Percy Jackson and the Olympians: the lightning thief (25 page)

"Oh, goodness," Annabeth said. "This place is ..."

"Sweet," Grover said. "Absolutely sweet."

There were clothes in the closet, and they fit me. I frowned, thinking that this was a little strange.

I threw Ares's backpack in the trash can. Wouldn't need that anymore. When we left, I could just charge a new one at the hotel store.

I took a shower, which felt awesome after a week of grimy travel. I changed clothes, ate a bag of chips, drank three Cokes, and came out feeling better than I had in a long time. In the back of my mind, some small problem kept nagging me. I'd had a dream or something ... I needed to talk to my friends. But I was sure it could wait.

I came out of the bedroom and found that Annabeth and Grover had also showered and changed clothes. Grover was eating potato chips to his heart's content, while Annabeth cranked up the National Geographic Channel.

"All those stations," I told her, "and you turn on National Geographic. Are you insane?"

"It's interesting."

"I feel good," Grover said. "I love this place."

Without his even realizing it, the wings sprouted out of his shoes and lifted him a foot off the ground, then back down again.

"So what now?" Annabeth asked. "Sleep?"

Grover and I looked at each other and grinned. We both held up our green plastic LotusCash cards.

"Play time," I said.

I couldn't remember the last time I had so much fun. I came from a relatively poor family. Our idea of a splurge was eating out at Burger King and renting a video. A five-star Vegas hotel?

Forget it.

I bungee-jumped the lobby five or six times, did the waterslide, snowboarded the artificial ski slope, and played virtual-reality laser tag and FBI sharpshooter. I saw Grover a few times, going from game to game. He really liked the reverse hunter thing—where the deer go out and shoot the rednecks. I saw Annabeth playing trivia games and other brainiac stuff. They had this huge 3-D

sim game where you build your own city, and you could actually see the holographic buildings rise on the display board. I didn't think much of it, but Annabeth loved it. I'm not sure when I first realized something was wrong.

Probably, it was when I noticed the guy standing next to me at VR sharpshooters. He was about thirteen, I guess, but his clothes were weird. I thought he was some Elvis impersonator's son. He wore bell-bottom jeans and a red T-shirt with black piping, and his hair was permed and gelled like a New Jersey girl's on homecoming night.

We played a game of sharpshooters together and he said, "Groovy, man. Been here two weeks, and the games keep getting better and better."

Groovy?

Later, while we were talking, I said something was "sick," and he looked at me kind of startled, as if he'd never heard the word used that way before.

He said his name was Darrin, but as soon as I started asking him questions he got bored with me and started to go back to the computer screen.

I said, "Hey, Darrin?"

"What?"

"What year is it?"

He frowned at me. "In the game?"

"No. In real life."

He had to think about it. "1977."

"No," I said, getting a little scared. "Really."

"Hey, man. Bad vibes. I got a game happening."

After that he totally ignored me.

I started talking to people, and I found it wasn't easy. They were glued to the TV screen, or the video game, or their food, or whatever. I found a guy who told me it was 1985. Another guy told me it was 1993. They all claimed they hadn't been in here very long, a few days, a few weeks at most. They didn't really know and they didn't care.

Then it occurred to me: how long had I been here? It seemed like only a couple of hours, but was it?

I tried to remember why we were here. We were going to Los Angeles. We were supposed to find the entrance to the Underworld. My mother ... for a scary second, I had trouble remembering her name. Sally. Sally Jackson. I had to find her. I had to stop Hades from causing World War III. I found Annabeth still building her city.

"Come on," I told her. "We've got to get out of here." No response.

I shook her. "Annabeth?"

She looked up, annoyed. "What?

"We need to leave."

"Leave? What are you talking about? I've just got the towers—"

"This place is a trap."

She didn't respond until I shook her again. "What?"

"Listen. The Underworld. Our quest!"

"Oh, come on, Percy. Just a few more minutes."

"Annabeth, there are people here from 1977. Kids who have never aged. You check in, and you stay forever."

"So?" she asked. "Can you imagine a better place?" I grabbed her wrist and yanked her away from the game.

"Hey!" She screamed and hit me, but nobody else even bothered looking at us. They were too busy.

I made her look directly in my eyes. I said, "Spiders. Large, hairy spiders." That jarred her. Her vision cleared. "Oh my gods," she said. "How long have we—"

"I don't know, but we've got to find Grover."

We went searching, and found him still playing Virtual Deer Hunter.

"Grover!" we both shouted.

He said, "Die, human! Die, silly polluting nasty person!"

"Grover!"

He turned the plastic gun on me and started clicking, as if I were just another image from the screen.

I looked at Annabeth, and together we took Grover by the arms and dragged him away. His flying shoes sprang to life and started tugging his legs in the other direction as he shouted, "No! I just got to a new level! No!"

The Lotus bellhop hurried up to us. "Well, now, are you ready for your platinum cards?"

"We're leaving," I told him.

"Such a shame," he said, and I got the feeling that he really meant it, that we'd be breaking his heart if we went. "We just added an entire new floor full of games for platinum-card members." He held out the cards, and I wanted one. I knew that if I took one, I'd never leave. I'd stay here, happy forever, playing games forever, and soon I'd forget my mom, and my quest, and maybe even my own name. I'd be playing virtual rifleman with groovy Disco Darrin forever. Grover reached for the card, but Annabeth yanked back his arm and said, "No, thanks." We walked toward the door, and as we did, the smell of the food and the sounds of the games seemed to get more and more inviting. I thought about our room upstairs. We could just stay the night, sleep in a real bed for once....

Then we burst through the doors of the Lotus Casino and ran down the sidewalk. It felt like afternoon, about the same time of day we'd gone into the casino, but something was wrong. The weather had completely changed. It was stormy, with heat lightning flashing out in the desert. Ares's backpack was slung over my shoulder, which was odd, because I was sure I had thrown it in the trash can in room 4001, but at the moment I had other problems to worry about. I ran to the nearest newspaper stand and read the year first. Thank the gods, it was the same year it had been when we went in. Then I noticed the date: June twentieth. We had been in the Lotus Casino for five days.

We had only one day left until the summer solstice. One day to complete our quest.

17 WE SHOP FOR

It was Annabeth's idea.

She loaded us into the back of a Vegas taxi as if we actually had money, and told the driver,

"Los Angeles, please."

The cabbie chewed his cigar and sized us up. "That's three hundred miles. For that, you gotta pay up front."

"You accept casino debit cards?" Annabeth asked.

He shrugged. "Some of 'em. Same as credit cards. I gotta swipe 'em through first." Annabeth handed him her green LotusCash card.

He looked at it skeptically.

"Swipe it," Annabeth invited.

He did.

His meter machine started rattling. The lights flashed. Finally an infinity symbol came up next to the dollar sign.

The cigar fell out of the driver's mouth. He looked back at us, his eyes wide. "Where to in Los Angeles... uh, Your Highness?"

"The Santa Monica Pier." Annabeth sat up a little straighter. I could tell she liked the "Your Highness" thing. "Get us there fast, and you can keep the change." Maybe she shouldn't have told him that. The cab's speedometer never dipped below ninetyfive the whole way through the Mojave Desert. On the road, we had plenty of time to talk. I told Annabeth and Grover about my latest dream, but the details got sketchier the more I tried to remember them. The Lotus Casino seemed to have short-circuited my memory. I couldn't recall what the invisible servant's voice had sounded like, though I was sure it was somebody I knew. The servant had called the monster in the pit something other than "my lord" ... some special name or title....

"The Silent One?" Annabeth suggested. "The Rich One? Both of those are nicknames for Hades."

"Maybe ..." I said, though neither sounded quite right.

"That throne room sounds like Hades's," Grover said. "That's the way it's usually described." I shook my head. "Something's wrong. The throne room wasn't the main part of the dream. And that voice from the pit ... I don't know. It just didn't feel like a god's voice." Annabeth's eyes widened.

"What?" I asked.

"Oh ... nothing. I was just—No, it
has
to be Hades. Maybe he sent this thief, this invisible person, to get the master bolt, and something went wrong—"

"Like what?"

"I—I don't know," she said. "But if he stole Zeus's symbol of power from Olympus, and the gods were hunting him, I mean, a lot of things could go wrong. So this thief had to hide the bolt, or he lost it somehow. Anyway, he failed to bring it to Hades. That's what the voice said in your dream, right? The guy failed. That would explain what the Furies were searching for when they came after us on the bus. Maybe they thought we had retrieved the bolt." I wasn't sure what was wrong with her. She looked pale.

"But if I'd already retrieved the bolt," I said, "why would I be traveling to the Underworld?"

"To threaten Hades," Grover suggested. "To bribe or blackmail him into getting your mom back."

I whistled. "You have evil thoughts for a goat."

"Why, thank you."

"But the thing in the pit said it was waiting for
two
items," I said. "If the master bolt is one, what's the other?"

Grover shook his head, clearly mystified.

Annabeth was looking at me as if she knew my next question, and was silently willing me not to ask it.

"You have an idea what might be in that pit, don't you?" I asked her. "I mean, if it isn't Hades?"

"Percy ... let's not talk about it. Because if it isn't Hades ... No. It has to be Hades." Wasteland rolled by. We passed a sign that said CALIFORNIA STATE LINE, 12 MILES. I got the feeling I was missing one simple, critical piece of information. It was like when I stared at a common word I should know, but I couldn't make sense of it because one or two letters were floating around. The more I thought about my quest, the more I was sure that confronting Hades wasn't the real answer. There was something else going on, something even more dangerous.

The problem was: we were hurtling toward the Underworld at ninety-five miles an hour, betting that Hades had the master bolt. If we got there and found out we were wrong, we wouldn't have time to correct ourselves. The solstice deadline would pass and war would begin.

"The answer is in the Underworld," Annabeth assured me. "You saw spirits of the dead, Percy. There's only one place that could be. We're doing the right thing." She tried to boost our morale by suggesting clever strategies for getting into the Land of the Dead, but my heart wasn't in it. There were just too many unknown factors. It was like cramming for a test without knowing the subject. And believe me, I'd done
that
enough times. The cab sped west. Every gust of wind through Death Valley sounded like a spirit of the dead. Every time the brakes hissed on an eighteen-wheeler, it reminded me of Echidna's reptilian voice.

At sunset, the taxi dropped us at the beach in Santa Monica. It looked exactly the way L.A. beaches do in the movies, only it smelled worse. There were carnival rides lining the Pier, palm trees lining the sidewalks, homeless guys sleeping in the sand dunes, and surfer dudes waiting for the perfect wave.

Grover, Annabeth, and I walked down to the edge of the surf.

"What now?" Annabeth asked.

The Pacific was turning gold in the setting sun. I thought about how long it had been since I'd stood on the beach at Montauk, on the opposite side of the country, looking out at a different sea. How could there be a god who could control all that? What did my science teacher used to say—two-thirds of the earth's surface was covered in water? How could I be the son of someone that powerful?

I stepped into the surf

"Percy?" Annabeth said. "What are you doing?"

I kept walking, up to my waist, then my chest.

She called after me, "You know how polluted that water is? There're all kinds of toxic—" That's when my head went under.

I held my breath at first. It's difficult to intentionally inhale water. Finally I couldn't stand it anymore. I gasped. Sure enough, I could breathe normally.

I walked down into the shoals. I shouldn't have been able to see through the murk, but somehow I could tell where everything was. I could sense the rolling texture of the bottom. I could make out sand-dollar colonies dotting the sandbars. I could even see the currents, warm and cold streams swirling together.

I felt something rub against my leg. I looked down and almost shot out of the water like a ballistic missile. Sliding along beside me was a five-foot-long mako shark. But the thing wasn't attacking. It was nuzzling me. Heeling like a dog. Tentatively, I touched its dorsal fin. It bucked a little, as if inviting me to hold tighter. I grabbed the fin with both hands. It took off, pulling me along. The shark carried me down into the darkness. It deposited me at the edge of the ocean proper, where the sand bank dropped off into a huge chasm. It was like standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon at midnight, not being able to see much, but knowing the void was right there.