𝒎𝒊𝒓𝒓𝒐𝒓𝒃𝒂𝒍𝒍 - 𝒑𝒆𝒓𝒄𝒚 𝒋𝒂𝒄𝒌𝒔𝒐𝒏 𝒙 𝒐𝒄

.•°*¯'*¤° 𝑭𝑶𝑼𝑹𝑻𝑬𝑬𝑵 °¤*'¯*°•.

They ran. They ran until they were exhausted. They ran until they couldn't run anymore.

Rachel steered them away from traps, but they had no destination in mind—only away from that dark mountain and the roar of Kronos.

They stopped in a tunnel of wet white rock, like part of a natural cave.

Phoenix couldn’t hear anything behind them, but she didn’t feel any safer.

She could still remember those unnatural golden eyes staring out of Luke’s face, and the feeling that her limbs were slowly turning to stone.

“I can’t go any farther,” Rachel gasped, hugging her chest.

Annabeth had been crying the entire time they'd been running.

Now, she collapsed into Davey's arms on the ground and put her head against his chest. Her sobs echoed in the tunnel.

Nico and Percy sat next to each other.

They dropped their swords to eachother.

Phoenix sat next to Percy and rested her head against the wall before letting it drop onto Percy's shoulder.

Nico took a shaky breath. “That sucked,” he said, which Phoenix thought summed things up pretty well.

"Mhm," Phoenix said, half asleep.

“You saved our lives,” Percy said.

Nico wiped the dust off his face. “Blame the girls for dragging me along. That’s the only thing they could agree on. We needed to help you or you’d mess things up.”

Davey glanced at him sideways, "I was there too," Davey said, noting the fact that Nico called him a girl.

"Yeah I know," Nico said.

“Nice that they trust me so much,” Percy shined his flashlight across the cavern.

Water dripped from the stalactites like a slow-motion rain.

“Nico…you, uh, kind of gave yourself away.”

“What do you mean?”

“That wall of black stone? That was pretty impressive. If Kronos didn’t know who you were before, he does now—a child of the Underworld.”

Nico frowned. “Big deal.”

Percy let it drop. He figured Nico was just trying to hide how scared he was, and Phoenix couldn’t blame him.

Annabeth lifted her head. She and Davey were sitting across from the others also against the wall. Her eyes were red from crying.

“What…what was wrong with Luke? What did they do to him?”

Percy told her what he'd seen in the coffin, the way the last piece of Kronos’s spirit had entered Luke’s body when Ethan Nakamura pledged his service.

“No,” Annabeth said. “That can’t be true. He couldn’t—”

“He gave himself over to Kronos,” Percy said. “I’m sorry, Annabeth. But Luke is gone.”

“No!” she insisted. “You saw when Rachel hit him.”

Percy nodded, looking at Rachel with respect. “You hit the Lord of the Titans in the eye with a blue plastic hairbrush.”

Rachel looked embarrassed. “It was the only thing I had.”

“But you saw,” Annabeth insisted. “When it hit him, just for a second, he was dazed. He came back to his senses.”