Percy

XIII

Winter 2010

As it turns out, a makeshift bed constructed from a bunch of packages isn't too bad to rest on, as long as you made sure none of the packages had sharp objects or boxes inside. My pro tip? Check the label to see if the sender is a clothing company. Sure, it might be a little challenging if you have dyslexia, but it's very worth it.

I guess I should get you up to speed. Bobby had passed out the second Dido started to resemble a shish-kabob. We didn't know how long the madness trance he'd put on everyone else in the room would last—it could have been over in a matter of seconds or perhaps the damage was permanent—but we didn't wait to find out.

Dakota carefully carried Gwen while I slung Bobby over my shoulder as we high-tailed it out of the courthouse. We found a FedEx truck left unattended, Dakota did a little hot-wiring, and then we were back on the road in no time.

To my left at the moment, Bobby and Gwen were still unconscious on the floor of the truck. We'd bandaged up Gwen's wound and poured some nectar down her throat, so she would probably be okay sometime in the next day or two.

That left me and Hazel as the only conscious ones in the back. Since leaving the courthouse, Melody had looked shaken up and pale. Hazel was giving her the cold shoulder. I know it had to have been bad because, when we were getting ready to climb into the truck, Melody took one look at Hazel, who was already in the rear, and decided she'd rather fare the ride with her ex-boyfriend in the cab.

After spending the better part of the hour struggling to read packaging labels, I had a haphazard bed roll courtesy of American Eagle, Lululemon, Nike, and J. Crew.

Hazel was leaning her back up against a large Amazon box, facing forward. For a second, I thought she had dozed off, but then she looked up at me silently.

I kept replaying the events of the night in my head over and over, trying to make sense of it all. The image of Bobby's eyes completely black as he watched Dido gruesomely kill herself was burned into my brain. I could barely comprehend that it was the same guy who was snoring quietly on the floor.

I held Hazel's gaze as I asked, "Have you ever seen Bobby do that before?"

She hesitated before shaking her head. "Not like that. I mean, there was a time when he did something where he made a couple of giants who had been following us get a little loopy, but nothing on that scale." She paused before continuing, "It was terrifying, right? Like that wasn't just me?"

I nodded my head in reassurance. "It wasn't just you."

Hazel cast her eyes over Gwen before saying, "I'm still glad that he did it, though. Otherwise, I know she wouldn't have survived it."

I noticed Hazel's jaw tighten up at the end of the sentence, and decided to pry a little more. "What did you mean when you asked Melody to sing?"

Hazel's eyes quickly flickered to the shut door that separated us from the cab of the truck, double-checking that she wouldn't be heard. "She used to do this thing… I can't quite describe it."

"What sort of thing?"

"She's a great fighter and all, don't get me wrong, but she and her twin sister could almost work magic by singing. They once put a small army to sleep, and they summoned woodland animals to fight along us, and another time they literally sang until a windstorm that threatened to knock us out of the sky ceased to exist."

I raised my brows. "That's impressive."

Hazel looked at the wall. "It's like they could charm anything to bend to their will with just a short tune. She could have stopped what happened in that courtroom, if she had wanted to."

I took a moment to process this information, reflecting on how panicked Melody had looked when Hazel had asked her to sing. My eyebrows knit together. "Her twin… Were the two of them like carbon copies of each other?"

"They were identical in looks, but you could tell them apart easily," Hazel scowled. "I don't know how to tell you this, but the Melody you've met isn't the one I grew up with."

I raised my head inquisitively.

I didn't even have to say anything for Hazel to continue. "She was so rigid. She trained harder than anyone there, except maybe Jason. I think that's why they got along so well: they both acted like they had something to prove all the time. Melody was unrelentlessly determined to be better than everyone else. She didn't really care about anything else other than moving up the ranks.

"Harmony kind of just went along with it, but she was never as intense." Hazel's eyes fell to her lap. "They trained together, but Harmony didn't put herself under as much pressure. If I'm being honest, Harmony was way more likeable and personable—really like a ray of sunshine had turned into a person. We were really good friends..."

She was silent for a few seconds. I met her gaze. "I'm sorry for your loss. All the losses from that battle in the summer."

Hazel gave me a small, sad smile. "I mean, obviously Melody took it the worst. Didn't eat for three days and then started to talk about how it should have been her; that she had been the one who'd angered that individual giant who ended up throwing the spear so she should've been the one who died."

I felt a heavy tug in my gut, like I wasn't a stranger to survivor's guilt. "That's a hard thought to live with."

Hazel shook her head, fidgeting with her hands. "The thing is though: Melody probably would have survived it. She had always trained harder. Her reflexes were a little bit sharper. If it had been aimed at Melody, they both would still be alive. To me, that's the worst part; because she wasn't lying—the giant had wanted to kill Melody and probably just got the two mixed up. Unfortunately."

I didn't have a chance to probe any further because Hazel then turned away and rested her head on a package she was using as a pillow. Honestly, I don't think I had a heart to keep asking questions anyway.

I tried to relax while lying on the packages. When I fell asleep, my dreams were anything but peaceful.

I started out on a school bus, which was driving through some busy city. I was sharing my cracked, uncomfortable bench seat with a boy who was dodging pieces of a sandwich that were being hurtled at his head from a redheaded girl a few rows back.

I looked down at my arms, but my whole body was smaller than normal, as if I had shrunk. Looking around at all the other students, I realized that I was just a younger version of myself. Pre-pubescent. I shuddered at the thought.

I fixed my gaze out of the window. Above the skyscrapers we were driving past, the sky was churning and grey as if it was preparing for an epic storm.

Suddenly, the boy in the seat next to me turned toward me. He was a little scrawny and his cheeks were riddled with acne, his curly hair bursting out from the edges of his hat. He looked me right in the eyes and asked, "Percy, where are you?"

"Uh, I'm right here," I replied as if it was obvious, but then the dream changed scenes.

I was back in the courthouse in Carthage, standing in the hallway with all the murals. I walked through slowly, examining each painted scene. A ship leaving the port of a city in the pitch black of night. A depiction of Dido throwing herself onto an altar with an upturned sword as fires broke out in the city outside of her window. A pair of twin brothers being cared for by Lupa the wolf.

"Romulus and Remus."

I jumped at the sound of the voice, my head snapping in its direction.

Hera—I mean, Juno—was standing beside me in a goatskin cloak with her black hair cascading down her shoulders. For a goddess, she looked terrible: her skin looked grey and sickly. There were bags under her eyes like she hadn't had a wink of sleep in weeks. Did gods even need to sleep?

Her subpar condition almost made me feel bad for being so angry at the sight of her. My hands closed into fists. "What are you doing here?"

She ignored me. "You know, people talk about the Trojan Aeneas as if he was the father of Rome—Pater Aeneas—but the twin brothers Romulus and Remus were truly behind the foundation of the empire. Well, moreso it was Romulus."

I recalled the myth about the two brothers. They were sons of Mars whose mother was forced to give them up, and they ended up being raised by the she-wolf for a while. There are some other parts in the middle that I can't quite remember, but I know the story ends with the twins arguing, leading to the death of one. Presumably Remus.

I shook my head. "Why are you telling me this?"

Hera looked me up and down scornfully. "I'm using a lot of my energy—and I don't have much of it— to be here, so you should be more grateful, Percy. But I am telling you this because you need to understand this story to understand how your group will succeed on this quest."

I forced myself to focus on the painting in front of me, my vision swimming with anger. This woman had the audacity to pluck me out of my life and into a whole new messy scenario and wanted me to act like she was doing me a favour? My body felt hot with rage. "Well, I don't get what you're trying to say. Can you give me the sparknotes version?"

She didn't respond for a few moments. When my head snapped back in her direction to confront her about her silence, I realized that she was gone.

I turned back to the wall, but the painting had changed entirely. It was the image I had seen on the way into Dido's banquet hall: the one of the boy on the black pegasus soaring through the night sky.

Except this time, the boy on the pegasus wasn't me. It was a blonde guy who looked weirdly familiar even though I was certain we'd never met before.

I jolted awake when the truck suddenly stopped. Packages went flying around and a sizable Barnes & Noble order fell squarely on my chest, knocking the air out of my lungs.

Hazel sleepily rubbed at her eyes and, for the first time since Carthage, Bobby and Gwen stirred.

Bobby's voice was rough when he asked, "Whoa, where are we?"

The truck doors at the back swung open dramatically, the light searing into my eyes from the morning sun, which must have just come up over the horizon. I squinted through the blinding light.

"Dakota, will you please slow down!" I heard Melody yell.

Dakota's silhouette appeared in the doorway as he made a beeline in my direction. He grabbed the collar of my coat and dragged me up until I was scrambling to stand. He sneered down at me, "Who the hell are you?"

"You're being so dramatic right now!" Melody complained for a second time. "Come on, put him down!"

Dakota didn't listen to her. Instead, he pulled me along, half-asleep and disoriented until we were outside of the vehicle, and then he shoved me down to the icy ground. I surveyed our surroundings: it appeared that we were in the empty parking lot of a high school. Maybe it was the weekend? I realized that I had not been keeping track of the days of the week since I'd first woken up outside of Mel's barn, which felt like a lifetime ago.

Above me, Melody shoved Dakota in the chest—hard. "What the hell is wrong with you?"

"What's wrong with me?" He responded, seething. He pushed her back even harder. "What's wrong with you? Why do you trust this guy so much? We know nothing about him."

The others were climbing out the back of the truck, anxious to see what all the commotion was about. I definitely could have gotten up, but I felt like I was safer staying on the ground.

Dakota pointed down at me. "You know what I saw in that courthouse? A painting of this guy on a pegasus amongst a bunch of images of New York: the place he so conveniently said is the destination of our quest."

I felt my throat close, realizing what was happening. "That's not—"

"—And," Dakota continued, "We've seen multiple mortals from the past who certainly died a long time ago come back from the Underworld, claiming to serve some patron who wants to harm us."

A look of contemplation started to emerge on Gwen and Hazel's faces. A shiver ran down my spine.

"Melody, you have no idea where this guy came from when he showed up outside your house," Dakota stated. "He claims he can't remember anything, but how do we know that's true? What if he was involved in Jason's disappearance and now he's trying to lead us into a trap in New York, the one place we know we aren't supposed to go!"

Melody's eyes widened slightly as they flickered between Dakota and me. She opened her mouth to speak, shut it, and then opened it again. "You're making a lot of assumptions here, Dakota. Let's hear him out. The painting might not even have been of him."

She looked at me with pleading eyes, as if begging me to prove Dakota wrong.

I closed my eyes. "He's not lying about the painting; I'm pretty sure that it was me."

Hazel audibly gasped in the background while Gwen and Bobby narrowed their eyes at me. Dakota's expression was smug, but Melody genuinely looked devastated.

"But the rest of that isn't true," I reaffirmed. "I really don't know anything about my past life, but I think I'd know if I'd died. I can't say why the dream told me we needed to go to New York or why I was associated with the city in the mural, but I swear I've done nothing to try to mislead you."

I looked at Melody desperately. "You said so yourself: I had clearly been trained before. What if I fought in a battle that I can't even remember now? Hera told me she took all of my memories for a reason."

"Hera?" Dakota's eyes narrowed. "You should've said Juno. I'm telling you guys: something about him is off!"

I didn't avert my gaze from Melody, who was looking intently at me as if she was in pain before she turned her head away. I glanced at the others: Bobby looked quizzical, like he wasn't sure what to make of this information.

"I don't know what I need to say to convince you I'm on your side, but I swear I am," I said, my throat feeling tight.

Melody made eye contact with me again. For a second, I thought that she was going to tell me to go to hell, but then I noticed tears starting to well up in her eyes. "I think he's telling the truth."

Dakota groaned in exasperation. "There's literally no reason for you to believe him. Why are you so obsessed with this one person? You trust him more than your closest friends? Are you serious?"

Melody kept her eyes on me, a tear sneaking down her cheek. "I believe him because all of those paintings depicted heroes in great battles. Dakota, if you hadn't been so obsessively focused on finding a reason to hate Percy, you would have noticed that there were images of the fight on Mount Othrys, too. I saw Jason defeating Krios. I saw my sister die again in that mural."

The group went silent. Gwen looked like she was about to step in and speak, but then she stopped herself. Bobby and Hazel suddenly found their shoes very interesting.

Melody wiped her cheek, turning to look at Dakota. "He's telling the truth; there's just a piece of the puzzle we're missing." She took a deep breath before she turned back to me. "Besides, I don't think he's smart enough to mastermind a scheme that big. He thought that a Midwestern small town would actually have a monarchy."

Under normal circumstances, I would have reacted indignantly to the comment, but I understood she'd actually made it for my benefit.

It worked. Gwen's lips twitched as if she was holding back a giggle. Bobby's face broke out into a grin as he laughed. "True. Man, that was hilarious."

Dakota's face twisted in a mixture of rage and disbelief, but before he could say something else damning about be, Melody was extending her arm out to help pull me up. Once I was upright, she gave me a look like, I know I got you out of this one, but you have some explaining to do.

However, I was shocked by her next move. Melody walked over to Dakota, who was staring into the horizon with a borderline murderous glare, and gently placed her hand on his shoulder. She stared at him so intently that it was almost magnetic: he couldn't avoid her gaze.

She looked him in the eyes, humming a low sound so quietly I almost thought that I was making it up. She raised her hand to stroke his cheek with her thumb, and softly said, "You've been up for way too long. You must be exhausted. Get some rest in the back."

I waited for him to push her away, but instead his frame relaxed. "You're right. I need to sleep."

Unceremoniously, he climbed through the backdoor of the truck, taking over my makeshift bedroll of online clothing orders.

Melody looked at the others pointedly. "Well? What are you waiting for? Climb in. I'm driving."

When Dakota had stopped the car to interrogate me, we apparently were in a small town off the highway near the border of Illinois and Indiana. Luckily, it was a small town with a McDonald's though.

Melody had dragged me to the front to sit in the cab with her and, frankly, I was grateful for it. Now I was sitting in the passenger seat, chowing down my second Bacon 'n Egg McMuffin, and staring at the stretch of highway before us.

Melody had one hand on the wheel and the other was holding a hashbrown.

"I thought that only Bobby, Gwen, and Dakota had driver's licenses. Why are you behind the wheel?" I asked.

She rolled her eyes. "I can drive, I just don't have a license yet. Besides, shouldn't I be the one interrogating you?"

Fair point. I leaned back in my seat, feeling a queasiness in my stomach that probably had nothing to do with the greasy food I'd just wolfed down. "I mean, you can try but I really feel just as in the dark as you do."

"So you really have no recollection of ever being in New York?" She asked.

I shook my head. "None. All I know is that looking at those murals of New York, I felt like I should've known the people depicted in the images but I couldn't say where from. I saw myself there and it was like I'd been slapped."

Her eyebrows knit together. "Bizzare."

"And then I had this dream where I was in the same place, but the image of me in the mural been replaced by a different boy. A blonde one."

Her jaw dropped. "A blonde guy?"

I nodded. "Yeah: short neat hair, similar frame to me. I felt like I should know who he was even though we had never met."

She swallowed hard, and then she looked like she was going to be sick. "The murals opposite each other in that hallway were of our battle at Othrys and you were looking at something in New York and… I think there's some sort of parallel going on here. Because that guy you're describing sounds like Jason."

"Okay, but why would Jason replace me in the picture?" I asked.

She pursed her lips together tightly. "Because… I mean this is insane but… I think you replaced him here. Like there was some sort of switch that happened, which means he's wherever you came from."

"You mean I'm—"

"I'm saying that you're probably from the New York area, and that Jason is probably there right now. There might even be a whole other Roman camp we've never met before. Did anything else happen in your dream that could have been a clue?"

I didn't know how to tell her about the part of my dream where I was on the school bus, because I couldn't even make sense of that myself. Instead, I said a half-truth. "Juno visited me to show me an image of Romulus and Remus as babies and told me that I had to understand their story to succeed on this quest."

I watched a series of expressions play out over her features in a matter of seconds: confusion, understanding, and then a sick sense of dread. She looked up to me in horror. "What if she was equating the two of you to the twin brothers?"

"I don't see how we could be twin brothers if we have different dads."

She scowled at my comment. "What if she meant metaphorically? Just two guys who are pretty equally balanced?" Her expression darkened, a desperately sad look in her eyes. "What if one of you has to kill the other?"