Chapter Text
The Labyrinth was dark. Too late, Percy thought to ask Daedalus if there was any way to find a lantern or light the way a bit, but by then the tunnel had closed behind him. He considered trying to find the mark to open it again, but that wasn’t important. There was a very faint light coming from farther down the tunnel; he’d just have to trust in that.
The walls were the same dark stone as Kronos’s palace. At first, it just felt like he was walking down yet another of those corridors, and he felt homesick for Annabeth’s chattering about architecture. Then between one stride and another, the walls changed to a rougher stone, more crudely cut, and much warmer in colour. He brushed his hand along it. When he pulled away, dust clung to his fingers. Maybe that would be the way forward, then—touch the wall to ground himself as he walked and keep from wandering. Spikes might fly out and impale him, but hey, at least that would solve his problems one way or the other.
He shuffled over to the left-hand side of the tunnel. Thankfully, it didn’t vanish underneath his hand. From there, he took a few tentative steps forward, his fingertips brushing the wall the whole time. No spikes. No sudden trapdoors. No evil skeletons jumping out to skewer him. And no Nazis.
Maybe his mom was right. He’d watched too much Indiana Jones.
In his defence, he remembered the skeleton warriors that’d chased him on his last quest well enough that he didn’t want to deal with any more of them. He didn’t drop his guard, but he kept walking.
“Two lefts. One right. Three more lefts.” Those directions made it sound like he’d be walking around in circles, but he didn’t want to tempt the Fates by questioning them out loud.
He expected his voice to echo, but the rough rocks of the walls, and the earth underfoot, just absorbed it. The air tasted damp and thick. Where was the nearest exit? If he didn’t have sufficient oxygen this far underground, would he even survive? Actually, for that matter, wasn’t underground the domain of Hades, the way the sky was Zeus’s? Would he kill Percy for using it—or, he supposed, not using it in the proper, dead soul manner? He grimaced and shook his head, forcing his way onwards.
There was the first crossroad. Just a two-pronged fork in the path. He kept his hand on the left wall and followed.
There was no way to tell how long he’d been walking for. Daedalus had said it would be about three hours to New York—an insane statement, but Percy couldn’t exactly throw stones—and it felt like he’d been walking for a while. Should he take a break? He needed a second opinion. He missed having Annabeth and Grover to complain, consider, and walk with. But at least he’d spent enough time with them that at the back of his head, he heard Annabeth anyway: Keep moving, Seaweed Brain. The monsters might catch you.
She was right. He had to get home. He needed to find his mom.
Percy was no stranger to time blindness, but just walking like this made him antsy. His thoughts raced. How long had it been? He missed the wristwatch Tyson had made him, that turned into a shield. He’d left that at camp before the quest to rescue Artemis. Would it still be hanging on the wall of Cabin 3, or would someone have come in to collect his belongings? If they had, who would’ve done that? His mom?
Gods, how was his mom feeling? She’d just started getting her life together. She was writing her novel. She was free from Gabe. If that Iris message they’d had before he left on his last quest was anything to go by, she’d started dating someone new. And then she’d found out her son was dead.
Maybe it would have helped. He was her last tie to the mythological world. With him dead, she would have a peaceful life. But he also knew she loved him too much to appreciate that. She would have been devastated.
Who had broken the news to her? Annabeth had said she and Thalia had run off as soon as the meeting was over. Grover was comatose. Would Poseidon have bothered to drop in on Sally for the first time in fourteen years just to break the bad news? Annabeth had said he’d disappeared immediately after the meeting, but Percy doubted that had been to do the good, fatherly thing. Which meant the only other person at camp who knew how to contact his mom was Chiron.
“Gods, no,” he muttered. “Please don’t let it have been Chiron.”
Chiron was a great teacher and all, with a gift of calm endurance that Percy did not understand, but he was not subtle. Or sensitive. He’d once told Percy that it was only a matter of time before he got kicked out of Yancy. Percy hoped desperately that he hadn’t told his mom that it was only a matter of time before Percy was killed, anyway.
“What’s wrong with Chiron?”
Percy jumped about a foot in the air. The voice wasn’t too near to him, but it was ahead. He was coming up on another two-pronged split in the tunnel. The tunnel on the right was pitch dark. But the tunnel on the left, the one he was supposed to take, was tinged orange. If he listened closely, he could hear the crackling of a fire.
Follow the instructions he was given and walk toward the fire and the unexpected voice? Or plunge in the wrong direction, into the darkness, because he really wasn’t in the mood to talk to anyone right now?
He honestly would have taken the plunge if it weren’t for the fact that the voice was familiar. High and reedy—a kid’s voice. A boy. And someone who knew Chiron? That didn’t mean they were friendly—apparently a lot of campers had defected—but he did know this voice. When was the last time he’d heard it?
Oh. Oh no.
His stomach twisting itself into knots, he kept to the left and walked toward the fire. The earthen walls seemed to shimmer in the faint firelight, until he realised they weren’t earth and stone anymore, but mosaic pieces. Blue, white, and green porcelain tiles, interspersed with chips of sea glass, formed the pattern of the Greek meander that decorated the Camp Half-Blood t-shirts. It soared overhead in cheery arches, the tiles winking in the light.
Percy relaxed. He couldn’t say why.
The corridor—because it was a corridor now, not a tunnel—opened out into a small shrine, circular with a domed roof. The mosaics on the walls were ancient and badly damaged, but he thought he could make out seascapes: ships at war, tsunamis beating the shores of low-lying coastal towns, monsters writhing just under the surface of a bottomless sea. On the ceiling directly above him, a lodestar glowed against midnight tiles. The floor was just as decorated, if even more worn. He couldn’t make out any formal patterns or designs there, just the wear and tear of thousands of years of footfall. The tiles were a smudged white.
His feeling of safety increased. For a moment, he could hear waves crashing in his ears. The rotting smell of the deep underground gave way to salt and seaweed. Then it was gone.
He blinked, dragging himself away from his distraction, and clocked the actually important things to notice about this shrine. It was about ten paces in diameter. An altar stood at the centre but hadn’t been used in the last few centuries; it was drenched in enough cobwebs to weave a sail out of. There was another exit, directly opposite, just like the one he’d come in. And huddled on the right, against some tiles that were already scorched black with soot, behind a small fire, was a pre-teen boy.
At least, Percy was pretty sure Nico di Angelo wouldn’t be a teenager by now. But he looked older than he remembered. Also thinner, paler, and much dirtier. His limbs were skeletal: black jeans hung off his knees, and his skull t-shirt exposed scrawny arms littered with battle scars. Hair grew into his face, long, greasy, and uneven, like he’d been cutting it himself. He was collapsed behind the fire like a bundle of bones someone had shoved into a black sack.
Percy would feel bad for staring, except that Nico was staring at him just as hard.
“Percy?” he whispered. “Percy Jackson?” His tone grew irritated. “I didn’t summon you.”
What? “No one summons me.”
Okay, that wasn’t true. Kronos had summoned Percy. And he hadn’t liked it.
His gaze landed on Nico’s skull t-shirt again. Now that he was looking, he realised he had a heavy silver skull ring on his finger as well. Grasping for something to say, he tried: “Leaning hard into the son of Hades stereotype, aren’t you?”
He cursed himself as soon as he said it. But Nico looked more surprised than angry, even if Percy had just got back from the dead and decided to use his second life to bully a child.
“You know who my father is?” Nico demanded. “How?”
“No one else knows? You’ve managed to keep it a secret?”
“My father told me to. Something about a prophecy. That they’d try to hurt me.”
Percy gestured to himself. “He wasn’t wrong!”
Nico sat up straighter. As he shifted, the firelight glinted on a sword that lay on the ground beside him. It was a long, thin blade, and it shone black as pitch. Percy had never seen a sword made of that metal before. “How did you know?”
He swallowed. Noticing Nico’s terrifying sword right before he said what he was about to say was not encouraging. “I… uh…”
Thankfully, Nico figured it out. “Bianca told you.”
“We lived near to each other in Elysium,” he admitted. “She got her application fast-tracked, for obvious reasons. When we got through, Zoë and I asked why, and she told us. She hadn’t known before your dad spoke to her at her judgement.” He took a deep breath. “Nico, I’m so sorry.”
The boy scowled at him. “I didn’t summon you,” he repeated. “I don’t want to hear your apologies.”
“Still, I’m sorry,” he repeated. “I promise you I tried, but… I was stupid. It was unforgivable.”
“It was,” Nico agreed. “Get out. I don’t want to talk to you.”
Percy just stood there awkwardly. If he was more respectful, he would have walked right through the shrine and out the tunnel on the other side; he would have left Nico to his grief and isolation. But looking at him, Nico was so obviously still a kid. He looked terrified.
He couldn’t just walk away from him.
Nico glared. “What are you doing? I said leave!”
“I’m not gonna leave you like this, Nico,” Percy said. He sat down cross-legged on the mosaic floor, a few metres from Nico to give him space. The warmth he could feel from the fire was really nice, but he’d keep his distance for now.
He expected Nico to respond with vitriol. Maybe he’d hiss and spit like a feral cat; he looked like he wanted to. But most dominant in his face was confusion.
“Leave,” he said again—slowly, like he was testing the waters. When Percy didn’t twitch, his confusion was chased away by panic. “Leave! As the Ghost King, I command you!”
“Ghost King?” Percy asked. “You’re like, ten.”
“Twelve,” Nico mumbled.
“That’s not much better.”
Nico studied him with narrowed eyes. “Slap yourself,” he ordered.
“What? No!” He paused. “I mean… if you really want me to, I guess. If it’d make you feel better.”
“It would not make me feel better!” The kid’s gaze was really intense. “You’re not dead.”
Percy did jazz hands. “Surprise!”
“But they said you got lightning-bolted. And the lightning bolt has one thousand attack power on its own. Quadruple that when it’s wielded by Z—”
“No need to say his name.”
Nico huffed but stopped himself. Apparently, he knew the risks of saying names casually as well. “You said my dad’s name.”
“I don’t really care if your dad hears me and finds me. In fact, it might be the painless way out of here. Not that I liked Elysium much, but…” He shrugged.
“So you were dead. But you’re not now. I didn’t summon you. You just… showed up?” Nico looked disgusted.
“Sorry to disappoint.”
“How?”
Percy tried to explain as briefly as possible: “The Titan King wanted a prophecy child to work for him. Thalia is still an immortal Hunter”—Nico’s disgusted look doubled at that mention—“so she won’t work. He doesn’t know about you, so he decided to start resurrecting people.”
“And he picked you?”
Wow. Okay. It was one thing getting insulted by gods and stuff, but another thing getting insulted by a tween demigod who still used Mythomagic as his go-to reference book. “He figured that since the gods killed me, I had reason to join him.”
“And did you?”
Percy spread his hands. “If I did, I wouldn’t be wandering around the Labyrinth, dude.”
Nico wrinkled his nose. “Why you?” he asked again. Percy was about to respond again, then he asked—“Why not Bianca?”
Oh. Huh. Oh no.
“He doesn’t know about the two of you still,” Percy said. He didn’t try to make it an apology, but it came out as one. “Would you… want him to know?”
“No! No. I’ve heard bad things about him.”
How did this twerp have better instincts than Annabeth, the smartest demigod of all time?
Nico leaned forward, an obsessive glint in his eye. “How did he resurrect you?”
Percy did his best to explain. The Sword. The jailbreak. Mount Othrys. Kronos in Luke’s body. That part wasn’t necessary, but sue him, maybe he wanted to talk to someone about the horror of it.
The whole time he talked, Nico listened attentively, though he clearly wasn’t as horrified by Kronos’s new form as Percy thought he should be. He’d never met Luke, after all. “This Sword could bring somebody back from the dead? My father never mentioned this to me.”
He didn’t look for a response, which was good, because how was Percy supposed to respond to that? Sorry. Yeah, my dad doesn’t mention things to me either. In fact, he once tried to warn me about Thalia coming back to life but all he said was ‘brace yourself’…
Not useful input.
“Have you been trying to resurrect Bianca?”
“Don’t tell me not to,” Nico warned.
“Dude, I get it. I only went on my first quest because I thought my mom was dead and I wanted to get her back. But that doesn’t mean—”
“Your first quest?” Nico interrupted. He looked surprisingly intrigued. “The one where you were looking for the Master Bolt? Ironic,” he realised. “You brought back the bolt, and then Z… then you-know-who killed you with it.”
Percy had been trying not to think about that.
“If I could get that Sword…” Nico mused aloud. “Who has it?”
“I told you. The Titan King. You know, the guy trying to rule the world.”
“Oh yeah.” Nico only looked slightly put off by that. “You’re gonna fight him again, aren’t you? I’m coming with you.”
“What? No.”
“You said you’d help me bring Bianca back!”
“I literally never said that. Nico, I don’t think she’d want you to—” He cut himself off at Nico’s glower.
“You owe me,” he pointed out. “You let her die.”
Percy flinched. That was true. But he’d also spoken to Bianca in Elysium. And he had a feeling he knew what her response to Nico’s plans would be.
“I tried resurrecting her the Ghost King way,” Nico continued. “It’s why I’m in the Labyrinth. I summoned one of the ghosts who oversees the judgement of new souls—King Minos—and he showed me how to use it to travel. He taught me a lot about my powers. He said if I found and captured Daedalus, who’d evaded death for thousands of years, my father would be willing to trade his soul for Bianca’s.”
Nico’s gaze fell back to the fire. “Then I realised that he wanted to be resurrected himself, not help me get back Bianca, and he was about to betray me to the Titans. I banished him back to the Underworld. My dad stripped him of his duties. Apparently trying to return to life violates the Council of the Dead’s code or something.”
“The Titan King has Daedalus,” Percy offered. “Daedalus is the one who helped me escape.”
This was the happiest Percy had ever seen Nico, he was pretty sure. During that first Capture the Flag game at camp, he’d been bouncing with enthusiasm, but this was different. It looked like he’d been lit up from within. His teeth were bared in a grin and his skin seemed less sallow.
Was that depressing? Yeah, that was depressing.
“You can help me get the Sword and offer Daedalus’s life,” Nico said. “Then we can resurrect Bianca.”
Percy bit his lip. He didn’t really want to sacrifice Daedalus. The guy had helped him, after all. But if this motivated Nico to follow along… So long as Nico was with him, he could keep an eye on him and try to talk him down from his plans.
Maybe.
“I need to find my mom,” he said. “She thinks I’ve been dead. I can’t run around without telling her I’m back.”
That got through to Nico. He frowned. “Oh. Okay.”
He sounded so dejected that Percy felt terrible. Nico had been left all alone in his grief, to run through the Labyrinth with a madman for a mentor. He must have nearly fallen apart, and it was a surprise to see him alive, even if he was in visibly poor shape.
“Did you run away from camp?” Percy asked.
Nico nodded. “Chiron told me what happened, based on what Mr D had told him. He said no one had come back. Bianca and Zoë died on the quest. You were lightning-bolted, and Grover nearly died because of your empathy link. And he said Thalia joined the Hunters.” He scowled. “She defected, right?”
Percy nodded.
“Good.”
“What?”
“That she abandoned the Hunters. Not that she joined the Titans. I hate the Hunters.”
Percy had nothing in particular against the Hunters themselves, but he wasn’t about to criticise. “So you left?”
“I found the entrance to the Labyrinth,” Nico admitted. “And I ran.”
“Sorry it was Chiron who told you. He’s…” Percy trailed off.
“Yeah. He is.” Nico’s eyes glittered. “What was it you were saying about him before?”
“That I hoped it wasn’t him who told my mom I was dead.”
“I’m pretty sure it was.”
“Great.” Percy watched Nico a little longer. “So you found the Labyrinth and started training with your powers? What sort of thing can you do?” It was a blatant attempt to change the subject, but he figured Nico hadn’t spoken to anyone else in ages. Some small talk—even if it was about awe-inspiring, unnatural feats of power—might help him relax.
Nico glared at him. “I can tell the dead what to do, and they have to obey me.”
“You can’t tell me what to do.”
“Obviously.” Nico rolled his eyes. “I can summon the dead as well. I tried to summon Bianca, but she never came. Maybe being another child of Hades meant she could resist my summons.”
“I think it did.” Percy thought back to his conversations with her. “She mentioned to me that you were trying to summon her. I didn’t understand why she wouldn’t answer, but she said she kept hoping you’d give up. That if she never responded, you’d move on.”
“I was never gonna move on!”
Percy shrugged.
Nico took a few calming breaths, then clearly decided he did not want to talk about that any longer. “I can control the underground, but only a little. Collapse tunnels and stuff. It’s saved me from a few monsters in the Labyrinth. My father gave me this sword,” he patted it, “and I’ve been training with these skeleton warriors I summoned. But just summoning them is exhausting, let alone sparring as well. And I can sense death auras.” He snuck a glance at Percy. “You don’t have one, actually.”
“Thanks?” Percy didn’t know what to say to that.
Nico was still studying him, that mad gleam in his eye. “The Sword definitely works then. It properly brings them back. Not just as skeletons or ghosts—it brings people back to life.”
Percy cleared his throat. “That’s all really impressive, Nico.”
“What? Oh. It’s nothing.”
“It’s not nothing.”
“Don’t patronise me.”
“I’m not.”
“Yes, you are.”
“Okay, I’m sorry.” He put up his hands.
Nico didn’t want to meet his gaze, so Percy looked up instead, at the different designs in the mosaics around the walls. The tidal waves. The sea monsters. Hurricanes. There was one image he couldn’t understand: in the middle of an island, with no water in sight, a building shook. The earth cracked open. Considering the rest of the designs were to do with water, Percy had no idea what that had to do with the rest of them.
“I’m nowhere near as powerful as you,” Nico said as last.
“What?” Percy looked down at him and found Nico was looking in the same direction he was, at the mosaics around the walls.
“I thought you were a hero, when we met. You fought Dr Thorn and everything. Then in Capture the Flag you were so cool. You nearly drowned Thalia even after she lightning-bolted you.”
“Can we please stop talking about people lightning-bolting me?”
But Nico’s gaze was still on the walls. “You’re so powerful. All that stuff you can do because of your dad. And you couldn’t save my sister.” His voice darkened. “What’s the point? I thought you were a hero.”
“I messed up. I’m sorry.”
“Stop apologising,” Nico snapped. He curled in on himself, bringing his knees up to his chest. “How do I get to be stronger than you? How do I get to be a hero who’s actually strong enough to protect people?”
There were a lot of things Percy could say to that. Train. Live long enough to grow into your powers. Be smart. Most importantly: get lucky.
That wouldn’t help, though. Percy’s luck had run out pretty quickly, and he suspected so would Nico’s. Percy had unwittingly taught Nico the main lesson of his own life: don’t trust authority figures not to let you down.
At last, he said, “You’re already strong. And the more you fight, the more you survive… with every day you live, you’ll get stronger. You’re a kid, Nico. One day, you’ll be stronger than this.” He swallowed.
Nico was the same age Percy had been when he’d handed Zeus the weapon he would kill him with.
“We’re both kids,” he admitted.
Success: Nico looked back up at him and uncurled a little. He didn’t say anything, but he did nod.
Percy looked around rather than look into his eyes more than he had to. “This used to be a shrine to my dad, didn’t it?” he asked. “It feels like one. Uh, all the sea imagery aside.”
“It was a convenient place to rest.”
“It looks like it,” Percy agreed. “I don’t get that image though.” He pointed to the one with the trembling buildings and the split earth. “That has nothing to do with the sea.”
Silence. Nico was staring at him. “You’re an idiot,” he realised.
“Yeah, so what?”
“Your dad is the Earthshaker. One of his attacks—” Nico cut himself off. “He causes earthquakes.”
“Okay, that does ring a bell. Earthshaker.”
Nico was still staring at him. “Can you cause earthquakes?”
Percy felt his face flush. “I… uh… don’t think so. I’ve never tried.”
“What do you mean you’ve never tried?”
“Most of my powers were stuff I learnt on quests! I’ve never thought: hey, you know what would be useful right now? An earthquake!”
Miracle upon miracles: Nico laughed. Percy laughed too, he was so surprised by the sound. “Do you want to try it now?”
“Now? While we’re underground? Are you— oh.” Nico was smirking at him. “You little punk.”
“I bet you could. You can control water. If you’re a son of P—”
“Names!”
Nico looked confused. “You don’t want your dad to know where you are? I thought he liked you. Everyone said he voted against killing you.”
What a high bar for judging whether his dad liked him.
Percy fidgeted with his hands. “I just… uh… He’s an Olympian, you know? He’d have to tell the other gods. I think.”
He didn’t want to think about the grieving god he’d seen in his dream. That felt too intimate for him to have witnessed, when he’d only had one conversation with his dad in his life.
It was hard to reconcile the two images: a callous father who called him a mistake, and a grieving father who called him kind. And, for that matter, the father who’d vouched for him on his honour with the power and expectation that he be respected. Poseidon didn’t despise him. He’d known that—he’d always helped during his quests, after all—but Percy still agreed with what he’d told Hermes, so long ago. It was hard not to feel abandoned by the gods, even when you’d not really expected much in the first place.
Poseidon could grieve all he wanted. It was still too little, too late. Who knew which way he would turn if he knew Percy was still alive?
After a long moment of staring at him, Nico seemed to accept that Percy wasn’t gonna say anything else. Thank the gods. Or… don’t.
“Can you train me?” he asked instead. “You said heroes get stronger by training. You’re good with a sword, right?”
“Well, I haven’t died yet.” Percy reconsidered that statement. “I haven’t died in a swordfight yet.”
“Train me in how to use a sword.”
Percy smiled to himself at Nico’s imperious tone. “You’ve been hanging out with only ghosts for too long. You can’t tell me what to do.”
“I just did!”
He didn’t laugh. He didn’t. “I don’t have a sword at the moment,” he admitted. “But I can talk you through some drills. And if we find one, we can spar.”
“I thought your sword always returned to your pocket?”
Percy shrugged. “I, uh, had a dream. My dad has it. He’s stopping the magic from letting it return to me or something.”
Again, Nico didn’t ask. Phew. He just nodded. “You’re gonna train me in how to use a sword. Then you’re gonna help me get the Sword and we can find and kill Daedalus. If we get both of them, my father will have to exchange something for them in return. He’ll have to give Bianca back.”
“We’re gonna talk to my mom first,” Percy said. “I’m not walking back into Mount Othrys before seeing her again. You’ll like her,” he added, just to sweeten the deal. “She makes great cookies.”
He pretended not to see the longing that crossed over Nico’s face. “Deal,” he said. He stood up. “You know the way to New York?”
“Yeah.”
“Let’s go. And can we get some food? Can your mom cook?” Nico looked deeply embarrassed. “I never thought I’d say this… but I want to eat something that’s not a Happy Meal.”