Nico brushed some ice from his hair. He frowned at the scepter of Diocletian. “I should put this thing away. If it’s really causing the weather, maybe taking it below deck will help…”
“Sure,” Jason said.
Nico glanced at Piper and Leo, as if worried what they might say when he was gone. Piper felt his defenses going up, like he was curling into a psychological ball, the way he’d gone into a death trance in that bronze jar.
Once he headed below, Piper studied Jason’s face. His eyes were full of concern. What had happened in Croatia?
Leo pulled a screwdriver from his belt. “So much for the big team meeting. Looks like it’s just us again. ”
Just us again.
Piper remembered a wintry day in Chicago last December, when the three of them had landed in Millennial Park on their first quest.
Leo hadn’t changed much since then, except he seemed more comfortable in his role as a child of Hephaestus. He’d always had too much nervous energy. Now he knew how to use it. His hands were constantly in motion, pulling tools from his belt, working controls, tinkering with his beloved Archimedes sphere. Today he’d removed it from the control panel and shut down Festus the figurehead for maintenance—something about rewiring his processor for a motor-control upgrade with the sphere, whatever the heck that meant.
As for Jason, he looked thinner, taller, and more careworn. His hair had gone from close-cropped Roman style to longer and shaggier. The groove Sciron had shot across the left side of his scalp was interesting too—almost like a rebellious streak. His icy blue eyes looked older, somehow—full of worry and responsibility.
Piper knew what her friends whispered about Jason—he was too perfect, too straitlaced. If that had ever been true, it wasn’t anymore. He’d been battered on this journey, and not just physically. His hardships hadn’t weakened him, but he’d been weathered and softened like leather—as if he were becoming a more comfortable version of himself.
And Piper? She could only imagine what Leo and Jason thought when they looked at her. She definitely didn’t feel like the same person she’d been last winter.
That first quest to rescue Hera seemed like centuries ago. So much had changed in seven months…she wondered how the gods could stand being alive for thousands of years. How much change had they seen? Maybe it wasn’t surprising that the Olympians seemed a little crazy. If Piper had lived through three millennia, she would have gone loopy.
She gazed into the cold rain. She would have given anything to be back at Camp Half-Blood, where the weather was controlled even in the winter. The images she’d seen in her knife recently…well, they didn’t give her much to look forward to.
Jason squeezed her shoulder. “Hey, it’ll be fine. We’re close to Epirus now. Another day or so, if Nico’s directions are right. ”
“Yep. ” Leo tinkered with his sphere, tapping and nudging one of the jewels on its surface. “By tomorrow morning, we’ll reach the western coast of Greece. Then another hour inland, and bang—House of Hades! I’ma get me the T-shirt!”
“Yay,” Piper muttered.
She wasn’t anxious to plunge into the darkness again. She still had nightmares about the nymphaeum and the hypogeum under Rome. In the blade of Katoptris, she’d seen images similar to what Leo and Hazel had described from their dreams—a pale sorceress in a gold dress, her hands weaving golden light in the air like silk on a loom; a giant wrapped in shadows, marching down a long corridor lined with torches. As he passed each one, the flames died. She saw a huge cavern filled with monsters—Cyclopes, Earthborn, and stranger things—surrounding her and her friends, hopelessly outnumbering them.
Every time she saw those images, a voice in her head kept repeating one line over and over.
“Guys,” she said, “I’ve been thinking about the Prophecy of Seven. ”
It took a lot to get Leo’s attention away from his work, but that did the trick.
“What about it?” he asked. “Like…good stuff, I hope?”
She readjusted her cornucopia’s shoulder strap. Sometimes the horn of plenty seemed so light she forgot about it. Other times it felt like an anvil, as if the river god Achelous was sending out bad thoughts, trying to punish her for taking his horn.
“In Katoptris,” she started, “I keep seeing that giant Clytius—the guy who’s wrapped in shadows. I know his weakness is fire, but in my visions, he snuffs out flames wherever he goes. Any kind of light just gets sucked into his cloud of darkness. ”
“Sounds like Nico,” Leo said. “You think they’re related?”
Jason scowled. “Hey, man, cut Nico some slack. So, Piper, what about this giant? What are you thinking?”
She and Leo exchanged a quizzical look, like: Since when does Jason defend Nico di Angelo? She decided not to comment.
“I keep thinking about fire,” Piper said. “How we expect Leo to beat this giant because he’s…”
“Hot?” Leo suggested with a grin.
“Um, let’s go with flammable. Anyway, that line from the prophecy bothers me: To storm or fire the world must fall. ”
“Yeah, we know all about it,” Leo promised. “You’re gonna say I’m fire. And Jason here is storm. ”
Piper nodded reluctantly. She knew that none of them liked talking about this, but they all must have felt it was the truth.
The ship pitched to starboard. Jason grabbed the icy railing. “So you’re worried one of us will endanger the quest, maybe accidentally destroy the world?”
“No,” Piper said. “I think we’ve been reading that line the wrong way. The world…the Earth. In Greek, the word for that would be…”
She hesitated, not wanting to say the name aloud, even at sea.
“Gaea. ” Jason’s eyes gleamed with sudden interest. “You mean, to storm or fire Gaea must fall?”