Read Online The Last Olympian by Rick Riordan - Free Book Online Page A

relief. Still, she seemed so much more mature. It was kind of intimidating. I mean, sure, she’d always been cute, but she was starting to be seriously beautiful.
    Finally she said, “That flying chariot.”
    “What?”
    “You asked what they were fighting about.”
    “Oh. Oh, right.”
    “They captured it in a raid in Philadelphia last week. Some of Luke’s demigods were there with that flying chariot. The Apollo cabin seized it during the battle, but the Ares cabin led the raid. So they’ve been fighting about who gets it ever since.”
    We ducked as Michael Yew’s chariot dive-bombed an Ares camper. The Ares camper tried to stab him and cuss him out in rhyming couplets. He was pretty creative about rhyming those cuss words.
    “We’re fighting for our lives,” I said, “and they’re bickering about some stupid chariot.”
    “They’ll get over it,” Annabeth said. “Clarisse will come to her senses.”
    I wasn’t so sure. That didn’t sound like the Clarisse I knew.
    I scanned more reports and we inspected a few more cabins. Demeter got a four. Hephaestus got a three and probably should’ve gotten lower, but with Beckendorf being gone and all, we cut them some slack. Hermes got a two, which was no surprise. All campers who didn’t know their godly parentage were shoved into the Hermes cabin, and since the gods were kind of forgetful, that cabin was always overcrowded.
    Finally we got to Athena’s cabin, which was orderly and clean as usual. Books were straightened on the shelves. The armor was polished. Battle maps and blueprints decorated the walls. Only Annabeth’s bunk was messy. It was covered in papers, and her silver laptop was still running.
    “Vlacas,” Annabeth muttered, which was basically calling herself an idiot in Greek.
    Her second-in-command, Malcolm, suppressed a smile. “Yeah, um . . . we cleaned everything else. Didn’t know if it was safe to move your notes.”
    That was probably smart. Annabeth had a bronze knife that she reserved just for monsters and people who messed with her stuff.
    Malcolm grinned at me. “We’ll wait outside while you finish inspection.” The Athena campers filed out the door while Annabeth cleaned up her bunk.
    I shuffled uneasily and pretended to go through some more reports. Technically, even on inspection, it was against camp rules for two campers to be . . . like, alone in a cabin.
    That rule had come up a lot when Silena and Beckendorf started dating. And I know some of you might be thinking, Aren’t all demigods related on the godly side, and doesn’t that make dating gross? But the thing is, the godly side of your family doesn’t count, genetically speaking, since gods don’t have DNA. A demigod would never think about dating someone who had the same godly parent. Like two kids from Athena cabin? No way. But a daughter of Aphrodite and a son of Hephaestus? They’re not related. So it’s no problem.
    Anyway, for some strange reason I was thinking about this as I watched Annabeth straighten up. She closed her laptop, which had been given to her as a gift from the inventor Daedalus last summer.
    I cleared my throat. “So . . . get any good info from that thing?”
    “Too much,” she said. “Daedalus had so many ideas, I could spend fifty years just trying to figure them all out.”
    “Yeah,” I muttered. “That would be fun.”
    She shuffled her papers—mostly drawings of buildings and a bunch of handwritten notes. I knew she wanted to be an architect someday, but I’d learned the hard way not to ask what she was working on. She’d start talking about angles and load-bearing joints until my eyes glazed over.
    “You know . . .” She brushed her hair behind her ear, like she does when she’s nervous. “This whole thing with Beckendorf and Silena. It kind of makes you think. About . . . what’s important. About losing people who are important.”
    I nodded. My brain started seizing on little random details, like the fact that she