Chapter 16
We chase evil coffee
Jason woke up and yelled, "Cyclops!"
"Whoa, sleepyhead." Piper sat behind him on the bronze dragon, holding his waist to keep him balanced. Leo sat in front, driving. They flew peacefully through the winter sky as if nothing had happened.
"D-Detroit," Jason stammered. "Didn't we crash-land? I thought—"
"It's okay," Leo said. "We got away, but you got a nasty concussion. How are you feeling?"
Jason's head throbbed. He remembered the factory, then walking down the catwalk, then a creature looming over him —a face with one eye, a massive fist—and everything went black.
"How did you—the Cyclops—"
"Leo and Vivian ripped them apart," Piper said. "They were amazing. Leo and Vivian can summon fire—"
"It was nothing," Leo and Vivian said quickly in unison.
Piper laughed. "Shut up, Gomez and Valdez. I'm going to tell him. Get over it."
And she did—how Leo and Vivian single-handedly defeated the Cyclops family; how they freed Jason, then noticed the Cyclopes starting to re-form; how Leo and Vivian had replaced the dragon's wiring and gotten them back in the air just as they'd started to hear the Cyclopes roaring for vengeance inside the factory.
Jason was impressed. Taking out three Cyclopes with nothing but a tool kit and vines? Not bad. It didn't exactly scare him to hear how close he'd come to death, but it did make him feel horrible. He'd stepped right into an ambush and spent the whole fight knocked out while his friends fended for themselves. What kind of quest leader was he?
When Piper told him about the other kid the Cyclopes claimed to have eaten, the one in the purple shirt who spoke Latin, Jason felt like his head was going to explode. A son of Mercury ... Jason felt like he should know that kid, but the name was missing from his mind.
"I'm not alone, then," he said. "There are others like me."
"Jason," Piper said, "you were never alone. You've got us."
"Beauty Queen is right Superman," Vivian said. "We got your back!"
"I—I know ... but something Hera said. I was having a dream...
He told them what he'd seen, and what the goddess had said inside her cage.
"An exchange?" Piper asked. "What does that mean?"
"Well it can't be anything good," Vivian said.
Jason shook his head. "But Hera's gamble is me. Just by sending me to Camp Half-Blood, I have a feeling she broke some kind of rule, something that could blow up in a big way—"
"Or save us," Piper said hopefully. "That bit about the sleeping enemy—that sounds like the lady Leo told us about."
"The sleeping women also came to me," Vivian said. She told them about what happened.
Leo cleared his throat. "About that ... she again kind of appeared to us back in Detroit, in a pool of Porta-Potty sludge."
Jason wasn't sure he'd heard that right. "Did you say ... Porta-Potty?
Leo told them about the big face in the factory yard, Vivian chiming in once a while. "I don't know if she's completely unkillable," he said, "but she cannot be defeated by toilet seats. I can vouch for that. She wanted us to betray you guys, and we were like, 'Pfft, right, we'm gonna listen to a face in the potty sludge.
"She's trying to divide us." Piper slipped her arms from around Jason's waist. He could sense her tension without even looking at her
"What's wrong?" he asked.
"I just ... Why are they toying with us? Who is this lady, and how is she connected to Enceladus?"
"Enceladus?" Vivian asked. "The counterpart of my Aunt Athena?"
"I mean ..." Piper's voice quavered. "That's one of the giants. Just one of the names I could remember."
Vivian got the feeling there was a lot more bothering her, but she decided she wouldn't press her. She'd had a rough morning.
Leo scratched his head. "Well, I dunno about Enchiladas—"
"Enceladus," Piper corrected.
"Whatever. But Old Potty Face mentioned another name. Porpoise Fear, or something?"
"Porphyrion?" Piper asked. "He was the giant king, I think."
"Yup, the head giant and the counterpart to Zeus," Vivian said like it was the most normal thing ever. Well to her it probably was.
Jason envisioned that dark spire in the old reflecting pool —growing larger as Hera got weaker. "I'm going to take a wild guess," he said. "In the old stories, Porphyrion kidnapped Hera. That was the first shot in the war between the giants and the gods."
"I think so," Piper agreed. "But those myths are garbled and conflicted. It's almost like nobody wanted that story to survive. I just remember there was a war, and the giants were almost impossible to kill."
"Heroes and Demigods have to work together," Vivian said. "When I was on Olympus, Hestra told me stories all the time."
"Kind of hard to do," Leo grumbled, "if the gods won't even talk to us."
They flew west, and Vivian became lost in her thoughts —all of them bad. She wasn't sure how much time passed before the dragon dove through a break in the clouds, and below them, glittering in the winter sun, was a city at the edge of a massive lake. A crescent of skyscrapers lined the shore. Behind them, stretching out to the western horizon, was a vast grid of snow-covered neighborhoods and roads.
"Chicago," Jason said.
"One problem down," Leo said. "We got here alive. Now, how do we find the storm spirits?"
Jason saw a flash of movement below them. At first, he thought it was a small plane, but it was too small, too dark and fast. The thing spiraled toward the skyscrapers, weaving and changing shape—and, just for a moment, it became the smoky figure of a horse.
"How about we follow that one," Jason suggested, "and see where it goes?".