Morpheus spell

| looked down at the city. | could see almost everything from here - the East River and the Hudson River carving the Shape of Manhattan, the grid of streets, the lights of Skyscrapers, the dark stretch of Central Park in the north. Everything looked normal, but something was wrong. | felt it in my bones before | realized what it was.
‘| don’t ... hear anything,’ Annabeth said.
That was the problem.
Even from this height, | should’ve heard the noise of the city - millions of people bustling around, thousands of cars and machines - the hum of a huge metropolis. You don’t think about it when you live in New York, but it’s always there. Even in the dead of night, New York is never silent.
But it was now.
| felt like my best friend had suddenly dropped dead. ‘What did they do?’ My voice sounded tight and angry. ‘What did they do to my city?’
| pushed Michael Yew away from the binoculars and took a look.
In the streets below, traffic had stopped. Pedestrians were lying on the sidewalks, or curled up in doorways. There was no sign of violence, no wrecks, nothing like that. It was as if all the people in New York had simply decided to stop whatever they were doing and pass out.
‘Are they dead?’ Silena asked in astonishment.
Ice coated my stomach. A line from the prophecy rang in my ears: And see the world in endless sleep. | remembered Grover’s story about meeting the god Morpheus in Central Park. You’re lucky I’m saving my energy for the main event.
‘Not dead,’ | said. ‘Morpheus has put the entire island of Manhattan to sleep. The invasion has started.

Pollux crouched next to a sleeping policeman. ‘I don’t get it. Why didn’t we fall asleep too? Why just the mortals?’
‘This is a huge spell,’ Silena Beauregard said. ‘The bigger the spell, the easier it is to resist. If you want to sleep millions of mortals, you’ve got to cast a very thin layer of magic. Sleeping demigods is much harder.’

What’s happening with the mortals outside Manhattan?’ | said. ‘Is the whole state asleep?’
Annabeth frowned. ‘I don’t think so, but it’s strange. As far as | can tell from these pictures, Manhattan is totally asleep.

You’re the greatest heroes of this millennium,’ | told them. ‘It doesn’t matter how many monsters come at you. Fight bravely, and we will win.’ | raised Riptide and shouted, ‘FOR OLYMPUS!’
They shouted in response, and our forty voices echoed off the buildings of midtown. For a moment, it sounded brave, but it died quickly in the silence of ten million sleeping New Yorkers.


TLO ch.9-10