The Altered Seven

Roman Holiday

The sky was brilliant blue, as if the stormy weather had never happened. The sun rose over the distant hills, so everything below them shone and sparkled like the entire city of Rome had just come out of the car wash.

Killian had seen big cities before. He was from New York, after all. But the sheer vastness of Rome grabbed him by the throat and made it hard to breathe. The city seemed to have no regard for the limits of geography. It spread through hills and valleys, jumped over the Tiber with dozens of bridges, and just kept sprawling to the horizon. Streets and alleys zigzagged with no rhyme or reason through quilts of neighborhoods. Glass office buildings stood next to excavation sites. A cathedral stood next to a line of Roman columns, which stood next to a modern soccer stadium. In some neighborhoods, old stucco villas with red-tiled roofs crowded the cobblestone streets, so that if Killian concentrated just on those areas, he could imagine he was back in ancient times. Everywhere he looked, there were wide piazzas and traffic-clogged streets. Parks cut across the city with a crazy collection of palm trees, pines, junipers, and olive trees, as if Rome couldn't decide what part of the world it belonged to-or maybe it just believed all the world still belonged to Rome.

It was as if the city knew about Percy's dream of Gaea. It knew that the earth goddess intended on razing all human civilization, and this city, which had stood for thousands of years, was saying back to her: You wanna dissolve this city, Dirt Face? Give it a shot.

"We're setting down in that park," Leo announced, pointing to a wide green space dotted with palm trees. "Let's hope the Mist makes us look like a large pigeon or something."

Killian wished Jason's sister Thalia were here. She'd always had a way of bending the Mist to make people see what she wanted. He had never been very good at that. He just kept thinking: Don't look at me, and hoped the Romans below would fail to notice the giant bronze trireme descending on their city in the middle of morning rush hour.

It seemed to work. They didn't notice any cars veering off the road or Romans pointing to the sky and screaming, "Aliens!" The Argo II set down in the grassy field and the oars retracted.

The noise of traffic was all around them, but the park itself was peaceful and deserted. To their left, a green lawn sloped toward a line of woods. An old villa nestled in the shade of some weird-looking pine trees with thin curvy trunks that shot up thirty or forty feet, then sprouted into puffy canopies. They reminded Killian of trees in those Dr. Seuss books his three year old daughter liked.

To their right, snaking along the top of a hill, was a long brick wall with notches at the top for archers-maybe a medieval defensive line, maybe Ancient Roman. Killian wasn't sure.

To the north, about a mile away through the folds of the city, the top of the Colosseum rose above the rooftops, looking just like it did in travel photos. That's when Killian's legs started shaking. They were actually here. Killian thought his trip to Alaska had been pretty exotic, but now he was in the heart of the old Roman Empire, enemy territory for a Greek demigod. In a way, this place had shaped his life as much as New York.

Jason pointed to the base of the archers' wall, where steps led down into some kind of tunnel.

"I think I know where we are," he said. "That's the Tomb of the Scipios."

Killian frowned. "Scipio...Reyna's pegasus?"

"No," Annabeth put in. "They were a noble Roman family, and...wow, this place is amazing."

Jason nodded. "I've studied maps of Rome before. I've always wanted to come here, but..."

Nobody bothered finishing that sentence. Looking at his friends' faces, Killian could tell they were just as much in awe as he was. They'd made it. They'd landed in Rome-the Rome.