❛ 𝐓𝐈𝐃𝐄𝐒 ❜ ━━ 𝐏𝐄𝐑𝐂𝐘 𝐉𝐀𝐂𝐊𝐒𝐎𝐍 𝐱 𝐎𝐂

𝐈𝐕

"Cool! Can I drive?" Nico asked.

"No. Too young."

"Ooh! Ooh!" Grover raised his hand.

"Mmh, no. Too furry," Apollo decided.

He looked straight past Percy, considered Menodora, but shook his head. Then he got to Thalia and nodded, satisfied.

"Thalia! Daughter of the sky! Perfect," Apollo said.

"Oh, no," Thalia shook her head. "No, thank you."

"C'mon," Apollo urged. "How old are you?"

Thalia hesitated. "I don't know."

It was sad, yet true. Thalia had been turned into a tree when she was twelve. That was about seven years ago. She should, chronically speaking, be nineteen now.

Percy couldn't imagine Thalia as nineteen. She still acted and behaved like a twelve year old. Her physique was inbetween the two.

The only logical conclusion Chiron could come up with was that Thalia had still been aging as a tree, but much slower.

Apollo tapped his fingers to his lip. "You're fifteen. Almost sixteen.

"How do you know that?" Thalia asked.

"Well, hey! I'm the god of prophecies as well. I know stuff. Your birthday is in about a week."

"That's right. The twenty-second of December," Thalia huffed, impressed.

"Which means you're old enough to drive with a learner's permit!"

Thalia shuffled her feet nervously. "Uh—"

"I know what you're going to say," Apollo said. "That it's too great of an honour to drive the sun chariot."

"That's not what I was going to say."

"Don't sweat it! Maine to Long Island isn't that long of a trip, rather short! And don't worry about what happened to the last kid I trained. You're Zeus's daughter; he won't blast you out of the sky."

Apollo laughed amiably. None of us joined in.

Thalia tried to protest, but Apollo wasn't taking no for an answer. He hit a button on the dashboard, and a sign popped up against the windshield.

Percy had to read it backwards (which was really the same thing as reading forward for dyslexic people like him). Percy guessed it said WARNING: STUDENT DRIVING.

Percy had no clue who was supposed to read that sign, but at least it was there.

"Take it away!" Apollo announced. "You're gonna be a natural!"

Percy felt a tinge of jealousy. He couldn't wait to start driving. His mom, Sally Jackson, had taken him to Montauk when the beach road was empty and she'd let him drive her Mazda.

Sure, it was a Japenese compact, and this was the sun chariot. But, really, how different could it be?

"Speed equals heat,"Apollo said. "So, start slowly and make sure you have a good altitude before you start her up."

Thalia gripped the weel so tight, her knuckles turned white. For a daughter of the sky god who was about to fly the sun across the sky, she looked pretty miserable.

"Are you alright?" Percy asked.

"Mhm," she grunted.

She pulled back on the wheel. It tilted, and the bus lurched upward so fast that Percy fell back and crashed against something soft.