The Lost Hero (The Heroes of Olympus #1)(105)

When they reached the floating island, Piper and Coach Hedge pulled them aboard just as the last of the vapor bridge vanished. They stood gasping for breath at the base of a stone stairway chiseled into the side of the cliff, leading up to the fortress.

Leo looked back down. The top of Pikes Peak floated below them in a sea of clouds, but there was no sign of Thalia. And Leo had just burned their only exit.

“What happened?” Piper demanded. “Leo, why are your clothes smoking?”

“I got a little heated,” he gasped. “Sorry, Jason. Honest. I didn’t—”

“It’s all right,” Jason said, but his expression was grim. “We’ve got less than twenty-four hours to rescue a goddess and Piper’s dad. Let’s go see the king of the winds.”

JASON HAD FOUND HIS SISTER AND lost her in less than an hour. As they climbed the cliffs of the floating island, he kept looking back, but Thalia was gone.

Despite what she’d said about meeting him again, Jason wondered. She’d found a new family with the Hunters, and a new mother in Artemis. She seemed so confident and comfortable with her life, Jason wasn’t sure if he’d ever be part of it. And she seemed so set on finding her friend Percy. Had she ever searched for Jason that way?

Not fair, he told himself. She thought you were dead.

He could barely tolerate what she’d said about their mom. It was almost like Thalia had handed him a baby—a really loud, ugly baby—and said, Here, this is yours. Carry it. He didn’t want to carry it. He didn’t want to look at it or claim it. He didn’t want to know that he had an unstable mother who’d gotten rid of him to appease a goddess. No wonder Thalia had run away.

Then he remembered the Zeus cabin at Camp Half-Blood—that tiny little alcove Thalia had used as a bunk, out of sight from the glowering statue of the sky god. Their dad wasn’t much of a bargain, either. Jason understood why Thalia had renounced that part of her life too, but he was still resentful. He couldn’t be so lucky. He was left holding the bag —literally.

The golden backpack of winds was strapped over his shoulders. The closer they got to Aeolus’s palace, the heavier the bag got. The winds struggled, rumbling and bumping around.

The only one who seemed in a good mood was Coach Hedge. He kept bounding up the slippery staircase and trotting back down. “Come on, cupcakes! Only a few thousand more steps!”

As they climbed, Leo and Piper left Jason in his silence. Maybe they could sense his bad mood. Piper kept glancing back, worried, as if he were the one who’d almost died of hypothermia rather than she. Or maybe she was thinking about Thalia’s idea. They’d told her what Thalia had said on the bridge—how they could save both her dad and Hera—but Jason didn’t really understand how they were going to do that, and he wasn’t sure if the possibility had made Piper more hopeful or just more anxious.

Leo kept swatting his own legs, checking for signs that his pants were on fire. He wasn’t steaming anymore, but the incident on the ice bridge had really freaked Jason out. Leo hadn’t seemed to realize that he had smoke coming out his ears and flames dancing through his hair. If Leo started spontaneously combusting every time he got excited, they were going to have a tough time taking him anywhere. Jason imagined trying to get food at a restaurant. I’ll have a cheeseburger and—Ahhh! My friend’s on fire! Get me a bucket!

Mostly, though, Jason worried about what Leo had said. Jason didn’t want to be a bridge, or an exchange, or anything else. He just wanted to know where he’d come from. And Thalia had looked so unnerved when Leo mentioned the burned-out house in his dreams—the place the wolf Lupa had told him was his starting point. How did Thalia know that place, and why did she assume Jason could find it?

The answer seemed close. But the nearer Jason got to it, the less it cooperated, like the winds on his back.

Finally they arrived at the top of the island. Bronze walls marched all the way around the fortress grounds, though Jason couldn’t imagine who would possibly attack this place. Twenty-foot-high gates opened for them, and a road of polished purple stone led up to the main citadel—a white-columned rotunda, Greek style, like one of the monuments in Washington, D.C.—except for the cluster of satellite dishes and radio towers on the roof.

“That’s bizarre,” Piper said.

“Guess you can’t get cable on a floating island,” Leo said. “Dang, check this guy’s front yard.”

The rotunda sat in the center of a quarter-mile circle. The grounds were amazing in a scary way. They were divided into four sections like big pizza slices, each one representing a season.

The section on their right was an icy waste, with bare trees and a frozen lake. Snowmen rolled across the landscape as the wind blew, so Jason wasn’t sure if they were decorations or alive.

To their left was an autumn park with gold and red trees. Mounds of leaves blew into patterns—gods, people, animals that ran after each other before scattering back into leaves.

In the distance, Jason could see two more areas behind the rotunda. One looked like a green pasture with sheep made out of clouds. The last section was a desert where tumbleweeds scratched strange patterns in the sand like Greek letters, smiley faces, and a huge advertisement that read: watch aeolus nightly!

“One section for each of the four wind gods,” Jason guessed. “Four cardinal directions.”