04 The Mark of Athena

On the bright side, there were no lines and no admission fee, so they just muscled their way past
the tour groups and walked on in.
The interior was pretty impressive, considering it had been constructed two thousand years ago.
The marble floor was patterned with squares and circles like a Roman tic-tac-toe game. The main
space was one huge chamber with a circular rotunda, sort of like a capitol building back in the States.
Lining the walls were different shrines and statues and tombs and stuff. But the real eye-catcher was
the dome overhead. All the light in the building came from one circular opening right at the top. A
beam of sunlight slanted into the rotunda and glowed on the floor, like Zeus was up there with a
magnifying glass, trying to fry puny humans.
Leo was no architect like Annabeth, but he could appreciate the engineering. The Romans had
made the dome out of big stone panels, but they’d hollowed out each panel in a square-within-square
pattern. It looked cool. Leo figured it also made the dome lighter and easier to support.
He didn’t mention that to his friends. He doubted they would care, but if Annabeth were here,
she would’ve spent the whole day talking about it. Thinking about that made Leo wonder how she
was doing on her Mark of Athena expedition. Leo never thought he’d feel this way, but he was
worried about that scary blond girl.
Hazel stopped in the middle of the room and turned in a circle. “This is amazing. In the old days,
the children of Vulcan would come here in secret to consecrate demigod weapons. This is where
Imperial gold was enchanted.”
Leo wondered how that worked. He imagined a bunch of demigods in dark robes trying to quietly
roll a scorpion ballista through the front doors.
“But we’re not here because of that,” he guessed.
“No,” Hazel said. “There’s an entrance—a tunnel that will lead us toward Nico. I can sense it close
by. I’m not sure where.”
Frank grunted. “If this building is two thousand years old, it makes sense there could be some kind
of secret passage left over from the Roman days.”