"you could be the king, but watch the queen conquer"
-
Rosalyn Carter is the daughter of Aphrodite and the last thing Percy expected to find at Camp Half-Blood.
But he wouldn't want to fight deadly battles with anyone else.
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The boat turned, lifted in the flood, and spun in circles around the whirlpool. The water was full of short-circuiting spiders, some of them smashing against the pool's concrete wall with such force they burst.
Spotlights glared down at them. The Cupid-cams were rolling, live to Olympus, but Rosie could only concentrate on controlling the boat.
Percy willed it to ride the current, to keep away from the wall, at her instructions. The pair spun around one last time, the water level now almost high enough to shred them against the metal net. Then the boat's nose turned toward the tunnel and rocketed through the darkness.
Rosalyn and Percy held tight, both of them screaming as the boat shot curls and hugged corners and took forty-five-degree plunges past pictures of Romeo and Juliet and a bunch of other Valentine's Day stuff.
Then they were out of the tunnel, the night air whistling through their hair as the boat barreled straight toward the exit. If the ride had been in working order, the boat would've sailed off a ramp between the golden Gates of Love and splashed down safely in the exit pool.
The Gates of Love were chained.
Two boats that had been washed out of the tunnel before them were now piled against the barricade—one submerged, the other cracked in half.
"Unfasten your seat belt," Rosie yelled over the sound of the rushing water.
"Are you crazy?" Percy laughed hysterically.
"Unless you want to get smashed to death, we're going to have to jump for it," she snapped. Rosalyn strapped Ares's shield to her arm, standing shakily on her feet.
Her idea was simple and insane. As the boat struck, they would use its force like a springboard to jump the gate. With luck, they would land in the pool.
Percy seemed to understand. She gripped his hand as the gates got closer.
"On my mark," he said.
"No! On my mark!"
"What?"
"Simple physics!" she yelled. "Force times the trajectory angle—"
Rosie was right. If they had jumped when Percy thought they should've, they would've crashed into the gates. She got them maximum lift.
Unfortunately, that was a little more than they needed. The boat smashed into the pileup and the duo was thrown into the air, straight over the gates, over the pool, and down toward solid asphalt.
Something grabbed Rosalyn from behind, and she let out a loud "Ouch!"
Grover.
In midair, he had grabbed Percy by the shirt, and Rosalyn by the arm, and was trying to pull them out of a crash landing.
