The Blood of Olympus (The Heroes of Olympus, #5)(64)

Percy pointed over the side.

‘Something is causing the storm?’ Jason asked.

Percy grinned and tapped his ears. Clearly, he couldn’t hear a word. He made a gesture with his hand like diving overboard. Then he tapped Jason on the chest.

‘You want me to go?’ Jason felt kind of honoured. Everybody else had been treating him like a glass vase, but Percy … well, he seemed to figure that if Jason was on deck he was ready for action.

‘Happy to!’ Jason shouted. ‘But I can’t breathe underwater!’

Percy shrugged. Sorry, can’t hear you.

Then Percy ran to the starboard rail, pushed another massive wave away from the ship and jumped overboard.

Jason glanced at Piper and Annabeth. They both clung to the rigging, staring at him in shock. Piper’s expression said, Are you out of your mind?

He gave her an okay sign, partly to assure her that he would be fine (which he wasn’t sure about), partly to agree that he was in fact crazy (which he was sure about).

He staggered to the railing and looked up at the storm.

Winds raged. Clouds churned. Jason sensed an entire army of venti swirling above him, too angry and agitated to take physical form, but hungry for destruction.

He raised his arm and summoned a lasso of wind. Jason had learned long ago that the best way to control a crowd of bullies was to pick the meanest, biggest kid and force him into submission. Then the others would fall in line. He lashed out with his wind rope, searching for strongest, most ornery ventus in the storm.

He lassoed a nasty patch of storm cloud and pulled it in. ‘You’re serving me today.’

Howling in protest, the ventus encircled him. The storm above the ship seemed to lessen just a bit, as if the other venti were thinking, Oh, crud. That guy means business.

Jason levitated off the deck, encased in his own miniature tornado. Spinning like a corkscrew, he plunged into the water.

Jason assumed things would be calmer underwater.

Not so much.

Of course, that could’ve been due to his mode of travel. Riding a cyclone to the bottom of the ocean definitely gave him some unexpected turbulence. He dropped and swerved with no apparent logic, his ears popping, his stomach pressed against his ribs.

Finally he drifted to a stop next to Percy, who stood on a ledge jutting over a deeper abyss.

‘Hey,’ Percy said.

Jason could hear him perfectly, though he wasn’t sure how. ‘What’s going on?’

In his ventus air cocoon, his own voice sounded like he was talking through a vacuum cleaner.

Percy pointed into the void. ‘Wait for it.’

Three seconds later, a shaft of green light swept through the darkness like a spotlight, then disappeared.

‘Something’s down there,’ Percy said, ‘stirring up this storm.’ He turned and sized up Jason’s tornado. ‘Nice outfit. Can you hold it together if we go deeper?’

‘I have no idea how I’m doing this,’ Jason said.

‘Okay,’ Percy said. ‘Well, just don’t get knocked unconscious.’

‘Shut up, Jackson.’

Percy grinned. ‘Let’s see what’s down there.’

They sank so deep that Jason couldn’t see anything except Percy swimming next to him in the dim light of their gold and bronze blades.

Every so often the green searchlight shot upward. Percy swam straight towards it. Jason’s ventus crackled and roared, straining to escape. The smell of ozone made him lightheaded, but he kept his shell of air intact.

At last, the darkness lessened below them. Soft white luminous patches, like schools of jellyfish, floated before Jason’s eyes. As he approached the seafloor, he realized the patches were glowing fields of algae surrounding the ruins of a palace. Silt swirled through empty courtyards with abalone floors. Barnacle-covered Greek columns marched into the gloom. In the centre of the complex rose a citadel larger than Grand Central Station, its walls encrusted with pearls, its domed golden roof cracked open like an egg.

‘Atlantis?’ Jason asked.

‘That’s a myth,’ Percy said.

‘Uh … don’t we deal in myths?’

‘No, I mean it’s a made-up myth. Not, like, an actual true myth.’

‘So this is why Annabeth is the brains of the operation, then?’

‘Shut up, Grace.’

They floated through the broken dome and down into shadows.

‘This place seems familiar.’ Percy’s voice became edgy. ‘Almost like I’ve been here –’

The green spotlight flashed directly below them, blinding Jason.

He dropped like a stone, touching down on the smooth marble floor. When his vision cleared, he saw that they weren’t alone.

Standing before them was a twenty-foot-tall woman in a flowing green dress, cinched at the waist with a belt of abalone shells. Her skin was as luminous white as the fields of algae. Her hair swayed and glowed like jellyfish tendrils.

Her face was beautiful but unearthly – her eyes too bright, her features too delicate, her smile too cold, as if she’d been studying human smiles and hadn’t quite mastered the art.

Her hands rested on a disc of polished green metal about six feet in diameter, sitting on a bronze tripod. It reminded Jason of a steel drum he’d once seen a street performer play at the Embarcadero in San Francisco.