IMPORTANT NOTE: I made some major edits to the last chapter. If you're coming back to the story after having been caught up, make sure you read the note I left at the top of the last chapter. Enjoy.

When I got back to my room, Tyson was sprawled out on the couch, snoring away with a bowl of popcorn balanced precariously in his lap. Disney's Hercules was playing on the big screen. I stood there for a while and listened to the soft sounds of the TV. I'd honestly forgotten about that movie up until now, which surprised me. It used to be one of my favorites as a kid.

I remembered relating to Hercules pretty hard. I knew all too well that feeling of belonging somewhere else. I felt it every day at school, and even at home when Gabe was around. I remember feeling like I was meant to do something greater, something that would make everyone, including my real father, proud of me.

But those had just been childish delusions. My life wasn't a Disney movie. Heroes can't save everyone, and families aren't perfect. Facts I'd learned the hard way.

I left a couple of blankets folded up on the couch for Tyson and turned in for the night, feeling like I hadn't slept in weeks.

In the early morning, I showed Tyson to his own cabin, which was in a different section of the ship. The holo-peeps were out and about again, carrying out their various ghostly activities. Tyson wasn't too fond of them. I think he nearly had a heart attack when one of them walked straight through him. I tried to explain that they weren't real and couldn't hurt him, but he didn't let his guard down until we got to his cabin.

It was a pretty standard ocean-view room, nothing special. There was a bunk-bed in the corner next to a porthole window, and beside it an end table with a lamp and alarm clock. A small TV sat on top of a wooden dresser, and across from it was a comfy looking couch.

I felt kind of bad that it wasn't anywhere near as big as my room, but Tyson didn't seem to mind. He excitedly darted around the cabin like a kid on Christmas morning, inspecting all of his new possessions and taking a moment to gaze out of his window.

"Wow," he breathed, his big eye wide in fascination. He turned to me. "This is all mine?" he asked incredulously.

I grinned at him and nodded. The room didn't have much, but it was certainly big enough to fit a Cyclops, and I guessed anybody who'd been living in a cardboard box would be pretty stoked to even have a room. I couldn't believe how easily satisfied the guy was. He was certainly nothing like the greedy Cyclopes of legend.

Glancing at the clock, I realized with a start that I was five minutes late for my meet-up with Luke, and he was definitely someone you didn't want to keep waiting. I left Tyson to get himself situated. He looked a little nervous about being left alone, but he seemed to cheer up when I promised to give him a tour of the ship later on.

The sun was just starting to peek over the horizon when I got to the Promenade. Luke was sitting at one of the tables on the deck, a steaming hot mug of coffee in his left hand and a rather annoyed look on his face.

"You're late," he stated.

"Sorry. I was getting Tyson settled in."

Luke's eyebrows furrowed when I mentioned my half-brother, but fortunately he didn't say anything.

"Come on," he said, wasting no time.

I silently followed him along the ship and into the interior, where we took an elevator up a number of floors to the top. The metal doors slid open to reveal a room full of computers and monitors and a bunch of other nerdy stuff. The navigation room, I figured. I noted with disappointment that there wasn't actually a giant wooden steering wheel directing the ship. Getting to spin one of those was pretty high up on my bucket list.

At the other end of the room in front of a floor-to-ceiling glass window was a tall, slender woman. She wore dark robes that rippled around her like a dense fog, and there was a fur scarf the color of a rainy day wrapped snugly around her neck. A midnight-black labrador retriever dozed off at her feet.

The woman was hunched over some kind of crystal apparatus, cursing and fiddling around with its mechanisms. Light was being projected into the crystal, where it split out into multiple beams as if passing through a prism. The beams of light shone down onto the deck below, each one following a holographic guest around. I quickly deduced that this device was responsible for creating the ghostly passengers. Which meant that this woman working on it was…

"Lady Hecate," Luke greeted her, bowing.

I quickly followed his lead and did the same.

The titaness startled, and the crystal went crashing to the floor where it shattered into tiny glossy pieces, each one casting a reflection on the ceiling and walls like a disco party. The dog woke up with an alarmed "Woof!", and the thing that I had previously thought was a scarf came to life and jumped off her shoulders. It landed on the ground and hissed at us.

"She has a pet weasel?" I whispered to Luke.

"Polecat," he corrected.

"Urgh!" Hecate's face turned red as she stooped down to sweep the shards off the floor. Her image shimmered like a mirage. For a moment, I could've sworn she had three faces, but then they merged back into one. "To Hades with it all!"

She whirled on Luke, who flinched back, his face pale. "You better have a good reason for interrupting my work, son of Hermes," she said, her voice impatient.

Luke scowled, the mention of his father seeming to break him out of his stupor.

"Lord Kronos instructed us to come here," he told her. "He said you have a gift for us."

Her eyes narrowed as she regarded us. Her gaze rested upon me, and I felt as though she was peering straight into my mind. She pointed a bony finger at me.

"I have a gift for him," she said.

She threw her long, black hair back behind her shoulders and reached behind her neck, unclasping a golden chain that the weasel had been covering. From beneath her robe, she produced a beautiful golden amulet. A wavelike pattern lined the edges of the pendant, and in the middle was a large, green gem engraved with an image of a torch. As the light reflected off of it, the torch seemed to blaze, its smoke giving the gem a hazy glow.

"Stand," she ordered.

I did as I was told. The titaness glided forward and wrapped the chain around my neck, clasping it in the back. I stared at the pendant as she stepped away.

"This amulet is enchanted to safeguard its wearer from Mist magic. The Mist is my domain, of course, but there are plenty of gods who have begun to unravel its secrets. Dionysus was quite infamous back in the day for turning young heroes such as yourself into dolphins. Artemis has recently gone on a jackalope spree. As long as you wear this amulet, such magics will not affect you."

First Kronos's blessing, and now this. I was floored, wondering why I was suddenly so deserving of all these gifts. But then I heard my mother's voice in my head, and my manners kicked back in. I bowed to Hecate.

"Thank y—"

She raised a hand to stop me. "Do not thank me," she said. "Kronos asked me to craft this for you, and being his subordinate, I complied. He seems to think you are a valuable asset." Her eyes bored into mine once more, and I felt as if she were trying to pick apart my brain. "I, however, think you are more trouble than you are worth. Now, I must start again from scratch, and the sooner I'm off this gods forsaken ship, the better. Leave me."

I didn't need to be told twice. As grateful as I was for the amulet, Hecate kind of gave me the creeps. I made for the elevator, but Luke hesitated. He turned to Hecate, and for a moment it seemed like he was going to ask something, but then must've thought better of it and followed after me.

As the elevator doors drifted shut, I heard Hecate's brooding voice once more. "Some guard dog you are."

"Woof."

Training began. Luke's new training regimen was way harder than anything he ever gave me back at camp. We started with some basic sparring with wooden swords.

We had cleared an area and squared off next to the swimming pool. All the deck chairs and umbrella stands had been moved off to the side, leaving quite a bit of room for us to maneuver around. Luke came at me like a madman.

I was pretty shocked at the raw strength behind his blows. I deflected each of his strikes, but my muscles screamed in protest each time I did. Before, he had been trying to teach me control and efficiency, but now it seemed he was just trying to overpower me. It didn't feel like training at all.

There was only so much you could do with practice swords, though. A few minutes later, cracks began to form in the wood. After a particularly intense horizontal swipe aimed at my midsection, Luke's sword crashed into mine and splintered, scattering wood chips into the pool. Mine wasn't doing much better.

Luke frowned, examining what was left of his sword handle. As I gasped for breath, he calmly strode over to the table where he'd set down his gear and drew Backbiter from its sheath.

"That's enough of a warm up, I'd say. Ready to begin?"

I gulped, getting the sense that Luke wasn't about to hold back just because we were now using real, lethal swords. I tossed my wooden stick aside and nervously uncapped Riptide, listening to the blade elongate. Luke approached, and I eyed his weapon.

It was the third time I'd seen Backbiter, and its aura still made me uneasy. It gleamed in two different colors, one grey, one bronze. There was a perfectly straight line down the middle of the blade where the two materials melded together. Celestial bronze and tempered steel, capable of killing mortals and immortals both.

I sensed a tragedy about the sword. It was cursed. Someone must have died forging it. I couldn't tell you how I knew that, but it was true.

I did my best to steady my breathing and nodded to Luke. I raised Riptide and took a defensive stance. My heart hammered in my chest. It was just training, right? Luke wouldn't hurt me too badly. At least that was what I tried to tell myself.

We'd become good friends over the summer, and he'd even said he considered me to be family. But after I got back to the ship the previous night with Tyson and my stepfather's head, it felt like something changed. Maybe he was mad about my leaving, or maybe he was just grumpy that there was a Cyclops on board. I still didn't know why he despised Cyclopes so much, but that might've explained his foul mood.

Backbiter flashed, and my adrenaline spiked. I thought for sure I was about to be sporting a brand new scar, but then something happened. That icy feeling that crept over me when I touched Kronos's sarcophagus returned. It was the same sensation as the one I felt on the beach with Ares, where the world seemed to take a momentary breath of malice.

Luke's sword came at me in slow motion, a vertical slash from top to bottom that I was able to sidestep with ease. I even had to wait a moment for it to fall to the proper height before I could attempt a disarming maneuver. I wrapped my blade around his hilt and thrust downward, the first move Luke had ever taught me. Backbiter fell to the ground like a leaf from a tree.

Time returned to its normal flow. Luke stared at his now empty hand, devoid of all lethal weaponry. Mouth agape, he looked at me.

"I didn't even see… How did you…"

I stared at the fallen weapon on the floor, just as confused as Luke. How did I do that, exactly? "Um, Kronos's blessing, I think. It distorts time or something."

That was about as near as I could figure. Luke pursed his lips, contemplating. "Again," he said.

He picked up his sword and together, we sparred for a few more rounds, but I wasn't able to get the blessing to activate again. I wondered if there was a cooldown, or if I had to do something specific to activate it that I hadn't noticed before.

By the time we were finished, I was covered in cuts and bruises, but a quick dip in the pool fixed those right up and left me feeling rejuvenated. That energy didn't last too long though. Luke then made me run the perimeter of the main deck until my legs gave out, followed by so many push-ups that I was certain I'd pushed the ship off course a little bit.

The last bit of training was my favorite. It involved sitting in the pool and practicing moving water around. 'Hydrokinesis', as Luke called it. He was curious to see how my abilities worked, but honestly, I'd never given it much thought before. The water had always just done what I wanted it to do in the past. It didn't require much concentration on my part.

But now, as I sat in the pool and morphed the water into different shapes, I felt that practicing like this would really serve to fine-tune my abilities. Luke watched impassively from his hippocampus inner tube, aviator shades covering his eyes and a red-orange drink in his hand.

"More," he said.

"Come again?"

"Pick up more water. I wanna see what your one-rep-max is."

The water that I'd been shaping into hydro-sphinxes and aqua-ferrets fell back into the pool. Taking in a deep breath, I closed my eyes and extended my focus into the water. I could feel it flowing all around me like a sixth sense. There was a familiar tug in my gut, and the water around me started to rise as I activated my Jedi mind powers.

Luke and his floaty began to descend as I lifted the water out of the pool. After a few seconds, the strain on my gut became painful, and I started to lose focus. I managed to drain the pool about halfway before the feeling in my gut dissipated. The water roared as it crashed back down into the basin.

I opened my eyes to see a not-at-all amused Luke. His hair had flattened itself against his forehead and was sopping wet. The glass in his hand was now filled with water.

"You spilled my tequila sunrise."

"You're too young to drink anyway," I pointed out.

"We're in international waters!" He let out a sigh. "Nevermind. Do it again. Without putting me through the spin cycle this time."

I tried to summon up the strength to lift all that water again, but found I couldn't even drain the pool a fraction of what I'd done before. I was left with an overwhelming feeling of fatigue. I couldn't tell you what muscles controlled hydrokinesis, as nothing in particular ached. I just felt weakened and tired.

Luke nodded as if expecting this. "It's probably like strength training. The more you use it, the better you'll get at controlling it. You'll just have to keep exercising your abilities, then. We'll try again tomorrow."

Abandoning his floaty and swimming to the edge, he hefted himself out of the water. He pulled his shades off before shaking out his hair, making it stick up at random angles.

"Come find me later tonight," he said. "The Dove will have some news for us."

I raised a brow, unfamiliar with the name. "The Dove?"

Luke flashed a grin at me that said, 'I know something you don't.'

I was about halfway back to my room, ready for a nice long nap, when I remembered with a groan that I'd promised Tyson I'd show him around.

I knocked twice on his door and waited, but there was no answer. In my bone-tired state, I figured he was just asleep and turned to go back to my room, but then my stupid brain started thinking of all the ways he could get hurt on this ship. What if he wandered out and got lost? Or got spooked by one of the holograms and fell overboard? Or got assaulted by Hecate's weasel?

I had to go find him.

It took me about an hour of increasingly panicked searching, but I finally found him in the last place I would've expected. He had seemed so afraid of loud noises and his own shadow that I didn't think he'd even go near a place as hectic as the engine room, but there he was, hunched over an open panel and tinkering with something inside.

"What are you doing?" I asked over the cacophony of expelled steam and grinding metal.

Tyson startled and smacked his head on the panel above him, leaving a dent in the alloy.

"Ow," he muttered, rubbing the back of his head. He turned and looked at me, and his face lit up. At least someone was glad to see me today.

"Percy!" he said giddily. "I fix engine! We sail much faster now."

I blinked, not even knowing that there had been a problem with it in the first place. I remembered what Luke told me about Cyclopes being great at forging. That must have extended to working with machinery as well. It was funny. Tyson could barely form complete sentences, yet he had the technical know-how of a professional engineer. An idea popped into my mind.

"Hey, how would you like a job, big guy?"

"A job?" he asked, his big eye widening.

"Yeah. Tyson, First Engineer of the Princess Andromeda. Sounds pretty good, right?"

He clapped his hands together and nodded enthusiastically. "Yes, I am good at fixing things! When do I start?"

"You already have. And once we start recruiting more people, you can put a crew together to help you out."

Tyson was absolutely brimming with happiness as I led him around the ship, giving him the same tour that Luke had given me two days prior. I made sure to steer clear of the navigation room, but I managed to show him pretty much everything else the ship had to offer. He definitely enjoyed the sauna, but I don't think anything topped the engine room for him.

We ended the tour at the same restaurant I'd eaten at with Luke. We made some idle chit chat for a few minutes as we waited for the staff to come out and take our orders. Then I remembered that the staff was entirely holographic and the magic device that created them was broken. So, we raided the pantries in the kitchen and served ourselves.

I wasn't sure what was considered a healthy, balanced meal for a Cyclops, but Tyson seemed to have no problems finding his own food. I watched in astonishment as he scarfed down a chicken. Yeah, I mean the entire chicken. Raw. Bones and all.

I found some hamburger meat and tried to make myself a double cheeseburger, but I'd never really cooked before so they came out misshapen and burnt, and not at all like the ones at camp. Another skill I'd have to add to my training regimen.

We parted ways after dinner, each of us heading back to our respective rooms and wishing the other goodnight. I was ready to sleep for an entire week at this point, so you can imagine my annoyance when Luke pulled me into his room as I walked by.

"What?" I asked irritably.

That was when I noticed the shimmering image hovering behind him, dead center in the middle of a rainbow made from the mist of the hot faucet. A familiar, pretty girl was looking at me through the mist, but her image was grainy, like it couldn't buffer fast enough and had to drop the resolution.

My eyebrows knitted in confusion. "Silena?"

She smiled. "Hi, Percy."

I glanced back to Luke, perplexed, but he just gave me a crooked sideways grin. "I see you've already met our Dove," he said.

"B-but…" I stammered.

My face must have been quite comical, because Silena was giggling now. "Relax, I'm on your side. I'm not going to tell anyone where you are, if that's what you're wondering."

"But Iris. She's the messenger of the gods. If you told her where to find us, then that means she'll—"

"Arke," Silena interjected.

"Come again?"

"This is an Arke Message, not an Iris Message."

I stared at her dumbly. Luke must have finally gotten enough satisfaction out of my visible confusion, because he took that moment to butt into the conversation and explain things.

"Arke is Iris's twin sister, though I'm not surprised you've never heard of her. Not many people have. It's a sad story. During the first Titan war, the two sisters got into a little spat and went their separate ways. Iris chose to serve as messenger for the gods, and Arke became the messenger for the titans. Evidently, Zeus never heard the phrase, 'Don't shoot the messenger,' because when the war was over and the titans defeated, he tore off Arke's wings and cast her into Tartarus. Only recently did her wings regrow, allowing her to escape."

Silena's image flickered. "Ever seen a double rainbow, Percy? I'm sure you have. That really faint rainbow underneath the clear one is Arke, struggling to be reunited with her sister."

"Is that why you look like you're on one of those vintage antenna TVs?" I asked.

She laughed lightheartedly, a pleasant, joyful sound that made my chest feel light. It sort of reminded me of my mom's laugh. "Yes, exactly. Her wings haven't fully healed yet. Once they have, it'll be just like an Iris Message." Her face turned serious. "But I didn't call you guys to give you a history lesson. I have some news."

This caught Luke's attention. He stepped closer to the image, a look of concern on his face. "Good or bad?" he asked.

"Good, mostly. We have a new recruit."

Luke's eyes widened. "You're recruiting people? Silena, you have to be caref—"

"Chill," she said. "I'm a good judge of character. I decided to trust you, after all, didn't I?"

Luke looked like he wanted to argue, but then his face softened. "Who's the new guy?"

"Chris Rodriguez."

Luke rubbed at his chin, a look of recognition on his face. "Chris. He was a member of Cabin 11 for a few years. Unclaimed. I remember how frustrated he was that his godly parent never revealed themselves to him. Decent with any weapon you hand him, and strong enough to give Clarisse a run for her money in arm wrestling. Yeah, he'd make a good addition to our ranks."

"Exactly my train of thought," said Silena.

Chris Rodriguez. I recognized the name, but it was hard for me to put it to a face. I'd only been in Cabin 11 for about a week, and I hadn't had enough time to figure out who was who. I had been mostly preoccupied with keeping people from stealing my Minotaur horn.

"Where do you want to pick him up?" the daughter of Aphrodite asked. "It probably wouldn't be a good idea to sail past camp, especially with the gods in such a tizzy about Percy's disappearance."

A bad idea popped into my head, and I ended up spilling it before I could stop myself. "Tell him to go to Montauk," I said.

Luke turned and shot me a questioning look. I mentally scolded myself. "My mom… she owned a cabin there," I explained. "We had to leave in a hurry the last time we visited, so it should be unlocked, and it's not too far from camp. Chris can meet us there."

I didn't know if I wanted to see that place again. It had been a private getaway for me and my mom. A place where we wouldn't be bothered by Smelly Gabe or anyone else for that matter. The memories of my last trip there were too fresh, too painful. Why hadn't I just suggested any of the other random beaches around Camp Half-Blood?

Silena gave me a tiny, sympathetic smile. "I'll tell him you'll meet him there tomorrow night. Does that work?"

I bit my lip, but nodded. "Tomorrow night it is, then," Luke affirmed. "Is there anything else you wanted to tell us, Silena?"

She shook her head. "There haven't really been any new developments. The year-rounders here know you two disappeared, but Chiron hasn't given them any details about it. That hasn't stopped them from coming up with rumors, though. A lot of them think you're on a top-secret quest to catch the Lightning Thief."

"The Lightning Thief?" I asked, eyebrows raised.

"Mh-hm. It's what they're calling the guy who stole Zeus's master bolt. See, the campers still don't know who took it. As far as they know, the thief is still at large somewhere out there, and judging by the freak weather, they think he's struck at the gods again."

"They're not too far from the truth, then," I said.

Silena's head snapped to the side, her attention fixing itself on something off-screen. Her image fluttered. Her voice fell to a hushed whisper that sounded garbled. "Someone's coming, gotta go. Tomorrow night at Montauk."

She swiped her hand through the image and disappeared.