LOVE THE WAY YOU LIE . . . pjo

VI.

MIA DIDN'T KNOW what was happening, but she knew that they needed to hide and find Percy.

"Run, run, run!" She hissed, running for cover among the foliage.

"Wait, Mia!" Annabeth grabbed her arm. "We need to find Percy!"

"Do you think we'll find Percy if any of us get recognized?" Mia gestured toward the emergency vehicles coming toward the Arch, and the crowd. "Especially me. We need to hide, and then we'll find Percy. Knowing him, he's probably miraculously alive somewhere."

"She's right, Annabeth," Grover said. "Let's run."

So they ran, the sound of sirens and panicked people behind them. Soon, Mia found cover underneath a large tree and with a bunch of bushes and she stopped, dropping to the ground and breathing heavily, because, damn, was she not in shape for this.

"Are we alright?" Annabeth asked, dropping to her knees beside Mia, looking out of the bushes.

Mia followed her gaze. Every emergency vehicle in St. Louis was surrounding the Arch. Police helicopters circled overhead. The crowd of onlookers reminded her of when she waited in a crowd of girls to go into the new Build-A-Bear that had been opening up at the time. Good times.

"I think we are." Mia shut her eyes, trying to calm her brain down, but it was just screaming one thing at her. "Except we don't know where Percy is. But he's alive. I'm sure of it."

"How do you know that?" Grover asked.

"I don't know," Mia admitted. "But it's the only thing that my brain's telling me. Now, if we could just find the troublemaker . . ."

"There!" Annabeth said, pointing toward the crowd. Somewhere in there, Mia saw a blur of jet-black hair and ratty clothes.

"Go, before someone else suspects him!" Mia hissed, and they got up and started running toward the crowd.

As they got closer, she heard news anchors reporting, and she immediately ducked her head down and let Annabeth and Grover lead her closer.

"Probably not a terrorist attack, we're told, but it's still very early in the investigation. The damage, as you can see, is very serious. We're trying to get to some of the survivors, to question them about eyewitness reports of someone falling from the Arch."

" . . . an adolescent boy," another reporter was saying. "Channel Five has learned that surveillance cameras show an adolescent boy going wild on the observation deck, somehow setting off this freak explosion. Hard to believe, John, but that's what we're hearing. Again, no confirmed fatalities . . ."

Finally, Grover bleated, "Perrr-cy!"

Mia looked up to see Percy get tackled by Grover's bear hug — or goat hug. He said, "We thought you'd gone to Hades the hard way!"

Annabeth grabbed Mia's arm to stop her, trying to look angry, but she saw the relief in Annabeth's eyes. "We can't leave you alone for five minutes! What happened?"

"I sort of fell."

"Percy!" Mia smacked his arm. "Six hundred and thirty feet?"

Behind us, a cop shouted, "Gangway!" The crowd parted, and a couple of paramedics hustled out, rolling a woman on a stretcher. She was saying, "And then this huge dog, this huge fire-breathing Chihuahua—"

"Okay, ma'am," the paramedic said. "Just calm down. Your family is fine. The medication is starting to kick in."

"I'm not crazy! This boy jumped out of the hole and the monster disappeared." Then she saw Percy. "There he is! That's the boy!"