At the port of Pylos, Piper and Frank search for the poison they need to make the physician’s cure. Piper is happy for the distraction from thinking about the conversation she and her mother shared the previous evening, in which Aphrodite offered a bleak vision of the future and made Piper promise not to share it. Frank secures the poison from his shape-shifting distant relatives, though the demigods still don’t know how to brew the physician’s cure.

Back on the Argo II, the demigods discuss their plans. Frank’s relatives told him that “the chained god” they need to find refers to a statue of Ares that the Spartans keep “chained up in their city so the spirit of war would never leave them” (137). When Jason wonders how this will help them, Piper privately recalls Aphrodite’s warning that the threat to Jason isn’t only his sword wound but also “the ugly truth he saw in Ithaca” (138, italics in original). Prompted by Hazel, Piper shares one of the visions she saw in Katoptris: herself and Annabeth in a cave with a statue of a warrior engulfed in flames.