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TWENTY ONE, where's chiron?
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CAMP HALF-BLOOD DIDN'T feel the same. It looked the way it always had, with endless blue skies and beautiful strawberry fields—but it was different. It was something in the air, something sinister. Like something had changes in the morale of the campers, and Aster knew exactly who was at fault.
Luke.
He had started this conflict with hopes of war, and his family got in the way. He poisoned Thalia's tree; the girl who had risked her life countless times to save him, had sacrificed her life for him, Aster, and Annabeth—and they watched her death with their own eyes. Luke knew all that she had done, and he still had the nerve to poison her legacy. It made Aster sick to her stomach; she wanted to use him as a target rather than the Apollo wooden boards. The next time she saw him, he would have a knife between the eyes.
As Aster, Percy, Annabeth, and Tyson made their way to the Big House, Aster recognized a lot of kids she knew from over the years. Nobody stopped to talk. Nobody said, "Welcome back." Some did double takes when they saw Tyson, but most just walked grimly past and carried on with their duties—running messages, toting swords to sharpen on the grinding wheels. The camp felt like a military school.
None of that mattered to Tyson. He was absolutely fascinated by everything he saw. "Whasthat!" he gasped.
"The stables for pegasi," Percy said. "The winged horses."
"Whasthat!"
"Um... those are the toilets."
"Whasthat!"
"The cabins for the campers. If they don't know who your Olympian parent is, they put you in the Hermes cabin—that brown one over there—until you're determined. Then, once they know, they put you in your dad or mom's group."
He looked at him in awe. "You... have a cabin?"
"Number three." Percy pointed to a low gray building made of sea stone.
"You live with friends in the cabin?"
"No. No, just me." Percy didn't elaborate. He was the only one who stayed in that cabin because he wasn't supposed to be alive.
The "Big Three" gods—Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades—had made a pact after World War II not to have any more children with mortals. They were simply more powerful than regular half-bloods. They were too unpredictable. When they got mad they tended to cause problems... like World War II, for instance. Aster had seen their power firsthand, and what it could do if they had big vendettas. The Big Three pact had only been broken twice—once when Zeus sired Thalia, once when Poseidon sired Percy. Neither of them should've been born.
Thalia had gotten herself turned into a pine tree when she was twelve. Aster stared longingly at her tree in the distance, piles of pine needles surrounding her trunk.
