DURING THE THIRD ATTACK, Hazel almost ate a boulder. She was peering into the fog, wondering
how it could be so difficult to fly across one stupid mountain range, when the ship’s alarm bells
sounded.
“Hard to port!” Nico yelled from the foremast of the flying ship.
Back at the helm, Leo yanked the wheel. The Argo II veered left, its aerial oars slashing through
the clouds like rows of knives.
Hazel made the mistake of looking over the rail. A dark spherical shape hurtled toward her. She
thought: Why is the moon coming at us? Then she yelped and hit the deck. The huge rock passed so
close overhead it blew her hair out of her face.
CRACK!
The foremast collapsed—sail, spars, and Nico all crashing to the deck. The boulder, roughly the
size of a pickup truck, tumbled off into the fog like it had important business elsewhere.
“Nico!” Hazel scrambled over to him as Leo brought the ship level.
“I’m fine,” Nico muttered, kicking folds of canvas off his legs.
She helped him up, and they stumbled to the bow. Hazel peeked over more carefully this time.
The clouds parted just long enough to reveal the top of the mountain below them: a spearhead of black
rock jutting from mossy green slopes. Standing at the summit was a mountain god—one of the numina
montanum, Jason had called them. Or ourae, in Greek. Whatever you called them, they were nasty.
Like the others they had faced, this one wore a simple white tunic over skin as rough and dark as
basalt. He was about twenty feet tall and extremely muscular, with a flowing white beard, scraggly
hair, and a wild look in his eyes, like a crazy hermit. He bellowed something Hazel didn’t understand,
but it obviously wasn’t welcoming. With his bare hands, he pried another chunk of rock from his
mountain and began shaping it into a ball.
The scene disappeared in the fog, but when the mountain god bellowed again, other numina
answered in the distance, their voices echoing through the valleys.
“Stupid rock gods!” Leo yelled from the helm. “That’s the third time I’ve had to replace that
mast! You think they grow on trees?”
Nico frowned. “Masts are from trees.”
“That’s not the point!” Leo snatched up one of his controls, rigged from a Nintendo Wii stick,
and spun it in a circle. A few feet away, a trapdoor opened in the deck. A Celestial bronze cannon
rose. Hazel just had time to cover her ears before it discharged into the sky, spraying a dozen metal
spheres that trailed green fire. The spheres grew spikes in midair, like helicopter blades, and hurtled
away into the fog.
A moment later, a series of explosions crackled across the mountains, followed by the outraged
roars of mountain gods.
“Ha!” Leo yelled.
Unfortunately, Hazel guessed, judging from their last two encounters, Leo’s newest weapon had
only annoyed the numina.
Another boulder whistled through the air off to their starboard side.
Nico yelled, “Get us out of here!”
Leo muttered some unflattering comments about numina, but he turned the wheel. The engines
hummed. Magical rigging lashed itself tight, and the ship tacked to port. The Argo II picked up speed,
retreating northwest, as they’d been doing for the past two days.
Hazel didn’t relax until they were out of the mountains. The fog cleared. Below them, morning
sunlight illuminated the Italian countryside—rolling green hills and golden fields not too different
from those in Northern California. Hazel could almost imagine she was sailing home to Camp Jupiter.
The thought weighed on her chest. Camp Jupiter had only been her home for nine months, since
Nico had brought her back from the Underworld. But she missed it more than her birthplace of New
Orleans, and definitely more than Alaska, where she’d died back in 1942.
She missed her bunk in the Fifth Cohort barracks. She missed dinners in the mess hall, with wind
spirits whisking platters through the air and legionnaires joking about the war games. She wanted to
wander the streets of New Rome, holding hands with Frank Zhang. She wanted to experience just
being a regular girl for once, with an actual sweet, caring boyfriend.
Most of all, she wanted to feel safe. She was tired of being scared and worried all the time.
She stood on the quarterdeck as Nico picked mast splinters out of his arms and Leo punched
buttons on the ship’s console.
“Well, that was sucktastic,” Leo said. “Should I wake the others?”
Hazel was tempted to say yes, but the other crew members had taken the night shift and had
earned their rest. They were exhausted from defending the ship. Every few hours, it seemed, some
Roman monster had decided the Argo II looked like a tasty treat.
A few weeks ago, Hazel wouldn’t have believed that anyone could sleep through a numina
attack, but now she imagined her friends were still snoring away belowdecks. Whenever she got a
chance to crash, she slept like a coma patient.
“They need rest,” she said. “We’ll have to figure out another way on our own.”