¹Royal Cries, p. jackson

017.

ROYAL CRIES
━━ chapter seventeen

━━ FLYING ON THE shoulder of a statue wasn't the most comfortable place to sleep. Still, Elisa managed to get in an hour or two of sleep in. And just as expected, her dreams were plagued with images of Bianca. She knew what would happen, and yet, she tried. Maybe she thought something would be different—not that it ever was.

               She snapped awake at the sound of a tinny voice yelling over the wind whistling by. "Hey, hey, Frisco!" the angel carrying Elisa yelled. "Yo, Chuck! We could visit those guys at the Mechanics Monument again! They know how to party!"

               "Oh, man," the other angel, Chuck, said. "I am so there!"

               "You've been to San Francisco?" Elisa asked. She didn't dare yawn as a means to wake up, she didn't want a bug flying into her mouth. ( It had happened before on a carnival ride—never again will Elisa open her mouth high in the air. )

               "We automation gotta have some fun once in a while, right?" the statue carrying her said. "Those mechanics took us over to the de Young Museum and introduced us to these marble lady statues, see. And—"

               "Hank!" Chuck squawked. "They're kids, man."

               If bronze statues could blush, Elisa swore Hank was. "Oh, right," he mumbled. "Back to flying."

               Elisa shared a look with Percy, who looked just as amused as she was.

               Eventually, the mountains fell away into smaller and smaller hills. Then the hills faded away into flat farmland, with a speck of city and highway every once in a while.

               Grover played his reed pipes over on Chuck's shoulder to pass the time by. Elisa was grateful for the winds to carry the sound of reed pipes away, not wanting to hear Grover's attempts at any of Hillary Duff's songs. Zoë soon got bored and started shooting arrows at random billboards as they flew by. Whenever she saw a Target department store—and they had to pass by at least thirty of them—she would peg the store's sign with a few bulls-eyes at a hundred miles an hour.

               The strangest way to pass time by was to keep your eyes sealed shut. And that's exactly what Thalia was doing. Elisa would glance over every so often just to see if the daughter of Zeus had moved, but the only thing Thalia was doing was muttering a prayer over and over.

               Elisa flicked Percy in the back of the head, nodding to Thalia. The son of Poseidon watched Thalia for a moment, quickly shaking his head to Elisa. Don't say anything, he mouthed to her.

               "You did good back there," he was quick to start a conversation with Thalia. "Zeus listened."

               It was hard to tell Thalia's reaction with her eyes closed.

               "Maybe," she finally said. "How did you get away from the skeletons in the generator room, anyway? You said they cornered you."

               "Yeah," Elisa spoke up. "How did you get away? Those skeletons were such a pain the fucking neck to get rid of."

               Then Percy told the two about this mortal girl he had run into while being chased. A girl named Rachel Elizabeth Dare, a girl who could see Riptide for what it truly was. It seemed the girl was someone who could see through the Mist.