Warning: This chapter is in Percy's prospective

I PLAY DODGEBALL WITH CANNIBLES

The day started out just as normal as any other day. Or as normal as it ever gets at Meriwether College Prep.

You see, it's this "progressive" school in downtown Manhattan, which means we sit on beanbag chairs instead of at desks, and we don't get grades, and the teachers wear jeans and rock concert T-shirts to work.

That's all cool with me. I mean, I'm ADHD and dyslexic, like most half-bloods, so I'd never done that great in regular schools even before they kicked me and Cammie out. whenever we talk about school—which is next to never—I like to brag about this to Cammie, make her feel jealous, but wherever I try, she likes to throw out the fact that they have a chief that used to work for the president as their cook. She doesn't even have to mention they don't do math there. I know in comparison, Gallagher is better than Meriwether. Not even factoring in that it's a spy school and they have a gourmet chief. The teachers at Meriwether were always looking on the bright side of things, and the kids weren't always…well, bright.

Take my first class today: English. The whole middle school had read this book called Lord of the Flies, where all these kids get marooned on an island and go psycho. So for our final exam, our teachers sent us into the break yard to spend an hour with no adult supervision to see what would happen. What happened was a massive wedgie contest between the seventh and eighth graders, two pebble fights, and a full-tackle basketball game. The school bully, Matt Sloan, lead most of these activities.

Sloan wasn't big or strong, but he acted like he was. He had eyes like a pit bull, and shaggy black hair, and he always dressed in expensive but sloppy clothes, like he wanted everybody to see how little he cared about his family's money. One of his front teeth was chipped from the time he'd taken his daddy's Porsche for a joyride and run into a PLEASE SLOW DOWN FOR CHILDREN sign.

I didn't like talking about Sloan much either, but when he got to be too much for me some days, I'd rant for hours on end about him to Cammie. She didn't need to have met him to hate his guts. There were days I had to convince her to stay in Virginia instead of running up to New York just to kick his brain back into a respectable place.

Anyway, Sloan was giving everybody wedgies until he made the mistake of trying it on my friend Tyson.

Tyson was the only homeless kid at Meriwether Collage Prep. As near as my mom and I could figure, he'd been abandoned by his parents when he was very young, probably because he was so…different. He was six-foot-three and built like the Abominable Snowman, but he cried a lot and was scared of just about everything, including his own-reflection. His face was kind of misshapen and brutal-looking. I couldn't tell you what color his eyes were, because I could never make myself look higher than his crooked teeth. His voice was deep, but he talked funny, like a much younger kid—I guess because he'd never gone to school before coming to Meriwether. He wore tattered jeans, grimy size-twenty sneakers, and a plaid flannel shirt with holes in it. He smelled like a New York City alleyway, because that's where he lived, in a cardboard refrigerator box off 72nd street.

Meriwether Prep had adopted him as a community service project so all the students could feel good about themselves. Unfortunately, most of them couldn't stand Tyson. Once they discovered he was a bid softie, despite his massive strength and scary looks, they made themselves feel good by picking on him. I was pretty much his only friend, which meant he was my only friend.

My mom had complained to the school a million times that they weren't doing enough to help him. She'd called social services, but nothing ever seemed to happen. The social workers claimed Tyson didn't exist. They swore up and down that they'd visited the alley we described and couldn't find him, though how you miss a giant kid living in a refrigerator box, I don't know.

Anyway, Matt Sloan snuck up behind him and tried to give him a wedgie, and Tyson panicked. He swatted Sloan away a little too hard. Sloan flew fifteen feet and got tangled in the little kids' tire swing.

"You freak!" Sloan yelled. "Why don't you go back to your cardboard box!"

Tyson started sobbing. He sat down on the jungle gym so hard he bent the bar, and buried his head in his hands.

"Take it back, Sloan!" I shouted.

Sloan just sneered at me. "Why do you even bother, Jackson? You might have friends if you weren't always sticking up for that freak."

I balled my fists. I hoped my face wasn't as red as it felt. "He's not a freak. He's just…"

I tried to think of the right thing to say, but Sloan wasn't listening. He and his big ugly friends were to busy laughing. I wondered if it were my imagination, or if Sloan had more goons hanging around him than usual. I was used to seeing him with two or three, but today he had like , half a dozen more, and I was pretty sure I'd never seen then before.

"Just wait till PE, Jackson!" Sloan called. "You are so dead."

When first period ended, our English teacher, Mr. de Milo, came outside to inspect the carnage. He pronounced that we'd understood Lord of the Flies perfectly. We all passed his course, and we should never, never grow up to be violent people. Matt Sloan nodded earnestly, then gave me a chip-toothed grin.

I had to promise to buy Tyson an extra peanut butter sandwich at lunch to get him to stop sobbing.

"I…I am freak?" he asked me.

"No," I promised, without hesitation, gritting my teeth. "Matt Sloan is the freak."

Tyson sniffled. "You are good friend. Miss you next year if…if I can't…"

His voice trembled. I realized he didn't know if he'd be invited back next year for the community service project. I wondered if the headmaster had even bothered talking to him about it.

"Don't worry, big guy," I managed. "Everything's going to be fine."

He was rubbing the tears out of his eyes, sniffling. "Will the pretty girl with black hair come back tonight?" he asked.

He was talking about Cammie. I had mentioned her once, saying how much I missed my sister, and Tyson started asking me question. At first I answered them hesitantly, not really wanting to share her anymore then I had too. I already had to share her with those girls from Gallagher, and I didn't enjoy that, but Tyson was persistent. So I told him everything he wanted to know. What she looked like, her favorite color, how strong she was despite how little she looked. How crazy, yet caring she could be. She's a tough kid, but had such a soft heart. I told him how much I needed her, how she was my best friend, next to him. I had brought a picture of her once, and Tyson told me she looked like a princess. I laughed and told him he should never say that again, or at least not in ear-shot of her. Before I knew it, Tyson had started idolizing her in a way. I wasn't even sure if he realized she was, in fact, a real person. I started to think he thought she was just some character, like Aladdin, or the Little Mermaid. Most parents read stories to their children, but since Tyson didn't have parents, Cammie kind of became his story book hero. Which I thought was okay. I know Cam wouldn't mind; she'd probably enjoy it a little too much. I know she told her roommates stories about me all the time, and if I had accidentally made her out to be some kind of hero to my friend, she'd consider her life completed. Whenever Tyson got really upset, he'd ask me to tell him a story about the pretty girl with black hair.

One day, when he was super upset, I told him that Cammie was coming up to New York for a week to spent time with my mom, and promised him he could come meet her. He was so happy, I could just tell him 'the pretty black haired girl's coming here soon', and he'd stop crying about anything.

But really shouldn't have told him that. Because she had just said last night she wouldn't be making it. And now I was going to have to break the news to Tyson.

"Well, you see…she might be…" I tried to word it someway that wouldn't sound so horrible.

He just looked at me with hopeful eyes.

Well, Chiron did say we shouldn't head to camp just yet. That it wasn't exactly safe. I do still have to tell her, I thought. I'm sure she'll have to come spend a few days with us now.

"She's still coming," I finally told him. "She might be day or two late though, so don't get upset."

He shook his head wildly, like a little kid that promised he'd behave so his mom would give him a sucker.

Everything's going to be fine, I told myself.

Man did I feel likes such a liar in that moment.

Our next exam was science. Mrs. Tesla told us that we had to mix chemicals until we succeeded in making something explode. Tyson was my lab partner. His hands were ways too big for the tiny vials we were supposed to use.

Hey, Cammie, I asked. What chemicals make a small explosion?

What do you have? She asked.

Uh, blue liquids, red liquids, yellow, green…

Do you have a light blue liquid, and a sort of lime-ish green?

Uh…yeah, I do.

Okay, take the green, and pour the blue into it.

I told Tyson to hand over the blue, and did what she said.

It made an orange mushroom cloud.

After Mrs. Tesla evacuated the lab and called the hazardous waste removal squad, she praised Tyson and me for being natural chemists. We were the first ones who'd ever aced her exam in under thirty seconds.

I smiled to myself as we left the classroom. That wasn't a small explosion.

Oh, dear, naive, Percy. You know I have no idea how to make a small explosion. That sort of knowledge just doesn't exist in my brain. Now I have to get back to my test. I'm in P&E, and kicking butt.

Okay, but Cam, we have to talk later. Let me know when you're done with your finals.

I was glad the morning went fast, because it kept me from thinking too much about my problems. I couldn't stand the idea that something might be wrong at camp. Even worse, I couldn't shake the memory of my bad dream. I had a terrible feeling that Grover was in danger.

In social studies, while we were drawing latitude/longitude maps, I opened my notebook and stared at the photo inside next to the one of me and Cammie—my friend Annabeth on vacation in Washington, D.C. She was wearing jeans and a denim jacket over her orange Camp Half-Blood T-shirt. Her blond hair was pulled back in a bandanna. She was standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial with her arms crossed, looking extremely pleased with herself, like she'd personally designed the place. See, Annabeth wants to be an architect when she grows up, so she's always visiting famous monuments and stuff. She's weird that way. She'd e-mailed me the picture after spring break, and every once in a while I'd look at it just to remind myself she was real and Camp Half-Blood hadn't just been my imagination. I couldn't depend on Cammie's testimony alone—she's full out bat crazy.

I wished Annabeth were here. She'd know what to make of my dream. I'd never admit it to her, but she was smarter than me, even if she was annoying sometimes.

I was about to close my notebook when Matt Sloan reached over and ripped the photo out of the rings.

"Hey!" I protested.

Sloan checked out the picture and his eyes got wide. "No way, Jackson. Who is that? She is not your—"

"Give it back!" My ears felt hot.

Sloan handed the photo to his ugly buddies, who snickered and started ripping it up to make spit wads. They were new kids who must've been visiting, because they were all wearing those stupid HI! MY NAME IS: tags from the admissions office. They must've had a weird sense of humor, too, because they'd all filled in the strange names like: MARROW SUCKER, SKULL EATER, and JOE BOB. No human beings had names like that.

"These guys are moving here next year," Sloan bragged, like that was supposed to scare me. "I bet they can pay the tuition, to, unlike your retard friend."

"He's not retarded." I had to try really, really hard not to punch Sloan in the face.

His huge buddies chewed up my photo. I wanted to pulverize them, but I was under strict orders from Chiron never to take my anger out on regular mortals, no matter how obnoxious they were. I had to save my fighting for monsters.

Still, part of me thought, if Sloan only know who I really was…

The ball rang.

As Tyson and I were leaving class, a girl's voice whispered, "Percy!"

I looked around the locker area, but nobody was paying me any attention. Like any girl at Meriwether would ever be caught dead calling my name. Must have been Cammie. Why she didn't follow up with anything is strange.

Before I had time to consider whether or not it was Cammie or I was imagining things, a crowd of kids rushed for the gym, carrying Tyson and me along with them. It was time for PE. Our coach had promised us a free-for-all dodgeball game and Matt Sloan had promised to kill me.

The gym uniform at Meriwether is sky blue shorts and tie-dyed T-shirts. Fortunately, we did most of our athletic stuff inside, so we don't have to jog through Tribeca looking like a bunch of boot-camp hippie children.

I changed as quickly as I could in the locker room because I didn't want to deal with Sloan. I was about to leave when Tyson called, "Percy?"

He hadn't changed yet. He was standing by the weight room door, clutching his gym clothes. "Well you…uh…"

"Oh. Yeah." I tried not to sound aggravated about it. "Yeah, sure, man."

Tyson ducked inside the weight room. I stood guard outside the door while he changed. I felt kind of awkward doing this, but he asked me to most days. I think it's because he's completely hairy and he's got weird scars on his back that I've never had the courage to ask him about.

Anyway, I'd learned the hard way that if people teased Tyson while he was dressing out, he'd get upset and start ripping the doors off lockers.

When we got into the gym, Coach Nunley was sitting at his little desk reading Sports Illustrated. Nunley was about a million years old, with bifocals and no teeth and a greasy wave of gray hair. he reminded me of the Oracle at Camp Half-Blood—which was a shriveled-up mummy—except Coach Nunley moved a lot less and he never billowed green smoke. Well, at least not that I'd observed.

Matt Sloan said, "Coach, can I be captain?"

"Eh?" Coach Nunley looked up from his magazine. "Yeah," he mumbled. "Mm-hmm."

Sloan grinned and took charge of the picking. He made me the other team's captain, but it didn't matter who I picked, because all the jocks and the popular kids moved over to Sloan's side. So did the big group of visitors.

On my side I had Tyson, Corey Bailer the computer geek, Raj Mandeli the calculus whiz, and a half dozen other kids who always got harassed by Sloan and his gang. Normally I would've been okay with just Tyson—he was worth half the team all by himself—but the visitors on Sloan's team were almost as tall and strong-looking as Tyson, and there were six of them.

Matt Sloan spilled a cage full of balls in the middle of the gym.

"Scared," Tyson mumbled. "Smell funny."

I looked at him. "What smells funny?" Because I didn't figure he was talking about himself.

"Them." Tyson pointed at Sloan's new friends. "Smell funny."

The visitors were cracking their knuckles, eyeing us like it was laughter time. I suddenly imagined Cammie standing right beside me, mirroring their actions, sneering, hissing any insults that came to her mind without hesitation. I couldn't help wondering where they were from. Someplace where they fed the kids raw meat and beat them with sticks.

Sloan blew coach's whistle and the game began. Sloan's team ran for the center line. On my side, Raj Mandali yelled something in Urdu, probably "I have to go potty!" and ran for the exit. Corey Bailer tried to crawl behind the wall mat and hide. The rest of my team did their best cower in fear and not look like targets.

"Tyson," I said. "Let's g—"

A ball slammed into my gut. I sat down hard in the middle of the gym floor. The other team exploded in laughter.

My eyesight was fuzzy. I felt like I'd just gotten the Heimlich maneuver from a gorilla. I couldn't believe anybody could throw that hard.

Tyson yelled, "Percy, duck!"

I rolled as another dodgeball whistled past my ear at the speed of sound.

Whooom!

It hit the wall mat, and Corey Bailer yelped.

"Hey!" I yelled at Sloan's team. "You could kill somebody!"

The visitor named Joe Bob grinned at me evilly. Somehow, he looked a lot bigger now…even taller than Tyson. His biceps bulged beneath his T-shirt. "I hope so, Perseus Jackson! I hope so!"

The way he said my name sent a chill down my back. nobody called me Perseus except those who knew my true identity. Friends…and enemies.

What had Tyson said? They smell funny.

Monsters.

All around Matt Sloan, the visitors were growing in size. They were no longer kids. They were eight-foot-tall giants with wild eyes, pointy teeth, and hairy arms tattoed with snakes and hula women and Valentine hearts.

Matt Sloan dropped his ball. "Whoa! You're not from Detroit! Who…"

The other kids on his team started screaming and backing toward the exit, but the giant named Marrow Sucker threw his ball with deadly accuracy. It streaked past Raj Mandali just as he was about to leave and hit the door, slamming it shuck like magic. Raj and some of the other kids banged on it desperately but it wouldn't budge.

"Let them go!" I yelled at the giants.

The one called Joe Bob growled at me. He had a tattoo on his biceps that said: JB luvs babycakes. "And lose our tasty morsels? No, Son of the Sea God. We Laistrygonians aren't just playing for your death. We want lunch!"

He waved his hand and a new batch of dodgeballs appeared on the center line—but these balls weren't made of red rubber. They were bronze, the size of cannon balls, perforated like wiffle balls with fire bubbling out the holes. They must've been searing hot, but the giants picked them up with their bare hands.

"Coach!" I yelled.

Nunley looked up sleepily, but if he saw anything abnormal about the dodgeball game, he didn't let on. That's the problem with mortals. Am magical force called the Mist obscures the true appearance of monsters and gods from their vision, so mortals tend to see only what they can understand. Maybe the coach saw a few eighth graders pouding the younger kids like usual. Maybe the other kids saw Matt Sloan's thugs getting ready to toss Molotov cocktails around. (It wouldn't have been the first time.) At any rate, I was pretty sure nobody else realized we were dealing with genuine man-eating bloodthirsty monsters.

"Yeah. Mm-hmm," Coach muttered. "Play nice."

And he went back to his magazine.

The giant named Skull Eater threw his ball. I dove aside as the fiery bronze comet sailed past my shoulder.

"Corey!" I screamed.

Tyson pulled him out from behind the exercise mat just as the ball exploded against it, blasting the mat to smoking shreds.

"Run!" I told my teammates. "The other exit!"

They ran for the locker room, but with another wave of Joe Bob's hand, the door also slammed shut.

"No one leaves unless you're out!" Joe Bob roared. "And you're not out until we eat you!"

He launched his own fireball. My teammates scattered as it blasted a crater in the gym floor.

I reached for Riptide, which I always kept in my pocket, but then I realized I was wearing gym shorts. I had no pockets. Riptide was tucked in my jeans inside my gym locker. And the locker room door was sealed. I was completely defenseless.

Another fireball came streaking toward me. Tyson pushed me out of the way, but the explosion still blew me head over heels. I found myself sprawled on the gym floor, dazed from smoke, my tie-dyed T-shirt peppered with sizzling holes. Just across the center line, two hungry giants were glaring down at me.

"Flesh!" they bellowed. "Hero flesh for lunch!" They both took aim.

"Percy needs help!" Tyson yelled, and he jumped in front of me just as they threw their balls.

"Tyson!" I screamed, but it was too late.

Both balls slammed into him…but no…he'd caught them. Somehow Tyson, who was so clumsy he knocked over lab equipment and broke playground structures on a regular basis, had caught two fiery metal balls speeding towards him at a zillion miles an hour. He sent them hurtling back toward their surprised owners, who screamed, "BAAAAAAD!" as the bronze spheres exploded against their chests.

The giants disintegrated in twin columns of flame—a sure sign they were monsters, all right. Monsters don't die. They just dissipate into smoke and dust, which saves heroes a lot of trouble cleaning up after a fight.

"My brothers!" Joe Bob the Cannibal wailed. He flexed his muscles and his Babycakes tattoo rippled. "You will pay for their destruction!"

Obviously my destruction was already on the menu.

Another comet hurtled toward us. Tyson just had time to swat it aside. It flew straight over Coach Nunley's head and landed in the bleachers with a huge KA-BOOM!

Kids were running and screaming, trying to avoid the sizzling craters in the floor. Other were banging on the door, calling for help. Sloan himself stood petrified in the middle of the court, watching in disbelief as balls of death flew around him.

Coach Nunley still wasn't seeing anything. He tapped his hearing aid like the explosions were giving him interference, but kept his eyes on his magazine.

Surely the whole school could hear the noise. The headmaster, the police, somebody would come help us.

"Victory will be ours!" roared Joe Bob the Cannibal. "We will feast on your bones!"

"I think you're taking the game way to seriously!" I yelled at him. Oh, great, I thought. My inner Cammie is showing.

Another dodgeball hit the wall next to my head.

Yeah, it's showing, that's how most would react to her saying that.

I knew we were dead. Tyson couldn't deflect all those balls at once. His hands had to be seriously burned form blocking the first volley. Without my sword…

I had a crazy idea.

I ran towards the locker room.

"Move!" I told my teammates. "Away from the door."

Explosions behind me. Tyson had batted two of the balls back toward their owners and blasted them to ashes.

The left two giants still standing.

A third ball hurtled straight at me. I forced myself to wait—one Mississippi, two Mississippi—then dove aside as the fiery sphere demolished the locker room door.

Now, I figured that the built-up gas in most boys' locker rooms was enough to cause an explosion, so I wasn't surprised when the flaming dodgeball ignited a huge WHOOOOOOM!

The wall blew apart. Locker doors, socks, athletic supporters, and other various nasty personal belongings rained all over the gym.

In turned just in time to see Tyson punch Skull Eater in the face. The giant crumpled. But the last giant, Joe Bob, had wisly held on to his own ball, waiting for an opportunity. He threw just as Tyson was turning to face him.

"No!" I yelled.

The ball caught Tyson square in the chest. He slid the length of the court and slammed into the back wall, which cracked and partially crumbled on top of him, making a hole right onto Church Street. I didn't see how Tyson could still be alive, but he only looked dazed. The bronze ball was smoking at his feet. Tyson tried to pick it up, but he fell back, stunned, into a pile of cinder blocks.

"Well!" Joe Bob gloated. "I'm the last one standing! I'll have enough meat to bring Babycakes a doggie bag!"

He picked up another ball and aimed it at Tyson.

"Stop!" I yelled. "It's me you want!"

The giant grinned. "You wish to die first, young hero?"

I had to do something. Riptide had to be around her somewhere.

Then I spotted my jeans in a smoking heap of clothes right by the giant's feet. If I could only get there…I knew it was hopeless, but I charged.

The giant laughed. "My lunch approaches." He raised his arm to throw. I braced myself to die.

I'm sorry, Cammie. I don't want to leave you alone, but I have to do something.

Suddenly the giant's body went ridged. His expression changed from gloating to surprise. Right where his belly button should've been, his T-Shirt ripped open and he grew something like a horn—no, not a horn—the glowing tip of a blade.

The ball dropped out of his hand. The monster stared down at the knife that had just run him through from behind.

He muttered, "Ow," and burst into a cloud of green flame, which I figured was going to make Babycakes pretty upset.

Standing in the smoke was my friend Annabeth. Her face was grimy and scratched. She had a ragged backpack slung over her shoulder, her baseball cap tucked in her pocket, a bronze knife in her hand, and a wild look in her storm-gray eyes, like she'd just been cased a thousand miles by ghosts.

Matt Sloan, who'd been standing there dumbfounded the whole time, finally came to his senses. He blinked at Annabeth, as if he dimly recognized her from my notebook picture. "That's the girl…that's the girl—"

Annabeth suddenly raised her knife above him, as though she was going to stab him right in the middle of his forehead. Having been through enough near death for the day, he proceeded to pass out, hitting the floor with a loud thud.

Annabeth lowered her knife and gave him a swift kick to his ribs. "And you," she told him, "lay off my friend."

They gym was in flames. Kids were still running around screaming. I heart sirens wailed and a garbled voice over intercom. Through the glass windows of the exit doors, I could see the headmaster, Mr. Bonsai, wrestling with the with the lock, a crowd of teachers piling up behind him.

"Annabeth…"I stammered. "How did you…how long have you…"

"Pretty much all morning." She sheathed her bronzed knife. "I've been trying to find a good time to talk to you, but you were never alone."

"The shadow I saw this morning—that was—" My face felt hot. "Oh my gods, you were looking in my bedroom window?"

"There's no time to explain!" she snapped, though she looked a little red-faced herself. "I just didn't want to—"

"There," a woman screamed. The doors burst open and the adults came pouring in.

"Meet me outside," Annabeth told me. "And him." She pointed to Tyson, who was still dazed against the wall. Annabeth gave him a look of distaste that I didn't quite understand. "You'd better bring him."

"What?"

"No time!" she said. "Hurry!"

She put on her Yankees baseball cap, which was a magic gift from her mom, and instantly vanished.

That left me standing alone in the middle of the burning gymnasium when the headmaster came charging in the half the faculty and a couple of police officers.

"Percy Jackson?" Mr. Bonsai said. "What…how…"

Over by the broken wall, Tyson groaned and stood up from the pile of cinder blocks. "Head hurts."

Matt Sloan was coming around, too. He focused on me with a look of terror. "Percy did it, Mr. Bonsai! He set the whole building on fire. Coach Nunley will tell you! He saw it all!"

Coach Nunley had been dutifully reading his magazine, but just my luck—he chose that moment to look up when Sloan said his name. "Eh? Yeah. Mm-hmm."

The other adults turned toward me. I knew they would never believe me, even if I could tell them the truth.

I grabbed Riptide out of my ruined jeans, told Tyson, "Come on!" and jumped through the gaping hole in the side of the building.

The girl with long black hair that was as wavy and untamed as the sea stood in front of the burning school wing, her arms crossed, a blank look on her face. She wore a long, charcoal pea coat, sunglasses to shield her eyes from the sun that had hit itself away as soon as the rain started falling, and a pair of gray ankle boots with tall heels to make her look much taller then she actually was. For only being thirteen years old, the look made her seem much older, and she blended in with the adults around her.

An hour or two had passed since the incident happened, and still people hadn't calmed down in the slightest bit. Civilians flocked to the scene, like bees to flowers, and were buzzing around like them too. Except this one girl, who stood calmly, looking as if what she was watching happened every day, and was by this point boring. But if anyone at the scene knew her they'd have seen the smirk beneath the placid look.

Of course he gets in trouble the day I come back, she thought. I stopped by for him, and he makes it a point to disappear. Typical Percy.

She scanned the wreckage slowly, taking everything in. A giant hole in the gym wall, obviously. Would have taken a great amount of force. It burned slightly at the edges. Maybe there was a gas leak. Highly improbable. Some kid being stupid, brought something explosive. Again, unlikely.

Monsters. Now that's a feasible theory.

She could see a kid a few yards away making a bit of a scene. He was ranting and raving about giant kids who were not from Detroit, a girl threating him with a knife, and a loser named Percy Jackson blowing up the school gym, nearly killing everybody. Him in particular.

She studied him. Short, skinny, bratty looking. He had what used to be nice clothes, now covered in ash, and starting to char on the edges. From the accident. No other explanation there really. He got driven around anywhere he wanted to go, that much was clear by his shoes. Not a scratch, mud stain, or wearing on the heels. His hands had slight scratching, and his knuckles had tint of red in the folds—blood. Scratching most lightly from scrapping his knuckles across something sharp, or hitting a thin edge fast and hard. Glasses or braces, maybe something else. Blood, not his—no obvious open wounds, and he hasn't bothered to wash it off. Shows he took pride in what it symbolized. Based on his rude vocabulary, narcissistic behavior, and obvious dislike to the kids around him, he was most lightly a bully. 98% likely.

Her smirk grew into a mischievous smile. From what she heard from Percy, this boy was more than likely Matt Sloan. The school's residential rich kid and bully.

There was two choices that came to mind in that moment. Ignore the kid, get on with what she came to do: examine the damage and figure out a way to keep this off the news. The charitable way.

Or she could go a little off script. Do something a little stupid, something they wouldn't approve of in the field she was training for.

Charity when out the window.

First, to take care of business.

Pulling the ID wallet out of her pocket, she marched over to the group of adults that seemed to be in charge of the school.

"Hello," she said in a brisk tone, flashing them her ID. "I'm Alisa Fletching from the Harrison Gas Company. It seems the email didn't reach you in time. Thankfully, no one got hurt."

One man, who stood in the middle of the group, turned to stare at her. "Uh, hi, I'm Mr. Bonsai, the headmaster here. I'm sorry, but what email would you be referring to?"

"The one informing you there has been a gas leak in the gymnasium area." It may have been an implausible explanation, but it was the human way to believe in an easy explanation—no matter how unlikely—against no explanation.

"That was caused by a gas leak?" one man asked.

"Yes, a small one. I assure you, the Harrison Company has already started drawing up plans to fix this problem, so you best not worry too much about it. Though that kind of explosion would have had to had been caused by setting the gas aflame. A match, or lighter perhaps."

"Are you saying that one of the kids might have set the room on fire?" a woman asked.

One of the other men studied her. "Are you sure you're old enough to work for the Gas Company? You seem very young."

"I'll take that as a complement, Sir. If you have any problems with me, you can have one of the many police officers here look me up, and they can confirm that I do, in fact, work for the Gas Company."

They shared a look that said no one wanted to go through the trouble. Not that it would have matter anyway. All the IDs she'd ever made had government backups, and they could search for an Alisa Fletching, and find her right away. Twenty-five year old assistant in the Harrison Gas Company.

"Anyway, what I'm saying that it wouldn't have just exploded on its own. Something had to had set it aflame."

"Well, we've already gotten a witness claiming Percy did it," Mr. Bonsai told his colleagues, who all nodded in agreement.

"For legal purposes, you might want to check the students," she advised. "Just so it's not a 'he said, she said' kind of situation."

The adults seemed to share a look and agree. They all split up, and started searching the kids' pockets.

Her smile returned as they left. "That went well," she muttered to herself, pulling off her sunglasses, walking over to the boy who continued to make a fuss.

She slid her glasses into her pocket, looking around to make sure none of the adults she was just talking to saw what she was about to do.

Tapping the boy on the shoulder, she asked, "Matt Sloan, right?"

The boy turned, and stared at her, as though he was seeing someone else. Then he shook his head, still looking a bit suspicious. "Ah, yeah, that's me."

Her smile grew. "Oh, great. It's so great to finally meet you. I'm heard all about you."

"Ah, really?"

"Yep. And I've got something for you," she said, almost flirtatiously. She stepped closer, close enough to slip a lighter into his pocket unnoticed.

Mission complete

She stepped back a bit. "I can give it to you now, if you'd like."

"Uh…sure…"

The smile turned into a grin as her fist clenched at her side, before raising it. Her job was complete, but revenge had not yet been delivered. "By the way, my name's Cameron Jackson."

Chapter two guys! Feels great to have this completed. How'd you guys like it? I know that's it's Percy perspective again, and I'm sorry, it will be his again for the next chapter, then I swear it will be Cam's turn. I just wanted to get Percy's little pre-camp adventure out there, and since Cam didn't come until a few hours later, it would have been really hard to write what happened. I would have had to put up a chapter of Cammie taking tests all day. Not exactly prime reading material. Do you like what I've done with Cammie? She's a bit more mysterious in this chapter. After a full year at spy school, she's already starting to use the skills she learned there, but she's still got her little spark of rebellion. I'm really going to start tying in some of the spy stuff in this story.

So give me some feedback on what you did and didn't like about this chapter.

Stay nerdy my dearest readers.

P.S. I might be doing a short Youtube video on this last scene with Cammie. Like really short. Maybe I will, if I can get my friends help on it, and it would take months to complete most likely. So tell me what you think about that.