caldecott Tunnel, seeing a bunch of flashing signs and
orange cones, and deciding, Well, darn. We’ll have to come back tomorrow.
“We could ditch the truck,” Reyna mused. Then she glanced at us and
clearly dismissed the idea. None of us was in any shape to run a halfmarathon
from the middle of the Bay Bridge to Camp Jupiter.
She muttered a curse. “We need…Ah!”
Just ahead, a maintenance truck was trundling along, a worker on the
tailgate picking up cones that had been blocking the left lane for some
unknown reason. Typical. Friday at rush hour, with the Caldecott Tunnel
shut down, obviously what you wanted to do was close one lane of traffic on
the area’s busiest bridge. This meant, however, that ahead of the