Chapter Text
Annabeth’s racing thoughts outpaced even the New York City metro cars hurtling past her as she crouched low to the dirty ground, leaning on a support column. The cold metal dug into her back, and the backpack she had on offered no protection whatsoever.
Annabeth glared at her worn sneakers, then back at the subway car, which had now slowed to a stop twenty feet in front of her. She collected her courage. The doors opened with a hiss, revealing graffiti, a row of seats, and a half-eaten sandwich lying on the floor.
Come on. You can do it. Just—stand up. Jump on, super quick. Annabeth steeled herself to get up.
She didn’t budge an inch.
You’ve gotten this far! Her mind yelled. No one will even notice.
She cast furtive glances around at the relatively empty station. Only a handful of people were attempting to ride the subway at three-forty-eight in the morning, and half of them seemed to be drunk.
Annabeth wrinkled her nose. Her attention snapped back to the metro as its doors closed, her view inside the subway car blurring and disappearing. She clenched her jaw. This must have been the fifth time she’d missed her chance.
She’d never taken the metro by herself before. Her family had moved from Richmond, Virginia to New York only recently, due to her dad’s job, and the opportunity had never arisen for her to travel by herself.
Her legs were falling asleep. Familiar pins and needles started flooding through—no, stabbing—her calves, and she reluctantly pushed off the ground to stand up.
Annabeth grimaced as her legs burned with the ferocity of having held a crouched position for far too long, and she did a little shimmy to try to shake them out. She hoped the movement seemed more inconspicuous than it felt.
She sighed and set her backpack down on the ground. She kept one hand firmly clutching the straps in case anyone tried to grab it from her, bending down to unzip the zipper. It got stuck. She huffed in frustration and ripped the backpack flap open with more force than intended.
Annabeth peered down at her rations—the beginning of her new life on the run—and dug out one of the two granola bars sitting at the otherwise empty backpack bottom.
She straightened up. A happy-looking child eating cereal on an advertisement plastered to the station wall faced Annabeth. She glared at that, too. The kid might’ve been the same age as Annabeth, but she knew she was much more mature and capable at her whole seven years old than the child grinning at her with unending eye contact surely was.
The subway cars slowed, and slid to a stop once again.
This time, Annabeth was ready.
The doors opened with the same telltale hiss. Someone stumbled out. Her gaze caught on the boy, scrutinizing the way he braced himself against another metal support. The doors closed, and the subway left.
Annabeth’s first coherent thought was that he was short. Shorter than her, maybe. And probably her age. A faded, stained blue hoodie obscured most of his body, contrasting his dark hair and probably-once-white sneakers. His socks were mismatched—one white and the other striped gray.
They locked eyes.
Annabeth shifted her weight back, apprehensive. The boy looked more alert now, less like he was about to pass out standing up. His gaze was firmly fixated on her own.
Her stepmom’s voice rang clearly in her head: Stranger danger!
But he didn’t look any more eager to kidnap her than she did him. Without breaking eye contact, Annabeth slowly inched her foot towards her backpack and, hooking her shoe around a strap, dragged it closer to her body.
His eyes flicked up and down, glancing at her sneakers, her backpack flopped on the ground, and back up at her face.
“You okay?” His voice was barely above a whisper, as if he didn’t want to scare her off. Annabeth almost scoffed. Of course, she was fine. She was going to have a better life now—well, once she figured out where to go and how to get money, and once she was able to just get on the subway and leave.
Annabeth crossed her arms over her chest.
“Where are you going? Are you lost?” He tried again. Too bad that wouldn’t work on her. She knew all the lines of the bad guys who would try to lure her back to their big white van and kidnap her. She needed to be more attentive now to take care of herself on her own.
“I’m fine,” Annabeth snapped, going for seeming self-assured and probably achieving defensive, “and I need to go now.” She had no idea where she was going with this. Or where she was physically going. “I’m leaving. And I’m never coming back.” Why was she still talking?
The boy looked at her. She couldn’t read his expression, but thought he might have looked sad. That was stupid. Why did he look sad? He was about to kidnap her.
His shoulders twitched minutely, like the beginning of a shrug, and he pointed away from where Annabeth had come from. “Okay. I’m going that way. You can come with me, if you want. You don’t have to.”
He turned, then, crossing to the other side of the platform. He boarded the subway as if it were as easy as breathing—ugh. Now that she thought about it, her inhaling and exhaling had become manual. Annabeth forced a breath in. She wasn’t going to follow him. Nothing good would come out of that. He could be luring her somewhere.
While her mind had been preoccupied, her backpack had appeared in her hands and her feet had started moving. Before she could stop herself, she’d crossed the threshold. Automatic doors shut behind her, and Annabeth found herself face-to-face with the inside of a subway car.
The stark, harsh light inside made her wince as she adjusted to the brightness, contrasting with the deep black in the windows.
There were only a few other people inside: a guy with a bright green mohawk passed out on the two seats to her left; a standing woman with her hair pulled up into a tight ponytail; an older woman who was peering curiously at them; and a man dressed in a full suit and tie who was sitting very rigidly in his seat. Annabeth held her chin up high. She knew what she was doing.
The dark-haired boy was standing towards the end of the car, holding onto a metal pole. Annabeth moved cautiously towards him and stood a few feet away, holding onto a pole of her own.
As soon as she grabbed hold of the metal bar, the subway started moving, and she only just managed to brace herself so she didn’t stumble.
“Where are you going?” Annabeth asked the boy, mirroring his earlier question back at him. It was best to know where she was headed, seeing as she was going along for the ride with him.
“I’ve just been, uh, riding the E train up and down for a while.”
Well, that hadn’t really answered her question. “Why are you just riding around? Why aren’t you going anywhere?”
At that, the boy grimaced and looked away. Annabeth narrowed her eyes.
“My mom’s away. Work trip. She left me with—” he hesitated, looking up to meet her eyes. “My stepdad. She gave me this MetroCard to get to school and come back. But I don’t like spending time at the apartment without her.” He exhaled, hunching in on himself a little, making him appear even shorter than he already was. He looked small.
Annabeth didn’t mention that the MetroCard she had stuffed in her backpack wasn’t exactly hers. She’d waited at the station, watching the crowds go by and earning a few curious stares from passersby—at whom she scowled fiercely—until she saw what she’d been looking for. A man in a large, loose overcoat, obviously in a hurry. A gold MetroCard poked out of his pocket, precariously balancing on the edge before fluttering to the ground unnoticed. Annabeth had waited for a beat and then rushed into the crowd. She had grabbed the card from under the impending heels of the horde, clutching it tightly. Her plan had actually worked, and Annabeth had pushed through the barrier as quickly as she could, ignoring the nervous sweat that had collected on her palms. To her surprise, nothing had stopped her, and she’d been able to get onto the platform all by herself.
“So, I’ve just been riding the subway when I can’t sleep.” The boy finished. He fidgeted with his sleeves a little, which were slightly too long on his arms.
Annabeth shifted her weight, unsure what to do. The boy didn’t exactly seem like he was a threat to her. In fact, he looked like he was about to fall over. Or maybe throw up. Or cry. She wasn’t very good at reading facial expressions.
“I don’t want to stay here anymore,” Annabeth blurted out. “I can survive on my own. I have a plan.”
Now why, pray tell, had she said that? She didn’t need him to know any more about her. She had to play her cards close to her chest if she was going to survive out here.
A corner of the boy’s mouth twitched upward a fraction. “I would run away, too. But only if my mom could come with me.”
Annabeth scowled. She didn’t need her stepmom. Was he insinuating that? And she wasn’t running away. She was just leaving for a better life somewhere else. Somewhere where people would pay attention to her, believe her when she said that there really were those spiders in her room—
Annabeth jerked herself out of her thoughts with a quick shake of the head, like she was erasing an Etch-A-Sketch. She quickly assessed him to see if he’d noticed her momentary lapse, but as she squinted at him, he seemed to sway slightly, his blinks becoming longer and longer. His grip on the pole went slack.
She was suddenly filled with the irrational urge to keep him awake and keep the conversation alive. Why? Annabeth mentally scolded herself for already relying on someone when she was supposed to be practicing self-sufficiency.
“You don’t like your stepdad?” Annabeth’s voice, unnaturally loud and childish in the otherwise quiet subway car, rang out and startled them both.
The boy snapped awake, his previously bleary eyes meeting her own with a surprising new clarity. His eyes were startlingly green, she noted nonsensically.
“I mean—uh,” he began eloquently, clearing his throat. Annabeth could relate, she thought, the image of her stepmom’s pinched expression flashing through her mind. She could see his hesitation, as if he were torn, unsure of how much to say.
“I call him Smelly Gabe,” he whispered, exhaling a small laugh. Annabeth could feel her lips curving up too. He must’ve been a stupid guy to earn such a stupid name. The boy opened his mouth to continue. “He smells gross. Imagine, like, moldy garlic pizza wrapped in gym shorts and beer.”
Annabeth wrinkled her nose. “That’s disgusting.”
As he opened his mouth to speak, the subway car stopped abruptly. Annabeth pitched forward with a yelp, slamming into the boy and nearly sending them both sprawling to the ground.
He stumbled but caught them both, steadying her before she could become one with the ground.
By the time her mind caught up with what had happened, her body had already pushed away to put distance between the two. Her face burned.
The subway doors opened with a hiss before either of them could say anything more. The boy grimaced.
“This is my stop. I gotta go back now if I want to get back unnoticed,” he said, as if he were reluctant to even say the words. “But I guess you’re going to keep going, right? You’re not,” he paused, “coming back.”
Annabeth swallowed, her throat suddenly dry. She felt a thousand emotions rush through her at his words. She was leaving. She’d made her peace with it. She knew this. She couldn’t go back. She couldn’t.
Her father’s face, her stepmother’s face, and the faces of her younger brothers all flickered through her vision like a slideshow. She looked up at the boy in front of her instead to clear her head, and she found him staring right back at her. His shoulders were set and his jaw was clenched.
He turned around to leave, stepping out of the subway car and onto the platform.
She only had a couple of seconds left until the doors closed again and she was alone. Time seemed to stretch on into an eternity as she stood frozen in the doorway. Her backpack suddenly weighed a million pounds, dragging her down.
She followed him, crossing the station to the metro headed back to where they’d come from.
When the subway doors closed, the sound echoed in her head with the finality of the slam of a prison cell door. She sat down in a seat next to him, shoulders touching, without a sound.
The familiar prickle of unshed tears closed her throat like a vice, and her eyes burned.
He didn’t speak, and she didn’t either; they rode in silence.
The image of her ratty sneakers blurred in front of her. She swallowed thickly and tried very hard to will away the stinging lump in her throat.
He fidgeted with a hole in his jeans, stretching the fabric open wider.
“I don’t,” Annabeth’s voice broke, “I don’t want to go back.”
“I’m sorry.” His voice was nearly a whisper. “Me neither. I’m sorry.”
The subway car began to slow its hurtle through the tunnel until it came to a full stop.
He finally turned to look her fully in the eyes once more. “This is your stop. I have to keep going.”
The doors opened.
She nodded minutely. He opened his mouth to speak again. “But,” he gave a small smile, “thank you for riding with me. My name’s Percy.”
She hesitated for a moment before trusting her voice to speak without wobbling. “I’m Annabeth.”
They both got up, but only she crossed back onto the platform, clutching her backpack straps on her shoulders like a lifeline. The doors closed behind her.
When Annabeth turned, the subway had already begun to move, and she instinctively stepped back. Her ears filled with the overwhelming rumble echoing through the tunnel as the cars blurred together into one mass of color. Percy was gone.
She was back where she’d started. Alone, exhausted, and with even less hope.
Annabeth wasn’t sure how long she stood there, but when her chin quivered and tears finally began to fall, she turned away from the now-empty black tunnel and walked away.
She unlocked the apartment door quietly, feeling as though she were a million miles away, and pushed it open with a soft creak. She crept into the dark space, illuminated only by the flickering hallway light, and listened for her stepmother and father’s familiar snoring.
It was as if she were underwater, her senses muffled; Annabeth barely felt the doorknob as she shut the door behind her or heard the low creak of the floorboards as she carefully made her way to her room.
When she reached her bedroom, Annabeth slid the backpack under her bed and collapsed on top of her covers. She lay there, unmoving, feeling devoid of anything, as if everything inside her had been scraped out and replaced with cotton, in the stillness of her room. Only the snores of her father and stepmother filled the deadened, dark silence.
They hadn’t even noticed she was gone.