The Half-Blood Project

39- Toppling Dreams

Annabeth Chase 

"You're such an idiot." I slapped him right across the back of his head and then crushed him into a hug. Percy chuckled but there was a high note in the back of his tone. He saw something too. Something terrible. 

"How'd you escape whatever that was?" 

"Percy, it wasn't even a monster. It was like a hologram, I stabbed it right in the eye, but it went right through." I patted the dagger resting on its sheath. Percy frowned. 

"It wasn't real?" 

"Yeah, it wasn't." 

But that fear, the one that pumped in my veins was real. It was just as real as the floor that shifted a little beneath my feet or as real as Percy who stood in front of me. But the monster wasn't. And whoever cast that hologram deserved a punch in the face, preferably one that broke their nose. 

"We should get moving." Rachel tugged on Percy's arm, who immediately turned bright red. Why all of the sudden was the pink in the face and ears? Why? 

"Yeah, we should." Percy gulped and turned in the direction we had intended on going in the first place. 

I didn't know what to do with the moon, I didn't know what he had seen when he ran but the way he kept his head down, eyes fixated on the dirty ground beneath, how his hands were still. Whatever he had seen, it was destroying him from the inside out. Eating away at whatever kind of soul he had locked down there. 

We kept moving for what felt like hours and hours, tracking up and down these underground hills, through empty bunkers, storage containers that were rusty and reeked of death. Rachel kept us moving forwards, not looking back in the darkness that collected, pooling behind us. Maybe she was stronger than I was thinking her to be. 

"I hate this place. I hate all of this." Rachel mumbled and we pushed a stone wall that was a fake and let the dust collect before plowing along. My feet ached and hurt terribly, my arms hurt and we were nowhere close to Tyson and Grover. I wanted to lie down and forget about this underground maze of death, despair, and well death. I hoped that one day we would be able to destroy it. But that day wouldn't come soon. 

Rachel was at least ten feet ahead of me and Percy and Percy walked up next to me, his arm brushing mine, making the hairs on my neck stand up a little. He was chillingly cold-like bathed in ice and snow. 

"I saw Luke," Percy mumbled. This snapped my attention to him and his blazing green eyes that shone like beacons in the pooling shadows around us. 

"You saw what?!" 

"I saw Luke." 

"Explain please," I said quietly, trying not to hope he was dead, or worse, alive. 

So he explained. The glowing coffin that would haunt him and the thought of the coffin would haunt me too, and he explained how Luke was sleeping, almost like he was dead, arms crossed over his chest, looking peaceful. 

"He's transforming. Into him." My whisper is frail and I do feel like breaking because all of this reminds me of how Luke used to be kind, caring, smart. How stupid is he to transform himself into an all-powerful time titan that will later just dispose of his body like roadside trash? What was the point of even joining Kronos? To avenge his anger and pain because Hermes wasn't in his pitiful wasted life? What was the point? Luke would die one day, and he would suffer for the lives he's taken without a hint of mercy. 

"If I had to guess, he'll be ready by the 18th, and that is the day Luke will die," I say quietly as we keep hiking through the murky tunnels. 

"Annabeth." Percy's hands rest on my shoulder and a comforting look in his eyes comes into the light, like the kind that I've sort of fallen for I guess. "I know you have a past with Luke and I won't ever question that but I need to know if you're okay with this?"