Chapter Text

PERCY

I didn't ask for my sister to be in every class with me. I definitely didn't ask for her to watch me get in trouble all the time.

But that's twins for you.

Yancy Academy was a boarding school for kids nobody else wanted, which meant kids like me, and—annoyingly—kids like Perse, even though she never actually got in trouble for anything. She'd been kicked out of two other schools before this one, not that she did anything wrong, but because whatever happened to me somehow ended up attached to her file too. I asked Mom about that once. She just said, "Some things are easier to explain when you're older.”

I was failing everything except English and Latin. Perse wasn't failing anything. She wasn't a genius, she'd tell you that herself, but she had this way of figuring out what a teacher actually wanted, not what they said they wanted, like every assignment came with a shortcut only she could see. It used to bug me, not because she made me look bad, but because I couldn't figure out how she did it. She said anyone could if they paid attention. I didn't believe her.

We were eight months into the school year by the time of the museum trip, long enough that I'd stopped counting down to summer and started counting down to whatever disaster would get us sent home early. I just hadn't guessed the disaster would look like a sixth-grade field trip.

Mr. Brunner led us through the Metropolitan Museum of Art, wheeling himself in front of the group, stopping in front of marble carvings. 

He stopped us at a huge stone grave marker and started explaining the carvings on the side. I was actually trying to listen, but Nancy Bobofit kept flicking bits of her sandwich at the back of Grover's head, and every time I told her to knock it off, Mrs. Dodds gave me a look like I was the one causing problems.

Mrs. Dodds was our pre-algebra teacher, fifty years old and always in a leather jacket, like she'd ridden in on a motorcycle she didn't own. She'd hated me since her first week at Yancy. Perse too, for that matter—Mrs. Dodds looked at the two of us less like students and more like a matched set she was still deciding what to do with.

Brunner pointed at one of the carvings. "Perhaps you can tell us what this represents, Mr. Jackson."

I actually knew this one. "That's Kronos eating his kids."

"And why did he do that?"

I fumbled through the rest—something about a rock disguised as a baby, something about Zeus tricking his dad into throwing the other gods back up. Brunner gave me half credit and moved us along toward lunch, and I figured that was the end of it.

It wasn't.

Mrs. Dodds found me on the front steps, right after Nancy dumped the rest of her lunch in my lap and blamed me for shoving her into the fountain, which I definitely hadn't done, not that anybody believed me.

"A word, Mr. Jackson," Mrs. Dodds said.

"I know," I muttered. "A month of erasing workbooks."

That was not the right thing to say.

"Now," she said.

Perse went still beside me, the way she did right before something mattered. "I'll come."

"I didn't ask for you," Mrs. Dodds said, and something under her voice made the hair on my arms stand up.

"I know," Perse said. "I'm coming anyway."

Mrs. Dodds didn't argue. She just turned and led us both back inside, past a hallway of old vases, into an empty side gallery. Grover tried to follow and got cut off by a chaperone at the door—I caught his face right before it swung shut, and he looked terrified in a way that had nothing to do with getting in trouble.

"You've been giving us problems, honey," Mrs. Dodds said, once the door closed. "Did you really think you'd get away with it?"

"Get away with what?"

Thunder cracked outside, even though there hadn't been a cloud in the sky an hour ago.

"Your time is up," she said, and her voice didn’t sound very human anymore.

Then she wasn't Mrs. Dodds anymore. Her whole body came apart and reassembled into something with leathery wings and claws. I froze completely. My brain just stopped working.

Perse didn't. She grabbed my arm and hauled me sideways into a display pedestal, and out of nowhere Mr. Brunner was in the doorway, throwing something at me—a pen, except when it hit my hand it wasn't a pen anymore, it was a sword. I swung it because there wasn't time to do anything else. The blade caught her across the middle, and she came apart into a cloud of yellow dust that smelled like a struck match.

For a second neither of us moved. My arm was still up. My ears were ringing. Down the hall I could hear the rest of the class laughing about something, completely unaware that the world had just come apart in the next room over.

"Perse," I said. "What was that?"

She was staring at the spot where the dust had settled, and for the first time in my life, my sister looked scared. Not panicked—well maybe a little, but more scared in a deeper way, like she knew we shouldn’t say anything.

"There's no Mrs. Dodds," she said blankly. "There's never been a Mrs. Dodds."

She turned out to be right. By the time we found the rest of the group, nobody remembered the woman existing—not the other kids, not the second chaperone who showed up on the bus ride home introducing herself as our pre-algebra teacher like she'd always been. I asked Grover about it a dozen different ways on the ride back. He got motion sick, apparently, on a bus that wasn't moving, and every time I pushed he found somewhere else to look.

Perse caught my eye from across the aisle and gave a small shake of her head. I knew she was telling me to let it go, for now. I did, mostly because arguing with two people who wouldn't tell me anything sounded exhausting. But I noticed she kept looking at Grover's sneakers the whole ride, suspicious.

PERSE

I'd known something was wrong with Mrs. Dodds since about the third week of school. Not wrong like mean—she was that too—wrong like she watched Percy and me at the same time, which teachers never did, because we were two separate people, whatever the front office thought. She looked at us like we were a set she hadn't finished collecting yet. And there was a smell that came off her sometimes, faint, like a struck match, that nobody else seemed to notice.

I hadn't told Percy any of that. What was I supposed to say—*I think our math teacher isn't human, also I don't know how I know that, I just do*?

There was a lot I didn't tell him. I had dreams most nights, some vivid, some blurry, none of them making sense in the moment, but I always woke up sure they were true in some way I couldn't explain. I'd known how to hold a knife, no one taught me, though it was weird. And it was for fighting, not chopping vegetables. I didn't talk about any of that either. Percy had enough going on.

After the museum, there wasn't much to say about Mrs. Dodds, since as far as the rest of the world was concerned, she'd never existed. The year ended the way our years usually did—badly. Percy got blamed for something involving a fountain and Nancy Bobfit, and by finals we both knew Yancy wasn't inviting us back. We took a cab from the bus station, mostly because Percy had a bad feeling about Grover that neither of us could explain, and Grover didn't argue either, which somehow made it worse.

Gabe was the same as usual when we got to the apartment—with his stupid poker buddies, cigar smoke, a demand for whatever cash Percy had in his pockets. He had a nose for money like a bloodhound. Mom got home a few hours later, still in her candy-shop uniform, and when she saw us she didn't ask about the school thing. She just hugged us both at once, one arm each, and said we were going to the beach.

"Montauk?" Percy asked.

"Montauk. Same cabin."

I loved that cabin. I couldn't have told you why, except that the smell of the ocean made something in my chest loosen and it made me feel safe. I knew Percy felt it too.

We only got one night.

I was in the top bunk, listening to the waves, when I heard Grover outside, out of breath, saying Percy's name like it was the only word he had left. By the time I climbed down, Percy already had the door open, and Grover was standing in the rain, soaked through, and something about the way he stood was wrong—off-balance in a way that made my stomach drop before I understood why.

"It's here," he said. "I lost track of it. I thought I had more time."

"What's here?" I asked.

He didn't answer. "We have to go. Now."

Mom didn't argue. That scared me more than anything else that night—my mother, who argued about everything, took one look at Grover's face and started throwing things into the car without a single question. She'd known. Maybe not everything, but enough.

The storm got worse the whole drive. Grover kept twisting around to check behind us, and every time he did, his face got grayer. "There's a camp," he said, mostly to Percy, though he kept glancing at me too, careful, like he wasn't sure how much to say in front of me. "Camp Half-Blood. It's—it's safe. For kids like you."

"Kids like us, how?"

He didn't answer that either.

We didn't get much farther before something came out of the trees—huge, wrong-shaped, moving faster than anything that size should move. Mom yelled at us to get down. The car swerved, and then we weren't in the car anymore, we were running through the storm toward a hill I recognized, though I'd never once been there. Two enormous pines at the top, and past them, a shimmer in the air like heat rising off summer pavement.

"The barrier's right there," Grover shouted. "Get past the trees!"

I looked back. I shouldn't have, but I did, and I saw it clearly for the first time—a bull's head on a man's body, eight feet if it was an inch, closing in on my mother, who'd stopped to make sure Percy and I were ahead of her.

"Mom!" Percy screamed.

I don't remember deciding to run back. I remember Percy right behind me, both of us grabbing for her arms, and the monster's hand closing around her shoulder and pulling, and then she wasn't there—she was light, gold and formless, gone before she could even scream.

Grover went down hard a second later, whether from exhaustion or the monster's backswing I never got a clear look, and he didn't get back up. I understood that somebody had to get him over that tree line, and Percy was the only one of us who stood a chance of holding the monster off long enough for me to do it.

"Go," I told him. "I've got Grover. Just—hold whatever that is."

I don't know if he heard me clearly, but he nodded, and I grabbed Grover under the arms and started hauling him uphill through wet grass while behind me I heard the monster roar and Percy's voice, furious, shouting something wordless back at it.

I didn't watch. I couldn't—Grover was heavier than he looked, and every yard felt like it was costing me something, and the two pines were still so far away. I heard the fight behind me instead: a heavy, wrong sound, like bone meeting bone, and then a scream that wasn't Percy's, and then the particular quiet of something enormous coming apart into sand.

By the time I dragged Grover across the tree line, my arms shaking, my whole body running on nothing, Percy came stumbling up behind us, soaked and bloody-knuckled and holding a broken horn.

We collapsed on the grass together, all three of us, shaking.

"You made it," Grover mumbled, barely conscious. "Both of you."

Percy didn't answer. He was staring at the empty spot where our mother had been standing, and I understood I should probably be crying too, but everything in me had gone quiet and clear instead, the way it did right before I needed to think instead of feel.

I put my hand on his shoulder. He didn't shake it off.

"We'll get her back," I said. I didn't know if that was true. I said it anyway, because it was the only thing I had.

"You don't know that," he said, not accusing.

"No," I agreed. "But I know she wouldn't want you sitting in the mud giving up.."

He laughed, rough and hollow. "Typical Perse."

"Somebody has to be in their right mind right now," I said. "You're allowed to be angry, Percy. I’m mad too."

Up the hill, past a lit farmhouse, I heard voices, hooves on gravel, someone calling out that they had new arrivals. I remember thinking, right before I passed out, I felt as if this place was very familiar.

PERCY

I woke up in a bed that smelled like grass with the sun shining from the window, in a room full of empty beds. Everything hurts and sore, and for a few seconds I couldn't remember why.

Then I remembered. My mom, turning into a shimmering golden light. The horn in my hand.

I sat up too fast and immediately regretted it.

"Easy," said a voice.

"Grover?"

"Hey, Percy." He gave me a guilty smile.

"Where's my sister?"

"Outside," Grover said, not looking up from his hand. "Woke up an hour before you. She's fine. Mostly."

Before I could ask what he meant, the door opened, and a man in a wheelchair rolled in. 

"Mr. Brunner?"

"Not quite," he said, and stood up out of the chair—except his legs didn't stop where legs should stop. His lower half kept unfolding until, where his human legs should have been, there was the body of a white horse.

I said something extremely intelligent. I think it was "huh."

"My name is Chiron," he said. "I imagine you have questions."

I had about a hundred, and most of them came out of order over the next hour, while Chiron and a camper named Luke—dark blond hair, a scar down one cheek, and he had an easy smile—walked me and, eventually, Perse around the property.

Camp Half-Blood. A too-blue lake. A farmhouse everyone called the Big House. Cabins arranged in a horseshoe like a shrine to twelve different gods, because this didn’t feel real, gods didn’t exist.

"Gods," I repeated. "Actual, currently-existing Greek gods."

"They move with the heart of Western civilization," Chiron gently explained. "Currently, that's America."

"And they have kids," Luke added, in almost false cheer. "With mortals. You and your sister are demigods. Half-blood. Welcome to the club.” 

We stopped by the Big House on the way to the cabins, where a bored-looking man in a leopard-print shirt was sprawled in a lounge chair, flipping through a magazine, a can of Diet Coke sweating on the table beside him.

"This is Mr. D," Chiron said. "Camp director."

“So gods are real?” Percy asked. 

“Ah yes, gods, plural, as in, great beings that control the forces of nature and human endeavors: the immortal gods of Olympus. That’s a smaller matter.”

“Smaller?” 

“Yes, quite. The gods we discussed in Latin class.”

“Like Zeus,” I said. “Hera. Apollo. You mean them.” And there it was again—distant thunder on a cloudless day. “Young man,” said Mr. D, “I would really be less casual about throwing those names around, if I were you.” 

“But they’re stories,” I said. “They’re—myths, to explain lightning and the seasons and stuff. They’re what people believed before there was science.”

“Science!” Mr. D scoffed. “And tell me, Perseus Jackson”—I flinched when he said my real name, which I never told anybody—“what will people think of your ‘science’ two thousand years from now?” 

Mr. D continued. “Hmm? They will call it primitive mumbo jumbo. That’s what. Oh, I love mortals—they have absolutely no sense of perspective. They think they’ve come so-o-o far. And have they, Chiron? Look at this boy and tell me.” I wasn’t liking Mr. D much, but there was something about the way he called me mortal, as if . . . he wasn’t. 

I looked at Perse, and she looked as confused and scared as me. At least we were in the same boat. As I caught her eye, she shook her head subtly.

It was enough to put a lump in my throat, to suggest why Grover was dutifully minding his cards, chewing his soda can, and keeping his mouth shut. 

“Percy,” Chiron said, “you may choose to believe or not, but the fact is that immortal means immortal. Can you imagine that for a moment, never dying? Never fading? Existing, just as you are, for all time?” I was about to answer, off the top of my head, that it sounded like a pretty good deal, but the tone of Chiron’s voice made me hesitate.

“You mean, whether people believed in you or not,” I said. “Exactly,” Chiron agreed. “If you were a god, how would you like being called a myth, an old story to explain lightning? What if I told you, Perseus Jackson, that someday people would call you a myth, just created to explain how little children can get over losing their mothers?”

 My heart pounded. He was trying to make me angry for some reason, but I wasn’t going to let him. I could feel Perse shaking in rage beside me. I said, “I wouldn’t like it. But I don’t believe in gods.”

“Oh, you’d better,” Mr. D murmured. “Before one of them incinerates you.” Grover said, “P-please, sir. They just lost their mother. They’re in shock.”

“A lucky thing, too,” Mr. D grumbled, playing a card. “Bad enough I’m confined to this miserable job, working with kids who don’t even believe!” 

He waved his hand and a goblet appeared on the table, as if the sunlight had bent, momentarily, and woven the air into glass. The goblet filled itself with red wine. My jaw dropped, but Chiron hardly looked up.

“Mr. D,” he warned, “your restrictions.” Mr. D looked at the wine and feigned surprise. “Dear me.” He looked at the sky and yelled, “Old habits! Sorry!” More thunder. Mr. D waved his hand again, and the wineglass changed into a fresh can of Diet Coke.

He sighed unhappily, popped the top of the soda, and went back to his card game. Chiron winked at me. “Mr. D offended his father a while back, took a fancy to a wood nymph who had been declared off-limits.” 

“A wood nymph,” I repeated, still staring at the Diet Coke can like it was from outer space. “Yes,” Mr. D confessed. “Father loves to punish me. The first time, Prohibition. Ghastly! Absolutely horrid ten years! The second time—well, she really was pretty, and I couldn’t stay away—the second time, he sent me here. Half-Blood Hill. Summer camp for brats like you. ‘Be a better influence,’ he told me. 

‘Work with youths rather than tearing them down.’ Ha! Absolutely unfair.” Mr. D sounded about six years old, like a pouting little kid. “And . . .” I stammered, “your father is . . .” 

“Di immortales, Chiron,” Mr. D said. “I thought you taught this boy the basics. My father is Zeus, of course.” I ran through D names from Greek mythology. Wine. The skin of a tiger. The satyrs that all seemed to work here. The way Grover cringed, as if Mr. D was his master. 

“You’re Dionysus,” Perse said, finishing my thought. “The god of wine.” Mr. D rolled his eyes. “What do they say, these days, Grover? Do the children say, ‘Well, duh!’?” 

“Y-yes, Mr. D.”

“Then, well, duh! Percy Jackson. Did you think I was Aphrodite, perhaps?”

“You’re a god.” 

“Yes, child.” 

“A god. You.” 

He turned to look at me straight on, and I saw a kind of purplish fire in his eyes, a hint that this whiny, plump little man was only showing me the tiniest bit of his true nature. I saw visions of grape vines choking unbelievers to death, drunken warriors insane with battle lust, sailors screaming as their hands turned to flippers, their faces elongating into dolphin snouts. 

I knew that if I pushed him, Mr. D would show me worse things. He would plant a disease in my brain that would leave me wearing a straitjacket in a rubber room for the rest of my life. “Would you like to test me, child?” he said quietly. Perse nudged me, silently telling me to not do anything.

“No. No, sir.”

The fire died a little. He turned back to his card game. “I believe I win.” 

“Not quite, Mr. D,” Chiron said. He set down a straight, tallied the points, and said, “The game goes to me.” I thought Mr. D was going to vaporize Chiron right out of his wheelchair, but he just sighed through his nose, as if he were used to being beaten by the Latin teacher. He got up, and Grover rose, too. “I’m tired,” Mr. D said. “I believe I’ll take a nap before the sing-along tonight. 

But first, Grover, we need to talk, again, about your less-than-perfect performance on this assignment.” Grover’s face beaded with sweat. “Y-yes, sir.” Mr. D turned to me. “Cabin eleven, Percy Jackson and Perse Jackson. And mind your manners.”

PERSE

I felt it before I saw it. We were still a hundred feet off when something in my chest pulled sideways, hard, and I didn't understand why until we got close enough to see the statue's face.

It looked like me.

Not vaguely, not just a similar feature. Not the way strangers sometimes look like familiar people. Same jaw, same set to the eyes, hair carved in the same loose waves mine fell. If someone had shown me a photograph of that statue without context, I'd have assumed it was a photo of myself in a Greek dress.

I didn't say anything.

Other campers noticed too. I caught it over the next hour in glances I wasn't supposed to see—a  blonde girl at the archery range doing a full double take, two younger kids whispering, an older camper at the forge going pale and finding somewhere else to be. Nobody said anything to my face, which somehow made it worse.

"That's the Athenide shrine," Luke said, when I asked, and I noticed a couple of older campers nearby go quiet, one setting down a whetstone she'd been sharpening a dagger with, both of them watching us with careful attention.

"Who's Athenide?"

Luke's expression flickered before he covered it. "A goddess. Not one of the twelve—she faded a long time ago. Trojan War. But she mattered to demigods especially. Goddess of loyalty, demigods, etc. People say she watched over half-bloods like they were her own, whether or not they actually were."

"Faded meaning what?"

"Meaning gone," Luke said, harder than I expected. "Gods don't die easy. It takes a lot. Most stories point to loyalty itself getting stretched too thin during that war—ten years of people switching sides, breaking oaths, even the gods turning on each other. She couldn't survive being what she was anymore."

There was an inscription carved into the base of the statue, worn soft by weather. I understood it without trying, I knew it was Greek, not English.

She who stayed when the rest left.

Underneath, newer, recut more than once over the years: Still owed. Still missed.

That evening, cabin eleven turned out to be loud and crowded, but not unkind, and it made my skin crawl. I sat next to Percy on the futon, leaning against him, my eyes closed involuntarily. 

At dinner, Mr. D stood to make the usual announcements—Friday's capture the flag, cabin five holding the flag laurels—and then his eyes landed on me for the first time, over the rim of his Diet Coke can.

His face contorted, it was small, and gone almost before I even fully saw it, something like grief. 

"And we have new campers," he said, his voice flat. "Peter Johnson and—"

"—Penelope Johnson. Hurrah. Now run along to your silly campfire. Go on.”

Chiron murmured something I didn't catch. Mr. D didn't correct the name. He sat back down, poured himself more Diet Coke, and avoided looking at this table for the rest of dinner.

PERCY

The days between arriving and Friday's capture the flag blurred into something like a training montage. Mornings started with the conch horn dragging everybody out for breakfast, where you scraped part of your food into a fire as an offering to whichever god you belonged to—awkward when you didn't know who that was, so I muttered "whoever's listening.”

Afternoons were sword drills with Luke, who turned out to be really good but he didn’t humiliate you. He fixed my stance without making me feel like an idiot for getting it wrong the first six times, which I appreciated more than I told him.

"You've got good  instincts," he told me, the third day, after I disarmed one of the Ares kids more by accident than skill.

"Perse has better instincts," I shrugged. "She’s good at reading people."

Luke's face contorted again, the one I kept catching around my sister, and covered it fast. "Yeah," he said. "I've noticed."

Perse split her afternoons between archery, which she was mediocre at, and combat forms, which she picked up so fast Luke ran out of things to correct within a week. I found her once at dusk, alone at the practice dummies, fighting with a knife technique I’m sure nobody had taught her.

"Where'd you learn that?" I asked.

She looked at the knife like she was surprised to find it in her hand. "I don't know," she said. "Sometimes in my dreams." Her dreams were a lot, and it creeped both of us out.

Annabeth—a girl from cabin six with gray eyes always looked over to me and Perse.

"You're going to get claimed soon," she told me flatly, the second night. "I can tell."

"How?"

"I have my ways." Her eyes flicked past me, toward Perse, and something more careful crossed her face. "Both of you, probably."

I asked Grover, one afternoon at the lake, about the empty cabins at the end of the horseshoe. He explained the Big Three pact—Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades swearing off mortal kids after World War Two, because their children were too powerful—and told me about a girl named Thalia who'd died holding off an army of monsters at the top of this same hill so her friends could make it inside the border. Zeus had turned her into the pine tree at the summit. Her spirit still helped guard the camp.

I thought about that a lot over the next few days. About what it cost some kids here just to survive being who they were.

Friday night, the conch horn blew and the whole camp lined up for capture the flag.

PERSE

Chiron laid out the rules—the creek was the boundary, the forest was fair game, no killing or maiming, magic items allowed. Percy and I got put on the Blue Team, alongside Annabeth's cabin and we were with Luke’s cabin, Hermes, against Ares and everyone Clarisse had managed to bully into an alliance.

Luke put me on the flanking line and Percy on border patrol at the creek, and I understood that this was less a game and more of something the older campers took a lot more seriously than they let on.

The horn blew. Within thirty seconds I figured out why.

I heard the fight before I found it—Clarisse and two of her siblings had cornered Percy in the creek, and by the time I got there he'd already put one of them down, but Clarisse's spear crackled with electricity, and I didn't like the way he was favoring one arm.

"Two on two," I said, coming up behind the others. "Better odds."

"How do you know how to do that?" Percy shouted, blocking a strike.

"I don't know," I shouted back, mostly annoyed about it. "I just do it."

We held the creek long enough for someone on our side to actually get the flag—I only caught the shape of it moving through the trees, Luke running low and fast with the red banner over his shoulder, Hermes and Apollo campers covering him. Our side exploded into noise a second later, and Clarisse screamed something about a trick, but it was already over.

That was when the growling started.

I felt it before I heard it clearly—something low, wrong, closing fast. On the rocks above the creek stood a hound the size of a small car, eyes like lit coals, and it wasn't looking at the flag. It was looking at Percy.

"Percy, move!" I screamed, but it was already airborne, as I tried to push Percy out of the way, its claws scratched and sliced both of us, shredding our armor. 

Chiron shot his bow at it. "Someone summoned it," he said, grim. "Someone inside the camp."

Nobody had time to argue about who, because that was when the light appeared over Percy's head—a green, hologram-bright trident, and over mine as well.

The whole clearing went dead silent.

"Poseidon," Chiron said, into that silence, his voice carrying strangely. "Hail, Perseus Jackson and Perseleia Jackson, children of the Sea God."

Everyone bowed and no one cheered. I noticed that immediately—the ripple of unease moving through camp instead, campers glancing at each other, at us, and then, as if it confirmed their worst fears, at me specifically.

"Two," someone murmured. "Both of them, at once."

"The pact," someone else said. "He broke it twice in one go."

"It's not just that," said a third voice, quieter, but the clearing had gone quiet enough that it carried anyway. "Look at her face."

I felt Percy go rigid beside me. I reached for his hand, shaking.

Chiron cleared his throat, sharp enough to cut through the murmuring. "That's enough. Cabin three, both of you. The game is suspended."

Luke walked us back himself, unusually quiet. At the door of Cabin Three, he lingered a moment too long, looking mostly at me.

"For what it's worth," he said, "I don't think it's your fault. Whatever they're all whispering about."

"Whatever what is?" Percy said. "Somebody want to actually tell us?"

"Ask Chiron," Luke said. "It's not really my story to tell." And then he was gone, leaving us alone in the too-quiet cabin, the twin trident afterimages still burning faintly behind my eyes.

PERSE

I couldn't sleep. Around midnight, once Percy's breathing had gone slow and even, I got up, pulled on a jacket, and slipped outside. I told myself I wasn't going looking for anything. I didn't fully believe it.

I found a little girl at the hearth in the courtyard between the Big House and the dining pavilion, tending a fire that clearly didn't need tending, same as before, except this time, I approached the girl.

She looked up before I said anything. "Come sit, Perse. It's a good night for it."

I sat across the fire from her. For a while neither of us said anything, and it wasn't uncomfortable, which surprised me more than it should have.

"You have questions," she said curiously.

"Who are you?” I knew the answer without even needing to ask.

"That's usually how it starts. I’m Hestia, goddess of the Hearth." She gave me a wry smile. "You felt something today. When your name went out over that clearing."

"I felt everyone staring at me like I'd done something wrong." I hugged my legs.

"But you didn’t, it's just the cruel irony of fate isn’t it?" Her eyes, when they met mine, were kind in a way that didn't ask anything of me. "The hearth doesn't choose whose house it warms, Perseleia. It just stays lit. Whatever's underneath you—whatever they think they recognize—that doesn't make you responsible for carrying it before you understand what it is."

"Do you know what it is?"

She was quiet long enough that I thought she wouldn't answer. "I know grief when I see it wearing someone else's face," she said finally. "I know that some of the oldest campers here have been waiting a long time for something they can't quite name. I won't tell you more than that. It isn't mine to tell, and you're not ready to carry it tonight regardless."

"Everyone keeps telling me that."

"I know, but it isn’t my place to tell." She almost smiled. "Comfort, I can give you separately."

She just let me sit there by the fire until my chest eased into something more like exhaustion than fear. When I finally stood to go, she said one more thing, quiet, like she wasn't sure I was meant to hear it.

"Whoever she was to this camp," Hestia said, "you're allowed to be someone else to it, you’re allowed to be yourself. The fire doesn't care what it used to be lighting. It only cares that it's still burning."

I ran back to Cabin Three with that turning over in my head, and though I didn't understand it yet, and that whatever I was going to find out about myself, I wasn't going to find it out tonight.

Percy was still asleep, one arm flung over the side of his bunk the way it had been since we were six years old sharing a room in our apartment. I watched him for a while before I climbed into my own bed.

Whatever I was. Whoever I'd been. He was still my brother, and I was still his sister, and nothing carved into a shrine was going to change the order those two facts came in.

I closed my eyes. If I dreamed again, I wouldn't remember it by morning—just the sense, distant.