In Between Two Worlds (HP/PJO Crossover)

Chapter 22: We Settle Our Tab.

It turns out, in the Underworld, 'most luxurious cell' means the cell where they torture you until you are quite literally hanging onto life by a thread—they had me suspended over a volcano holding onto a piece of thread to support my weight. They put me through a lot of mental and physical torture. And I mean a lot! After one of the worst ones (I was crushed under 30 hellhounds) all I could do was think of Percy, Annabeth, Grover, Sally and all my friends and siblings back at camp.

I don't know how, but I had a feeling like I was being squeezed like through a tube. The next thing I knew, I was in the Empire State Building, looking at the backs of my best friends.

<<>>|<<>>|<<>>

"Six hundredth floor."

"No such floor, kiddo."

"Hey!" I said, they all looked at me, "I was just tortured by Hades for hours! Don't tell us that there is no 600th floor! Oh. And by the way...I think every bone in my body is broken. Get me some Nectar or Ambrosia."

My friends all rushed to my side. Annabeth pulled some Nectar out of Percy's backpack and poured it into my mouth. After a few seconds, I started to feel a little better. But they still had to drag me into the elevator once the guy let us in. On the way up there I told them what happened in the Underworld and how I escaped. They, in turn, told me about fighting Ares, flying home, and then finally meeting me in the lobby.

Finally, ding. The doors slid open. I hobbled out-with the help of Annabeth and Percy-and almost had a heart attack.

We were standing on a narrow stone walkway in the middle of the air. Below us was Manhattan, from the height of an airplane. In front of us, white marble steps wound up the spine of a cloud, into the sky. My eyes followed the stairway to its end, where my brain just could not accept what I saw.

Look again, my brain said.

We're looking, my eyes insisted. It's there.

From the top of the clouds rose the decapitated peak of a mountain, its summit covered with snow. Clinging to the mountainside were dozens of multi-leveled palaces—a city of mansions—all with white-columned porticos, gilded terraces, and bronze braziers glowing with a thousand fires. Roads wound crazily up to the peak, where the largest palace gleamed against the snow. Precariously perched gardens bloomed with olive trees and rosebushes. I could make out an open-air market filled with colorful tents, a stone amphitheater built on one side of the mountain, a hippodrome and a coliseum on the other. It was an Ancient Greek city, except it wasn't in ruins. It was new and clean, and colorful, the way Athens must've looked twenty-five hundred years ago.

This place can't be here, I told myself. The tip of a mountain hanging over New York City like a billion-ton asteroid? How could something like that be anchored above the EmpireStateBuilding, in plain sight of millions of people, and not get noticed?

But here it was. And here I was.

My trip through Olympus was a daze-mostly because I was trying hard not to pass out in the home of the gods. We passed some giggling wood nymphs who threw olives at Percy from their garden. Hawkers in the market offered to sell us ambrosia-on-a-stick, and a new shield, and a genuine glitter-weave replica of the Golden Fleece, as seen on Hephaestus-TV. The nine muses were tuning their instruments for a concert in the park while a small crowd gathered—satyrs and naiads and a bunch of good-looking teenagers who might've been minor gods and goddesses. Nobody seemed worried about an impending civil war. Everybody seemed in a festive mood. Several of them turned to watch us pass, and whispered to themselves.

We climbed the main road, toward the big palace at the peak. It was a reverse copy of the palace in the Underworld.

There, everything had been black and bronze. Here, everything glittered white and silver.