Wildflowers, Percy Jackson ₁

050, you're not that guy pal

CHAPTER FIFTY

₊˚࿐࿔ 𖥧‧₊⚘ ❀༉. 𓏲｡

The end of the world started when Sylvie's father got institutionalized again.

Again, because it wasn't the first time, but that didn't mean it didn't crush a piece of her soul every time it happened. This was the fourth instance that Sylvie had been conscious enough to remember, and it was also the worst one by far. Sylvie herself had to call the ambulance, she had to wait in the hospital for over a day with Uncle Emerson, and she had to break the news to her dad about institutionalizing him again if he didn't want Sylvie sent away to CPS.

Hera wasn't lying when she told Sylvie she was going to make Sylvie regret insulting the immaculate goddess. Sylvie had no way to prove it, but she was pretty certain Hera had something to do with the whole situation. First thing Sylvie knew, she was packing up to leave for camp this summer, and the next, Conan Duvall was having an episode so bad that Sylvie's dreams were going to be haunted by it for years to come. It couldn't be a coincidence that Hera insulted her father so heavily, then this had to happen.

So Sylvie's dad was institutionalized, and Sylvie left for Camp Half-Blood.

Things were getting more serious at camp by the day, with no break or rest given to any of the campers. Unless you were special like Percy Jackson and got to head off whenever you need a break because you were the subject of a Great Prophecy that would be enacting soon. Chiron was giving him a lot of grace, and Percy was using a lot of that grace to hang out with a particular redhead.

Sylvie didn't care.

Another thing that Sylvie totally didn't care about was another reason Percy kept leaving camp. He and Beckendorf kept going on practice missions to train for the much scarier, more dangerous mission that was about to take place. In fact, Beckendorf had just left to go and pick up Percy at this very moment.

Charles Beckendorf, senior counselor for the Hephaestus cabin, would make most monsters fry for their mommies. He was this huge, dark-skinned guy with ripped muscles from working in the forges all day. He was two years older than Sylvie, and one of the camp's best armorsmiths. He made some seriously ingenious mechanical stuff. A month before, he'd rigged a Greek firebomb in the bathroom of a tour bus that was carrying a bunch of monsters across country. The explosion took out a whole legion of Kronos's evil assholes as soon as the first harpy went flush.

Now, the plan was to blow up the Princess Andromeda—the cruise ship that inhabited basically all of Kronos's forces. If they could explode everything, they could take out their enemies.

Sylvie wanted to have faith in them—they'd done dry runs at the dockyards in New Jersey, using abandoned ships as their targets—but at the end of the day, she was still Sylvie. Her mind basically told her they had no hope for survival and were going to die horrible, gruesome deaths.