the_blood_of_olympus_-_rick_riordan

‘Here.’ Hedge offered her a plate of flame-grilled waffles with fresh sliced kiwi and pineapple. It
all looked surprisingly good.
‘Where are you getting these supplies?’ Reyna marvelled.
‘Hey, I’m a satyr. We’re very efficient packers.’ He took a bite of waffle. ‘We also know how to
live off the land!’
As Reyna ate, Coach Hedge took out a notepad and started to write. When he was finished, he
folded the paper into an aeroplane and tossed it into the air. A breeze carried it away.
‘A letter to your wife?’ Reyna guessed.
Under the rim of his baseball cap, Hedge’s eyes were bloodshot. ‘Mellie’s a cloud nymph. Air
spirits send stuff by paper aeroplane all the time. Hopefully her cousins will keep the letter going
across the ocean until it finds her. It’s not as fast as an Iris-message, but, well, I want our kid to have
some record of me, in case, you know …’
‘We’ll get you home,’ Reyna promised. ‘You will see your kid.’
Hedge clenched his jaw and said nothing.
Reyna was pretty good at getting people to talk. She considered it essential to know her comradesin-arms.
But she’d had a tough time convincing Hedge to open up about his wife, Mellie, who was
close to giving birth back at Camp Half-Blood. Reyna had trouble imagining the coach as a father, but
she understood what it was like to grow up without parents. She wasn’t going to let that happen to
Coach Hedge’s child.
‘Yeah, well …’ The satyr bit off another piece of waffle, including the stick he’d toasted it on. ‘I
just wish we could move faster.’ He chin-pointed to Nico. ‘I don’t see how this kid is going to last
one more jump. How many more will it take us to get home?’
Reyna shared his concern. In only eleven days, the giants planned to awaken Gaia. Octavian
planned to attack Camp Half-Blood on the same day. That couldn’t be a coincidence. Perhaps Gaia
was whispering in Octavian’s ear, influencing his decisions subconsciously. Or worse: Octavian was
actively in league with the earth goddess. Reyna didn’t want to believe that even Octavian would
knowingly betray the legion, but after what she’d seen in her dreams she couldn’t be sure.
She finished her meal as a group of Chinese tourists shuffled past the courtyard. Reyna had been
awake for less than an hour and already she was restless to get moving.
‘Thanks for breakfast, Coach.’ She got to her feet and stretched. ‘If you’ll excuse me, where there
are tourists, there are bathrooms. I need to use the little praetors’ room.’
‘Go ahead.’ The coach jangled the whistle that hung around his neck. ‘If anything happens, I’ll
blow.’
Reyna left Aurum and Argentum on guard duty and strolled through the crowds of mortals until she
found a visitors’ centre with restrooms. She did her best to clean up, but she found it ironic that she
was in an actual Roman city and couldn’t enjoy a nice hot Roman bath. She had to settle for paper
towels, a broken soap dispenser and an asthmatic hand dryer. And the toilets … the less said about
those, the better.
As she was walking back, she passed a small museum with a window display. Behind the glass lay
a row of plaster figures, all frozen in the throes of death. A young girl was curled in a fetal position.