Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
we'd arrived on the outskirts of a little ski town nestled in the mountains.
the sign said 'welcome to cloudcroft, new mexico'. the air was cold and thin. the roofs of the cabins were heaped with snow, and dirty mounds of it were piled up on the sides of the streets. tall pine trees loomed over the valley, casting pitch-black shadows, though the morning was sunny.
i was freezing by the time we got to main street, which was about half a mile from the train tracks. the wind was pounding through my sweatshirt like bullets.
i tightened the strings of my sweatshirt. as we walked, percy and i told grover about our conversation with apollo the night before — how he'd told us to seek out nereus in san francisco.
grover looked uneasy. "that's good, i guess. but we've got to get there first."
we stopped in the middle of town. you could pretty much see everything from there: a school, a bunch of tourist stores and cafes, some ski cabins, and a grocery store.
"great," thalia said, looking around. "no bus station. no taxis. no car rental. no way out."
"there's a coffee shop!" i said pointing.
"yes," zoë said. "coffee is good."
"and pastries," grover said dreamily. "and wax paper."
thalia sighed. "fine. how about you two go get us some food. percy, bianca, riley, and i will check in the grocery store. maybe they can give us directions."
we agreed to meet back in front of the grocery store in fifteen minutes. bianca looked a little uncomfortable coming with us, but she did.
inside the store, we found out a few valuable things about cloudcroft: there wasn't enough snow for skiing, the grocery store sold rubber rats for a dollar each, and there was no easy way in or out of town unless you had your own car.
"you could call for a taxi from alamogordo," the clerk said doubtfully. "that's down at the bottom of the mountains, but it would take at least an hour to get here. cost several hundred dollars."
