Blaze of Glory - a PJO fanfiction

14. Planning

It was the morning after the events of Westover Hall, and I'd been woken up early to attend a meeting that had apparently been postponed until I got back. We had to plan our route to Atlas' Mountain, and unfortunately, none of the demigods there had a very good knowledge of geography. Thank you, American Public School System.

Aurelie nodded, "I agree, but we have to minimize our supply stops." Aurelie was a daughter of Notus, the south wind, as well as the only other demigod here who could be trusted to know where I was talking about. She was probably about 17, she had originally lived in Quebec before moving to Maine, but she had dark skin and honey-colored eyes that showed her Caribbean heritage. The Princess Andromeda had picked her up on the coast of Maine a couple of months back, so she was a relatively new, though useful, addition. And it totally wasn't just because she was teaching me French better than the Aphrodite kids ever had.

Zayden groaned from his spot on the couch under two blankets. "Can someone please show me what you're talking about on the map?" he asked. I sighed, the son of Deimos could be terrifying in battle, but the scariest thing about him was how little was in his head. He was 14, only a year older than me, but he acted 3 years younger. I liked to tease that he was 14 going on 5.

"Get over here and I'll show you," I said. He flopped off the couch onto the floor, quickly standing up and coming over to the table. "So," I explained. "We're here, and we're trying to get here." I pointed to the coast of Massachusetts, then to the Californian coast. "We're going to go down the coast, and pass between those two islands there." I traced my finger between Cuba and Haiti.

Aurelie aggressively put her finger down on Panama. "There's a really big canal there," she told Zayden. "We're gonna go through to the pacific, then we're gonna go straight up the coast." She looked up at me. "We need to decide where to stop," she said, handing me a couple of red push pins. I studied the map for a second.

"The latest we could probably stop next would be somewhere in North Carolina," I said. "We'd have to stop again in Florida before going to the Caribbean, but we could probably make it past Cuba before stopping again in Jamaica."

Zayden nodded. "We should stop in Panama when we go through the canal, if we want to keep the stops at consistent distances," he said. I ruffled his hair.

"I knew we kept you around for a reason," I told him playfully. We had recruited him when we had stopped in Georgia a couple of months ago, so he definitely wasn't used to the cold like we'd had on the ship for the past few days. "Glad to know the heat in the south didn't completely cook your brain."

"Hey!" he protested. "I think the snow up here's frozen yours. There ain't no way you aren't cold right now. It's like 50 degrees out." I placed a push pin into the North Carolina Coast, writing down 'Wilmington NC' as the first stop on our list.

"I think you and Jamie share half a brain cell between the two of you," I said. "And it bounces around in your head. When it hits perfectly in the corner, you experience intelligent thought." I put another pin into the map. "Where is Jamie anyway? Also, Miami or Fort Lauderdale?" I asked.

"Heads for Fort Lauderdale," Jamie said, walking into the room and flipping a drachma he had been holding. He caught it, putting it on his arm. "Fort Lauderdale it is," he decided, sitting on the edge of the map table and started flipping the coin repeatedly. "Nice of you guys to start without me."

"Don't look at me," I said. "They so rudely woke me up 20 minutes ago." I wrote down 'Fort Lauderdale FL' as the second bullet on my growing list of stops. "And we can probably stop in Morant Bay in Jamaica and Panama City on our way out of the canal." I wrote those ones down too. "Jamie, since you haven't contributed yet, do you by any chance know any coastal cities in..." I checked my map. "Guatemala."