CHAPTER EIGHT!
alternatively titled: charybdis and scylla
THE ENGINE ROARED, THE IRON PLATING RATTLING AS THE SHIP BEGAN TO PICK UP SPEED.
I felt anxiety welling in me, the whole thing was making me nervous and sick. I leant over the railing of the ship, throwing up into the ocean.
"Oh, Di," Percy murmured, coming over and holding back my braids from falling into my face, his other hand rubbing circles into my back.
He knows that I have anxiety, I was diagnosed at the same time as I was with ADHD. I get lots of fun things like panic attacks and anxiety sickness, but Percy has been a lot of help. His presence is the calm in the middle of the storm that is my life.
"Clarisse," Percy said, "Charybdis sucks up the sea. Isn't that the story?"
"And spits it back out again, yeah."
"What about Scylla?"
"She lives in a cave, up on those cliffs. If we get too close, her snaky heads will come down and start plucking sailors off the ship."
"Choose Scylla then," He said. "Everybody goes below deck and we chug right past."
"No!" Clarisse insisted. "If Scylla doesn't get her easy meat, she might pick up the whole ship. Besides, she's too high to make a good target. My cannons can't shoot straight up. Charybdis just sits there at the center of her whirlwind. We're going to steam straight toward her, train our guns on her, and blow her to Tartarus!"
I pulled myself up and shakily wiped my face, Percy put something in my hand. It was a mint, i shoved it in my mouth and moved to stand with him.
The engine hummed. The boilers were heating up so much I could feel the deck growing warm beneath my feet. The smokestacks billowed. The red Ares flag whipped in the wind.
As we got closer to the monsters, the sound of Charybdis got louder and louder—a horrible wet roar like the galaxy's biggest toilet being flushed. Every time Charybdis inhaled, the ship shuddered and lurched forward. Every time she exhaled, we rose in the water and were buffeted by ten-foot waves.
It made me so sick, but i was determined to hold onto my stomach this time.
Undead sailors calmly went about their business on the spar deck. I guess they'd fought a losing cause before, so this didn't bother them. Or maybe they didn't care about getting destroyed because they were already deceased. Neither thought made me feel any better.
Annabeth's knuckles were turning white against the rail, "You still have your thermos full of wind?"
Percy nodded, I scoffed, "With that whirlpool? It's way too dangerous, its like adding gasoline to a fire."
"What about controlling the water?" She asked, looking directly at Percy, "You're Poseidon's son. You've done it before."
He closed his eyes for a few moments, before he shrugged miserably, "I-I can't"
"We need a backup plan," Annabeth said. "This isn't going to work."
"Annabeth is right," Tyson said. "Engine's no good."
"What do you mean?" she asked.
"Pressure. Pistons need fixing."
Before he could explain, the cosmic toilet flushed with a mighty roaaar! The ship lurched forward and I was thrown to the deck. We were in the whirlpool.
"Full reverse!" Clarisse screamed above the noise. The sea churned around us, waves crashing over the deck. The iron plating was now so hot it steamed. "Get us within firing range! Make ready starboard cannons!"
Dead Confederates rushed back and forth. The propeller grinded into reverse, trying to slow the ship, but we kept sliding toward the center of the vortex.
A zombie sailor burst out of the hold and ran to Clarisse. His gray uniform was smoking. His beard was on fire. "Boiler room overheating, ma'am! She's going to blow!"
"Well, get down there and fix it!"
"Can't!" the sailor yelled. "We're vaporizing in the heat."
Clarisse pounded the side of the casemate. "All I need is a few more minutes! Just enough to get in range!"
"We're going in too fast," the captain said grimly. "Prepare yourself for death."
"No!" Tyson bellowed. "I can fix it."
"You?" Clarisse looked at him incredulously.
"He's a Cyclops," Annabeth said. "He's immune to fire. And he knows mechanics."
"Go!" yelled Clarisse.
"Tyson, no!" I grabbed his arm. "It's too dangerous!"
He patted my hand. "Only way, Di." His expression was determined—confident, even. I'd never seen him look like this before. "I will fix it. Be right back."
I wanted to follow him, stop him, but I couldn't. As I watched him follow the smoldering sailor down the hatch, I had a terrible feeling. I wanted to run after him, but the ship lurched again—and then I saw Charybdis.
She appeared only a few hundred yards away, through a swirl of mist and smoke and water.
The first thing I noticed was the reef—a black crag of coral with a fig tree clinging to the top. It seemed oddly peaceful, calm in the middle of a storm.
All around it, water curved into a funnel, like light around a black hole. Then I saw the horrible thing anchored to the reef just below the waterline—an enormous mouth with slimy lips and mossy teeth the size of rowboats. And worse, the teeth had braces, bands of corroded scummy metal with pieces of fish and driftwood and floating garbage stuck between them.
Charybdis was an orthodontist's nightmare, I would know; I had braces for three years. She was nothing but a huge black maw with bad teeth alignment and a serious overbite, and she'd done nothing for centuries but eat without brushing after meals. As I watched, the entire sea around her was sucked into the void—sharks, schools of fish, a giant squid. And I realized that in a few seconds, the CSS Birmingham would be next.
"Lady Clarisse," the captain shouted. "Starboard and forward guns are in range!"
"Fire!" Clarisse ordered.
Three rounds were blasted into the monster's maw. One blew off the edge of an incisor. Another disappeared into her gullet. The third hit one of Charybdis's retaining bands and shot back at us, snapping the Ares flag off its pole.
"Again!" Clarisse ordered. The gunners reloaded, but I knew it was hopeless. We would have to hot Charybdis at least a hundred times to do any real damage, and we certainly didn't have that long.
Then the vibrations in the deck changed. The hum of the engine got stronger and steadier. The ship shuddered and we started pulling away from the mouth.
I let out a breath i didn't know i was holding in, the ghost of a smile on my lips, "He did it."
"Wait!" Clarisse said. "We need to stay close!"
"We'll die!" Percy countered. "We have to move away."
My hands gripped the rail as the ship fought against the monster's whirlpool. Talk about a vacuum. The broken Ares flag raced past us and lodged in Charybdis's braces. We weren't making much progress, but at least we were holding our own. Tyson had somehow given us just enough juice to keep the ship from being sucked in.
Suddenly, the mouth snapped shut. The sea died to absolute calm. Water washed over Charybdis.
Then, just as quickly as it had closed, the mouth exploded open, spitting out a wall of water, ejecting everything inedible, including our cannonballs, one of which slammed into the side of the CSS Birmingham with a ding like the bell on a carnival game.
We were thrown backward on a wave that must've been forty feet high. Another smoldering sailor burst out of the hold. He stumbled into Clarisse, almost knocking them both overboard. "The engine is about to blow!"
"Where's Tyson!" Percy exclaimed.
"Still down there," the sailor said. "Holding it together somehow, though I don't know for how much longer."
The captain said, "We have to abandon ship."
"No!" Clarisse yelled.
"We have no choice, m'lady. The hull is already cracking apart! She can't—"
He never finished his sentence. Quick as lightning, something brown and green shot from the sky, snatched up the captain, and lifted him away. All that was left were his leather boots.
"Guys," I yelled, "It's Scylla!"
Percy uncapped his pen-sword and tried to swipe at her, but it was no use. The monster was quite literally faster than lightning.
"Everyone get below!" Percy demanded.
"We can't!" Clarisse drew her own sword. "Below deck is in flames."
I glanced to the edge of the ship, a plan forming in my brain, "Lifeboats!"
"They'll never get clear of the cliffs," Clarisse said. "We'll all be eaten."
"We have to try," Annabeth agreed, which was saying something that she was agreeing with what i said, "Percy, the thermos."
"We can't leave Tyson," He protested.
"We have to get the boats ready!"
Clarisse took Annabeth's command. She and a few of her undead sailors uncovered one of the two emergency rowboats while Scylla's heads rained from the sky like a meteor shower with teeth, picking off Confederate sailors one after another.
"Get the other boat." Percy threw Annabeth the thermos. "I'll get Tyson."
"The heat will turn you to ash!" I protested, grabbing his arm.
He wrenched it from my grasp and ran for the boiler room hatch, when suddenly Scylla snatched him up. Annabeth pulled me towards the lifeboats, i had a feeling she was only trying to save me for Percy's sake as he would probably kill her if I died.
I pulled my dagger and slashed through the ropes tying the lifeboat to the ship. We plummeted towards the ocean, Annabeth let a spurt of wind out of the thermos and we went rocketing away from the ship. We touched the water just as it exploded behind us.
"Tyson!" I sobbed.
We weren't far enough away, cinders rained down. Annabeth opened the thermos a little too far and white sheets of wind blasted in every direction, scattering the lifeboats.
I couldn't see Percy now, but I hoped he was somewhere nearby. We rocketed through the ocean, slowing down as we went. We sailed for about half an hour before we found him floating face up, if he wasn't Poseidon's son he would have drowned.
Annabeth fished him out of the water while i found his ripped knapsack. Most of Percy's things had floated away, but the bottle of multivitamins were still there. We managed to salvage some things from the wreckage; a Ziploc bag full of ambrosia, a couple of sailors' shirts, and a bottle of Dr Pepper.
I fed Percy some ambrosia and brushed the hair from his eyes, tears escaping my own. I hoped that Tyson was still alive, but deep down I knew he probably wasn't.
☽☾
PERCY'S EYES FLUTTERED OPEN, A PAINED GROAN ESCAPING HIS LIPS.
He tried to sit up, but my hands held his shoulders down, "Rest," I told him.
"She's right, you'll need it," Annabeth said, Percy's eyes widened. He must of thought that if she was agreeing with me on something, it must have been serious.
"Tyson... ?" He trailed off.
I choked back a sob, Annabeth sighed, "Percy, I'm really sorry."
He grasped my hand like a lifeline, we were silent for a while, mourning our friend.
"He may have survived," she said halfheartedly. "I mean, fire can't kill him."
Waves lapped at the boat. Annabeth and I showed Percy what we managed to save from the wreck.
We sailed for hours. Now that we were in the Sea of Monsters, the water glittered a more brilliant green, like Hydra acid. The wind smelled fresh and salty, but it carried a strange metallic scent, too—as if a thunderstorm were coming. Or something even more dangerous.
No matter which way we turned, the sun seemed to shine straight into my eyes. We took turns sipping from the Dr Pepper, shading ourselves with the sail as best we could. And we talked about Percy's latest dream of Grover.
By Annabeth's estimate, we had less than twenty-four hours to find Grover, assuming Percy's dream was accurate, and assuming the Cyclops Polyphemus didn't change his mind and try to marry Grover earlier.
"Yeah," Percy said bitterly. "You can never trust a Cyclops."
Annabeth stared across the water. "I'm sorry, Percy. I was wrong about Tyson, okay? I wish I could tell him that."
I could tell that he was trying to stay mad at her, but it was impossible. She had saved both his life and mine multiple times. I pondered on the fact that she seemed to hate me, yet she continued to save my life but I pushed it out of my mind because the whole thing was starting to give me a headache.
"Annabeth," Percy asked, "What's Chiron's prophecy?"
Her eyes flickered between him and I, and then away again before she pursed her lips. "Percy, I shouldn't—"
"I know Chiron promised the gods he wouldn't tell me. But you didn't promise, did you?"
"Knowledge isn't always good for you."
"Your mom is the wisdom goddess!"
"I know! But every time heroes learn the future, they try to change it, and it never works."
"The gods are worried about something I'll do when I get older," Percy guessed. "Something when I turn eighteen."
Annabeth twisted her Yankees cap in her hands. "Percy, I don't know the full prophecy, but it warns about a half-blood child of the Big Three—the next one who lives to the age of eighteen. That's the real reason Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades swore a pact after World War II not to have any more kids. I also know that there's a child of Hera involved," Her eyes flicked to me again, "The next child of the Big Three and a child of Hera who reach eighteen will be dangerous weapons."
"Why?"
"Because they will decide the fate of Olympus. They will make a decision that either saves the Age of the Gods, or destroys it."
Percy's face was green, "That's why Kronos didn't kill me last summer."
She nodded. "You could be very useful to him. If he can get you on his side, the gods will be in serious trouble."
"But if it's me in the prophecy—"
"We'll only know that if you survive three more years. That can be a long time for a half-blood. When Chiron first learned about Thalia, he assumed she was the one in the prophecy. That's why he was so desperate to get her safely to camp. Then she went down fighting and got turned into a pine tree and none of us knew what to think. Until you came along."
On our port side, a spiky green dorsal fin about fifteen feet long curled out of the water and disappeared.
"This kid in the prophecy ... he or she couldn't be like, a Cyclops?" Percy asked. "The Big Three have lots of monster children."
Annabeth shook her head. "The Oracle said 'half-blood.' That always means half-human, half-god. There's really nobody alive who it could be, except you."
"Then why do the gods even let me live? It would be safer to kill me."
"You're right."
"Thanks a lot."
"Percy, I don't know. I guess some of the gods would like to kill you, but they're probably afraid of offending Poseidon. Other gods ... maybe they're still watching you, trying to decide what kind of hero you're going be. You could be a weapon for their survival, after all. The real question is ... what will you do in three years? What decision will you make?"
"Did the prophecy give any hints?"
Annabeth hesitated. Maybe she would've told us more, but just then a seagull swooped down out of nowhere and landed on our makeshift mast. Annabeth looked startled as the bird dropped a small cluster of leaves into her lap.
"Land," she said. "There's land nearby!"
Sure enough, there was a line of blue and brown in the distance. Another minute and I could make out an island with a small mountain in the center, a dazzling white collection of buildings, a beach dotted with palm trees, and a harbor filled with a strange assortment of boats.
The current was pulling our rowboat toward what looked like a tropical paradise.
☽☾
charlie speaks!
Annabeth and Di's dynamic is just Annabeth hating her and Di being extremely confused
Di and Percy comforting each other <33