𝗖𝗢𝗨𝗡𝗧 𝗗𝗢𝗪𝗡 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗗𝗘𝗔𝗗
⚖︎
Jackie Karev has been different for her entire life. Even in the orphanage, she was the odd one out.
She just wasn't expecting to find her people at military school, of all places.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
𝗝𝗔𝗖𝗞𝗜𝗘 𝗗𝗔𝗥𝗧𝗘𝗗 𝗢𝗩𝗘𝗥 to Marielle, who had paled drastically, but seemed steadier on her feet. Percy met her there, expression completely clear of any of the humor he'd shown earlier.
Behind them, the scrap mountain was boiling, rising up. The ten toes tilted over, and Jackie realized that they were toes. The thing that rose up from the metal was a bronze giant in full Greek battle armor. He was impossibly tall–a skyscraper with legs and arms. He gleamed wickedly in the moonlight. He looked down at them, and his face was deformed. The left side was partially melted off. His joints creaked with rust, and across his armored chest, written in thick dust by some giant finger, were the words WASH ME.
"Talos!" Zoë gasped.
"Who. . . who's Talos?" Jackie stuttered.
"One of Hephaestus's creations," Thalia said. "But that can't be the original. It's too small. A prototype, maybe. A defective model."
The metal giant didn't like the word defective.
He moved one hand to his sword belt and drew his weapon. The sound of it coming out of its sheath was horrible, metal screeching against metal. The blade was thirty meters long, easy. It looked rusty and dull, but Jackie figured that it didn't matter. No matter how the robot hit you, you'd die.
"Someone took something," Zoë said. "Who took something?"
She stared accusingly at Percy.
Percy shook his head. "I'm a lot of things, but I'm not a thief."
His words filled Jackie with guilt, because she was a thief. She'd gotten arrested for it and sent to Westover, which was the whole reason she ended up in this mess. She'd tried her best not to be tempted by the treasures that they'd been surrounded by.
But she turned out her pockets anyway, like somehow a chunk of gold had jumped into the pocket of her jeans. They were empty.
Talos took one step towards them, closing half the distance and making the ground shake.
"Run!" Grover yelped.
Great advice, except that even at its slowest, the giant's stride meant that it could outpace any demigod.
The group scattered, just like they'd done with the Nemean lion, and just like with the boar, Percy and Jackie each took one of Marielle's arms to help her along. Thalia drew her shield and held it up as she ran down the highway. The giant swung his sword and took out a row of power lines, which exploded in sparks and scattered across Thalia's path.
Zoë's arrows whistled towards the creature's face but shattered harmlessly against the metal. Grover brayed like a baby goat and went climbing up a mountain of metal.
Jackie and Percy sat Marielle down, hiding behind a broken chariot. Bianca joined them, looking up at Talos with a decidedly guilty expression.
