Chapter Three REYNA RAMÍREZ-ARELLANO As we set up our camping tents, I again felt amazed by the technology of the Hunters of Artemis. Even though Romans were great crafters, I doubted they would have invented the special Hunter design of a tent. All you needed to do was to take out the tent pack(which was about as small as a bubble gum pack) and it would start turning into a 3D tent. Closing it was almost the same process and just as easy. Even better, today I got to share a tent with Luna! That girl was always putting glow-in-the-dark moon decorations outside and inside the tent. That may seem a bit childish, but, hey, the one time a Hunter named Samantha dared challenge Luna’s tent decorations, she got locked in the tent by Luna. You may be thinking Why do you have to share? Can’t you all just have one tent? Thing is, we have like fifty Hunters now. Twenty-five tents is already a lot. If we needed to arrange fifty tents into a circle, we’d have our own out-in-the-wild apartment. And we didn’t want that. We wanted to keep our location secret, to be stealthy and sneaky and small. We’re hunters. We sneak. “Do you prefer this one? Or that one? Or this silvery one?” Luna asked me as she effortlessly switched between a whole glow-in-the-dark tent, a glow-in-the-dark tent with moon craters on top of it, and a silver tent with gray crescent moons on it. I chuckled. Tent decorations were Luna’s one and only childish liking. “Oh, what about this one?” Luna asked as she made the tent have a constellation background. I peered in closely. I gasped. The constellation was of Zoe Nightshade! “The constellation one!” I exclaimed. “Okay,” Luna said. “Just expect me to be asleep quickly. This one takes slightly more energy.” Luna actually makes tent decorations because she can’t sleep well and needs to do something that requires energy. This may seem like a stupid reason, but the time Luna forgot to do tent decorations, she fell asleep in the middle of folding her tent back up and the tent swallowed her up. Yes, our tents can do that. Whatever is put inside our tents when they fold stays inside until we open the tents again. Which made it really funny, because when Luna woke up, she had a mini moon smash the folded tent case, which kind of gave a big gut injury to Hunter Kowalski, who was carrying the extra tent pack in her belt. Yes, we have a Hunter named Hunter. It’s not funny. At least, Hunter claims it isn’t. Katherine thinks differently. Anyway, true to her word, Luna fell asleep fast. “Wake up,” Luna said as she shook me awake. “Quest… Zoe Nightshade… prophe…” I promptly fell asleep again. I woke up inside a dark space. I could feel the surface bobbing up and down. Where was I? Then I recalled the events of this early morning. Oh. Luna had kept me in the tent while we started our quest. Fine. I may not be able to summon a mini moon to give Hunter Kowalski a gut injury, but I still have Imperial gold daggers from my time as a Roman praetor. Very, very carefully, I used my daggers to cut a large hole in the tent. Ow. Did my landing have to be so harsh? “So, finally, the sleeper is awake,” announced a sarcastic voice from above me. I sighed. “Do we have an extra tent? I think I just ruined this one.” Amanda, who was looming above me, shook her head. “You’ll have to share with someone. Not it!” she said, followed by a ‘Not it!’ from Thalia and Katherine, which left poor Luna, who did not know the rules of ‘Not it!’. Unfortunately, that meant I was stuck as her tentmate again. “Great,” Luna and I muttered unintentionally at the same time. I chuckled. “We really do think alike, don’t we?” I groaned, tired. “We haven’t shot a monster in hours! Where are we even?” A confused Luna who did not know the ways of the modern world shrugged. Thalia was ahead on scouting duty. Katherine, her nose literally buried in her book, seemed oblivious to the conversation. That left only Amanda, who sighed. “Unfortunately, we’re close to Manhattan, and we’re heading to Camp Half-Blood.” That did not seem like bad news to me, but then again, I had worked with this camp and led a Roman version of it for years. Just then, Thalia came back. “Your turn,” she said to Luna. Luna groaned. “I told you already, I don’t know anything about the modern world! I won’t be helpful!” Amanda grinned. “Scaredy-cat?” That got Luna going. “I’ll show you who’s a scaredy-cat,” she said as she sprinted ahead into scouting duty.
