She sighed. “Afleece. The coat of a ram is called a fleece. And if that ram happens to have golden wool—”
“The Golden Fleece. Are you serious?”
Annabeth scraped a plateful of death-bird bones into the lava. “Percy, remember the Gray Sisters? They said they knew the location of the thing you seek. And they mentioned Jason. Three thousand years ago, they toldhimhow to find the Golden Fleece. Youdoknow the story of Jason and the Argonauts?”
“Yeah,” I said. “That old movie with the clay skeletons.”
Annabeth rolled her eyes. “Oh my gods, Percy! You are so hopeless.”
“What?” I demanded.
“Just listen. The real story of the Fleece: there were these two children of Zeus, Cadmus and Europa, okay? They were about to get offered up as human sacrifices, when they prayed to Zeus to save them. So Zeus sent this magical flying ram with golden wool, which picked them up in Greece and carried them all the way to Colchis in Asia Minor. Well, actually it carried Cadmus. Europa fell off and died along the way, but that’s not important.”
“It was probably important to her.”
“Thepointis, when Cadmus got to Colchis, he sacrificed the golden ram to the gods and hung the Fleece in a tree in the middle of the kingdom. The Fleece brought prosperity to the land. Animals stopped getting sick. Plants grew better. Farmers had bumper crops. Plagues never visited. That’s why Jason wanted the Fleece. It can revitalize any land where it’s placed. It cures sickness, strengthens nature, cleans up pollution—”
“It could cure Thalia’s tree.”
Annabeth nodded. “And it would totally strengthen the borders of Camp Half-Blood. But Percy, the Fleece has been missing for centuries. Tons of heroes have searched for it with no luck.”
“But Grover found it,” I said. “He went looking for Pan and he found the Fleece instead because they both radiate nature magic. It makes sense, Annabeth. We can rescue him and save the camp at the same time. It’s perfect!”
Annabeth hesitated. “A littletooperfect, don’t you think? What if it’s a trap?”
I remembered last summer, how Kronos had manipulated our quest. He’d almost fooled us into helping him start a war that would’ve destroyed Western Civilization.
“What choice do we have?” I asked. “Are you going to help me rescue Grover or not?”
She glanced at Tyson, who’d lost interest in our conversation and was happily making toy boats out of cups and spoons in the lava.
“Percy,” she said under her breath, “we’ll have to fight a Cyclops. Polyphemus, theworstof the Cyclopes. And there’s only one place his island could be. The Sea of Monsters.”
“Where’s that?”
She stared at me like she thought I was playing dumb. “The Sea of Monsters. The same sea Odysseus sailed through, and Jason, and Aeneas, and all the others.”
“You mean the Mediterranean?”
“No. Well, yes…but no.”
“Another straight answer. Thanks.”
“Look, Percy, the Sea of Monsters is the sea all heroes sail through on their adventures. It used to be in the Mediterranean, yes. But like everything else, it shifts locations as the West’s center of power shifts.”
“Like Mount Olympus being above the Empire State Building,” I said. “And Hades being under Los Angeles.”
“Right.”
“But a whole sea full of monsters—how could you hide something like that? Wouldn’t the mortals notice weird things happening…like, ships getting eaten and stuff ?”
“Of course they notice. They don’t understand, but they know something is strange about that part of the ocean. The Sea of Monsters is off the east coast of the U.S. now, just northeast of Florida. The mortals even have a name for it.”
“The Bermuda Triangle?”
“Exactly.”
I let that sink in. I guess it wasn’t stranger than anything else I’d learned since coming to Camp Half-Blood.
