The Omnitrix holder and the lighting theif

Return of the Bolt

"I need an audience with Zeus."  Percy continued 

He gave me a vacant smile. "Sorry?"

"You heard me."

I was about to decide this guy was just a regular mortal, and I'd better run for it before he called the straitjacket patrol, when he said, "No appointment, no audience, kiddo. Lord Zeus doesn't see anyone unannounced."

"Oh, I think he'll make an exception." I slipped off Percy's backpack and unzipped the top. The guard looked inside at the metal cylinder, not getting what it was for a few seconds. Then his face went pale. "That isn't .. ."

"Yes, it is," I promised. "You want me to take it out and — "

"No! No!" He scrambled out of his seat, fumbled around his desk for a key card, then handed it to me. "Insert this in the security slot. Make sure nobody else is in the elevator with you."

We did as he told us. I slipped the key into the slot as soon as the elevator doors closed. The card disappeared and a new button appeared on the console, a red one that said 600. 1 pressed it and waited, and waited. Muzak played. "Raindrops keep falling on my head. . . ." Finally, ding. The doors slid open.

Percy pov

We stepped out and almost had a heart attack. We were standing on a narrow stone walkway in the middle of the air. Below me was Manhattan, from the height of an airplane. In front of me, white marble steps wound up the spine of a cloud, into the sky. My eyes followed the stairway to its end, where my brain just could not accept what I saw.

Look again, my brain said.

We're looking, my eyes insisted. It's really there.

From the top of the clouds rose the decapitated peak of a mountain, its summit covered with snow. Clinging to the mountainside were dozens of multileveled palaces — a city of mansions — all with white-columned porticos, gilded terraces, and bronze braziers glowing with a thousand fires. Roads wound crazily up to the peak, where the largest palace gleamed against the snow.

Precariously perched gardens bloomed with olive trees and rose bushes. I could make out an open-air market filled with colorful tents, a stone amphitheater built on one side of the mountain, a hippodrome, and a coliseum on the other. It was an Ancient Greek city, except it wasn't in ruins. It was new, clean, and colorful, the way Athens must've looked twenty-five hundred years ago.

This place can't be here, I told myself. The tip of a mountain hanging over New York City like a billion-ton asteroid? How could something like that be anchored above the Empire State Building, in plain sight of millions of people, and not get noticed?

But here it was. And here I was.

Amara was shaking cause there was nothing for her to hold on to on the pathway and she is afraid if she slipped she might fall. Also, she looked more tired than I, I gave her my bag and lifted her onto my back as she held on tight as I walked over to the place and put her down once safe for her to walk again.

My trip through Olympus was in a daze. I passed some giggling wood nymphs who threw olives at me from their garden which made amara laugh. Hawkers in the market offered to sell me ambrosian-a-stick, a new shield, and a genuine glitter-weave replica of the Golden Fleece, as seen on Hephaestus-TV. The nine muses were tuning their instruments for a concert in the park while a small crowd gathered — satyrs and naiads and a bunch of good-looking teenagers who might've been minor gods and goddesses. Nobody seemed worried about an impending civil war. In fact, everybody seemed in a festive mood. Several of them turned to watch us pass and whispered to themselves.