The Missing Gods

Chapter 9 - We Go Skydiving

The wind slapped me in the face so hard my eyes teared up. I could vaguely feel Annabeth clinging to me as we fell through my overwhelming panic. I'm not a frequent flyer, but I've never been particularly afraid of heights. This was something else, though, and I seemed to have left my stomach back up on Olympus.

Annabeth started climbing up my waist, her nails digging into my skin as she fought the air resistance to stay with me. Every millisecond brought Manhattan's skyscrapers closer, and I desperately tried to come up with a plan. I heard something through my left ear and tried to figure out what it was before looking down into my arms at Annabeth. She was now only holding onto my waist with one arm, my hands being the only thing keeping her from tumbling around the sky like a kite. Her other arm was quickly digging into her backpack, still on her back, and I caught the noise again, which I figured out was her yelling at me.

"What?" I yelled through the wind, but she shook her head and continued searching her bag. She couldn't hear me, just like I couldn't hear her. The air pressure kept dropping fast and my ear drums felt like they were going to burst. Annabeth started pulling something bulky out of her bag as the skyscrapers came into sharp focus, only a couple hundred feet below us now. I quit looking for a plan and just prayed to whatever gods that were still in Olympus to look out for my mother and friends when Annabeth yanked her way up to my face, gripping my thigh between her legs like the rope we had to climb in gym class.

"THE BOLT!" She yelled right into my ear, and I puzzled for half a second, before I realized her plan. Holding onto each other with one arm each, she held out the master bolt, fighting to keep it steady against the wind as I reached out and unscrewed the bottom the smallest fraction of an inch.

The electricity arced straight toward the ground quickly materializing below us, with every hair on my head standing on end. Annabeth and I tightened our hold on the bolt as the lightening met the ground with a tremendous boom, and we were shot into the air so fast that I could feel my eardrums burst.