The Titan's Curse

sacrifices, so they laid off Helios and Selene and folded their duties into our job descriptions. My sis got the moon. I got the sun. It was pretty annoying at first, but at least I got this cool car.”
    “But how does it work?” Nico asked. “I thought the sun was a big fiery ball of gas!”
    Apollo chuckled and ruffled Nico’s hair. “That rumor probably got started because Artemis used to call me a big fiery ball of gas. Seriously, kid, it depends on whether you’re talking astronomy or philosophy. You want to talk astronomy? Bah, what fun is that? You want to talk about how humans think about the sun? Ah, now that’s more interesting. They’ve got a lot riding on the sun . . . er, so to speak. It keeps them warm, grows their crops, powers engines, makes everything look, well, sunnier. This chariot is built out of human dreams about the sun, kid. It’s as old as Western Civilization. Every day, it drives across the sky from east to west, lighting up all those puny little mortal lives. The chariot is a manifestation of the sun’s power, the way mortals perceive it. Make sense?”
    Nico shook his head. “No.”
    “Well then, just think of it as a really powerful, really dangerous solar car.”
    “Can I drive?”
    “No. Too young.”
    “Oo! Oo!” Grover raised his hand.
    “Mm, no,” Apollo said. “Too furry.” He looked past me and focused on Thalia.
    “Daughter of Zeus!” he said. “Lord of the sky. Perfect.”
    “Oh, no.” Thalia shook her head. “No, thanks.”
    “C’mon,” Apollo said. “How old are you?”
    Thalia hesitated. “I don’t know.”
    It was sad, but true. She’d been turned into a tree when she was twelve, but that had been seven years ago. So she should be nineteen, if you went by years. But she still felt like she was twelve, and if you looked at her, she seemed somewhere in between. The best Chiron could figure, she had kept aging while in tree form, but much more slowly.
    Apollo tapped his finger to his lips. “You’re fifteen, almost sixteen.”
    “How do you know that?”
    “Hey, I’m the god of prophecy. I know stuff. You’ll turn sixteen in about a week.”
    “That’s my birthday! December twenty-second.”
    “Which means you’re old enough now to drive with a learner’s permit!”
    Thalia shifted her feet nervously. “Uh—”
    “I know what you’re going to say,” Apollo said. “You don’t deserve an honor like driving the sun chariot.”
    “That’s not what I was going to say.”
    “Don’t sweat it! Maine to Long Island is a really short trip, and don’t worry about what happened to the last kid I trained. You’re Zeus’s daughter. He’s not going to blast you out of the sky.”
    Apollo laughed good-naturedly. The rest of us didn’t join him.
    Thalia tried to protest, but Apollo was absolutely not going to take “no” for an answer. He hit a button on the dashboard, and a sign popped up along the top of the windshield. I had to read it backward (which, for a dyslexic, really isn’t that different than reading forward). I was pretty sure it said WARNING: STUDENT DRIVER.
    “Take it away!” Apollo told Thalia. “You’re gonna be a natural!”
    I’ll admit I was jealous. I couldn’t wait to start driving. A couple of times that fall, my mom had taken me out to Montauk when the beach road was empty, and she’d let me try out her Mazda. I mean, yeah, that was a Japanese compact, and this was the sun chariot, but how different could it be?
    “Speed equals heat,” Apollo advised. “So start slowly, and make sure you’ve got good altitude before you really open her up.”
    Thalia gripped the wheel so tight her knuckles turned white. She looked like she was going to be sick.
    “What’s wrong?” I asked her.
    “Nothing,” she said shakily. “N-nothing is wrong.”
    She pulled back on the wheel. It tilted, and the bus lurched upward so fast I fell back and crashed against something soft.
    “Ow,” Grover said.
    “Sorry.”
    “Slower!” Apollo said.
    “Sorry!” Thalia said. “I’ve got it under control!”
    I managed to get to my feet. Looking out the window, I saw a smoking ring of trees from the clearing where we’d taken off.
    “Thalia,” I said, “lighten up on the accelerator.”
    “I’ve got it, Percy,” she said, gritting her teeth. But she kept it floored.
    “Loosen up,” I told her.
    “I’m loose!” Thalia said. She was so stiff she looked like she was made out of plywood.
    “We need to veer