The Last Olympian

FOUR WE BURN A METAL SHROUD

I dreamed Rachel Elizabeth Dare was throwing darts at my picture.

She was standing in her room . . . Okay, back up. I have to explain that Rachel doesn't have a room. She has the top floor of her family's mansion, which is a renovated brownstone in Brooklyn. Her "room" is a huge loft with industrial lighting and floor-to-ceiling windows. It's about twice as big as my mom's apartment.

Some alt rock was blaring from her paint-covered Bose docking system. As far as I could tell, Rachel's only rule about music was that no two songs on her iPod could sound the same, and they all had to be strange.

She wore a kimono, and her hair was frizzy, like she'd been sleeping. Her bed was messed up. Sheets hung over a bunch of artist's easels. Dirty clothes and old energy bar wrappers were strewn around the floor, but when you've got a room that big, the mess doesn't look so bad. Out the windows you could see the entire nighttime skyline of Manhattan.

The picture she was attacking was a painting of me standing over the giant Antaeus. Rachel had painted it a couple of months ago. My expression in the picture was fierce—disturbing, even—so it was hard to tell if I was the good guy or the bad guy, but Rachel said I'd looked just like that after the battle.

"Demigods," Rachel muttered as she threw another dart at the canvas. "And their stupid quests."

Most of the darts bounced off, but a few stuck. One hung off my chin like a goatee.

Someone pounded on her bedroom door.

"Rachel!" a man shouted. "What in the world are you doing? Turn off that—"

Rachel scooped up her remote control and shut off the music. "Come in!"

Her dad walked in, scowling and blinking from the light. He had rust-colored hair a little darker than Rachel's. It was smushed on one side like he'd lost a fight with his pillow. His blue silk pajamas had "WD" monogrammed on the pocket. Seriously, who has monogrammed pajamas?

"What is going on?" he demanded. "It's three in the morning."

"Couldn't sleep," Rachel said.

On the painting, a dart fell off my face. Rachel hid the rest behind her back, but Mr. Dare noticed.

"So . . . I take it your friend isn't coming to St. Thomas?" That's what Mr. Dare called me. Never Percy. Just your friend. Or young man if he was talking to me, which he rarely did.

Rachel knit her eyebrows. "I don't know."

"We leave in the morning," her dad said. "If he hasn't made up his mind yet—"

"He's probably not coming," Rachel said miserably. "Happy?"

Mr. Dare put his hands behind his back. He paced the room with a stern expression. I imagined he did that in the boardroom of his land development company and made his employees nervous.

"Are you still having bad dreams?" he asked. "Headaches?"

Rachel threw her darts on the floor. "I should never have told you about that."

"I'm your father," he said. "I'm worried about you."

"Worried about the family's reputation," Rachel muttered.

Her father didn't react—maybe because he'd heard that comment before, or maybe because it was true.

"We could call Dr. Arkwright," he suggested. "He helped you get through the death of your hamster."

"I was six then," she said. "And no, Dad, I don't need a therapist. I just . . ." She shook her head helplessly.

Her father stopped in front of the windows. He gazed at the New York skyline as if he owned it—which wasn't true. He only owned part of it.

"It will be good for you to get away," he decided. "You've had some unhealthy influences."

"I'm not going to Clarion Ladies Academy," Rachel said. "And my friends are none of your business."

Mr. Dare smiled, but it wasn't a warm smile. It was more like, Someday you'll realize how silly you sound.

"Try to get some sleep," he urged. "We'll be at the beach by tomorrow night. It will be fun."

"Fun," Rachel repeated. "Lots of fun."

Her father exited the room. He left the door open behind him.

Rachel stared at the portrait of me. Then she walked to the easel next to it, which was covered in a sheet.

"I hope they're dreams," she said.

She uncovered the easel. On it was a hastily sketched charcoal, but Rachel was a good artist. The picture was definitely Luke as a young boy. He was about nine years old, with a wide grin and no scar on his face. I had no idea how Rachel could've known what he looked like back then, but the portrait was so good I had a feeling she wasn't guessing. From what I knew about Luke's life (which wasn't much), the picture showed him just before he'd found out he was a half-blood and had run away from home.

Rachel stared at the portrait. Then she uncovered the next easel. This picture was even more disturbing. It showed the Empire State Building with lightning all around it. In the distance a dark storm was brewing, with a huge hand coming out of the clouds. At the base of the building a crowd had gathered . . . but it wasn't a normal crowd of tourists and pedestrians. I saw spears, javelins, and banners—the trappings of an army.

"Percy," Rachel muttered, as if she knew I was listening, "what is going on?"

The dream faded, and the last thing I remember was wishing I could answer her question.

The next morning, I wanted to call her, but there were no phones at camp. Dionysus and Chiron didn't need a landline. They just called Olympus with an Iris-message whenever they needed something. And when demigods use cell phones, the signals agitate every monster within a hundred miles. It's like sending up a flare: Here I am! Please rearrange my face! Even within the safe borders of camp, that's not the kind of advertising we wanted to do.

Most demigods (except for Annabeth and a few others) don't even own cell phones. And I definitely couldn't tell Annabeth, "Hey, let me borrow your phone so I can call Rachel!" To make the call, I would've had to leave camp and walk several miles to the nearest convenience store. Even if Chiron let me go, by the time I got there, Rachel would've been on the plane to St. Thomas.

I ate a depressing breakfast by myself at the Poseidon table. I kept staring at the fissure in the marble floor where two years ago Nico had banished a bunch of bloodthirsty skeletons to the Underworld. The memory didn't exactly improve my appetite.

After breakfast, Annabeth and I walked down to inspect the cabins. Actually, it was Annabeth's turn for inspection. My morning chore was to sort through reports for Chiron. But since we both hated our jobs, we decided to do them together so it wouldn't be so heinous.

We started at the Poseidon cabin, which was basically just me. I'd made my bunk bed that morning (well, sort of) and straightened the Minotaur horn on the wall, so I gave myself a four out of five.

Annabeth made a face. "You're being generous." She used the end of her pencil to pick up an old pair of running shorts.

I snatched them away. "Hey, give me a break. I don't have Tyson cleaning up after me this summer."

"Three out of five," Annabeth said. I knew better than to argue, so we moved along.

I tried to skim through Chiron's stack of reports as we walked. There were messages from demigods, nature spirits, and satyrs all around the country, writing about the latest monster activity. They were pretty depressing, and my ADHD brain did not like concentrating on depressing stuff.

Little battles were raging everywhere. Camp recruitment was down to zero. Satyrs were having trouble finding new demigods and bringing them to Half-Blood Hill because so many monsters were roaming the country. Our friend Thalia, who led the Hunters of Artemis, hadn't been heard from in months, and if Artemis knew what had happened to them, she wasn't sharing information.

We visited the Aphrodite cabin, which of course got a five out of five. The beds were perfectly made. The clothes in everyone's footlockers were color coordinated. Fresh flowers bloomed on the windowsills. I wanted to dock a point because the whole place reeked of designer perfume, but Annabeth ignored me.

"Great job as usual, Silena," Annabeth said.

Silena nodded listlessly. The wall behind her bed was decorated with pictures of Beckendorf. She sat on her bunk with a box of chocolates on her lap, and I remembered that her dad owned a chocolate store in the Village, which was how he'd caught the attention of Aphrodite.

"You want a bonbon?" Silena asked. "My dad sent them. He thought—he thought they might cheer me up."

"Are they any good?" I asked.

She shook her head. "They taste like cardboard."

I didn't have anything against cardboard, so I tried one. Annabeth passed. We promised to see Silena later and kept going.

As we crossed the commons area, a fight broke out between the Ares and Apollo cabins. Some Apollo campers armed with firebombs flew over the Ares cabin in a chariot pulled by two pegasi. I'd never seen the chariot before, but it looked like a pretty sweet ride. Soon, the roof of the Ares cabin was burning, and naiads from the canoe lake rushed over to blow water on it.

Then the Ares campers called down a curse, and all the Apollo kids' arrows turned to rubber. The Apollo kids kept shooting at the Ares kids, but the arrows bounced off.

Two archers ran by, chased by an angry Ares kid who was yelling in poetry: "Curse me, eh? I'll make you pay! / I don't want to rhyme all day!"

Annabeth sighed. "Not that again. Last time Apollo cursed a cabin, it took a week for the rhyming couplets to wear off."

I shuddered. Apollo was god of poetry as well as archery, and I'd heard him recite in person. I'd almost rather yet shot by an arrow.

"What are they fighting about anyway?" I asked.

Annabeth ignored me while she scribbled on her inspection scroll, giving both cabins a one out of five.

I found myself staring at her, which was stupid since I'd seen her a billion times. She and I were about the same height this summer, which was a relief. Still, she seemed so much more mature. It was kind of intimidating. I mean, sure, she'd always been cute, but she was starting to be seriously beautiful.

Finally she said, "That flying chariot."

"What?"

"You asked what they were fighting about."

"Oh. Oh, right."

"They captured it in a raid in Philadelphia last week. Some of Luke's demigods were there with that flying chariot. The Apollo cabin seized it during the battle, but the Ares cabin led the raid. So they've been fighting about who gets it ever since."

We ducked as Michael Yew's chariot dive-bombed an Ares camper. The Ares camper tried to stab him and cuss him out in rhyming couplets. He was pretty creative about rhyming those cuss words.

"We're fighting for our lives," I said, "and they're bickering about some stupid chariot."

"They'll get over it," Annabeth said. "Clarisse will come to her senses."

I wasn't so sure. That didn't sound like the Clarisse I knew.

I scanned more reports and we inspected a few more cabins. Demeter got a four. Hephaestus got a three and probably should've gotten lower, but with Beckendorf being gone and all, we cut them some slack. Hermes got a two, which was no surprise. All campers who didn't know their godly parentage were shoved into the Hermes cabin, and since the gods were kind of forgetful, that cabin was always overcrowded.

Finally we got to Athena's cabin, which was orderly and clean as usual. Books were straightened on the shelves. The armor was polished. Battle maps and blueprints decorated the walls. Only Annabeth's bunk was messy. It was covered in papers, and her silver laptop was still running.

"Vlacas," Annabeth muttered, which was basically calling herself an idiot in Greek.

Her second-in-command, Malcolm, suppressed a smile. "Yeah, um . . . we cleaned everything else. Didn't know if it was safe to move your notes."

That was probably smart. Annabeth had a bronze knife that she reserved just for monsters and people who messed with her stuff.

Malcolm grinned at me. "We'll wait outside while you finish inspection." The Athena campers filed out the door while Annabeth cleaned up her bunk.

I shuffled uneasily and pretended to go through some more reports. Technically, even on inspection, it was against camp rules for two campers to be . . . like, alone in a cabin.

That rule had come up a lot when Silena and Beckendorf started dating. And I know some of you might be thinking, Aren't all demigods related on the godly side, and doesn't that make dating gross? But the thing is, the godly side of your family doesn't count, genetically speaking, since gods don't have DNA. A demigod would never think about dating someone who had the same godly parent. Like two kids from Athena cabin? No way. But a daughter of Aphrodite and a son of Hephaestus? They're not related. So it's no problem.

Anyway, for some strange reason I was thinking about this as I watched Annabeth straighten up. She closed her laptop, which had been given to her as a gift from the inventor Daedalus last summer.

I cleared my throat. "So . . . get any good info from that thing?"

"Too much," she said. "Daedalus had so many ideas, I could spend fifty years just trying to figure them all out."

"Yeah," I muttered. "That would be fun."

She shuffled her papers—mostly drawings of buildings and a bunch of handwritten notes. I knew she wanted to be an architect someday, but I'd learned the hard way not to ask what she was working on. She'd start talking about angles and load-bearing joints until my eyes glazed over.

"You know . . ." She brushed her hair behind her ear, like she does when she's nervous. "This whole thing with Beckendorf and Silena. It kind of makes you think. About . . . what's important. About losing people who are important."

I nodded. My brain started seizing on little random details, like the fact that she was still wearing those silver owl earrings from her dad, who was this brainiac military history professor in San Francisco.

"Urn, yeah," I stammered. "Like . . . is everything cool with your family?"

Okay, really stupid question, but hey, I was nervous.

Annabeth looked disappointed, but she nodded.

"My dad wanted to take me to Greece this summer," she said wistfully. "I've always wanted to see—"

"The Parthenon," I remembered.

She managed a smile. "Yeah."

"That's okay. There'll be other summers, right?"

As soon as I said it, I realized it was a boneheaded comment. I was facing the end of my days. Within a week, Olympus might fall. If the Age of the Gods really did end, the world as we knew it would dissolve into chaos. Demigods would be hunted to extinction. There would be no more summers for us.

Annabeth stared at her inspection scroll. "Three out five," she muttered, "for a sloppy head counselor. Come on. Let's finish your reports and get back to Chiron."

On the way to the Big House, we read the last report, which was handwritten on a maple leaf from a satyr in Canada. If possible, the note made me feel even worse.

" 'Dear Grover,'" I read aloud. " 'Woods outside Toronto attacked by giant evil badger. Tried to do as you suggested and summon power of Pan. No effect. Many naiads' trees destroyed. Retreating to Ottawa. Please advise. Where are you? —Gleeson Hedge, protector.'"

Annabeth grimaced. "You haven't heard anything from him? Even with your empathy link?"

I shook my head dejectedly.

Ever since last summer when the god Pan had died, our friend Grover had been drifting farther and farther away. The Council of Cloven Elders treated him like an outcast, but Grover still traveled all over the East Coast, trying to spread the word about Pan and convince nature spirits to protect their own little bits of the wild. He'd only come back to camp a few times to see his girlfriend, Juniper.

Last I'd heard he was in Central Park organizing the dryads, but nobody had seen or heard from him in two months. We'd tried to send Iris-messages. They never got through. I had an empathy link with Grover, so I hoped I would know if anything bad happened to him. Grover had told me one time that if he died, the empathy link might kill me too. But I wasn't sure if that was still true or not.

I wondered if he was still in Manhattan. Then I thought about my dream of Rachel's sketch—dark clouds closing on the city, an army gathered around the Empire State Building.

"Annabeth." I stopped her by the tetherball court. I knew I was asking for trouble, but I didn't know who else to trust. Plus, I'd always depended on Annabeth for advice. "Listen, I had this dream about, um, Rachel . . ."

I told her the whole thing, even the weird picture of Luke as a child.

For a while she didn't say anything. Then she rolled up her inspection scroll so tight she ripped it. "What do you want me to say?"

"I'm not sure. You're the best strategist I know. If you were Kronos planning this war, what would you do next?"

"I'd use Typhon as a distraction. Then I'd hit Olympus directly, while the gods were in the West."

"Just like in Rachel's picture."

"Percy," she said, her voice tight, "Rachel is just a mortal."

"But what if her dream is true? Those other Titans—they said Olympus would be destroyed in a matter of days. They said they had plenty of other challenges. And what's with that picture of Luke as a kid—"

"We'll just have to be ready."

"How?" I said. "Look at our camp. We can't even stop fighting each other. And I'm supposed to get my stupid soul reaped."

She threw down her scroll. "I knew we shouldn't have shown you the prophecy." Her voice was angry and hurt. "All it did was scare you. You run away from things when you're scared."

I stared at her, completely stunned. "Me? Run away?"

She got right in my face. "Yes, you. You're a coward, Percy Jackson!"

We were nose to nose. Her eyes were red, and I suddenly realized that when she called me a coward, maybe she wasn't talking about the prophecy.

"If you don't like our chances," she said, "maybe you should go on that vacation with Rachel."

"Annabeth—"

"If you don't like our company."

"That's not fair!"

She pushed past me and stormed toward the strawberry fields. She hit the tetherball as she passed and sent it spinning angrily around the pole.

I'd like to say my day got better from there. Of course it didn't.

That afternoon we had an assembly at the campfire to burn Beckendorf's burial shroud and say our good-byes. Even the Ares and Apollo cabins called a temporary truce to attend.

Beckendorf's shroud was made out of metal links, like chain mail. I didn't see how it would burn, but the Fates must've been helping out. The metal melted in the fire and turned to golden smoke, which rose into the sky. The campfire flames always reflected the campers' moods, and today they burned black.

I hoped Beckendorf's spirit would end up in Elysium. Maybe he'd even choose to be reborn and try for Elysium in three different lifetimes so he could reach the Isles of the Blest, which was like the Underworld's ultimate party headquarters. If anyone deserved it, Beckendorf did.

Annabeth left without a word to me. Most of the other campers drifted off to their afternoon activities. I just stood there staring at the dying fire. Silena sat nearby crying, while Clarisse and her boyfriend, Chris Rodriguez, tried to comfort her.

Finally I got up the nerve to walk over. "Hey, Silena, I'm really sorry."

She sniffled. Clarisse glared at me, but she always glares at everyone. Chris would barely look at me. He'd been one of Luke's men until Clarisse rescued him from the Labyrinth last summer, and I guess he still felt guilty about it.

I cleared my throat. "Silena, you know Beckendorf carried your picture. He looked at it right before we went into battle. You meant a lot to him. You made the last year the best of his life."

Silena sobbed.

"Good work, Percy," Clarisse muttered.

"No, it's all right," Silena said. "Thank . . . thank you, Percy. I should go."

"You want company?" Clarisse asked.

Silena shook her head and ran off.

"She's stronger than she looks," Clarisse muttered, almost to herself. "She'll survive."

"You could help with that," I suggested. "You could honor Beckendorf's memory by fighting with us."

Clarisse went for her knife, but it wasn't there anymore. She'd thrown it on the Ping-Pong table in the Big House.

"Not my problem," she growled. "My cabin doesn't get honor, I don't fight."

I noticed she wasn't speaking in rhymes. Maybe she hadn't been around when her cabinmates got cursed, or maybe she had a way of breaking the spell. With a chill, I wondered if Clarisse could be Kronos's spy at camp. Was that why she was keeping her cabin out of the fight? But as much as I disliked Clarisse, spying for the Titans didn't seem like her style.

"All right," I told her. "I didn't want to bring this up, but you owe me one. You'd be rotting in a Cyclops's cave in the Sea of Monsters if it wasn't for me."

She clenched her jaw. "Any other favor, Percy. Not this. The Ares cabin has been dissed too many times. And don't think I don't know what people say about me behind my back."

I wanted to say, Well, it's true. But I bit my tongue.

"So, what—you're just going to let Kronos crush us?" I asked.

"If you want my help so bad, tell Apollo to give us the chariot."

"You're such a big baby."

She charged me, but Chris got between us. "Whoa, guys," he said. "Clarisse, you know, maybe he's got a point."

She sneered at him. "Not you too!" She trudged off with Chris at her heels.

"Hey, wait! I just meant—Clarisse, wait!"

I watched the last sparks from Beckendorf's fire curl into the afternoon sky. Then I headed toward the sword-fighting arena. I needed a break, and I wanted to see an old friend.