The Lightning Thief

so moved that they passed around the hat and raised money for three tickets on the next plane to New York.
    I knew there was no choice but to fly. I hoped Zeus would cut me some slack, considering the circumstances. But it was still hard to force myself on board the flight.
    Takeoff was a nightmare. Every spot of turbulence was scarier than a Greek monster. I didn’t unclench my hands from the armrests until we touched down safely at La Guardia. The local press was waiting for us outside security, but we managed to evade them thanks to Annabeth, who lured them away in her invisible Yankees cap, shouting, “They’re over by the frozen yogurt! Come on!,” then rejoined us at baggage claim.
    We split up at the taxi stand. I told Annabeth and Grover to get back to Half-Blood Hill and let Chiron know what had happened. They protested, and it was hard to let them go after all we’d been through, but I knew I had to do this last part of the quest by myself. If things went wrong, if the gods didn’t believe me . . . I wanted Annabeth and Grover to survive to tell Chiron the truth.
    I hopped in a taxi and headed into Manhattan.
    Thirty minutes later, I walked into the lobby of the Empire State Building.
    I must have looked like a homeless kid, with my tattered clothes and my scraped-up face. I hadn’t slept in at least twenty-four hours.
    I went up to the guard at the front desk and said, “Six hundredth floor.”
    He was reading a huge book with a picture of a wizard on the front. I wasn’t much into fantasy, but the book must’ve been good, because the guard took a while to look up. “No such floor, kiddo.”
    “I need an audience with Zeus.”
    He gave me a vacant smile. “Sorry?”
    “You heard me.”
    I was about to decide this guy was just a regular mortal, and I’d better run for it before he called the straitjacket patrol, when he said, “No appointment, no audience, kiddo. Lord Zeus doesn’t see anyone unannounced.”
    “Oh, I think he’ll make an exception.” I slipped off my backpack and unzipped the top.
    The guard looked inside at the metal cylinder, not getting what it was for a few seconds. Then his face went pale. “That isn’t . . .”
    “Yes, it is,” I promised. “You want me take it out and—”
    “No! No!” He scrambled out of his seat, fumbled around his desk for a key card, then handed it to me. “Insert this in the security slot. Make sure nobody else is in the elevator with you.”
    I did as he told me. As soon as the elevator doors closed, I slipped the key into the slot. The card disappeared and a new button appeared on the console, a red one that said 600. I pressed it and waited, and waited. Muzak played. “Raindrops keep falling on my head. . . .” Finally, ding . The doors slid open. I stepped out and almost had a heart attack.
    I was standing on a narrow stone walkway in the middle of the air. Below me was Manhattan, from the height of an airplane. In front of me, white marble steps wound up the spine of a cloud, into the sky. My eyes followed the stairway to its end, where my brain just could not accept what I saw.
    Look again, my brain said.
    We’re looking, my eyes insisted. It’s really there.
    From the top of the clouds rose the decapitated peak of a mountain, its summit covered with snow. Clinging to the mountainside were dozens of multileveled palaces—a city of mansions—all with white-columned porticos, gilded terraces, and bronze braziers glowing with a thousand fires.
    Roads wound crazily up to the peak, where the largest palace gleamed against the snow. Precariously perched gardens bloomed with olive trees and rosebushes. I could make out an open-air market filled with colorful tents, a stone amphitheater built on one side of the mountain, a hippodrome and a coliseum on the other. It was an Ancient Greek city, except it wasn’t in ruins. It was new, and clean, and colorful, the way Athens must’ve looked twenty-five hundred years ago.
    This place can’t be here, I told myself. The tip of a mountain hanging over New York City like a billion-ton asteroid? How could something like that be anchored above the Empire State Building, in plain sight of millions of people, and not get noticed?
    But here it was. And here I was.
    My trip through Olympus was a daze. I passed some giggling wood nymphs who threw olives at me from their garden. Hawkers in the market offered to sell me ambrosia-on-a-stick, and a new shield, and a genuine glitter-weave replica