These Lifeless Things || p. jackson

VII. Grover Starts a Food Fight

XIAO WAS FOUR YEARS OLD WHEN SHE FIRST HEARD THE WORD "SECRET", and nine when she had one of her own to keep. It had started with a math teacher, one who made her hate herself for her trouble in the subject. As Xiao crushed the chalk in her hand, halfway through an equation on the board, her teacher doubled over. They ruled it a random heart attack, but Xiao had known. She dusted the chalk off her hands and couldn't help but think the white powder looked like the color of a person's ribs.

The spiral continued in other subjects, and no one suspected Xiao of anything. She was the perfect student. She never got into fights—they were over before they could begin. Though her grades in other areas weren't perfect, she was the star pupil of her biology class. When she was ten, she started to understand what she was—at least that she wasn't normal. A satyr teacher came for her and took her to camp half blood around the same time, and she returned there every summer.

But she still had her secrets, and one of them was this: Xiao knew that Bianca was going to die. Not from the beginning, of course, but the second she saw her mother the alarm bells rang in her head. Land without rain. One of them would die in the desert. There was a reason Xiao didn't try to stop Bianca from charging the defective Talos. Xiao was not ready to give up her life, and she knew the world would depend on Percy one day (like it or not). Bianca was...expendable. She was the most inexperienced, the one who would only serve to hinder them—skeleton killer or not. She only felt pity for Nico.

Xiao drove them through the desert on a borrowed tow truck, obviously less shaken up than the rest of them. Her hands were steady on the wheel, and she knew she'd made the right call. Zoë sat next to her up front. She didn't speak for the first hour at all. For an immortal, you'd have thought she'd be more accustomed to loss.

"It should have been me," Zoë said. "I should have gone into the giant."

"Get over yourself," Xiao said simply. "You know Artemis better than anyone. No one would have a better chance at finding her. You can't hold yourself responsible for what Bianca did."

Zoë looked over, studying Xiao with red eyes. "What did Aphrodite tell you? Honestly."

"She warned me that I might die, essentially. But I don't think she was too concerned for me." Xiao couldn't help laughing. "My own mother looks at me with fear. It's mildly gratifying."

Zoë said nothing to that. She didn't say anything until after the truck broke down at the edge of a river canyon. That was just as well, because the road dead-ended.

Xiao got out and crossed her arms. "Plan?"

It was desert in all directions, occasional clumps of barren mountains plopped here and there. The canyon was the only thing interesting. The river itself wasn't very big, maybe fifty yards across, green water with a few rapids, but it carved a huge scar out of the desert. The rock cliffs dropped away below them.

"There's a path," Grover said. "We could get to the river."

Xiao tried to see what he was talking about, and finally noticed a tiny ledge winding down the cliff face.

"That's a goat path," Percy said.

"So?" he asked.

"The rest of us aren't goats."

"We can make it," Grover said. "I think."

Xiao thought about that. She'd done cliffs before, but she didn't like them. Then she looked over at Thalia and saw how pale she'd gotten. Her problem with heights... she'd never be able to do it.

"No," Percy said. "I, uh, think we should go farther upstream."

Grover said, "But—"

"Come on," Xiao said. "A walk won't hurt us."