The Sea of Monsters(43)

“Lifeboats!” Annabeth said. “Quick!”

“They’ll never get clear of the cliffs,” Clarisse said. “We’ll all be eaten.”

“We have to try. Percy, the thermos.”

“I can’t leave Tyson!”

“We have to get the boats ready!”

Clarisse took Annabeth’s command. She and a few of her undead sailors uncovered one of the two emergency rowboats while Scylla’s heads rained from the sky like a meteor shower with teeth, picking off Confederate sailors one after another.

“Get the other boat.” I threw Annabeth the thermos. “I’ll get Tyson.”

“You can’t!” she said. “The heat will kill you!”

I didn’t listen. I ran for the boiler room hatch, when suddenly my feet weren’t touching the deck anymore. I was flying straight up, the wind whistling in my ears, the side of the cliff only inches from my face.

Scylla had somehow caught me by the knapsack, and was lifting me up toward her lair.

Without thinking, I swung my sword behind me and managed to jab the thing in her beady yellow eye. She grunted and dropped me.

The fall would’ve been bad enough, considering I was a hundred feet in the air. But as I fell, the CSS Birmingham exploded below me.

KAROOM!

The engine room blew, sending chunks of ironclad flying in either direction like a fiery set of wings.

“Tyson!” I yelled.

The lifeboats had managed to get away from the ship, but not very far. Flaming wreckage was raining down. Clarisse and Annabeth would either be smashed or burned or pulled to the bottom by the force of the sinking hull, and that was thinking optimistically, assuming they got away from Scylla.

Then I heard a different kind of explosion—the sound of Hermes’s magic thermos being opened a little too far. White sheets of wind blasted in every direction, scattering the lifeboats, lifting me out of my free fall and propelling me across the ocean.

I couldn’t see anything. I spun in the air, got clonked on the head by something hard, and hit the water with a crash that would’ve broken every bone in my body if I hadn’t been the son of the Sea God.

The last thing I remembered was sinking in a burning sea, knowing that Tyson was gone forever, and wishing I were able to drown.

Chapter Twelve: We Check In To C.C.’S Spa & Resort

I woke up in a rowboat with a makeshift sail stitched of gray uniform fabric. Annabeth sat next to me, tacking into the wind.

I tried to sit up and immediately felt woozy.

“Rest,” she said. “You’re going to need it.”

“Tyson … ?”

She shook her head. “Percy, I’m really sorry.”

We were silent while the waves tossed us up and down.

“He may have survived,” she said halfheartedly. “I mean, fire can’t kill him.”

I nodded, but I had no reason to feel hopeful. I’d seen that explosion rip through solid iron. If Tyson had been down in the boiler room, there was no way he could’ve lived.

He’d given his life for us, and all I could think about were the times I’d felt embarrassed by him and had denied that the two of us were related.

Waves lapped at the boat. Annabeth showed me some things she’d salvaged from the wreckage—Hermes’s thermos (now empty), a Ziploc bag full of ambrosia, a couple of sailors’ shirts, and a bottle of Dr Pepper. She’d fished me out of the water and found my knapsack, bitten in half by Scylla’s teeth. Most of my stuff had floated away, but I still had Hermes’s bottle of multivitamins, and of course I had Riptide. The ballpoint pen always appeared back in my pocket no matter where I lost it.

We sailed for hours. Now that we were in the Sea of Monsters, the water glittered a more brilliant green, like Hydra acid. The wind smelled fresh and salty, but it carried a strange metallic scent, too—as if a thunderstorm were coming. Or something even more dangerous. I knew what direction we needed to go. I knew we were exactly one hundred thirteen nautical miles west by northwest of our destination. But that didn’t make me feel any less lost.

No matter which way we turned, the sun seemed to shine straight into my eyes. We took turns sipping from the Dr Pepper, shading ourselves with the sail as best we could. And we talked about my latest dream of Grover.

By Annabeth’s estimate, we had less than twenty-four hours to find Grover, assuming my dream was accurate, and assuming the Cyclops Polyphemus didn’t change his mind and try to marry Grover earlier.

“Yeah,” I said bitterly. “You can never trust a Cyclops.”

Annabeth stared across the water. “I’m sorry, Percy. I was wrong about Tyson, okay? I wish I could tell him that.”

I tried to stay mad at her, but it wasn’t easy. We’d been through a lot together. She’d saved my life plenty of times. It was stupid of me to resent her.

I looked down at our measly possessions—the empty wind thermos, the bottle of multivitamins. I thought about Luke’s look of rage when I’d tried to talk to him about his dad.

“Annabeth, what’s Chiron’s prophecy?”

She pursed her lips. “Percy, I shouldn’t—”

“I know Chiron promised the gods he wouldn’t tell me. But you didn’t promise, did you?”

“Knowledge isn’t always good for you.”