Sun kissed - Apollo.

19: I become a known hostage.

I'd love to tell you we had some deep revelation on our way down, that I came to terms with my own mortality, laughed in the face of death, et cetera.

The truth? My only thought was: Aaaahhhhh!

The river raced toward us at the speed of a truck. Wind ripped the breath from my lungs. Steeples and skyscrapers and bridges tumbled in and out of my vision.

I was trying to pray to my father or Apollo to not die in a very painful way. That would put an end for our quest and to my miserable little life. Mr D would be happy about that.

And then: Flaaa-boooom!

A whiteout of bubbles. I sank through the murk, sure that I was about to end up embedded in a hundred feet of mud and lost forever. I couldn't see a fish down here and it instantly made me sad.

But my impact with the water hadn't hurt. I was falling slowly now, bubbles trickling up through my fingers. I set settled on the river bottom soundlessly. A catfish the size of my stepfather lurched away into the gloom. Clouds of silt and disgusting garbage-beer bottles, old shoes, plastic bags-swirled up all around me.

At that point, I realized a few things: first, I had not been flattened into a pancake. I had not been barbecued. I couldn't even feel the Chimera poison boiling in my veins anymore. I was alive, which was good.

Second realization: I wasn't wet. I mean, I could feel the coolness of the water. I could see where the fire on my clothes had been quenched. But when I touched my own shirt, it felt perfectly dry. Like it had been a few times before, but this somehow felt different, this had gone instinctively while the others i had wanted my clothes to stay dry.

I looked at the garbage floating by and watched as Percy snatched an old cigarette lighter.

No way, I thought.

He flicked the lighter. It sparked. A tiny flame appeared, right there at the bottom of the Mississippi.

Percy, then, grabbed a soggy hamburger wrapper out of the current and immediately the paper turned dry. He 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 me only last: I was breathing. I was underwater, and I was breathing normally.

Something I hadn't done ever in my life before, my mom knew i was an excellent swimmer and could hold my breath for almost more than a minute. But never did it occur to me that i might ever breathe underwater. In my dreams i hadn't thought much of it, it was nothing but a dream.

I stood up, thigh-deep in mud. My legs felt shaky. My hands trembled. I should've been dead. The fact that I wasn't seemed like ... well, a miracle. It felt like a miracle of some sorts, like my father had saved us.

Percy stood almost waist deep in the mud, looking slightly miserable about the mid being so high up.

"Thank you." I say in my head. Thanking my father.

I got no response but i expected that. Well, apart from the pearl necklace heating up for just a second before it cooled against my neck again.

"Percy, what do you say?" I say softly to him.

"Um ... thanks." Underwater, he sounded like he did on recordings, like a much older kid. "Thank you ... Father."

No response. Just the dark drift of garbage downriver, the enormous catfish gliding by, the flash of sunset on the water's surface far above, turning everything the color of butterscotch.

Why had our dad saved us? The more I thought about it, the more ashamed I felt. So we'd gotten lucky a few times before. Against a thing like the Chimera, we had never stood a chance. Those poor people in the Arch were probably toast. We couldn't protect them. We were no hero. Maybe I should just stay down here with the catfish, join the bottom feeders.