Percy finally managed to fall asleep, only to have his worst nightmare yet.
He found himself standing on the edge of a pit, so vast that it looked like you could drop the Empire State Building in it sideways and still have plenty of room to spare.
A glance down into the depths was enough to give him vertigo. Maybe it was a good thing that he couldn't fly in a plane, because the very sight of something so wide and so deep instilled a fear of falling within him that he had never felt in his life, and he knew would never leave him.
He approached the edge and looked down. It was so dark that nothing could be seen beyond a certain point, and yet…
"Weak…" a voice rolled up from the abyss, "but you will do…"
Every word felt like a noose had been thrown up around his neck. Like if he fought too hard to not fall in he might end up dead anyway.
"Bring me the bolt," it rumbled so low and so deep that the sand surrounding the pit began to slide in. Drops in an ocean, but a sickening sight. "Bring it to me, and I can give you anything… Strike a blow against the treacherous gods…"
Something placed its hand on his shoulder. He whipped around as he felt himself begin to fall…
And then his back slammed against cold metal, knocking the breath out of him. His hands lashed out for purchase, sure he would keep falling forever.
No. He wasn't in the pit anymore. He was back on the train.
Grover was hovering above him, arms out. "Sorry, dude. I tried to catch you."
Percy let himself be pulled back to his feet. His legs still felt like jelly. He dug the heels of his palms into his eyes as he sat back down, trying to dispel the dizziness.
"Can gods talk to you in your dreams?" he asked hoarsely.
Grover nodded hesitantly, eyes darting around the car to see who all was listening. "It wouldn't surprise me, but Annabeth would be the person to ask for specifics. Demigods dream a lot. Very rarely good ones. Why? What did you dream about?"
Percy shook his head slowly, putting a hand on his forehead. "It was so weird. It didn't feel like a dream."
Grover's eyebrows were on track to become the world champion pole vaulters with how high they hopped. "What do you mean?"
Percy hesitated. He didn't want to freak Grover out too badly before they even made it halfway to Los Angeles.
Still, he told Grover everything. The pit. The voice. The promise of anything in exchange for the bolt. With every word, Grover went paler. His fingers clenched the edge of his seat.
"Grover?" he asked uneasily.
Grover swallowed hard. "That doesn't sound like Hades. And he doesn't live in the pit."
"Wait, the pit?"
"Tartarus, Percy. The place where the worst of the worst go. Worse than the Fields of Punishment."
"Who could possibly have been talking to me from Tartarus?"
"I don't know. But if it was Hades, don't trust a word he says."
"Why not?"
Grover simply shook his head. He had no more to say on the matter. "We're almost to St. Louis."
Percy turned to the window. The city was nothing compared to New York, but still huge. Sprawling skyscrapers, bridges, and the Arch sticking out above everything else. "Neat place."
He turned to face Grover to be met with an almost mournful expression, and Percy immediately knew he'd fucked up.
Grover exhaled. "My first assignment as a protector didn't take me any farther than Virginia. I saw a lot of awful stuff in that time, but what upset me the most was always how polluted everywhere seemed to be. The rivers, the forests far away from cities, even the skies." He stared out the window. "Humans toss their refuse wherever they please with no thought for the natural world."
Percy winced. "Yeah… Wow. That feels way worse now that I know trees have actual spirits in them."
Grover tried to muster up a glare. "Even if you didn't know, that's still no excuse to toss your burger wrappers out your window or dump your soda cans in the streets because there's not a trash can nearby!"
Percy held up his hands. "Okay, okay. I get it now. It makes sense why you always got on my case to recycle at Yancy. You're right, dude. It's important. Good on you for standing up for what you believe in."
Grover's expression softened, but his frustration didn't fade. "Demigods aren't the biggest problem, obviously, but humans..." He sighed. "How am I ever supposed to find Pan in a world like this? There are so few truly wild places left. This trip is proving that more than ever."
"Who's Pan?"
"He's the god of the wild! Patron to all satyrs, dryads, nymphs, et cetera. Our god. He's why I need this quest to succeed. I need to get my Searcher's license. Two thousand years ago there was this sailor back in Greece. He heard someone call out from the shore, Tell everyone the great god Pan is dead! And soon enough everyone believed it. Humans have been slowly destroying the natural world ever since."
Percy frowned. "But gods can't die. They're immortal."
"Not exactly. If a god is forgotten, or loses the will to continue on, they can fade away. That's why we satyrs have to keep believing and keep searching. We can't let the destruction of Pan's kingdom destroy him. We have to believe."
Percy was quiet for a long moment. Then, with complete sincerity, he asked, "Can I do anything to help?"
Grover's breath hitched. His eyes widened, and for a moment, he just stared at Percy, like no one had ever asked him that before.
Then, slowly, he chuckled sadly and clapped Percy on the shoulder. "Searching for Pan is something that we have to do alone. As long as you believe in me, I'll succeed. I'll be the first one to ever make it back. I'll find Pan."
Percy felt his heart twist. Grover was his best friend, and if they succeeded in this quest he would go out on his own, possibly never to be seen again? He couldn't trust his words to come out without sounding shaky, so he nodded and gave Grover a firm pat on the back. No way was he about to make Grover reconsider. It was his life's dream, and the entire reason he had embarked on this quest in the first place. Percy wasn't going to stand in his way. He couldn't.
The rhythmic rumbling of the wheels shifted up in pitch ominously as they began crossing the bridge over the Mississippi. Percy joined Grover in staring down at the murky waters. He'd never really thought about it before. Water was just water, right? But now, looking at the thick, polluted river, all he could think was: No Naiad could survive in that.
"Where's Annabeth?" he finally asked after a solid few minutes of hoping that his voice wouldn't crack.
Grover barely glanced away from the window. "She was here for a couple hours while you were still asleep. Just kinda… stared at you the whole time."
Percy blinked. "What?"
Grover shrugged. "Yeah. Then she left about half an hour ago, said she needed breakfast."
Percy unconsciously wiped the corners of his mouth for drool as the train pulled into the station with an awful squeal. Nestled between the skyline of a hotel and a skyscraper the Gateway Arch rose and fell like a jump rope frozen mid hop.
"We should take Annabeth to see that," he said offhandedly. They were already low on money despite being only a third of the way to Los Angeles, but at this point what else did they have to lose? It wasn't like they could afford to buy another train ticket, and they were all too freaked out to ever set foot on another bus after the Furies attacked.
Grover gave him a look. "Aren't we kinda on a very time-sensitive, fate-of-the-world-hangs-in-the-balance type mission?"
"Yeah, I just… I think we could all use a break, yeah? We've made good progress so far. What's the harm in taking a slight detour? We've got eight days until the solstice, so at this rate we should get there with half a week to spare."
Grover mumbled something about how they didn't have the money for train tickets to keep up that progress, but relented. "Fine. Annabeth'll probably love it."
It took her an extra few minutes to meet them on the platform, carrying three granola bars and water bottles. "Fresh from the dining cart," she said.
She figured out where they were going in under a hundred feet.
"This is dumb," she said, though made no effort to stop walking. "We only have until the twenty-first to find the bolt."
"That's what I said!" Grover piped up as he ate one of the granola bars, wrapper and all. Percy wondered if he could manage that too, just to cut down on waste, "But Percy's got a point, too. If we do nothing but go, go, go all the way to Hades, we could burn out. We need a few breaks."
Annabeth crossed her arms. "The train ride was basically a break in and of itself."
"Really?" Grover snorted. "I'm not the one with ADHD and I still felt like I was about to start running laps from the front car to the back. You're probably on the verge of taking a high-speed foot tour of the entire city right now."
The walk to the Arch itself was good to burn off some of that built up energy, and twenty minutes later they descended underneath the Arch, where a museum was set up.
The exhibits didn't impress Grover. Percy didn't blame him. A timeline of colonization, stuffed animals in glass cases, descriptions of how the landscape had been carved apart for human progress. He took his leave to the gift shop and left Annabeth and Percy to stroll over the exhibits alone.
They stopped by a timeline of the construction and Percy tried really hard to focus on the words below each image.
"Having fun?" Annabeth asked, and he suddenly felt like a huge idiot because they had talked about this last night. She couldn't read these any better than he could.
"Yeah," he tried, managing to draw the ghost of a smile onto her face, "interesting stuff, you know. Says they started building in…" he craned his head back to look again, "1936."
She barely held back a laugh. "1963."
"Damn."
She floated over to an exhibit about the construction and stared at it for a minute while Percy kicked himself.
"I know Grover wouldn't have suggested this," she said as he caught up to her, nearly tripping over his own feet and face planting the display, "And you're probably more interested in the architecture of houses, not monuments. So tell me, why are we really here?"
Percy tried his best to keep the heat out of his face, but her staring him dead in the eyes didn't help. He rubbed the back of his neck with a wobbly laugh before finally deflating and hunching himself over the display so he wouldn't have to look her in the eyes. "I wanted to apologize for last night. I could say I was tired and cranky or whatever, but I didn't have a real reason to snap at you. It ate at me, because the more I thought about it, the more what you said makes sense. I just didn't want to see it."
One thing that Percy hated about children of Athena was that they had killer poker faces, which made it all the more freaky that Annabeth didn't so much as roll her eyes or cross her arms.
She reached into her back pocket, drew her yankees cap out, and whacked him on the back of the head. "You didn't offend me, Cinder Brain. But just for the record? Never let it happen again."
"Aye aye, Wise Girl."
She gave him a strange look, mumbling, "Wise Girl…?" under her breath before shaking her head and continuing. "I thought about it too," she admitted. "You shouldn't completely disregard what I said. But…" She exhaled. "Even if your mom did put you with Gabe to protect you, that doesn't mean you're not allowed to feel hurt by it."
Percy slowly nodded, staring at the display. A group of pioneers sitting around a campfire, their faces cast in warm light.
"I wish I could talk to her," he muttered. "Maybe if she told me herself, it wouldn't feel so much like she… abandoned me, you know?"
Annabeth didn't have a response for that. She already explained why the gods wouldn't contact them, back in the New Jersey forests.
"Come on, our time is coming up." She grabbed him by the hand and dragged him to the elevators, making a pass by the gift shop to call for Grover to join them as she went. The elevators were tiny, so it made sense that with smaller groups they had to fit extra people into each cart. That didn't mean that Percy appreciated it when the remaining two seats were taken by a large woman and who he could only assume was her son.
"First time?" her son asked. He had an interesting accent. German, perhaps, or was it French? He was strangely dressed for visiting the Gateway Arch, wearing a full three-piece suit, so smooth it looked like it had come straight from the dry cleaners. His mother, on the other hand, wasn't the most pleasant person to behold. She looked like she had been wearing the same denim dress since she was thirty years younger and three hundred pounds lighter.
Percy tried to be friendly. He nodded and looked up to meet the man's eyes. They were two different colors.
Once at the top he nearly pushed himself to the front of the line to get to the more open space quicker. It was better, and the view was nice. Percy tried to distract himself by appreciating how much Annabeth was enjoying herself, talking about how one day her monuments would take everything that made this one great and launch it sky high.
"Are you okay, man?" Grover asked him as the park ranger announced that the observation deck would be closing and the elevator would be back soon.
"Fine," Percy nodded, though he knew his pale face and sweaty forehead weren't doing him any favors, "I don't ever remember being claustrophobic before. Something's weird up here."
"Fires don't like to be contained," Annabeth said pointedly, but Percy couldn't focus enough to make much sense of it.
The elevator reopened soon enough and, unfortunately for Percy, he was the farthest away from the doors. By the time he finally reached the other side, Grover and Annabeth had taken the last two available seats for the down trip.
"Next car, sir," the ranger said, but that felt even weirder. There should have been the same amount of seats available as there were on the way up. Everyone at the top should have been able to fit on the ride back down.
"We'll wait with you," Annabeth said, but the doors snapped shut before she and Grover could get out. Percy watched with a sick stomach as the tram began descending before returning to the center of the deck to wait. It was only him, the park ranger, the fat lady, and her son.
A terrible silence filled the air.
"Now, mother?" the son asked. The fat lady flicked her tongue, and pain exploded across Percy's chest. A barbed spike had lodged itself right in his left shoulder.
Her son hunched over and began to change. His coat became a mane, his pants, a scorpion tail. He was smaller than the Chimera, but Percy could tell by looking that this thing was faster, it was stronger, and whatever it had shot at him, he wasn't immune this time.
The park ranger gasped from his position. Thankfully the monster didn't seem to care about his presence.
Percy reached for his sword and the woman began clicking her tongue.
"I wouldn't do that if I were you," she warned, wagging a crooked, reptilian finger, "unless you would like my son to put another poisonous spike in your chest."
"Poisonous?" Percy asked, and then his entire left side lit up like he had been stuck with a thousand IV needles, "Who are you? What are you?"
"Zeus sends his regards. It is so rare that he allows me to test a young hero. I am Echidna, the mother of monsters, and this is my son, the Manticore."
The scorpion tail flicked behind the beast so quickly that Percy could barely register what happened. Two more spikes embedded themselves in his right thigh, instantly sending him to his knees.
He couldn't think straight enough to come up with a witty remark, much less try to fight these things. Maybe it was time he had a real test. Everything so far had been successful. If he wasn't dead in the next few minutes, the loss would certainly knock him down a few pegs at the very least.
"Draw your weapon, boy. Face me like the hero you claim to be," The Manticore growled, which was even more unsettling since he was now mostly a lion. "Face me like the hero you claim to be."
"I don't claim anything of the sort," Percy tried to shoot back, but he drew his sword regardless.
The Manticore hissed, and then it lunged. Percy nearly bit his tongue off as he dodged. Barely. The poison made every movement felt like walking through molten glass.
The scorpion tail crushed through the floor right where he had been standing, and in an attempt to drag it back through tore an even larger hole like it was opening a can of St. Louis sardines.
"Stand up!" it snapped, lashing its tail. Percy tried to block it, but his arm had become so weak that the attack sent Riptide clattering to the side. Echidna picked it up, grinned, and tossed it right through the hole.
"Your namesake would be disappointed," she said, "Perseus. Slayer of Medusa. Cetus. Founder of a dynasty. You? A small, scared child. Greet your doom with a smile, for you never stood a chance."
Percy's fists balled up against the floor. Every attempt to regain his footing, to summon a flame to heal him or to at least block the monsters from him and the park ranger, all failed.
"Your mother can do nothing to save you here," she continued, "not that you believe she would save you though, do you? You were never meant to be born, hero. Tis better you perish now, before you live long enough to believe you will have a happy life."
"I'm not an accident," he spat, words slurring together. His jaw was going numb. "My mother wanted me! She takes her oath seriously!"
Echidna laughed. A horrible grating sound that definitely came from the mother of monsters. "Yet you do not have faith that she will save you. Very well. Jump. Your mother may yet take pity on you. She may just as likely let you hit the ground like a useless worm, for you have scorned her with your lack of faith."
Percy's hands shook. He could barely breathe. His last ditch attempt to summon flame barely singed the Manticore's mane.
A single kick to the ribs was all it took. Percy felt his body tumble backward through the hole. Air rushed past his ears. His heart pounded against his ribs. The sky swallowed him whole.
All he could hear over the wind was the crackling of fire as he prayed.