Rick Riordan
The Last Olympian - 05
stab him and cuss him out in rhyming couplets. He was pretty creative about rhyming those cuss
words.
"We're fighting for our lives," I said, "and they're bickering about some stupid chariot."
"They'll get over it," Annabeth said. "Clarisse will come to her senses."
I wasn't so sure. That didn't sound like the Clarisse I knew.
I scanned more reports and we inspected a few more cabins. Demeter got a four.
Hephaestus got a three and probably should've gotten lower, but with Beckendorf being gone and
all, we cut them some slack. Hermes got a two, which was no surprise. All campers who didn't know
their godly parentage were shoved into the Hermes cabin, and since the gods were kind of forgetful,
that cabin was always overcrowded.
Finally we got to Athena's cabin, which was orderly and clean as usual. Books were
straightened on the shelves. The armor was polished. Battle maps and blueprints decorated the
walls. Only Annabeth's bunk was messy. It was covered in papers, and her silver laptop was still
running.
"Vlacas," Annabeth muttered, which was basically calling herself an idiot in Greek.
Her second-in-command, Malcolm, suppressed a smile. "Yeah, um . . . we cleaned
everything else. Didn't know if it was safe to move your notes."
That was probably smart. Annabeth had a bronze knife that she reserved just for monsters
and people who messed with her stuff.
Malcolm grinned at me. "We'll wait outside while you finish inspection." The Athena campers
filed out the door while Annabeth cleaned up her bunk.
I shuffled uneasily and pretended to go through some more reports. Technically, even on
inspection, it was against camp rules for two campers to be . . . like, alone in a cabin.
That rule had come up a lot when Silena and Beckendorf started dating. And I know some of
you might be thinking, Aren't all demigods related on the godly side, and doesn't that make dating
gross? But the thing is, the godly side of your family doesn't count, genetically speaking, since gods
don't have DNA. A demigod would never think about dating someone who had the same godly par-
ent. Like two kids from Athena cabin? No way. But a daughter of Aphrodite and a son of
Hephaestus? They're not related. So it's no problem.
Anyway, for some strange reason I was thinking about this as I watched Annabeth straighten
up. She closed her laptop, which had been given to her as a gift from the inventor Daedalus last
summer.
I cleared my throat. "So . . . get any good info from that thing?"
"Too much," she said. "Daedalus had so many ideas, I could spend fifty years just trying to
figure them all out."
"Yeah," I muttered. "That would be fun."
She shuffled her papers—mostly drawings of buildings and a bunch of handwritten notes. I
knew she wanted to be an architect someday, but I'd learned the hard way not to ask what she was
working on. She'd start talking about angles and load-bearing joints until my eyes glazed over.
"You know . . ." She brushed her hair behind her ear, like she does when she's nervous.
"This whole thing with Beckendorf and Silena. It kind of makes you think. About . . . what's
important. About losing people who are important."
I nodded. My brain started seizing on little random details, like the fact that she was still
wearing those silver owl earrings from her dad, who was this brainiac military history professor in
San Francisco.
"Urn, yeah," I stammered. "Like . . . is everything cool with your family?"
Okay, really stupid question, but hey, I was nervous.
Annabeth looked disappointed, but she nodded.
"My dad wanted to take me to Greece this summer," she said wistfully. "I've always wanted
to see—"
"The Parthenon," I remembered.
She managed a smile. "Yeah."
"That's okay. There'll be other summers, right?"
As soon as I said it, I realized it was a boneheaded comment. I was facing the end of my
days. Within a week, Olympus might fall. If the Age of the Gods really did end, the world as we knew
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