IF FOUND, PLEASE RETURN TO EUDORA, ATLANTIC OCEAN
REFUNDABLE DEPOSIT: ONE GOLDEN DRACHMA
Great. If I failed to get into college or get a job, I could just wander around New York looking for blue plastic chairs to cash in for drachmas.
I struggled to my feet. The creek meandered through the middle of a gritty small-town business district: low brick buildings, old factories and warehouses repurposed as condos or offices. I knew it was Yonkers because along the riverfront, iron lampposts were hung with weirdly festive banners that yelled YONKERS!
It was the kind of post-industrial area that would’ve looked better in the dead of winter, under a heavy gray sky and a covering of dirty urban snow. Rough. Grim. A Deal with it or go home kind of place.
The riverbed was lined with scrubby bushes and gray boulders—many of them now painted with Percy blood and skin samples from my tumble out of the drainage pipe. The water was what you might politely call non-potable—muddy brown and streaked with foam like bubble bath, except I was pretty sure it wasn’t bubble bath.
I had landed right next to a marshy area labeled SAW MILL RIVER MUSKRAT HABITAT.
I saw zero muskrats. Being smart animals, they were probably vacationing in Miami.
The name Saw Mill River sounded vaguely familiar. I remembered something in the news from when I was little. My mom had read me this article about how a bunch of urban rivers had been paved over back in the day and turned into underground drainage canals, and how people were now trying to open them up again and make them nature habitats. What did they call it . . . ? Daylighting a river.
From what I could see, the Saw Mill River didn’t enjoy its daylighting much. Three blocks north, the water trickled reluctantly from a tunnel large enough to drive a truck through. The current was sluggish, as if it wanted to crawl back into the darkness and hide.
I wondered if Eudora had made a mistake.
Oh, you wanted the Elisson, the cleanest waters in the world? I imagined her saying. Sorry, I thought you said the Saw Mill, the cleanest waters in Westchester County! I always get those confused!
Or maybe she’d intentionally flushed me off-course to protect the Elisson’s location. If so, the river god must run a really great yoga class.
I waded upstream, slipping and stumbling over mossy rocks. My head was swiveling for monsters, or Yonkers police, or ill-tempered muskrats, but no one bothered me. About halfway to the tunnel, I caught my first whiff of putrid air from the entrance, like the breath of a sleeping giant who’d been living off moldy fish sandwiches. I doubled over and gagged.
The smell did not make me think of the cleanest waters in the world.
While I was hunched over, praying to the god of not vomiting, something floated by my foot. At first I thought it was a ripped grocery bag: just a shred of milky translucent plastic. Then I noticed the honeycomb pattern on the membrane. Like scales. Like the shed skin of a snake.
That was super helpful for my nausea.
Okay . . . Iris had told us that serpents bathed in the River Elisson. Maybe the water here was not so clean because I was wading through monster bathwater drain-off. Or that snakeskin could be from a normal snake, because nature.
I took a few more steps.
When I looked down again, I saw something else in the water. Snagged in a bed of moss was a curved black pointy thing about the size of my index finger. Some impulse—maybe a death wish—made me pick it up. The broken talon glistened in the sunlight. I’d seen ones like this before on the fingertips of my sixth-grade math teacher, aka the Fury Alecto.
I stared into the dark tunnel. Whatever might be in there taking a bubble bath, I did not want to meet it alone. Also, I didn’t have Iris’s staff.
Unfortunately, that meant I’d have to come back, with help, and subject Annabeth and Grover to the wonders of the Saw Mill River Fury habitat.
I cursed my guidance counselor, Sicky Frog, and the life of a demigod in general. Then I trudged off to find the nearest train station.
The next afternoon, I came back with reinforcements.
When I told Annabeth and Grover where we were going, they looked at me funny, but they didn’t ask questions. Downtown Yonkers was well within our standard deviation for weirdness.
I’m not sure what the other passengers thought about me carrying the staff of Iris on the subway train. Maybe they figured I was a shepherd commuting to my pastures. Grover, being Grover, had brought a backpack full of snacks along with his panpipes. Because you never know when you might want to dance a jig while eating sour-cream-and-jalapeno corn squiggles. Annabeth had packed a bunch of practical things, like her knife, flashlights, and a thermos of something that I hoped was more potable than the river water.