"Can't this thing go any faster?" Thalia demanded.
Zoë glared at her. "I cannot control traffic."
"You both sound like my mother," Percy muttered.
"Shut up!"
Zoë weaved in and out of traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge. The sun was sinking on the horizon when we finally got into Marin County and exited the highway.
The roads were insanely narrow, winding through forests and up the sides of hills and round the edges of steep ravines. Zoë didn't slow down at all, and I feel like Thalia was regretting sitting in the passenger seat.
"Why does everything smell like cough drops?" Percy asked.
"Eucalyptus," Zoë pointed to huge trees all around us.
"The stuff koala bears eat?"
I sighed, "Percy. They aren't koala bears. They're just koalas. They're not bears, they're just koalas."
"Whatever."
I rolled my eyes.
"Monsters eat them too," Zoë said. "They love chewing the leaves. Especially dragons."
"Dragons chew eucalyptus leaves?" Percy asked.
"Believe me," Zoë said, "if you had dragon breath, you would chew eucalyptus, too."
Ahead of us loomed Mount Tamalpais. In terms of mountains, it was small, but it looked huge. And it seemed a lot bigger considering what was awaiting us.
"So, that's the Mountain of Despair?" Percy asked.
"Yes," Zoë said rightly.
"Why do they call it that?"
She was silent for almost a mile before answering. "After the war between Titans and the gods, many of the Titans were punished and imprisoned. Kronos's right-hand man, the general of his forces, was imprisoned up there, on the summit, just beyond the Garden of the Hesperides."
"The General," Percy said. He shared a glance with me, and he knew I knew what was happening. I knew who the General was, and if the General was Zoë's father, and then I knew exactly where she was taking us, and exactly who she was. We were going to fight Atlas, Titan who held up the sky on Mount Tamalpais. And if he wasn't holding it up, then who was?
