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Marlowe would love to tell you that she had some deep revelation on her way down, that she came to terms with her own mortality, laughed in the face of death, et cetera.
It should have been easier to think that this was the end. She had died before, so falling to her death was a breeze.
But there was something in the back of her mind that kept telling her that she would live through this. Because of said thought, the only thing she could manage to get out of her mouth was: "FUCK!"
She held on tightly to Percy as the river raced toward them at the speed of a truck. Wind ripped the breath from her lungs. Steeples and skyscrapers and bridges tumbled in and out of her vision.
And then: Flaaa-boooom!
A whiteout of bubbles. Percy and Marlowe sank through the murk, sure that they were about to end up embedded in a hundred feet of mud and lost forever.
For Percy, his impact with the water hadn't hurt. He was falling slowly now, bubbles trickling up through his fingers. He settled on the river bottom soundlessly with Marlowe no longer in his grasp.
A catfish the size of Percy's stepfather lurched away into the gloom. Clouds of silt and disgusting garbage-beer bottles, old shoes, plastic bags-swirled up all around him.
At that point, he realized a few things: first, he had not been flattened into a pancake. He had not been barbecued. He couldn't even feel the Chimera poison boiling in his veins anymore. Percy was alive, which was good.
Second realization: he wasn't wet. He could feel the coolness of the water. He could see where the fire on his clothes had been quenched. But when Percy touched his own shirt, it felt perfectly dry.
Percy looked at the garbage floating by and snatched an old cigarette lighter.
No way, he thought.
He flicked the lighter. It sparked. A tiny flame appeared, right there at the bottom of the Mississippi. He grabbed a soggy hamburger wrapper out of the current and immediately the paper turned dry. Percy lit it with no problem. As soon as he let it go, the flames sputtered out. The wrapper turned back into a slimy rag. Weird.
But the strangest thought occurred to Percy only last: he was breathing. He was underwater, and he was breathing normally.
His very last thought was the one thing that made his eyes widen: Marlowe couldn't breathe.
When Percy looked down around him, he realized that Marlowe was no longer in his grasp. He looked up, finding her body slowly floating towards the top of the river. He couldn't tell if she was okay or not, but only hoped for the best.
Percy stood up, thigh-deep in mud. His legs felt shaky. His hands trembled. He should've been dead. The fact that he wasn't seemed like...well, a miracle. He imagined a woman's voice, a voice that sounded a bit like his mother: Percy, what do you say?
