The Sea of Monsters

about the son of Poseidon and some girl at the bottom of Siren Bay.
    “I’ll get us back to the ship,” I told her. “It’s okay. Just hang on.”
    Annabeth nodded to let me know she was better now, then she murmured something I couldn’t hear because of the wax in my ears.
    I made the current steer our weird little air submarine through the rocks and barbed wire and back toward the hull of the Queen Anne’s Revenge , which was maintaining a slow and steady course away from the island.
    We stayed underwater, following the ship, until I judged we had moved out of earshot of the Sirens. Then I surfaced and our air bubble popped.
    I ordered a rope ladder to drop over the side of the ship, and we climbed aboard.
    I kept my earplugs in, just to be sure. We sailed until the island was completely out of sight. Annabeth sat huddled in a blanket on the forward deck. Finally she looked up, dazed and sad, and mouthed, safe.
    I took out the earplugs. No singing. The afternoon was quiet except for the sound of the waves against the hull. The fog had burned away to a blue sky, as if the island of the Sirens had never existed.
    “You okay?” I asked. The moment I said it, I realized how lame that sounded. Of course she wasn’t okay.
    “I didn’t realize,” she murmured.
    “What?”
    Her eyes were the same color as the mist over the Sirens’ island. “How powerful the temptation would be.”
    I didn’t want to admit that I’d seen what the Sirens had promised her. I felt like a trespasser. But I figured I owed it to Annabeth.
    “I saw the way you rebuilt Manhattan,” I told her. “And Luke and your parents.”
    She blushed. “You saw that?”
    “What Luke told you back on the Princess Andromeda , about starting the world from scratch . . . that really got to you, huh?”
    She pulled her blanket around her. “My fatal flaw. That’s what the Sirens showed me. My fatal flaw is hubris.”
    I blinked. “That brown stuff they spread on veggie sandwiches?”
    She rolled her eyes. “No, Seaweed Brain. That’s hummus . Hubris is worse.”
    “What could be worse than hummus?”
    “Hubris means deadly pride, Percy. Thinking you can do things better than anyone else . . . even the gods.”
    “You feel that way?”
    She looked down. “Don’t you ever feel like, what if the world really is messed up? What if we could do it all over again from scratch? No more war. Nobody homeless. No more summer reading homework.”
    “I’m listening.”
    “I mean, the West represents a lot of the best things mankind ever did—that’s why the fire is still burning. That’s why Olympus is still around. But sometimes you just see the bad stuff, you know? And you start thinking the way Luke does: ‘If I could tear this all down, I would do it better.’ Don’t you ever feel that way? Like you could do a better job if you ran the world?”
    “Um . . . no. Me running the world would kind of be a nightmare.”
    “Then you’re lucky. Hubris isn’t your fatal flaw.”
    “What is?”
    “I don’t know, Percy, but every hero has one. If you don’t find it and learn to control it . . . well, they don’t call it ‘fatal’ for nothing.”
    I thought about that. It didn’t exactly cheer me up.
    I also noticed Annabeth hadn’t said much about the per sonal things she would change—like getting her parents back together, or saving Luke. I understood. I didn’t want to admit how many times I’d dreamed of getting my own parents back together.
    I pictured my mom, alone in our little apartment on the Upper East Side. I tried to remember the smell of her blue waffles in the kitchen. It seemed so far away.
    “So was it worth it?” I asked Annabeth. “Do you feel . . . wiser?”
    She gazed into the distance. “I’m not sure. But we have to save the camp. If we don’t stop Luke . . .”
    She didn’t need to finish. If Luke’s way of thinking could even tempt Annabeth, there was no telling how many other half-bloods might join him.
    I thought about my dream of the girl and the golden sarcophagus. I wasn’t sure what it meant, but I got the feeling I was missing something. Something terrible that Kronos was planning. What had the girl seen when she opened that coffin lid?
    Suddenly Annabeth’s eyes widened. “Percy.”
    I turned.
    Up ahead was another blotch of land—a saddle-shaped island with forested hills and white beaches and green meadows—just like I’d seen in my dreams.
    My nautical senses confirmed it. 30