Indigo Eyes

Chapter 24

"Pollux!" Cressida exclaimed when she woke in her hammock. Her dream had consisted of her home. She'd been watching her brothers on border patrol when they were attacked by a chimera. A chimera that bit into her brother's leg and left him screaming in agony.

"Grapes, are you alright?" Annabeth asked as the alarm bells sounded.

"Yeah - my brother - I'm fine," she said before rubbing her eyes and sliding out of her hammock.

They weren't above deck long before alarms started blaring and they knew exactly why.

They were entering the Sea of Monsters.

Percy eventually came up to join them, the boy slightly jarred from whatever dream he had as Clarisse called for full steam ahead.

Tyson muttered nervously, "Too much strain on the pistons. Not meant for deep water."

And his words made everyone nervous as Percy told them they were somewhere off the coast of Northern Florida.

After a few more minutes, the dark splotches ahead of us came into focus. To the north, a huge mass of rock rose out of the sea – an island with cliffs at least thirty metres tall. About half a mile south of that, the other patch of darkness was a storm brewing. The sky and sea boiled together in a roaring mass.

"Hurricane?" Annabeth asked.

"No," Clarisse said. "Charybdis."

"Oh, we are so going to die," Cressida remarked as Annabeth's face grew pale.

"Are you crazy?!"

"Only way into the Sea of Monsters. Straight between Charybdis and her sister Scylla." Clarisse pointed to the top of the cliffs, and I got the feeling something lived up there that I did not want to meet.

"What do you mean the only way?' Percy asked. "The sea is wide open! Just sail around them."

Clarisse rolled her eyes. "Don't you know anything? If I tried to sail around them, they would just appear in my path again. If you want to get into the Sea of Monsters, you have to sail through them."

"What about the Clashing Rocks?" Annabeth said. "That's another gateway. Jason used it."

"I can't blow apart rocks with my cannons," Clarisse said. "Monsters, on the other hand..."

"You are crazy," Annabeth decided.

"And sane," Cressida spoke up and they all turned to her. "There is no way in Hades that this steamship can go fast enough to get through the Clashing Rocks. This is quite literally the only way to get into the Sea of Monsters where we have the remote possibility of surviving."

"At least one of you has a brain," Clarisse said before turning to her crew. "Set course for Charybdis!"

The engine groaned, the iron plating rattled, and the ship began to pick up speed.

"Clarisse," Percy said, "Charybdis sucks up the sea. Isn't that the story?"

"And spits it back out again, yeah."

"What about Scylla?"

"She lives in a cave, up on those cliffs. If we get too close, her snaky heads will come down and start plucking sailors off the ship."

"Choose Scylla then," Percy suggested. "Everybody goes below deck and we chug right past."

"No!" Clarisse insisted. "If Scylla doesn't get her easy meat, she might pick up the whole ship. Besides, she's too high to make a good target. My cannon can't shoot straight up. Charybdis just sits there at the centre of her whirlpool. We're going to steam straight towards her, train our guns on her, and blow her to Tartarus!"