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Lena sits at the end of the dock, stares down into the lake, and tries to get out of her own head for a little bit.
She swings her legs over the side, slow. Picks tiny splinters off the dockboards and drops them in the water. Tries to mutter an old song from the radio and forgets the words halfway through. She glances behind her at the speck of flickering orange up the hill, beyond the shore, and the dark silhouettes of the campers surrounding it. Campfire songs after dinner seem to be a big deal at this place; maybe demigods have a thing for marshmallows, or something. If she listens closely, she can hear laughing and singing. Someone is playing a guitar.
If she was anywhere else, Lena may wonder if ditching the campfire was a bad move, if it makes her seem cagey, but she reminds herself that she has nothing to worry about here. Camp Half-Blood already has a great and perfectly valid reason to think she’s creepy, and it isn’t because she tends to skip out on a few singalongs every once in a while. It’s the claiming ceremony that ruined everything.
Yesterday, for the first time in the nearly two weeks since she’d arrived at camp with nothing but a backpack and a pack of slavering monsters at her heels, things had almost been going well—another unclaimed girl she slept near in the Hermes cabin had introduced her to a few Hecate campers, and they were nice and they complimented her hair and Lena swears they had actually really been starting to like her—
Until one of them had trailed off slowly, all friendliness dripping off their face like cold rain as their eyes rose toward something above Lena’s head, something that Lena just barely could see was glowing, and whispered, “Oh my gods.”
Lena had looked up and felt her stomach drop. A long, thin, bejeweled scepter, black as night and topped with two curved spikes that made her think of the minotaur’s horns mounted on the gift shop wall in the Big House, floated above her head, glowing a sickly and sinister greenish-gray. She could feel a crowd gathering around her, hear an adult’s shocked declaration as they christened her Lena de Spell, daughter of Hades, see the other demigods around her fall to their knees, gazing at her like she was one of those old, black-and-white video recordings of a nuclear explosion—awesome, but terrifying. The sinking feeling in Lena’s belly stuck with her long after the scepter had shimmered and vanished, long after the crowd dispersed, long after she had gone to the Hermes cabin in what felt like a trance to clear out her measly belongings from her temporary bed on the floor, and until she had found herself all alone in Cabin #13, where the empty beds were shaped like coffins and the curtains were always drawn and everything was much, much too quiet.
Anyway. Back to getting out of her own head, thanks.
Lena hears clunking footsteps behind her. She turns and sees the small, shadowy figure of a girl approaching in the twilight. Lena grits her teeth. Just what she needed.
“Hi!” the girl calls when she’s about halfway down the dock. She doesn’t wave—it looks like she’s holding a small object gingerly in each hand—but Lena guesses she’d be swinging both arms wildly above her head in joyous greeting if she could. She sounds that peppy. “I’m Webby. I have s’mores!”
Lena hesitates. What is she supposed to say? Congrats? Splendiferous? I’ve never met you before in my life? “That’s cool,” she says instead. “Wanna sit?”
“Okay!” The girl—Webby, apparently—runs the rest of the way down the dock, feet thumping against the wood, stops at the end, and sits down with her legs crossed next to Lena. She does have s’mores, and they look toasted and constructed to such perfection that Lena is the one who’s almost creeped out. She takes one anyway, when Webby offers.
“Um,” Lena says. “Hi.”
Webby just smiles at her. Now that she’s closer, Lena can see her better in the dark. She looks maybe twelve. She’s wearing one of those eye-straining orange t-shirts that everyone in this camp seems to love, a comfy-looking purple skirt, and a pink bow in her hair. She’s familiar.
“Hey, I know you. You’re that girl who holds the record for the fastest scale up the climbing wall, right?”
“Forty-nine seconds, even with the lava setting!” Webby beams. “I’m Webby Vanderquack, daughter of Athena. I think I already told you that. I can’t remember if I said my mom’s name, though, so I told you again. I know I told you who I was, though. I’ll stop talking now. Who’re you?”
That was a lot. “I’m Lena, daughter of—” Lena swallows. “I’m Lena.”
It’s pointless. Webby probably already knows.
Lena turns her eyes back to the lake, the only sounds being water lapping against the dock and the campers’ distant merrymaking. She bites into the s’more. It tastes just as good as it looks.
Right when she thinks things are starting to get awkward, Webby speaks so suddenly Lena nearly drops her s’more in the lake. “I like your hair!”
“Thanks,” Lena says blandly. It’s a nice thing for Webby to say, but Lena’s reminded of the last person who liked her hair, and how that interaction ended. “So, um, no offense or anything, but why did you come here?”
“Oh, I saw you leave before the campfire started.” Webby attacks her s’more. She says around pieces of graham cracker, “I figured you might want company, you know?”
“You thought the kid sneaking away from a social gathering would want company?”
Lena immediately regrets how cold those words sound, but Webby doesn’t seem bothered, or even like she noticed at all. “Well,” she says, brushing her fingers on her shirt, “considering your claiming ceremony yesterday, I thought anyone might want company after that, antisocial tendencies or not.”
So she does know. Now that is what Lena calls splendiferous.
Lena sighs. “I guess that makes sense.” Under her breath, she mutters, “God, that was a dumpster fire.”
“Hey, it’s not all bad!” Webby quickly assures her. “Being claimed is always an honor. It means your godly parent takes pride in you! Plus, Hades is a pretty cool god to have as a parent. And that claiming symbol was amazing, too, especially ‘cause there’s never been a child of Hades at Camp Half-Blood before, so I’ve only ever seen drawings of his Bident in books—”
“His bi-what?”
“Bident. Like a trident, but with two prongs instead of three. It’s Hades’s scepter, said to be crafted from the purest obsidian and rarest gemstones, the most powerful weapon in the whole Underworld—you know, normal god stuff. Anyway, being a Hades kid can be fun. There’s a lot of neat, unexplored abilities you may have, and you get a cabin all to yourself, and it means you’re a child of the Big Three!”
“And I’ve got the bonus additon of being the camp freak, too.” Lena sighs again, heavier, and pulls her knees up to her chest. Again, it sounds like Webby is only trying to cheer her up, but none of the things she’s pointing out sound particularly good to Lena. She doesn’t want any weird powers, or such a lonely cabin, or to be one of the only children known to have been born to these Big Three everyone keeps talking about. “This morning, one of the camp directors explained to me the oath those Big Three gods took. Apparently, they swore not to have kids, but here I am anyway. My whole existence is just proof that whoever this Hades guy is, he’s good at breaking promises. And, look, I’m sure being the daughter of some super smart goddess means you tend to do your research, but I know squat about all of this Greek stuff, and I doubt everyone here is as into books as you are. So when someone hears Hades, they probably think of the villain from the Disney movie before they think of whatever epic mythology facts about him you’ve got stored in your own head.”
“I... guess you’ve got a point,” Webby says grudgingly. Lena hears movement beside her and sees that Webby’s copying her knees-to-chest position. Her hands are fiddling with something around her neck.
“Nice necklace,” Lena tells her.
Webby pauses. She holds the leather cord out further in front of her, and Lena can see three different colored clay beads hanging from it. “Everyone at camp has one. You get a bead at the end of every August decorated with a design from something big that happened that summer. They’re like medals, to show that you survived another year.”
“Jeez. And these people think I’m morbid.”
Webby laughs faintly. “This is my fourth summer, but some people have been here way longer. Huey, Dewey, and Louie each have eleven beads—but they don’t really count, since their family runs the camp and they’ve lived here basically their whole lives.”
“They’re those triplets, right? I used to seen them in Cabin #11. Are they unclaimed?”
“Oh, no, they’re the cabin’s co-counselors. They’re sons of Hermes.” Webby cracks a smile. “But Donald pretty much acts like their dad.”
That makes Lena laugh, because from the few times she’s seen Donald Duck, the frazzled camp director who was in the wrong place at the wrong time and ended up having to officiate her claiming ceremony, he definitely seems the type. Webby joins in, giggling and covering her mouth. She’s definitely cooler than Lena initially thought.
Webby clutches her necklace tighter and asks, “Hey, Lena?”
“Yeah?”
“Tomorrow’s Friday, and—well, you knew that already—”
“No worries. Yeah?”
Lena thinks she sees Webby soften a little bit. “Well, um, because tomorrow is Friday, it’s Capture the Flag day. I was wondering if—what I mean to say is, would you like to be on my team? I can talk to the directors and ask for them to pair Cabin #13 with Cabin #6 no problem, since it’s only you, and really there’s no pressure for you to even play at all, I just thought maybe—”
“Hey, pink, take it easy,” Lena soothes.
Webby stares at her hopefully.
She should say no. Webby has been an outlier so far, but it’s only a matter of time before she starts seeing Lena like everyone else does, and Lena really doesn’t want to be there to experience it.
Instead, she says, “Sure. I’ll be on your team.”
Webby’s eyes widen. Lena doesn’t think she’s ever seen someone so happy. Before she can react, Webby tackles her in a bear hug. She starts rambling again, talking about battle strategies and teammates, and Lena nods along, silently praying Friday never comes.
—————
Growing up, Lena’s family situation was… not great.
Oh, who is she kidding. Magica was awful.
For as long as she could remember, Magica de Spell was the only relative Lena had ever known. Her father had never been in the picture, apparently, and her mother had died shortly after Lena was born. There were no photos of her parents in Aunt Magica’s house—only strange runes, symbols, and enchantment circles were deemed important enough to take up space on her walls. Aunt Magica had a thing for the occult.
Which meant, by extension, that there were no pictures of Lena anywhere either, but that was to be expected. Lena had known from a very young age that her aunt wasn’t exactly fond of her, and that wasn’t just because she was an unusually perceptive kid. Aunt Magica wasn’t a subtle person, and she wasn’t one to show her distaste for her niece through little signs or mixed signals. Telling Lena to her face that she was useless and unloved was more Aunt Magica’s style.
Magica did not like children. She thought they were dimwitted and weak, and had never in a million years planned on having any until news of her estranged sister’s death had come in one day and little Lena had been ungratefully dropped into her arms the next.
“And you stayed ungrateful,” Aunt Magica would tell her, during dinner or while watching the news, a glass of red wine sloshing in her hand. “Let it be known that I never wanted anything to do with you or your vile mother for the rest of my life, girl, and now all I get for my gift of generosity, for taking you into my home and feeding and clothing you, is grief!”
Lena had stopped listening to Magica after a few years of her saying only the same things over and over. Lena thought that living with her aunt was less of a gift and more of a curse, a sick joke that might someday end with her leaving Magica forever and finding a happy place somewhere else.
It only got worse when the monsters came.
At any given time of day, Lena began to see things watching her, things with buzzsaw fangs and jagged claws and auras that reeked of death and something otherworldly. These things circled her like she was roadkill, staring at her across the street and then vanishing behind passing cars without a trace, or drooling at her window as she tried to sleep, burying her face in her pillow, hoping that if she turned around she would see nothing and that there would be nothing there.
But Aunt Magica did not see these things. Lena would try to show her, to point at the man in the soup aisle who had been gazing at her silently with one large, hungry red eye on his forehead—and Aunt Magica would snatch her wrist, hiss in her ear to be quiet, and leave the store. Aunt Magica never believed her, and over time, Lena began to reach a point where she no longer believed herself. Until the first attack.
One night at the beginning of summer one of the things came into their house, a giant black dog as big as Aunt Magica’s sedan crashing through the front door and bounding up to Lena’s room. Lena had kneeled on her bed, shivering, speechless, as her aunt screeched for her downstairs and the hound filled up her entire bedroom, long teeth dripping saliva on her rug, blood-colored eyes beading and wanting. It had snarled, opened its mouth wide, and lunged—
And Lena, hysterical, had slammed both of her hands on its muzzle and shrieked, “Stop it! You will leave now, you will LEAVE!”
And the monster’s whole body trembled. It looked down at Lena, whimpered like a puppy, and left.
Afterwards Lena breathed. She filled her backpack with clothes and the stash of money that had been waiting under her mattress for five years, crumpled and expectant. She crawled out her bedroom window and climbed down the oak tree in the front yard, and by the time Aunt Magica had stopped screaming and gone upstairs to search for her, Lena was long, long gone.
—————
From the bushes beside the rocks where the red flag stands tall in the clearing, someone whispers urgently, “Hey, Lena.”
Lena nearly jumps out of her skin. She aims her sling toward the underbrush, stone pulled back and ready to fire. This morning, Webby had taken her to the armory to pick out a weapon for Capture the Flag, and after ten minutes of perusing and assuring Webby she probably wasn’t skilled enough to wield a five-foot-long broadsword, she’d settled on the sling. It was light, easy to carry, and had the added bonus of letting Lena chuck rocks at people.
There’s a flash of orange t-shirt and purple skirt and then she’s being dragged headfirst through a bush.
“Hey, what gives, I’m not a flag—” Lena protests, but stops when Webby shushes her. “Webs?”
“Hi! How’s guard duty going? I never liked it. Too boring.” Webby’s t-shirt is covered in the front by her bronze breastplate, and a helmet with a plume of red horsehair obscures most of her head. Her sword, long and gleaming, rests heavy beside her. “Do you think you can ditch? I found a weak spot in blue’s defenses! I need you to help me get through.”
Lena slows her breathing, brushing twigs off of her arms as nonchalantly as possible and trying not to dwell on the way Webby saying I need you makes her feel like her face is on fire. “Uh, I guess so? I don’t think the other guard will mind. He’s been eyeing me the whole game like he thinks I’m gonna sic a bunch of demons on him or something.”
Webby grins. “Then let’s go! And don’t let go of my hand.”
Before Lena can ask what that means, Webby grabs onto Lena’s hand and charges through the woods. Lena stumbles, but keeps up. They jump over a little gurgling stream and rush past tall trees with red team snipers hiding in the branches, who wave down at them. Webby calls back, cheerfully waving her sword, and Lena thinks screw it and gives a wave of her own, pleasantly surprised when the snipers don’t give her weird and/or horrified looks. The sound of metal clanging against metal is Lena’s only warning before Webby pulls them through another bush and they’re in the heart of the battle.
“On your right!” Webby shouts immediately, and Lena just barely manages to avoid getting knocked out by a rogue helmet flying directly at her face. Webby’s hand is firm in hers and she tugs them sharply in the opposite direction. It’s complete chaos. Lena dodges past teens older than her slamming into each other with massive round shields and long spears, campers her and Webby’s age hurling javelins and slashing daggers, and little kids who look like they belong in grade school arts-and-crafts class, not duking it out in the forest with armor and sharp objects. Lena sees campers fighting using considerably less conventional methods, too—she watches a giant Venus flytrap that looks like it belongs in Little Shop of Horrors swallow a blue team soldier whole, and at one point she’s almost certain she sees a girl riding a horse with wings swooping over the battlefield.
And then there’s Webby, who Lena is pretty sure takes down five enemy campers all by herself, while still holding tight to Lena’s hand. She pushes blue team soldiers out of their way with the hilt of her sword and scares off anyone who looks like they’re approaching with just a glint of her blade, carving a straight path to the other side of the main battle. In the back of her mind—the part that isn’t focused on not getting hacked to death—Lena wonders why Webby even wanted her to come, when it’s clear she could’ve made it this far all on her own.
They dart around the last of the main fray and suddenly Webby skids to a halt. Lena, meanwhile, nearly headbutts a wall of solid rock, Webby yanking her backward just in time.
“Be careful,” Webby, who just tugged Lena across a literal battlefield, says.
Lena cranes her neck, but can barely see the top of the cliff. There’s no way she can climb that.
Webby must be thinking the same thing, because after only a few seconds of deliberation, she pulls Lena sideways into a run again. “This way!”
They don’t get very far. For the third time in two minutes, Lena nearly suffers a head injury, only this time it’s something a little more deadly than a wayward helmet—a bronze double-headed axe comes whirling out of the battle still raging on their right, misses her face by no more than an inch, and embeds itself in the cliff beside her head. Lena yelps. Webby’s hand slips away.
There’s a group of older campers coming towards Lena, grinning faces half-masked by blue-plumed helmets and hands full of more battle axes.
“Lena,” Webby gasps. She’s on the ground a few yards away, thrown forward from the momentum of Lena letting go. “Lena, use your sling!”
Right. Her weapon, she still has one of those. Lena tries to concentrate, but her mind feels like a box of Nerds being rattled around by one of those kindergarteners with the knives. She grips the sling’s handle. She feels the stone heavy in the pouch and begins to move, squeezing her eyes shut and stepping forward, bringing her arms up and launching the stone with all her might—
Then there’s a rumbling noise from all around her, roaring in her ears and shaking the ground, and she opens her eyes and sees a lot more than one stone flying towards the campers with the axes. A surge of rocks from behind Lena pelts her attackers in a hailstorm of pebbles, and within moments they’re half-buried in a groaning heap. Lena whips around and sees that the very rockface behind her had reacted to the forward motion of her swing—a large chunk of it was torn off and crumbled into small projectile pieces, and now currently resides on top of her defeated opponents.
“Well. That’s a new one.” Lena breathes heavily. “You weren’t joking about unlocking neat abilities, pink.”
“Okay,” Webby says, and Lena’s chest floods with relief when she sees that she’s standing and unscathed, “as epic as that was, because oh my gods I’ve never seen anything like that in my life and of course children of Hades would be able to control the earth and I’m totally gonna replay that moment in my head forever, we need to keep moving.”
She holds out her hand. Lena takes it.
They run alongside the rockface, following it further into blue team territory in a wide curve until the sounds of the battle slowly fade away. The terrain turns steeper, with more unscalable walls of granite and sharp drop-offs into deep ditches. The woods are quiet save for the occasional bird call and their own crunching footsteps. Webby slows down to a brisk walk when they reach a clearing, pulling Lena closer.
“I know this is hero training camp and all,” Lena wheezes, “but Capture the Flag is a lot more intense than I expected.”
“We’re almost to the blue flag,” Webby whispers. “Keep an eye out for—”
A sudden frantic rustling starts up in the undergrowth all around them. Webby brandishes her sword and Lena raises her sling that she’s only just now realizing is empty, otherwise known as a useless length of rope and leather. In unison, three blue team soldiers jump out of the bushes. They’re all about Webby’s height, and look positively identical. The only distinction Lena can pick out is that each of their very sharp daggers has a different, brightly-colored hilt: red, blue, and green. They surround Lena and Webby on three sides, and Lena takes a step backward and feels her armor hit against rock. They’re at the bottom of another vertical cliff, and they’re cornered.
“Guards,” Webby finishes. “Hi, guys! Lena, remember the triplets I was telling you about?”
“Aw, yeah!” the one in the middle cries. He points his blue-hilted blade at Lena and Webby with dramatic vigor. “So nice of you to stop by, Webby. This is what happens when you try to mess with Team Dewey!”
On Lena’s left, the one with the green-hilted dagger says in a long-suffering voice, “Just because we got put on the blue team does not make us Team Dewey.”
“According to my calculations, Louie, yeah, it does. But let’s focus! Webbigail Vanderquack, you and your accomplice will pay greatly for the heinous crime of setting foot on our—”
“Wait, what calculations?” the one with the red hilt asks. “That makes no mathematical sense.”
“I just—” The one Lena assumes is Dewey drops his arm lamely. “Work with me a little bit, guys, please? I’m trying to monologue here, we planned this—”
“Monologue or not, you wanting something doesn’t make it a real calculation—”
“If this is how it looks when you’re trying, Dewford, I can only imagine how you’d be doing if this was just for fun—”
The guards dissolve into bickering. Webby releases Lena’s hand and mutters, “I’ll get Huey and Dewey, you get Louie. Deal?”
Lena’s about to ask which one Louie is again when Webby readjusts her hold on her sword, lets loose a gutteral war cry, and charges the triplet in the center (who Lena has concluded is almost definitely Dewey). She brings the hilt of her sword down on the forehead of his helmet and sweeps his legs out from under him in one fluid motion. Before Lena or the remaining triplets can so much as blink, Dewey is lying spread eagle in the dirt, still moaning about justice and vengeance, but effectively eliminated from their pool of threats.
Webby levels her fierce gaze on a second triplet, who gulps, gripping his red-hilted dagger. “Why do we always get put on guard duty when Webby’s on the other team?”
Lena doesn’t see what happens next, because the triplet to her left sighs deeply, unsheathes his green-hilted dagger, and says, “Alright, let’s get this over with.”
Lena feels the rock behind her with her palm and gets an idea. Granted, it’s an idea to use the same technique she just invented literal minutes ago, but cut her some slack, she’s new to this. She lets her empty sling fall to the ground and backs up completely into the rock, curling her hands into fists.
Focus, Lena tells herself. Just do… whatever it was you did before.
Ever so slightly, the cliff face at Lena’s back begins to rumble. Bits of gravel fall at her feet as she raises her fists, holding them beside her face like she’s about to knock someone’s lights out. The rumbling becomes a growl, then a roar, and Lena holds it, holds it, holds it as she senses the rock move, somehow knowing it’s being pulled from behind her without needing to look.
Then she straightens her arms in front of her, and with a sound like an avalanche the rocks all around her swarm forward.
The green triplet squawks like an animal in extreme distress and dives sideways with all of the Grade-A Hermes kid swiftness that Lena vaguely remembers Webby warning her about. Lena’s tidal wave of rock shoots an impressively far distance in front of her, but it doesn’t look very wide on either side, and she just misses her target. As the last of the torrent crumbles to a stop, Lena lowers her fists, fighting off a sudden wave of dizziness that almost sends her to her knees. Something tells her that’s the last time she’s doing that for a while.
Meanwhile, the green triplet—Louie, Lena settles on—is lying on his side in a ball, his dagger forgotten and his arms cradling his head. He pops one hesitant eye open, surveys the small mountain of granite debris occupying the space he’d been in moments before, and looks at Lena.
“Yeah.” His voice quavers just slightly. “I’ve seen enough. Good game, everybody. Louie out.”
He sits up, grabs for his dagger, and scoots backwards as far away from Lena and the rocks as possible until he’s practically back in the same bushes he appeared from. He gives off the strong vibes of someone who’s resigned himself to surrender. Lena leaves him be.
She focuses her attention on Webby instead, on the other side of the clearing. She’s made easy work of Huey, and now appears to be lugging him by the arms back to where Dewey remains on the ground. She looks up and meets Lena’s eyes, then notices Louie cowering at the edge of the clearing. “Hey, nice work, Lena!”
Lena picks her way across the clearing to Webby. “I didn’t even hit him.”
“That’s okay. Louie knows better than to try and fight us by himself.” Webby’s eyes narrow at him and she raises her voice menacingly. “Plus, we need him to tell us where the flag is, don’t we?”
Louie nods frantically.
“There,” Webby says, positioning her two groaning hostages back-to-back. “Now we just need something to tie them up with.” She scans the clearing, and Lena watches as her eyes quickly land on the abandoned sling beside the cliff. “Perfect! Could you hold them here, Lena?”
Lena puts an awkward hand on each of the boys’ shoulders as Webby runs the short distance to the cliff. There’s a new hollow in the rock that cuts deep into the cliffside, thick cracks spiderwebbing upwards and out of sight. The forest is quiet again, and this time there aren’t any singing birds.
Lena gets a bad feeling. Below her, one of the triplets mutters in a daze, “Webby. Watch out. Webby.”
“Hey, pink,” Lena starts, and she doesn’t get to finish.
Webby bends down to pick up the sling at the same time that the cliff creaks, tons and tons of rock suspended above the hollow giving way. Lena feels the ground trembling again and she sees those tons and tons of rock begin to fall and she moves because Webby does not.
Lena tears across the clearing, over the mass of rock she so recklessly moved, and watches Webby look up, slowly. She doesn’t shout, she doesn’t warn Webby, she just runs because there is no time. She makes it to the cliff and knows the rock is collapsing above her like an accordion as she wraps her arms around Webby, small and warm, and holds her close, close, close.
Then Lena feels cold spreading across her whole body and trickling down her spine, and sees an expanse of darkness in every direction, and after that there’s nothing.
—————
Lena wakes up.
The first thing she notices is that she’s in the infirmary. She’s lying in a soft bed covered in white sheets facing a big window, and through it she can see camp sloping down below the Big House under a starry sky, and even further down she sees the cabins with all of their lights out. The beds around her are empty.
The second thing she notices is the person in the chair beside her. Webby is asleep, snoring, her chin resting on her chest and the tiniest bit of drool hanging from her mouth. Her hair is unbrushed and her bow is missing. She looks like she’s been there for a long time.
“Webs,” Lena tries. Her throat feels like it’s lined with sandpaper. “Webby.”
Webby jolts awake. She looks around blearily. “Yes? What? Is Lena—”
“I’m right here, pink.”
Webby whirls to look at Lena. She blinks, then rubs her eyes, like she needs to make sure she’s not dreaming. “Lena!”
She leaps forward and crushes Lena in a hug (and Lena thinks, absurdly, about how this is the second time Webby has ever hugged her). Webby steps back and begins throwing questions at her. “How are you? How do you feel? Does anything hurt? What do you remember?”
“Bad, very bad, yes, and bits and pieces. What happened?”
Webby visibly restrains herself from hugging Lena again. She sits back down in her chair, hands in her lap. “Capture the Flag, remember? We went to get the blue team’s flag and ran into the guards. You did your epic-rock-slammy thing again, and then the whole cliff collapsed!”
Lena sort of remembers that. It’s coming back to her slowly—the battle, the triplets, the rockslide. With a grunt, she shifts herself into a sitting position. “Why do I feel like my whole body just got a concussion, then?” she asks.
If possible, the excitement on Webby’s face doubles. “Because you saved me,” she says reverently. “You shadow traveled.”
“I did what now?”
“There’s stories of children of Hades being able to travel with darkness—the ability to use shadows as a shortcut, kinda, between two distances.” Webby pulls her feet up onto the chair and wraps her arms around her legs, making herself smaller, but her eyes are unrelenting. They’re big and shiny and set on Lena’s. “When you reached me, you grabbed onto me, and then it just felt really cold for a second and I heard all these whispering noises around us, but when I opened my eyes, we were at the docks by the lake. Louie told me afterwards that it looked like we just vanished into nothing.”
“Oh. Cool,” Lena says, and realizes with no small amount of surprise that she means it. “How long was I out?”
“Four days,” Webby says. She lets go of her legs and swings them above the floor, hands grasping the side of the chair now. She always seems to be moving, Lena notices—like she’s always ready for the next battle. “It’s Tuesday. You passed out right when we hit the docks. You’re recovering well, though. We were expecting you to be unconscious for at least a week or so.”
Another wave of pain courses through Lena’s body, and she hisses. “Ugh. I kinda want to be unconscious for a week right now.”
“Oh!” Suddenly Webby jumps out of her chair. “I can’t believe I forgot!” She opens up a drawer in a bedside table beside Lena’s cot, pushes aside a first aid kit and a few rolls of gauze, and pulls out a plastic baggie full of what look like off-brand lemon pastries. “Here, take this. It’s ambrosia—food of the gods. It’ll taste like whatever your favorite food is. It’s also really strong, so just don’t eat too much or your body might burn up from the inside out, okay?”
Lena takes the baggie like it’s a grenade. “So,” she says, hoping to see that elated light in Webby’s eyes again, “what happened with Capture the Flag?”
Webby grins. She settles back, this time sitting at the foot of Lena’s cot, and recounts what happened after Lena rescued her, explaining how her friends, Violet Sabrewing and Gosalyn Mallard of the Hecate and Ares cabins, had found the blue flag by following her and Lena’s path into blue team territory, discovering a rockslide and three starstruck guards. The triplets, Webby says, had been up and ready to fight by the time Vi and Gos showed up, but within minutes were willingly pointing the girls in the direction of their flag.
“For camp veterans, those three still play Capture the Flag like newbies,” Webby giggles, the moonlight pouring in over her swaying shoulders as she laughs.
Lena watches Webby talk and listens to the story, and catches herself smiling. She pulls out a square of ambrosia and takes a bite. It tastes like a s’more, crafted to perfection.
—————
“I have something for you,” Webby says to Lena on the last day of August, many weeks after that first game of Capture the Flag when they discovered Lena’s powers are stronger than anyone could have imagined, leaning close so she won’t have to shout over the noise of the campfire and the singalong she’s finally convinced Lena to come to.
She pulls something out of the pocket of her skirt, stands on her seat, and moves behind Lena. Lena tenses as something falls past her face and brushes her neck. Then Webby sits back down next to her.
Lena looks down. It’s a leather necklace, with one white clay bead attached. In the firelight, Lena can just barely make out the design: a fallen pile of carefully painted gray rocks, with a tiny red flag stuck in the middle.
“For this summer’s design, the directors wanted to commemorate you in some way, being the first child of Hades to come to camp and all,” Webby explains. The fire reflects in her eyes like a single brilliant star. “They were originally just gonna do a Bident. I suggested this instead.”
Lena tries to imagine the bead painted differently, colored dark with a black scepter swirling in the middle, the ominous, godly weapon of a father she may never meet. The image doesn’t seem right. Not when the family she’s found here at camp is ten times better than any family she may be related to. She looks at the bead on her new necklace and calls back its memory—s’mores and battles and powers and victory and a quiet infirmary late at night filled with laughter and stories.
Lena smiles at Webby, feeling lighter than she ever has before. “I like this one much better.”
