Caliginosity [ Leo Valdez ]

Dwarfs Love to Pants People

The thought weighed on her chest. She thought back to her own camp in New York. There was no doubt they were under siege already, and if not then they were about to be. Livana worried for her siblings. Did they still think she was dead? There was no way to contact them.

Livana 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?"

Livana 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, Livana wouldn't have believed that anyone could sleep through a numina attack, but now she imagined her friends were still snoring away below decks. 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."

"Huh." Leo scowled at his monitor. In his tattered work shirt and grease-splattered jeans, he looked like he'd just lost a wrestling match with a locomotive.

Ever since their friends Percy and Annabeth had fallen into Tartarus, Leo had been working almost nonstop. He'd been acting angrier and even more driven than usual.

The change was scary. Livana had never seen him that way, not even when they were in trouble on quests. Leo was always the happy jokester who dumbed himself down despite being arguably the smartest of the eight.

The sad thing was that Livana didn't have any time to talk him better. She had been busy with training and keeping the ship safe. Leo never slept and was always working. The two were slipping away so fast.

"Another way," Leo muttered. "Do you see one?"

On his monitor glowed a map of Italy. The Apennine Mountains ran down the middle of the boot-shaped country. A green dot for the Argo II blinked on the western side of the range, a few hundred miles north of Rome. Their path should have been simple. They needed to get to a place called Epirus in Greece and find an old temple called the House of Hades (or Pluto, as the Romans called him; or as Hazel liked to think of him: the World's Worst Absent Father).

To reach Epirus, all they had to do was go straight east—over the Apennines and across the Adriatic Sea. But it hadn't worked out that way. Each time they tried to cross the spine of Italy, the mountain gods attacked.

For the past two days they'd skirted north, hoping to find a safe pass, with no luck. The numina montanum were sons of Gaea, Livana's least favorite goddess. That made them very determined enemies. The Argo II couldn't fly high enough to avoid their attacks; and even with all its defenses, the ship couldn't make it across the range without being smashed to pieces.

"It's our fault," Hazel said. "Nico's and mine. The numina can sense us."

She glanced at her half brother. Since they'd rescued him from the giants, he'd started to regain his strength, but he was still painfully thin. His black shirt and jeans hung off his skeletal frame. Long dark hair framed his sunken eyes. His olive complexion had turned a sickly greenish white, like the color of tree sap.

In human years, he was barely fourteen, just four years younger than Livana, but that didn't tell the whole story. Like Hazel, Nico di Angelo was a demigod from another era. He radiated a kind of old energy—a melancholy that came from knowing he didn't belong in the modern world.

Hazel hadn't known him very long, but the way the two of them talked and hung around each other... It pained Livana. She'd known him since he was ten and she was fourteen. He'd known all of her trauma and helped her those restless nights when she fought off PTSD attacks. And yet, he acted like Hazel was more important. Was it because they were actually related? Was it because he brought her back from the dead? Hazel had her own trauma- did Nico think it was worse than Livana's? Was she just overreacting? Was her pain just not good enough? Livana's heart was pained every time they were together. Nico just didn't care anymore, and Livana had to accept it.