Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
I'm going to kill him. We left him alone for five minutes. Five minutes! And now he's swimming somewhere in the water because he was too impatient to wait for the elevator. Sure, if it takes that long, I'll just jump off, it's not that hard.
"Calm down Lea," Annabeth said calmly. How can she be so calm, she's the one who would freak out in a situation like this, and what does she mean by calm down, I'm calm. She can't read my mind either. When Annie puts her hand on my shoulder, I follow her gaze. My hands were glowing. I quickly hid them in my hoodie pockets and tried to calm myself down.
In and out In and out In and out In and ...
"Perr-cy!" I turned around and saw Grover hugging a live Percy. "We were beginning to think you'd made it to Hades the brutal way." "You can't be left alone for five minutes either. What happened?" asked Annie. "I kind of fell." "Percy! One hundred and fifty feet?" I made my presence known, and unlike Annie, my angry expression was genuine.
Behind us, a police officer yelled, "Move!" The crowd dispersed, and two paramedics came running up with a stretcher and a woman on it. I immediately recognized her as the mother of the little boy from the viewing platform. She said, "And then there was this huge dog, a giant fire-breathing Chihuahua..." "It's okay, ma'am," said the one paramedic. "Calm down first. Your family is unharmed. And the medication will kick in soon." "I'm not crazy! The boy jumped through the hole and then the monster disappeared!" Then her eyes fell on Percy. "There he is! That's the boy!"
He whirled around and took off running. We disappeared into the crowd. "What's going on?" Annabeth wanted to know. "Did she mean the Chihuahua from the elevator?"
He told us the whole story about the chimera, about Echidna, about his jump and about the message the underwater woman had given him. "My goodness," Grover said, "we'll have to take you to Santa Monica then, you can't ignore a request from Dad."
Before I could say anything, we passed another reporter and I almost froze when he said, "Percy Jackson. As Channel 12 has just learned, the boy who may have caused the explosion appears to be a young man who is already wanted by authorities for a serious bus crash in New Jersey three days ago. This boy is believed to be traveling west. We are now showing our viewers a photo of Percy Jackson."
We crept around the broadcast van with our heads down and disappeared down a side street.
"First of all," he said to Grover, "we have to get out of here." Somehow we made it back to the station without being recognized. We just managed to jump on the train to Denver before it left. The train rattled west.
Time Skip
The next afternoon, June 14, seven days before the summer solstice, our train pulled into the Denver station. We had last eaten the night before, in the dining car somewhere in Kansas. We also hadn't showered since Half-Blood Hill, and it was clear to see. "Let's try to get in touch with Chiron," Annabeth said. "I'd like to tell him about your conversation with the river spirit." "But we can't talk on the phone, can we?" asked Percy "That's not what I'm talking about."
