Page 23 of The Wild Zone

Everyone within whispering distance turned to stare at me. Their message was clear.

I squirmed. “Oh. It was our dad.”

It figured Ares would want to start a war in his own family.

“Now everybody thinks Percy’s a hero,” Elam said with a bitter frown. “When really, he screwed up everything. The Titans are stirring. Demigods are leaving camp to join Kronos’s rebellion. Meanwhile, everyone looks at us like we’re thieves.”

My pancakes suddenly felt like lead in my belly. I knew about the Titans. They’d ruled the world before the gods overthrew them. Now they were trying to stage a comeback. If open war broke out between the gods and Titans, it would make nuclear Armageddon look like a Sunday picnic, and demigods would be caught in the middle.

On top of all that, I was an Ares kid. I was walking into this camp already branded a criminal.

Clarisse must have read my expression.

“Be grateful you’re here,” she said. “The only reason we increased off-season admissions is because we’re losing demigods faster than we can recruit them. Why do you think all five of you newbies got picked up at the same time? We need warm bodies. Cannon fodder.”

“You give great pep talks,” I grumbled.

Clarisse smirked. “Now everyone shut up before we get in trouble!” She pointed toward Argus, who was just finishing his spiel.

“Finally, a toast!” Argus held his goblet aloft, and we all did the same. “To…” He faltered, scowling at a satyr who had just run into the pavilion with a set of bagpipes. “Woodrow!”

The rest of us looked at one another in confusion. “To Woodrow!” we mumbled.

“Is it his birthday?” someone asked.

“No, no, no! We’re not toasting Woodrow,” Argus clarified. “I meant…Woodrow, I asked you to bring me the bag of pipes from the amphitheater! The panpipes! We need them for the music class!”

Woodrow the satyr blushed. “Oh, I thought bagpipes was a strange request. But as long as I have them, does anyone want to hear ‘The Itsy-Bitsy Satyr’?”

Several hands shot up, mostly at the Apollo table.

Argus pulled on his hair. “No! We’re not doing ‘Itsy-Bitsy Satyr.’ We’re toasting the gods. Then everyone goes to their first activity!” He raised his goblet again. “To the gods!”

“To the gods!” We all chorused and drank. Then everyone left their tables in a much less orderly fashion than they’d arrived.

I watched campers dump their trays at the busing station: food waste in one bin, cutlery in another, cups and plates in another. Most were pretty sloppy about it. I’d probably been just as careless the night before, but now that I was part of kitchen patrol, I had a new understanding of how piglike people were. I couldn’t wait to clean up after them….

5

We Are Sentenced to Death by Musical Theater

After breakfast, my cabinmates scattered in different directions—toward the stables, the blacksmith forge, a rock-climbing wall that appeared to be spewing lava….

I simply stood next to one of the dining hall pillars, unsure of what to do next. I guess I should have listened while Argus was reading from his clipboard. Nobody had given me a schedule or offered to show me around camp. Was I supposed to check in somewhere?

Then a voice on the other side of the pillar said, “He wasn’t at role call or breakfast, Clarisse.” It sounded like Silena.

I pressed as close to the pillar as I could. Silena could only be talking about Grant.

“What do you want me to do about it?” Clarisse snapped. “Go out into the forest and track him down myself?”

A boy said, “Argus already has the satyrs and dryads combing the woods.”

“Well, there you go,” Clarisse said. “The kid will turn up.”

The boy scoffed. “You sure you didn’t have something to do with this, Clarisse?”

“What are you implying, Travis?”