Disclaimer: I do not own Rick Riordan, the Percy Jackson books, characters, series, movies, or anything else you may recognize.

Chapter Thirty-One

See The World In An Endless Sleep

Nico sent Mrs. O'Leary with me (he said she liked me, and that I'd need her help), and as soon as we were out of the tunnel, I found the nearest payphone and left a message on Annabeth's cell phone asking for her to bring as many campers as possible to the Empire State Building. I explained that something was going to happen by tonight and we need to defend Olympus with everything we had.

I hailed a taxi and headed towards the Empire State Building where hopefully the rest of Camp Half-Blood would meet me. As the taxi got close to the building, I saw three white vans with "Delphi Strawberry Fields" written on the side of them. When the drivers saw Mrs. O'Leary loping behind my taxi, the vans quickly pulled over. I quickly got out of the cab and made my way over.

I was ecstatic to see just how many people had come. The only ones missing were the Ares cabin. Clarisse was a stubborn idiot and as far as I was concerned, we didn't need her. Even Chiron had come, his horse half compacted into his magic wheelchair. Everyone looked nervous – having so many demigods in one spot made us like a giant homing beacon for all the monsters in the northeastern United States.

"You look like crap. When was the last time you slept, Seaweed Brain?" Annabeth asked, giving me a quick hug. She was dressed in black camouflage with her celestial bronze knife strapped to her arm and a laptop bag slung over her shoulder. Over the same shoulder was the bag Andee usually carried. "Where were you? We were all panicking."

"Nowhere important," I said distractedly. "Where's Grover? And why do you have Andee's bag?"

"Grover is gathering nature spirits to help fight. And I have Andee's bag because she has a plethora of healing tools what we'll need when people are injured," Annabeth said.

"Any word on her?" I asked, hoping Annabeth had seen something through their connection, or that someone had caught a glimpse of her in public. Annabeth shook her head sadly, so I turned to address the rest of the group. "Thank you all for coming. Chiron, after you."

"I came only to wish you luck, my boy. I make it a point to never visit Olympus unless I've been summoned. I shall try to find as many allies as possible among my brethren. In the meantime, you are the one who called the campers here, Percy. That makes you the leader."

Even if I had wanted to protest, there would have been no way. Everyone's eyes were already on me, waiting for me to explain the plan. "Okay, so like my message to Annabeth said, something bad is going to happen tonight – some sort of trap. We need to get an audience with Zeus and convince him to defend the city. Remember, we can't take no for an answer."

There was still a spy in our midst so I wasn't telling the full truth, but it would attract Kronos. It was time we started this thing.

We all walked to the Empire State building and I immediately told the security guard we needed access to the six-hundredth floor. It didn't take long to convince him what a stupid idea it was to have fifty-some demigods standing in his lobby. We split into two groups to go up the elevator – I led the first one. We started down the pathway to the palace and everything was strangely silent and empty. We continued walking until Pollux cried out.

"Look! What is that?"

Everyone froze as we watched blue lights streak towards Olympus like comets. It was like they were coming from all over the city, but as we got closer, they started to fizzle out.

"Like infrared scopes," Lee said, before cursing. "We're being targeted."

"Get to the palace!" I ordered and everyone started running. No one was guarding the hall of the gods. The doors were wide open and the room was empty except for one goddess – Hestia.

"Lady Hestia," I greeted, bowing to her. The rest of my friends followed suit.

"I see you went through with the plan," Hestia said, choosing her words carefully. "You must be careful, though. You have gained much on your journey, but you are still blind to the most important truth. Perhaps a glimpse is in order."

"What is she talking about?" Annabeth whispered. I stared into Hestia's eyes and an image rushed into my mind. I could see two half-bloods crouched in the shadows, a fourteen-year-old Luke and a twelve-year-old Thalia. This was a vision from when Luke and Thalia were on the run before Grover found them. They both looked thin and hungry with wide eyes like they were used to being attacked.

This was when they found Annabeth because when they pulled back a tin, they found a much younger version of Annabeth wearing flannel pajamas. The little girl kicked and fought against Luke's grip, trying to get away. He calmed her down by explaining they were monster fighters too, and then told her they needed a fighter as fierce and clever as she was. Luke gave her a knife – the same knife she had been using for as long as I had known her – and told her that it took someone clever to wield a knife. She seemed to like that idea, and Thalia and Luke told her they weren't going to turn her into her family because they were her family now.

The scene shifted to show the trio several days – or maybe even weeks – later running from something. Annabeth had changed into clothes that were a little too big for her and Luke held her hand to keep her steady. Thalia took the rear, holding up her shield and limping as fast as she could. They scrambled to a white colonial house that Luke grudgingly admitted to his companions was his house, and that if it wasn't an emergency, he wouldn't have gone anywhere near it. A loud voice boomed that he should not have come home and then the vision stopped.

I had to shake my head a bit to remember where I was and when I looked at Hestia, I could tell that she expected me to know why she had shown me that. I remembered hearing once along my quests that to understand your enemy, you had to know their family. I still didn't quite understand why she had shown me those scenes, though.

"I don't understand," I said quietly, trying to pull myself together. Whatever those visions meant, I had to stay focused. "We're on urgent business, Lady Hestia. We need to see –"

"We know what you need," a man's voice said. I shuddered because it was the same booming voice from the vision. A god shimmered into existence next to Hestia. He had curly salt and pepper hair, elfish features, and held a long staff intertwined with two snakes.

"I will leave you now," Hestia said, quickly vanishing. If I could get out of there that quickly, I probably would too.

"Hello, Percy," he said and he seemed annoyed with me. I wonder if he knew about the vision I'd just had. I wondered what had happened after he had caught Luke because I remember asking Luke if he had ever met his dad and he replied with 'once'. I guess that had been the one time.

"Lord Hermes," I said, bowing before adding, "Hello George. Hello Martha." to the snakes on his staff. I addressed Hermes once the snakes were quiet enough that I could talk. "Hermes, we need to talk to Zeus. It's important."

"I'm his messenger. May I take a message?" The demigods behind me shifted nervously. This wasn't going how I planned.

Annabeth started getting everyone to go sweep the city and check for defenses, putting Travis and Connor Stoll in charge, which made them pretty happy, especially because it was done in front of their dad.

"Lord, Kronos is going to attack New York. Surely you must suspect that and my mother must have foreseen it," Annabeth said.

"Your mother," Hermes grumbled before going into a rage about how Athena kept pestering Zeus that it was a trap and that someone needed to warn the demigods. Of course Zeus wouldn't let his best strategist go so he sent Hermes. He explained that the gods' teleporting thing was actually a form of air travel and although it was fast, the wind gods were faster. He explained that if Kronos wanted Olympus, he'd have to go up the elevator just like anyone else. He also told us that with Poseidon fighting his own war, and Hades, Demeter and Persephone sitting idle in the Underworld, that the other Olympians were having trouble trying to defeat Typhon who almost defeated the gods back in the old days.

"So basically your mother said you're on your own, but to try plan twenty-three. She said you'd know what that meant." Annabeth paled at the thought. Obviously she did know what it meant but was a little uncomfortable with that plan. "And she told me to tell Percy to remember the rivers."

"Thank you, Lord Hermes," Annabeth said. "And I'm so sorry about Luke."

Wrong thing to say, apparently, because Hermes started to freak out. He grew until he was ten feet tall and changed his staff and into something that resembled an electric cow prod. I realized that he wasn't annoyed with me this entire time like it had seemed, but with Annabeth. He started going off about how Annabeth should blame herself and when I tried to step in, he went to attack me and I realized something. I tried to ask him about May Castellan but Hermes wasn't listening to any of us anymore.

"I will leave you now," he said tightly. "I have a way to fight."

He started to shine and I turned myself and a frozen Annabeth away. When he disappeared, I didn't have the heart to ask Annabeth what Hermes meant. I had to trust that Annabeth wasn't actually to blame. And I did trust it because I knew Annabeth.

"So what is 'Plan Twenty-Three'?" I asked Annabeth. She looked thankful for the distraction and booted up her laptop. She opened a few files and began to read.

"Do you remember when we were in Greece and how I was staying in Val's old room?" Annabeth asked and I nodded. "Apparently when Val and Avalon – Andee's mom – were our age and going on quests, they met the Daedalus." I gave her a blank look. "He was a son of Athena and a brilliant inventor. Terrified of death because he had slighted King Minos, who is on the board that decides your fate in the Underworld, he hid in this labyrinth he built and kept making himself new automaton bodies so he would never truly die. Val and Avalon destroyed the labyrinth, though, so he is very much dead now, but that's beside the point. He gifted Val his workbooks before he passed so that his – and his nephew Perdix's – knowledge would live on. All of the original copies were left at the house in Greece. I started inputting a lot of the information into this laptop, and Val has been helping me out by sending me all of the work she's converted over the years and added her own notes to as well. So there are plans, lots of them…and gods, we have a lot of work to do," Annabeth said. "If my mother wants me to use this plan, things are very bad. What does her message about 'remember the rivers' mean?"

I shrugged. Not for the first time, I had no clue what the gods were trying to tell me. It would help if they stopped speaking so cryptically. Just as I was trying to figure out what rivers she could possibly be talking about, Connor Stoll burst into the throne room.

"You need to see this," he said. "Now."

When a demigod burst into the room and used the word 'now' as a sentence, you knew it was urgent. Annabeth and I followed Connor to a small tourist area at the base of the mountain where the rest of the campers had gathered, looking through the binoculars down at the island. I put in a drachma and looked around to see that everything looked normal, but something was definitely wrong. There were no sounds, no movement, nothing. As I looked around, pedestrians were lying on the sidewalks or curled up in doorways. It was like everyone in New York had decided to stop what they were doing and pass out all at the same time. If this was some sort of flash mob, they had really bad timing.

"Are they dead?" Silena asked.

My stomach turned when I remembered one of the lines from the prophecy: And see the world in an endless sleep.

"They're not dead," I said as I looked around the park at how people were lying on the ground. They were still moving, just slightly, as they breathed deeply. "Kronos has found some way to put all of Manhattan to sleep. The invasion has started."