Page 61 of The Chalice of the Gods

“This is not a spectator sport,” he grumbled, which was the first time anyone had ever said that about wrestling.

“Do you want to fight me or not?” I asked.

I felt like I could risk saying that, because the gleam in Gary’s eyes told me he was eager to push my face into the pavement. He wasn’t the first person who’d ever felt that way.

“Fine,” he grunted.

He snapped his bony fingers. Annabeth and Grover both unfroze. They turned in my direction, removed their super-attractive menthol Kleenex tusks, and ran toward the playground.

By the time Annabeth reached us, she had drawn her knife. Grover was wielding a black-sesame mochi donut like a shuriken.

“What’s going on?” Grover demanded, hefting his pastry like he was ready to go full donut assassin.

Annabeth sized up Gary, then cursed under her breath. “Geras, I presume? I should have known we were fighting Old Age.”

Gary chuckled. “And I should have spoken to you first, young lady. You’re clearly the brains of this operation.”

“It’s cool,” I told my friends. “We’ve come to an agreement.”

Annabeth scowled at the god. “Let me guess. A wrestling match? Excuse me. I need a word with my client.”

She grabbed my arm and dragged me to the other end of the playground. Behind us, I heard Gary ask Grover, “You going to eat that?”

Annabeth gripped my shoulders. “Percy, you can’t do this.”

“Hey, it isn’t something Iwantto do.”

“You can’t beat him.”

I wanted to argue that this was our best shot. It was a lot better than all three of us getting turned into grave dust. But I could tell from Annabeth’s expression that she had already run the angles. She was way ahead, as usual.

“Hercules wrestled Old Age to a standstill,” she continued. “That’s theonlytime Geras has been forced to call a draw. Beating him is impossible.”

“What was Hercules’s secret?”

“No secret. Just brute force.”

I rubbed my biceps and tried not to feel offended. I wasn’t weak, exactly, but superstrength wasn’t on my list of powers. I gotbreathe underwaterandtalk to horsesinstead, which weren’t so useful in a Greenwich Village playground smackdown.

“There has to be another way,” I said. “Your mom told me one time at the Hoover Dam, there’s always a way out—”

“For those clever enough to find it,” she said. “Yeah, I know. But this... Geras is a force of nature. He’s inevitable. You can’t fight Old Age.”

Unless you’re immortal,I thought.

But that was exactly why Geras had stolen the chalice. It let you cheat the system. And he wasn’t wrong about immortality being a curse. The gods were the most messed-up people I’d ever met. They’d had centuries to work out their problems. They just didn’t. Sure, they changed their clothes and modernized their lifestyles once in a while, but at heart, they were still exactly who they had been back in the Bronze Age.

A heavy feeling settled in my gut.... I wasn’t sure if it was despair, desperation, or donut. Was I on the wrong side of this fight? If I walked away and let Gary keep the chalice, Ganymede might get shamed and exiled from Olympus. Would that be so bad? The gods would have to pour their own drinks. They’d have one less way of making new immortals. Ganymede could get a job at Himbo Juice. Maybe Gary would even write me a recommendation letter instead, praising me for embracing my inner cranky old man.

But Ganymede had chosen me for this quest. Putting aside the fact that every god chose me for every quest, I felt obligated to keep my promise. I remembered how nervous the poor cupbearer had looked at Himbo Juice; the way he’d ducked under the table when he thought the golden-eagle-flavored smoothie of Zeus might swoop down to get him.

Yes, he was traumatized and miserable. Maybe he would’ve been better off getting kicked back into the mortal world. But he hadn’t asked me to free him from Mount Olympus. He’d asked me to retrieve the cup. If I chose to wreck his life for his own good, without his permission, I wasn’t much better than Zeus. I believed everyone should have the right to ruin their own life without anyone else ruining it for them.

“I need to do this,” I told Annabeth. “I think I can find a way....”

She studied my face, maybe wondering whether she should try to knock some sense into me with the hilt of her dagger. Finally, she sighed. “It has to be your call. Just... don’t underestimate him because of how he looks, Percy.”

It made me uneasy when she called me Percy instead of Seaweed Brain. It meant we werewaybeyond the point where she needed to criticize how dumb I was being.

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