The Mark of Athena hoo-3

by Rick Riordan

  It didn’t seem possible he could have survived so long without suffocating. Even in a dream, Percy was already starting to feel panicky, struggling to get enough oxygen.

  Then he noticed something between Nico’s feet—a small collection of glistening objects no bigger than baby teeth.

  Seeds, Percy realized. Pomegranate seeds. Three had been eaten and spit out. Five were still encased in dark red pulp.

  “Nico,” Percy said, “where is this place? We’ll save you.…”

  The image faded, and a girl’s voice whispered: “Percy.”

  At first, Percy thought he was still asleep. When he’d lost his memory, he’d spent weeks dreaming about Annabeth, the only person he remembered from his past. As his eyes opened and his vision cleared, he realized she was really there.

  She was standing by his berth, smiling down at him.

  Her blond hair fell across her shoulders. Her storm-gray eyes were bright with amusement. He remembered his first day at Camp Half-Blood, five years ago, when he’d woken from a daze and found Annabeth standing over him. She had said, You drool when you sleep.

  She was sentimental that way.

  “Wh—what’s going on?” he asked. “Are we there?”

  “No,” she said, her voice low. “It’s the middle of the night.”

  “You mean…” Percy’s heart started to race. He realized he was in his pajamas, in bed. He probably had been drooling, or at least making weird noises as he dreamed. No doubt he had a severe case of pillow hair and his breath didn’t smell great. “You sneaked into my cabin?”

  Annabeth rolled her eyes. “Percy, you’ll be seventeen in two months. You can’t seriously be worried about getting into trouble with Coach Hedge.”

  “Uh, have you seen his baseball bat?”

  “Besides, Seaweed Brain, I just thought we could take a walk. We haven’t had any time to be together alone. I want to show you something—my favorite place aboard the ship.”

  Percy’s pulse was still in overdrive, but it wasn’t from fear of getting into trouble. “Can I, you know, brush my teeth first?”

  “You’d better,” Annabeth said. “Because I’m not kissing you until you do. And brush your hair while you’re at it.”

  For a trireme, the ship was huge, but it still felt cozy to Percy—like his dorm building back at Yancy Academy, or any of the other boarding schools he’d gotten kicked out of. Annabeth and he crept downstairs to the second deck, which Percy hadn’t explored except for sickbay.

  She led him past the engine room, which looked like a very dangerous, mechanized jungle gym, with pipes and pistons and tubes jutting from a central bronze sphere. Cables resembling giant metal noodles snaked across the floor and ran up the walls.

  “How does that thing even work?” Percy asked.

  “No idea,” Annabeth said. “And I’m the only one besides Leo who can operate it.”

  “That’s reassuring.”

  “It should be fine. It’s only threatened to blow up once.”

  “You’re kidding, I hope.”

  She smiled. “Come on.”

  They worked their way past the supply rooms and the armory. Toward the stern of the ship, they reached a set of wooden double doors that opened into a large stable. The room smelled of fresh hay and wool blankets. Lining the left wall were three empty horse stalls like the ones they used for pegasi back at camp. The right wall had two empty cages big enough for large zoo animals.

  In the center of the floor was a twenty-foot-square see-through panel. Far below, the night landscape whisked by—miles of dark countryside crisscrossed with illuminated highways like the strands of a web.

  “A glass-bottomed boat?” Percy asked.

  Annabeth grabbed a blanket from the nearest stable gate and spread it across part of the glass floor. “Sit with me.”

  They relaxed on the blanket as if they were having a picnic, and watched the world go by below.

  “Leo built the stables so pegasi could come and go easily,” Annabeth said. “Only he didn’t realize that pegasi prefer to roam free, so the stables are always empty.”

  Percy wondered where Blackjack was—roaming the skies somewhere, hopefully following their progress. Percy’s head still throbbed from getting whopped by Blackjack’s hoof, but he didn’t hold that against the horse.

  “What do you mean, come and go easily?” he asked. “Wouldn’t a pegasus have to make it down two flights of stairs?”

  Annabeth rapped her knuckles on the glass. “These are bay doors, like on a bomber.”

  Percy gulped. “You mean we’re sitting on doors? What if they opened?”

  “I suppose we’d fall to our deaths. But they won’t open. Most likely.”

  “Great.”

  Annabeth laughed. “You know why I like it here? It’s not just the view. What does this place remind you of?”

  Percy looked around: the cages and stables, the Celestial bronze lamp hanging from the beam, the smell of hay, and of course Annabeth sitting close to him, her face ghostly and beautiful in the soft amber light.

  “That zoo truck,” Percy decided. “The one we took to Las Vegas.”

  Her smile told him he’d gotten the answer right.

  “That was so long ago,” Percy said. “We were in bad shape, struggling to get across the country to find that stupid lightning bolt, trapped in a truck with a bunch of mistreated animals. How can you be nostalgic for that?”

  “Because, Seaweed Brain, it’s the first time we really talked, you and me. I told you about my family, and…” She took out her camp necklace, strung with her dad’s college ring and a colorful clay bead for each year at Camp Half-Blood. Now there was something else on the leather cord: a red coral pendant Percy had given her when they had started dating. He’d brought it from his father’s palace at the bottom of the sea.

  “And,” Annabeth continued, “it reminds me how long we’ve known each other. We were twelve, Percy. Can you believe that?”

  “No,” he admitted. “So…you knew you liked me from that moment?”

  She smirked. “I hated you at first. You annoyed me. Then I tolerated you for a few years. Then—”

  “Okay, fine.”

  She leaned over and kissed him: a good, proper kiss without anyone watching—no Romans anywhere, no screaming satyr chaperones.

  She pulled away. “I missed you, Percy.”

  Percy wanted to tell her the same thing, but it seemed too small a comment. While he had been on the Roman side, he’d kept himself alive almost solely by thinking of Annabeth. I missed you didn’t really cover that.

  He remembered earlier in the night, when Piper had forced the eidolon to leave his mind. Percy hadn’t been aware of its presence until she had used her charmspeak. After the eidolon was gone, he felt as if a hot spike had been removed from his forehead. He hadn’t realized how much pain he had been in until the spirit left. Then his thoughts became clearer. His soul settled comfortably back into his body.

  Sitting here with Annabeth made him feel the same way. The past few months could have been one of his strange dreams. The events at Camp Jupiter seemed as fuzzy and unreal as that fight with Jason, when they had both been controlled by the eidolons.

  Yet he didn’t regret the time he’d spent at Camp Jupiter. It had opened his eyes in a lot of ways.

  “Annabeth,” he said hesitantly, “in New Rome, demigods can live their whole lives in peace.”

  Her expression turned guarded. “Reyna explained it to me. But, Percy, you belong at Camp Half-Blood. That other life—”

  “I know,” Percy said. “But while I was there, I saw so many demigods living without fear: kids going to college, couples getting married and raising families. There’s nothing like that at Camp Half-Blood. I kept thinking about you and me…and maybe someday when this war with the giants is over…”

  It was hard to tell in the golden light, but he thought Annabeth was blushing. “Oh,” she said.

  Percy was afraid he’
d said too much. Maybe he’d scared her with his big dreams of the future. She was usually the one with the plans. Percy cursed himself silently.

  As long as he’d known Annabeth, he still felt like he understood so little about her. Even after they’d been dating several months, their relationship had always felt new and delicate, like a glass sculpture. He was terrified of doing something wrong and breaking it.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I just…I had to think of that to keep going. To give me hope. Forget I mentioned—”

  “No!” she said. “No, Percy. Gods, that’s so sweet. It’s just…we may have burned that bridge. If we can’t repair things with the Romans—well, the two sets of demigods have never gotten along. That’s why the gods kept us separate. I don’t know if we could ever belong there.”

  Percy didn’t want to argue, but he couldn’t let go of the hope. It felt important—not just for Annabeth and him, but for all the other demigods. It had to be possible to belong in two different worlds at once. After all, that’s what being a demigod was all about—not quite belonging in the mortal world or on Mount Olympus, but trying to make peace with both sides of their nature.

  Unfortunately, that got him thinking about the gods, the war they were facing, and his dream about the twins Ephialtes and Otis.

  “I was having a nightmare when you woke me up,” he admitted.

  He told Annabeth what he’d seen.

  Even the most troubling parts didn’t seem to surprise her. She shook her head sadly when he described Nico’s imprisonment in the bronze jar. She got an angry glint in her eyes when he told her about the giants planning some sort of Rome-destroying extravaganza that would include their painful deaths as the opening event.

  “Nico is the bait,” she murmured. “Gaea’s forces must have captured him somehow. But we don’t know exactly where they’re holding him.”

  “Somewhere in Rome,” Percy said. “Somewhere underground. They made it sound like Nico still had a few days to live, but I don’t see how he could hold out so long with no oxygen.”

  “Five more days, according to Nemesis,” Annabeth said. “The Kalends of July. At least the deadline makes sense now.”

  “What’s a Kalends?”

  Annabeth smirked, like she was pleased they were back in their old familiar pattern—Percy being ignorant, she herself explaining stuff. “It’s just the Roman term for the first of the month. That’s where we get the word calendar. But how can Nico survive that long? We should talk to Hazel.”

  “Now?”

  She hesitated. “No. It can wait until morning. I don’t want to hit her with this news in the middle of the night.”

  “The giants mentioned a statue,” Percy recalled. “And something about a talented friend who was guarding it. Whoever this friend was, she scared Otis. Anyone who can scare a giant…”

  Annabeth gazed down at a highway snaking through dark hills. “Percy, have you seen Poseidon lately? Or had any kind of sign from him?”

  He shook his head. “Not since…Wow. I guess I haven’t thought about it. Not since the end of the Titan War. I saw him at Camp Half-Blood, but that was last August.” A sense of dread settled over him. “Why? Have you seen Athena?”

  She didn’t meet his eyes.

  “A few weeks ago,” she admitted. “It…it wasn’t good. She didn’t seem like herself. Maybe it’s the Greek/Roman schizophrenia that Nemesis described. I’m not sure. She said some hurtful things. She said I had failed her.”

  “Failed her?” Percy wasn’t sure he’d heard her right. Annabeth was the perfect demigod child. She was everything a daughter of Athena should be. “How could you ever—?”

  “I don’t know,” she said miserably. “On top of that, I’ve been having nightmares of my own. They don’t make as much sense as yours.”

  Percy waited, but Annabeth didn’t share any more details. He wanted to make her feel better and tell her it would be okay, but he knew he couldn’t. He wanted to fix everything for both of them so they could have a happy ending. After all these years, even the cruelest gods would have to admit they deserved it.

  But he had a gut feeling that there was nothing he could do to help Annabeth this time, other than simply be there. Wisdom’s daughter walks alone.

  He felt as trapped and helpless as when he’d sunk into the muskeg.

  Annabeth managed a faint smile. “Some romantic evening, huh? No more bad things until the morning.” She kissed him again. “We’ll figure everything out. I’ve got you back. For now, that’s all that matters.”

  “Right,” Percy said. “No more talk about Gaea rising, Nico being held hostage, the world ending, the giants—”

  “Shut up, Seaweed Brain,” she ordered. “Just hold me for a while.”

  They sat together cuddling, enjoying each other’s warmth. Before Percy knew it, the drone of the ship’s engine, the dim light, and the comfortable feeling of being with Annabeth made his eyes heavy, and he drifted to sleep.

  When he woke, daylight was coming through the glass floor, and a boy’s voice said, “Oh…You are in so much trouble.”

  P ERCY HAD SEEN F RANK SURROUNDED by cannibal ogres, facing down an unkillable giant, and even unleashing Thanatos, the god of death. But he’d never seen Frank look as terrified as he did now, finding the two of them passed out in the stables.

  “What… ?” Percy rubbed his eyes. “Oh, we just fell asleep.”

  Frank swallowed. He was dressed in running shoes, dark cargo pants, and a Vancouver Winter Olympics T-shirt with his Roman centurion badge pinned to the neck (which seemed either sad or hopeful to Percy, now that they were renegades). Frank averted his eyes as if the sight of them together might burn him.

  “Everyone thinks you’ve been kidnapped,” he said. “We’ve been scouring the ship. When Coach Hedge finds out—oh, gods, you’ve been here all night?”

  “Frank!” Annabeth’s ears were as red as strawberries. “We just came down here to talk. We fell asleep. Accidentally. That’s it.”

  “Kissed a couple of times,” Percy said.

  Annabeth glared at him. “Not helping!”

  “We’d better…” Frank pointed to the stable doors. “Uh, we’re supposed to meet for breakfast. Would you explain what you did—I mean didn’t do? I mean… I really don’t want that faun—I mean satyr—to kill me.”

  Frank ran.

  When everyone finally gathered in the mess hall, it wasn’t quite as bad as Frank had feared. Jason and Piper were mostly relieved. Leo couldn’t stop grinning and muttering, “Classic. Classic.” Only Hazel seemed scandalized, maybe because she was from the 1940s. She kept fanning her face and wouldn’t meet Percy’s eyes.

  Naturally, Coach Hedge went ballistic; but Percy found it hard to take the satyr seriously since he was barely five feet tall.

  “Never in my life!” Coach bellowed, waving his bat and knocking over a plate of apples. “Against the rules! Irresponsible!”

  “Coach,” Annabeth said, “it was an accident. We were talking, and we fell asleep.”

  “Besides,” Percy said, “you’re starting to sound like Terminus.”

  Hedge narrowed his eyes. “Is that an insult, Jackson? ’Cause I’ll—I’ll terminus you, buddy!”

  Percy tried not to laugh. “It won’t happen again, Coach. I promise. Now, don’t we have other things to discuss?”

  Hedge fumed. “Fine! But I’m watching you, Jackson. And you, Annabeth Chase, I thought you had more sense—”

  Jason cleared his throat. “So grab some food, everybody. Let’s get started.”

  The meeting was like a war council with donuts. Then again, back at Camp Half-Blood they used to have their most serious discussions around the Ping-Pong table in the rec room with crackers and Cheez Whiz, so Percy felt right at home.

  He told them about his dream—the twin giants planning a reception for them in an underground parking lot with rocket launchers; Nico di Angelo trapped in a bronze jar, slowly dying from asphyxiation with
pomegranate seeds at his feet.

  Hazel choked back a sob. “Nico… Oh, gods. The seeds.”

  “You know what they are?” Annabeth asked.

  Hazel nodded. “He showed them to me once. They’re from our stepmother’s garden.”

  “Your step… oh,” Percy said. “You mean Persephone.”

  Percy had met the wife of Hades once. She hadn’t been exactly warm and sunny. He had also been to her Underworld garden—a creepy place full of crystal trees and flowers that bloomed bloodred and ghost white.

  “The seeds are a last-resort food,” Hazel said. Percy could tell she was nervous, because all the silverware on the table was starting to move toward her. “Only children of Hades can eat them. Nico always kept some in case he got stuck somewhere. But if he’s really imprisoned—”

  “The giants are trying to lure us,” Annabeth said. “They’re assuming we’ll try to rescue him.”

  “Well, they’re right!” Hazel looked around the table, her confidence apparently crumbling. “Won’t we?”

  “Yes!” Coach Hedge yelled with a mouthful of napkins. “It’ll involve fighting, right?”

  “Hazel, of course we’ll help him,” Frank said. “But how long do we have before… uh, I mean, how long can Nico hold out?”

  “One seed a day,” Hazel said miserably. “That’s if he puts himself in a death trance.”

  “A death trance?” Annabeth scowled. “That doesn’t sound fun.”

  “It keeps him from consuming all his air,” Hazel said. “Like hibernation, or a coma. One seed can sustain him one day, barely.”

  “And he has five seeds left,” Percy said. “That’s five days, including today. The giants must have planned it that way, so we’d have to arrive by July first. Assuming Nico is hidden somewhere in Rome—”

  “That’s not much time,” Piper summed up. She put her hand on Hazel’s shoulder. “We’ll find him. At least we know what the lines of the prophecy mean now. ‘Twins snuff out the angel’s breath, who holds the key to endless death.’ Your brother’s last name: di Angelo. Angelo is Italian for ‘angel.’”