AFTER SIX MONTHS of building, training, and preparing, the Argo II was finally ready to sail west to California. There would be no more scrambling to make last-minute repairs; no more morning jogs with the Hermes cabin; no more days spent training for a war that seemed so far off.
The time had come. The Prophecy of Eight was officially underway.
The entire camp had come to send them off. After a surprisingly optimistic speech from Chiron—surprising only because Ophelia had gotten so used to the centaur's pessimism in the last half-year—the campers said their goodbyes.
Leo and his siblings were rushing around, quadruple-checking every part of the ship to make sure everything was in order, which was their own way of saying goodbye to their head counselor.
Piper was saying her goodbyes to her half-siblings—even Drew Tanaka had come to wish them luck, though her cynicism made up for Chiron's lack of pessimism. Drew had seemed to calm down in the six months Piper had been the Aphrodite cabin's head counselor, and she'd even grudgingly apologized to Ophelia for threatening to steal her boyfriend. Ophelia doubted she and Piper's sister would ever be friends, per se, but it was nice to leave knowing they didn't outright hate each other.
Annabeth was saying goodbye to her siblings as well, though she was definitely eager to get going and get to her missing boyfriend. She'd spent the last six months trying to get to him sooner, but as most of them had predicted, they'd had to wait for the Argo II to be ready before they could set off for Camp Jupiter. Ophelia and Jason had narrowed down the camp's location from their memories, and Annabeth had gotten word from one of the search parties that Percy was alive and well, but the daughter of Athena was still a bit frantic to hit the road—or, well, skies, in their case.
Not that Ophelia could blame her. She doubted she'd be any better if she and Jason were in Annabeth and Percy's position.
Ophelia and Jason stood with her half-siblings as they said their final goodbyes, Travis alternating between glaring at Jason and pretending he wasn't crying like the rest of his siblings.
She knew her leaving was hitting her siblings hard. The last child of Hermes who'd been apart of a Great Prophecy hadn't survived, and there was a lingering fear that Ophelia might not come back from the voyage to Greece. It was a half-step up from a suicide mission—they'd be sailing into the Mare Nostrum, a place Roman demigods were banned from entering (for good reason), and attempting to stop the giants from raising Gaea and enacting her 'destroy the mortal world' plan.
It wasn't hard to imagine that they might not all make it back.
"Iris-message whenever you can," Lorena instructed, her tone motherly despite the fact that she was a full two years younger than Ophelia. "Don't look any gorgons in the eye. Keep your weapon on you at all times, even when you sleep. Remember to drink plenty of water—not just when your thirsty."
"Okay, mother," Ophelia teased.
"Just be careful," Lorena said, rolling her eyes at Ophelia's sarcastic tone. "And come back to us."
Ophelia smiled softly, pulling her sister into a hug. "I'll do my best," she whispered, because that was all she could offer.
Lorena's smile was understanding. "That's all we ask."
"My threat still stands," Travis told Jason, narrowing his watery eyes at the blond. He sniffled, then glared harder to make up for the sniffle.
Jason nodded, casting a fearful look toward Ophelia. She stifled a laugh.
Thomas wrapped his skinny arms around Ophelia's waist. "I'll miss you."
Ophelia hugged him back tightly, ruffling his perpetually messy hair for good measure. "I'll miss you too, buddy," she whispered.
Thomas pulled away, immediately moving over to give Jason a hug as well and repeat the process. Ophelia didn't bother to stop the smile that broke out across her face. Thomas practically idolized Jason, and had since he first met him. Jason had never had any little siblings, but back at Camp Jupiter, he'd helped look after the younger members in his cohort, who were usually only a little older than Thomas was now.
Suffice to say, Jason had experience being an honorary big brother.
The Argo II's horn blew, startling most of the campers. Leo leaned precariously over the railing, grinning maniacally down at the crowd with Nyssa and Jake beside him. "She's ready to go!" he announced. "Take-off in t-minus five minutes!"
"This is it," Connor mumbled, wrapping an arm around Ophelia shoulders. "Our baby sister's off to war."
Ophelia smacked him in the stomach. "I'm older than you."
Connor pouted. "Can't you let me have this one thing?"
Ophelia rolled her eyes. She hugged each of her siblings one last time, and Sophie went last, her eyes glassy with tears. Ophelia hated to pick favorites, but if she absolutely had to, her favorite sibling would definitely be Sophie. Hers was the hardest goodbye to endure.
"I wish you didn't have to go yet," Sophie whispered, reluctantly pulling away from their hug.
Ophelia smiled gently. "It's time, Soph," she said.
Sophie looked up at her, and Ophelia could see the fear in her eyes. Fear that Ophelia wouldn't come back from her quest—that Sophie would lose another sibling to another war.
Ophelia wished she could tell Sophie she'd come back. She wished she could make that promise and mean it. But who knew what the Fates had in store for them? The reality was that, in all likelihood, not all of the Eight would make it to the end of the prophecy. It was terrifying, but Ophelia wouldn't delude herself into thinking it wasn't a possibility. She knew the horrors of war firsthand, and she knew how much it could take.
Who was to say it wouldn't take her, too?
"I love you guys," Ophelia whispered, taking one last look at her siblings, committing their faces to memory. If she died before she saw them again... she wanted to remember exactly what they looked like, as safe and sound as demigods could be.
"We love you, too," Travis murmured, abandoning his one-sided glaring contest with Jason in favor of messing with Ophelia's hair one last time. "Be safe, Phee."
Ophelia cracked a smile. "Always."
Travis rolled his eyes. "Keep an eye on her, Grace," he said, looking pointedly at Jason. "Don't let her go marching off into a one-on-one battle against a giant again."
"It was one time!" Ophelia protested.
"I'll do my best," Jason promised Travis.
Ophelia and her friends boarded the ship. The five demigods and their satyr chaperone stood at the bow of the ship, looking down one last time at the campers waving goodbye. Piper sniffled quietly, slipping her hand into Ophelia's and squeezing it tightly. On Piper's other side, Annabeth looked out at the grassy expanse below them, as if committing the landscape to memory.
The Argo II lifted into the air, and they set sail for Camp Jupiter.
❖
By Leo's calculations, it would take them a full day to reach California.
She was already cracking by the end of the first hour in the air.
Ophelia knew she should have been brimming with excitement the closer they got to Camp Jupiter. It was her home—she'd been born and raised there. It should have felt like she was finally coming home.
But it didn't.
Even before Maren's betrayal, Ophelia hadn't fit in all that well at camp. For people who interacted with Lares on a regular basis, Romans were surprisingly antsy around other kinds of ghosts—or, rather, people who talked to those ghosts. Ophelia had been on the outskirts of camp life long before Maren's betrayal branded her a traitor-by-association.
Ophelia tried to keep herself busy, helping Leo set their course and ensure they wouldn't encounter any roadblocks—skyblocks?—along the way. What with her father being the god of travel, Ophelia had a pretty good grasp of most vehicles, and apparently that applied to flying warships, too. Leo had named her his co-pilot, which wasn't as exciting as it sounded, but it gave Ophelia something to do to keep from thinking too much.
And gods knew her thoughts were not a place she wanted to linger in at the moment.
Unfortunately, though, there was only so much for a co-pilot to do on a flying warship with autopilot in the form of a semi-sentient mechanical dragon, so she had more free time than she liked. She eventually found herself with nothing to do except watch the landscape pass underneath them.
"Hey."
Ophelia looked up at the sound of Jason's voice, managing a small smile as the blond stepped up to the railing next to her. "Hey."
"Leo says we'll be landing around eight tomorrow morning," he told her. "In eleven hours, we'll be... home."
Home.
"I should be relieved, right?" Ophelia murmured. "Excited, even. But it just feels... I don't know. Weird."
Jason was quiet for a moment. "Yeah," he finally sighed. "It does feel weird."
In the six months they'd spent at Camp Half-Blood, they'd hardly even talked about Camp Jupiter. Sure, when the Greek campers asked, Ophelia and Jason would answer whatever questions they had. They'd described the structure, the city of veterans, the big and little differences between the two camps. But it all felt technical, talking about the camp's history rather than their own history at the camp.
The latter was harder to talk about, at least in Ophelia's experience.
Because the truth was, despite the fact that New Rome would always be her hometown, the connection she'd had to it wasn't as strong as it was when she was a kid. She'd been away from it for six months, but the only thing she missed about it was Gianna. Everything else she'd loved about New Rome—her mother, her aunt, her brother—was gone.
The truth was, Camp Jupiter hadn't felt like home in a long time.
"I thought I would miss it more," Jason confessed quietly. "And I do, I guess. But it's more..."
"The people."
Jason nodded. "Yeah."
Ophelia was quiet for a moment, her gaze fixed on the horizon. The sun had all but disappeared behind it, leaving only a fading orange glow and a sky full of stars. If Ophelia looked hard enough, she could spot the constellation of an archer, her bowstring pulled back and an arrow notched, ready to fly.
"Do you ever wish you were Greek?" she asked.
If anyone else had asked him, Ophelia suspected Jason wouldn't have answered—at least, not honestly. He was Camp Jupiter's golden child, a praetor of the Twelfth Legion. To anyone else, any doubt would be seen as ungrateful or even traitorous.
But he was always honest with Ophelia.
"Sometimes," he admitted. "I... I don't regret growing up at Camp Jupiter, but... seeing everyone at Camp Half-Blood, how easy-going things are there, compared to at Camp Jupiter... I can't help but feel a little envious. There's no stupid politics to worry about, no constant fear of backstabbing. It's almost... peaceful. As peaceful as a demigod camp can be, at least."
Ophelia chewed on the inside of her lip, nodding. "There's no Octavian at Camp Half-Blood, either," she added.
Jason laughed a little. "Yeah, that's definitely a bonus."
Ophelia had spent more time than she'd like to admit wondering how differently things might have turned out if she was Greek instead of Roman; if her mother had never been cursed; if she'd never fallen for Maren; if she'd been born an ordinary, ignorant mortal, unaware of the true dangers of the world.
A hundred little things could have been different, and Ophelia's life could have turned out vastly different from how it had.
Maybe she would have been happier if she'd been born mortal, with no divine blood in her veins.
But could she ever be happier that way? Never knowing her friends at Camp Jupiter, her friends at Camp Half-Blood, Jason, Matt, Gianna? Even loving Maren had changed her—maybe not for the better, but would she even be Ophelia if none of that awful stuff had happened to her?
Would she be Ophelia if she hadn't suffered the way she had?
She took a deep breath, reaching for Jason's hand. "It'll be good to see Gianna," she said, determined to focus on the positives rather than the negatives. "And Hazel. And Reyna, though I won't be surprised if she kicks your ass for leaving her to deal with Octavian on her own."
Jason winced. "Yeah," he said. "She might stab me for that. And I'd kind of deserve it."
Ophelia laughed. "Hey, we could have matching scars."
Jason fixed her with an exasperated look. "We already have matching tattoos, now you want matching scars?"
"I'm just saying, might be kind of cool."
With an incredulous eye-roll, Jason leaned forward and kissed her. "C'mon," he said, tugging on her hand to lead her toward the stairs that led down belowdeck. "Big day tomorrow."
❖
The next morning, as Ophelia tied the laces of her boots after a fitful night of sleep, the intercom clicked on.
"Good morning, my adoring crew—and Annabeth," Leo's voice sounded through the intercom, making Ophelia roll her eyes. "This is your esteemed captain speaking. It is currently seven-thirty-four A.M., and we have just entered California airspace. Please report to the deck and get in your places. We should be landing at Camp Jupiter in approximately twenty minutes. Also, someone please bring me a muffin from the mess hall, I am very hungry. That is all."
By the time Ophelia reached the deck—throwing a blueberry muffin at Leo, who fumbled it before catching it like a newborn baby in his arms—everyone had already gathered, settling into their places on the deck.
Ophelia had done a lot of dangerous things in her life. She'd faced the Trojan sea monster, fought Lycaon and his pack of red-eyed wolves on more than one occasion, and been stabbed by a fire-breathing giant in the side on a quest to free the queen of Olympus from Gaea's prison—and that wasn't even half of the list.
And here she was yet again, flying on a Greek warship toward her old Roman camp.
She just had to hope the legion wouldn't blast them to smithereens on sight.
❖