A 1

Percy passed out early, which left Annabeth with nothing to do in the evening except stare at her
computer.
She’d brought Daedalus’s laptop with her, of course. Two years ago, she’d inherited the machine
from the greatest inventor of all time, and it was loaded with invention ideas, schematics, and
diagrams, most of which Annabeth was still trying to figure out. After two years, a typical laptop
would have been out of date, but Annabeth figured Daedalus’s machine was still about fifty years
ahead of its time. It could expand into a full-size laptop, shrink into a tablet computer, or fold into a
wafer of metal smaller than a cell phone. It ran faster than any computer she’d ever had, could access
satellites or Hephaestus-TV broadcasts from Mount Olympus, and ran custom-made programs that
could do just about anything except tie shoelaces. There might have been an app for that, too, but
Annabeth hadn’t found it yet.
She sat on her bunk, using one of Daedalus’s 3-D-rendering programs to study a model of the
Parthenon in Athens. She’d always yearned to visit it, both because she loved architecture and because
it was the most famous temple to her mother.
Now she might get her wish, if they lived long enough to reach Greece. But the more she thought
about the Mark of Athena, and the old Roman legend Reyna had mentioned, the more nervous she
got.
She didn’t want to, but she recalled her argument with her mother. Even after so many weeks, the
words still stung.
Annabeth had been riding the subway back from the Upper East Side after visiting Percy’s mom.
During those long months when Percy was missing, Annabeth made the trip at least once a week—
partly to give Sally Jackson and her husband Paul an update on the search, and partly because
Annabeth and Sally needed to lift each other’s spirits and convince one another that Percy would be
fine.
The spring had been especially hard. By then, Annabeth had reason to hope Percy was alive, since
Hera’s plan seemed to involve sending him to the Roman side, but she couldn’t be sure where he was.
Jason had remembered his old camp’s location more or less, but all the Greeks’ magic—even that of