Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

One hundred and ninety-two hours.

Annabeth had started counting on the third day and hadn’t managed to stop. It wasn’t deliberate. Her brain simply did it now, filling silences the way a house settles into its own foundations — the math running underneath everything else, underneath sword drills and inventory sheets and the trireme plans Jake Mason had left on her bunk with a sticky note that read is this even possible?

Eight days. Eleven thousand five hundred and twenty minutes since she’d walked to the Poseidon cabin at seven in the morning with a thermos of warm coffee, because he never made his own and always complained about it, and found the door standing open.

The bed made. The salt-crusted windowsill exactly as it had been. The whole cabin full of quiet like a held breath.

Minotaur horn on its bracket. Shell wind chime. Riptide gone, which meant nothing, because Riptide was always gone and always came back on its own.

Tyson’s crooked little water fountain still burbling in the corner.

That had somehow been the worst part. The fountain was still running and he wasn’t there and nobody had told the fountain.

Yet, winter came to camp the way it always did, politely and only partway.

Past the borders the world was iron-gray and salted white, but on the hill the frost only silvered the edges of things. It rimed the strawberry fields under their burlap and furred the split rails of the fence and made the grass crunch faintly underfoot. The wind came up the slope off the Sound carrying the cold of open water, dragging at the Fleece where it hung on its branch — dull gold in the flat afternoon light, snapping once, going still.

Peleus lay coiled at the roots of the pine, steaming gently. He cracked one eye at her, decided she still wasn’t interesting, and closed it again.

Annabeth pulled her jacket tighter and did not go down.

She’d been up here most of the afternoon and she was aware of how that looked. Malcolm had come twice, the second time with a sandwich, and had eventually retreated in the face of what he’d diplomatically called the thing you do where you stand somewhere until it gives you information.

The infuriating part was that it had worked. Once.

Five days ago she’d stood in almost exactly this spot with her heart going like a bird in her chest, because a vision had told her to look for a boy with one shoe. And that was a clue. That was a specific, actionable, beautiful clue — you get a detail that doesn’t fit, you pull on it, and the rest comes loose.

So she’d taken the chariot to the Grand Canyon at a speed that made Butch swear in Ancient Greek.

He’d had one shoe.

He’d had the wrong face.

Blond. Blue eyes. A little scar at the corner of his mouth. Wrong height, wrong walk, standing in the wreckage of a school field trip with no idea who he was — and behind him a girl with a knife and a boy who was already on fire and enjoying it, and not one of the three of them worth a single thing to her.

She had smiled at them. Shaken Jason’s hand. Put them in the chariot and been perfectly, professionally kind, and then spent the whole flight back with her jaw locked, because if she’d opened her mouth she would have said something unforgivable to a boy whose only crime was being alive in the wrong shape.

Four days ago they’d flown west on a bronze dragon.

Four days of nothing since.

One hundred and ninety-two—

“You’re going to freeze up here.”

She didn’t jump. She’d like that on the record.

The shadow under the pine had stretched longer than it had any right to, given where the sun sat, and Nico di Angelo stepped out of it the way he always did — like he’d been standing there a while and the world had only just gotten around to admitting it.

He looked terrible. He usually did. But this was a specific flavor of terrible: gray under the eyes, aviator jacket hanging off him, boots caked in something pale and dry that Annabeth chose not to identify.

“Eight days,” she said. “I sent four Iris-messages.”

“I know.”

“Do you have any idea how much drachma I have personally set on fire—”

“I said I know.” He stopped a few feet short of her, hands shoved in his pockets. “It doesn’t come through down there. That’s not a choice I’m making.”

“Then come up.”

“I did.” He gestured at himself, flatly. “This is me coming up. This is what it looks like.”

She breathed out. It ghosted between them and the wind pulled it apart.

“Well?”

“I’ve been asking,” Nico said. “That’s all I’ve got, so don’t get excited. I’ve been asking.”

“Asking who.”

“Everyone.” He said it like it explained itself, and then, when she kept looking at him: “Dead people talk, Annabeth. That’s essentially their entire personality. Somebody dies in a car on the Cross Bronx, they come through and they want to tell you about the traffic. Anything that happened in New York on the fourteenth, somebody down there saw it, and I’ve spent the past few days making a nuisance of myself asking.”

“And?”

“Nothing. Nobody saw a thing.” He shrugged, and it looked like it hurt. “Which is its own kind of information, so don’t make that face. Something that big should leave a hole in somebody’s afternoon. It didn’t. Whatever took him took him clean.”

Took him. Not happened to him. She catalogued it.

“And for the record, his soul is not down there either.”

Annabeth decided that was pointless information, she would kill Seaweed Brain if he thought he could die out of nowhere and leave her alone in the mortal realm.

“What about your father?”

“My father,” Nico said, “is in a mood I have not ever seen him in, and he won’t say why, but I’ve been down there long enough to tell you it’s not about Percy.” His mouth twisted. “Something’s got his attention. The whole place is off. The Furies are pulling doubles and nobody will tell me what for.”

“Off how?”

“Off like a house where somebody moved the furniture two inches to the left.” He looked out at the forest. “I don’t know. It’s probably nothing.”

“Nico.”

“It’s probably nothing.”

Annabeth let a beat go by, and then said, evenly, “You really have no idea where he is?”

And there it was.

Nico had spent eight days building her a report — witnesses, canvassing, negative results, the whole architecture of somebody who wanted very badly to be seen doing the work.

And to her question he said:

“I don’t know.”

A pause.

“I don’t know where he is.” Careful. Precise. Every word placed. “That is true. I’m not lying to you.”

“That’s not the same as—”

“I know it isn’t.” Sharp enough that Peleus lifted his head. Nico caught himself, glanced at the dragon, and when he spoke again it had gone quiet and hard. “There are things I can’t say. Not won’t. Can’t. And if you push me on it right now, on this hill, in front of a dragon, all you get is me leaving, and then you’ve got nothing and I’ve got nothing and we’ve both had a worse afternoon.”

“He’s my boyfriend.”

“As he is my friend.” Something flickered across his face and was gone before she could name it. “And I’ve been in the dark for eight days on his account. Give me a little credit.”

The wind came off the water. Somewhere below, somebody was ringing the bell for early dinner, badly, the way the Stolls always rang it when they got to it first.

Annabeth filed it. Whole and unresolved, into the enormous drawer in her head marked ASK ABOUT THIS LATER, the one that had been getting alarmingly full.

“Fine,” she said. “For today.”

“I’ll take it.”

“Don’t disappear again without telling me.”

“No promises.”

“Nico.”

“Fine.” He came the rest of the way up the hill and stood next to her, which from Nico was practically an embrace, and for a while neither of them said anything at all. The Sound went slate under the low sun.

“You’ve been up here a long time,” he observed.

“I’m thinking.”

“You’re waiting—“

Suddenly the sky cracked.

It was the only word for it — a hard golden seam splitting the air over the green, low and close enough that she felt it in her back teeth. Peleus came up hissing like a boiler letting go. The light unfolded, held half a second, and folded shut, and where it had been there were three people standing on the frost-stiff grass at the bottom of the slope, mid-stride, mid-sentence, like something had set them down and walked off.

One of them fell over immediately.

“—ow,” said Leo Valdez, from the ground, with enormous feeling.

Annabeth was already running.

They looked like they’d been through a war and then a laundry cycle. Piper’s hair had been hacked shorter on one side and there was a burn across the back of her hand. Leo’s jacket was scorched down to the lining and he was missing most of one eyebrow. Jason had a cut along his hairline, scabbed dark, and a purple shirt that was more of a rumor of a shirt at this point.

No dragon.

“Where’s Festus?” Annabeth said, which was not the question she’d meant to ask.

“Yeah,” Leo said, still lying down. “So. About that. Big topic. Emotionally complex. I’m gonna need to sit up first.”

Piper hauled him upright by the back of the jacket. “We’re okay. Everyone’s okay. Hera’s — Hera’s out.”

“You freed her.”

“We freed her,” Piper said, “and then she dropped us here without asking, which after four days of that woman is honestly on brand—”

“Annabeth.” Jason had straightened. Something in his face stopped her where she stood. “I need to talk to you.”

“Then talk.”

“It’s about Percy.”

The world went very quiet and very narrow, like a lens stopping down.

“Say it.”

“I got some of my memory back. At the Wolf House, when she came out — it came back in pieces.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist. His hand was shaking slightly, and she didn’t think it was cold. “Annabeth, I don’t think he’s anywhere you’ve been looking. I don’t think he’s—”

“Uh,” said Piper. “Is that the entire Hunt?”

⸻

They were coming up the frozen road below the border, moving in that loose tireless line they used when they weren’t hunting anything. Thirty-odd girls, packs on, bows cased, breath ghosting in the cold. A couple of the younger ones had already broken formation to sprint the last stretch, because word of a hot meal travels faster than any oath.

Silver parkas. Combat boots. A circlet catching the flat light at the head of the column.

And no goddess anywhere in it.

“No,” Annabeth said. “Finish the sentence.”

“That’s Thalia.” Jason was already smiling — an open, uncomplicated thing that took ten years off his face. “She said she’d find me again. I didn’t think she meant the next day.”

“Jason.”

“I will.” He looked at her, and to his credit he didn’t look away. “But not standing on a lawn in forty-five seconds, because it’s going to take longer than that and you’re going to have many questions that will take even more time to answer. Get Chiron. I’ll say the whole thing once, properly, and you can take it apart however you want.”

It was, infuriatingly, the correct call.

⸻

Thalia hugged her brother first, and Annabeth would have thought less of her if she hadn’t.

It landed differently than it must have at the Wolf House — Annabeth could see it from where she stood, the way a second meeting is always more careful and more real than the first. Thalia caught him by both shoulders, held him at arm’s length, looked him over like a coat she was deciding whether to buy.

“You’re still taller than me,” she said. “Still not allowed.”

“I’ll work on it.”

“You look like a dumpster fire.”

“You should’ve seen me Monday.”

“I did see you Monday.” She pulled him in anyway, hard, and held on about four seconds longer than she’d ever have admitted to. “That’s what I’m comparing it to.”

Then she turned, and saw Annabeth, and everything in her face reorganized.

“Hey.”

“Hey.” Annabeth got hugged too, brief and fierce. Thalia smelled like woodsmoke and pine sap and outdoors in winter. “Where’s Lady Artemis?”

The green went quiet in a ring around them, the way it does when somebody finally asks the real question.

Thalia didn’t look away. It was one of the best things about her.

“On Olympus, most likely. Or wherever she goes.” She said it loudly, deliberately, pitched to carry to the campers already leaning in. “She’s not missing. She made the solstice, she’s fine. She just isn’t allowed to talk to us.”

“Isn’t allowed.”

“Zeus— My Father’s order came down at the solstice. Olympus is shut.” Thalia’s jaw set. “No god speaks to any demigod. No messages, no visits, no dreams, nothing. And I asked whether the Hunt counted, but I got not a single reply, so that answers my question itself.”

“When did she last—”

“Three weeks ago.” Thalia’s thumb worked absently over the fletching of an arrow. “And it wasn’t a goodbye, that’s the part that sits wrong with me. It was an order. Lycaon’s pack had gotten too big in the northern Rockies and she wanted him scattered before the year turned. Said it was personal. Wouldn’t say why, which is normal for her.” She shrugged. “So we went. We finished it two days ago. He’s scattered. Job’s done.”

“And then?”

“And then nothing,” Thalia said. “No new orders. No contact. No way to ask for either. Thirty girls, a completed hunt, and a winter to get through, and I’m the lieutenant, so it’s my call.” Her eyes flicked sideways, and something in her went soft and ferocious at the same time. “And the only place I know that’s warded to Olympian standard has hot food, a healer, and my brother in it. Sue me. I got about fifteen years of catching up to do and I’ve had two days of it.”

“Fifteen?” Jason said. “Is that— am I supposed to have known that?”

“Oh, we are nowhere near the worst of it.”

At that moment, Chiron came down the lawn at a trot, and the crowd opened for him without being asked.

He greeted Thalia by name and rank. He put a hand on Jason’s shoulder and said something quiet that made the boy stand a little straighter. He surveyed Leo’s eyebrow situation with an expression of long-suffering recognition.

Then he looked at Annabeth, and held it a beat too long.

“Council,” he said. “The rec room. Cabin heads, Lieutenant Grace, and the three of you. Half an hour — and eat something first, all of you. Jason, Leo and Piper, well done on your quest,” He turned his head. “There is a great deal to hear.”

“Chiron—”

“Annabeth,” he said, “there is something I must ask of you.”

Something. Annabeth heard the shape of that word and did not like it.

But Jason was walking up the lawn beside her with the look of a man carrying something heavy and level, and behind them the Hunters were flooding through the borders in a river of silver, and for the first time in one hundred and ninety-two hours somebody in her general vicinity knew something.

She’d take it. Gods help her, she’d take it in whatever shape it came.

⸻

The rec room had not been designed for a war council. Apparently, it had been designed for ping-pong.

Annabeth had never noticed how aggressively it had been designed for ping-pong until she was standing in it with more than ten other people and a centaur, and the table was still in the middle of the floor, and nobody had figured out where else to put it. So they’d left it. So now the fate of the Greek world was going to be discussed across a warped green rectangle with a sagging net and a paddle somebody had left face-down in the corner, and that felt about right for her life.

Somebody’s wet boots steamed by the door. The windows had fogged so thoroughly that the outside world had become a rumor. The room smelled like old varnish and woodsmoke off everyone’s coats and, faintly, oranges — some ghost of summer that never washed out of the floorboards. Mr. D’s stuffed leopard head hung over the doorway looking personally offended, which was fair, because Mr. D had been recalled to Olympus as well, leaving behind half a crossword and no forwarding address.

Clarisse had taken the good armchair by the simple strategy of getting downstairs first, and sat in it with her boots up and her spear across her knees like a woman daring someone to comment. Will Solace had wedged himself onto the arm of the couch with a first-aid kit open beside him, because Will did not attend meetings, he attended patients, and he had already gotten butterfly closures onto Jason’s hairline and a burn dressing onto Piper’s hand while everyone was still finding seats. Leo had taken the pool table and was disassembling a stapler he had found somewhere. Piper sat cross-legged on the floor beside him.

Thalia stood. The Hunters didn’t sit in other people’s houses.

And Nico was in the corner past the stairs, in the wedge of shadow where the lamplight gave up, which was such a predictable choice that Annabeth had checked there before she’d checked the doorway.

Chiron rolled to the head of the ping-pong table and folded his hands as the rest of them settled down.

“Jason Grace,” he said. “From the beginning. Please.”

Thalia’s brother told it well. He laid it out like a man who had given a great many reports and been graded on them.

The Grand Canyon and the storm spirits — anemoi thuellai, he called them, which made Clarisse sit forward and Chiron’s tail go still. Boreas and his terrible beautiful children. Aeolus, who was several distinct kinds of unwell. Midas, gold to the wrists.

“In my defense,” Leo said, “he offered us a room.”

“He did not.”

“He offered us a room. There was a room. Contextually there were problems with the room.”

The Wolf House in the snow. Piper’s father in a cave on Mount Diablo with his hands over his eyes, which Piper described in eleven words and then stopped, and nobody made her keep going.

The giant. The cage of vines.

And what came out of Hera when it opened.

“She swapped me,” Jason said.

The room got the specific kind of quiet where you can hear the stove.

“Say more,” said Chiron.

“I don’t come from here.” He had his elbows on his knees, and he wasn’t looking at anybody. “I’ve known it for a while now and my mind still argues with it. There’s another camp. Out west. Same gods — different names. Jupiter. Mars. Pluto. Bellona.” A pause. “And it’s not a camp like this. It’s not a summer thing with a climbing wall. It’s an army. There’s a legion. There are ranks, there’s a standard with a gold eagle on it, and you get in through a tunnel, and there’s a river, and I used to sit somewhere high up in the evenings and watch the sun go down over a bay.”

“Those are Roman names,” said Annabeth.

“Yeah.”

“There’s an entire camp full of Romans.”

“There’s an entire camp full of Romans,” Jason said, “and until a few weeks ago I was in charge of a decent chunk of it.”

Leo’s stapler hit the floor. Nobody picked it up.

“Praetor. Elected, two of them, one year at a time.” He rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand, hard, the way he’d been doing all afternoon like he could squeegee the fog out. “I know that job down to the paperwork. I know what the seal looks like. I could tell you the smell of the mess hall in October.” He dropped his hand. “I can’t remember the name of a single human being I did it with.”

Nobody said anything for a second.

Then Will, quietly, without looking up from repacking his kit: “That’s not amnesia, by the way. Amnesia doesn’t do that. Amnesia takes chunks. That’s — somebody went in with tweezers.”

“Yeah,” Jason said. “That’s about how it feels.”

“Why,” said Chiron.

“Because she wants the two camps to meet.” Jason looked up. “She said it out loud. She said the halves have been kept apart for — far too long. She gave me a feeling, and the feeling was long. She said something’s waking up that neither side can beat on its own, and that she needed a bridge.”

“A bridge,” Chiron repeated.

“And a bridge has two ends.”

Chiron set both hands flat on the ping-pong table.

He didn’t say anything for a long moment, and the silence he made was so total that Annabeth felt it go up the back of her neck like a draft. She had known him six years. She had watched him receive news of a war without changing his expression. Right now his face wasn’t doing anything at all, and that was much, much worse.

“Then Hera is playing at something extraordinarily dangerous,” he said, “and she is playing it with every person in this room and both camps as a game piece.”

“Chiron—”

“Understand what has just been said here.” He looked around them, one at a time. “There is a reason none of you have ever heard the word Roman spoken inside these borders. Not because it was lost. Because it was kept.”

Annabeth’s stomach did something slow and cold.

“You knew.”

Chiron met her eyes. “Yes.”

The room detonated.

Not loudly — that was the strange part. There was no shouting. It was a scatter of small sounds all at once: Clarisse’s boots coming off the coffee table, Leo saying “Whoa,” Piper’s head snapping up, Will going very still with a roll of gauze in his hand. Thalia pushed off the wall.

“You knew,” Annabeth said again, and her voice did something ugly on the second word. “How long?”

“Longer than your country has existed.”

“Chiron—”

“I have trained heroes on both sides of this,” he said, “and I did not lie to you. You never asked me, because it never once occurred to you that there was a question, and that is precisely how the arrangement was designed to function.”

“That is lying—”

“It is an oath.” He said it with a flatness she had never heard from him. “It is an oath the gods required, and it is not the only one I hold, and I want all of you to understand what it was for before you decide what it makes me.”

He turned his chair a few degrees, so he was addressing the room and not just her.

“When the two halves have met,” he said, “it has not gone badly. It has gone catastrophically. Not once. Repeatedly, across centuries, in ways that ended civilizations and were subsequently written down as earthquakes. The same gods wearing different faces, and the children of those faces cannot stand in the same field without reaching for something sharp.” His hands closed on the arms of his chair. “I have buried both kinds. I have buried a great many of both kinds, and the pattern does not vary, and there is a reason I have spent two thousand years being extremely boring on this subject.”

“We’re the same people,” Clarisse said.

“You are the same people with the most to prove to one another,” Chiron said. “Yes. That is the entire difficulty.”

“So what,” said Thalia, “the gods just — put up a wall and hoped?”

“The gods put up a wall and maintained it. Rigorously. At some cost.” He looked at Jason. “And Hera has now taken a serving praetor of the legion, set him down in the middle of Camp Half-Blood, restored enough of his memory to make him articulate, and permitted him to explain all of it out loud.”

He let that sit.

“That door does not close again. As of about four minutes ago, this side knows. She has not built a bridge. She has removed a wall — and sooner or later, the other side shall too, if they have or shall meet Percy.”

“She’s the queen of the gods,” said Piper. “Doesn’t she outrank—”

“She is the queen of the gods,” Chiron agreed, “and she has just done a thing which Zeus’s edict, if I understand its purpose at all, existed in part to prevent. Which means either she is acting with his blessing—”

“Or she isn’t,” Nico said from the corner.

It was the first thing he’d said since he came in. Everyone turned. He didn’t seem to enjoy that.

“Or she is not,” said Chiron.

“Great,” said Leo. “Cool. Love that. Two options, both of them are ‘the marriage counseling is going poorly for the whole planet.’”

Which was the exact wrong thing to say and also the only thing that made the room breathable again, and Annabeth hated that it worked.

She was standing. She didn’t remember standing up.

“Two ends,” she said.

Jason looked at her. “Yeah.”

“You said a bridge has two ends. You said if you take a piece off a board—”

“You put one back.”

“So where did she put him.”

The room went quiet in a completely different key.

“I don’t know,” Jason said.

“You know he was traded—”

“I know I was traded. I’m assuming there’s a matching side to it because that’s what the word means, and because Hera doesn’t do anything by halves, and because there is a Percy Jackson–shaped hole in this camp and a Jason Grace–shaped hole in mine.” He spread his hands. “That’s an inference. That’s not knowledge. I never saw him. Nobody told me his name. Until four days ago I couldn’t have told you my name.”

“But he’s with them.”

“He’s somewhere on that side of the line,” Jason said carefully. “That’s the honest version. Whether that means he woke up inside their walls, or on a road in Nevada, or in the back of somebody’s truck in Sonoma with one shoe on—” He stopped. “It happened to me in a school bus in the middle of a field trip, Annabeth. She doesn’t set people down where it’s convenient. She sets them down where the story starts.”

He could be anywhere.

The thought arrived fully formed and enormous and she had to put a hand on the back of the couch.

He could be anywhere out there with no memory and no name and no idea that anyone is looking, and every monster in the western half of this country can smell him.

“Eight days,” she said.

“I know.”

“He was gone the fourteenth. You woke up on the fifteenth. Two holes, one day apart, same size.” She heard her voice climbing and could not get in front of it. “That’s not a coincidence, that’s a receipt, and it’s the first true thing anybody has said to me in eight days and it comes attached to nothing.”

“That is precisely the problem,” Chiron said quietly.

She sat down because her legs made the decision without consulting her. Will put a mug of something hot into her hands, wearing the particular expression healers get when they’d like to sedate you and know they’re not allowed.

“Fine,” Annabeth said. “Then we find it. West coast. A bay, a river, a tunnel, a legion. That’s narrowable. That’s four hundred miles of coastline and I have been narrowing things since I was seven—”

“It’s warded,” Jason said.

“Everything’s warded. Mortals wander into this place twice a summer by accident—”

“Not like this.” He shook his head. “I don’t know how I know that. I know it. You don’t find it. Somebody brings you in, or you’re born into it, or a wolf drags you across a state line. I lived there and I’ve had four days with a road atlas and I can’t put my finger on it. I’m pretty sure if we barged right in there, history would repeat itself, just like Chiron said.”

“And there’s Percy,” Nico said.

Annabeth’s head came up.

“I’m sorry. But there is.” Nico said it carefully, evenly. “If Hera did to him what she did to Jason, then he doesn’t know who he is. He doesn’t know you. And wherever he is, the only thing keeping him breathing is that nobody’s worked out yet that he isn’t theirs.”

“Nico,” said Thalia.

“No, she needs it, or she’s stealing a chariot tonight.” Nico held her eyes. “If a Greek turns up on their doorstep with a sword and a demand — what do they do to the boy who showed up a week ago and can’t explain himself?”

Annabeth shut her eyes.

“That’s not fair,” she said.

“No,” Piper agreed. “It’s just true.”

“So we build the ship,” said Leo.

Every head in the room turned, and he immediately looked like a man who wished he’d counted to five.

“Sorry. No — okay, hang on, I’ve been sitting on this and it is making me itch.” He slid off the pool table. There was a bootprint on the back of his jacket that nobody had mentioned yet. “Bunker Nine. Under the hill, in the woods, sealed up since the Civil War. There’s a shipyard in there.”

That was new.

“There are half-built hulls and there are plans,” Leo said, “and the plans have the same handwriting problem I have, which is a conversation I’m having with a therapist who does not exist. It’s a warship. It flies. It’s been down there for a hundred and fifty years waiting for somebody who could hear the dragon, and I heard the dragon, and the dragon’s head is currently in a duffel bag in my cabin, which is either extremely sad or extremely useful, and I’ve decided it’s useful.”

“How long?” said Chiron.

Leo opened his mouth. Then he stopped, and actually thought about it, which was not what Annabeth had expected of him.

“Six months,” he said. “That’s honest instead of excited. Propulsion I could do in my sleep. It’s the scale — I need a crew, I need Celestial bronze in quantities and everyone in cabin nine who can hold a rivet gun.” He shrugged. “I think I can get it ready by summer.”

“The summer solstice is the deadline in the prophecy regardless,” said Chiron.

“Then it’s the solstice.” And for one second the goofiness dropped clean off him and something considerably older looked out through his face. “I’ll get it done. That’s my one thing. Everybody in here does the sword stuff. I build. Let me build.”

“And when it flies,” Jason said, “we go west and we do it right. Ambassadors, not a raid. Me standing on the deck where they can see me, because whatever else is broken, I’m still a praetor and that means something over there. Piper talks. Leo lands us without dying.” He looked at Annabeth. “And you get him back.”

“June.”

“In June.”

“He’s been gone eight days,” she said. “You’re asking me to leave him out there for six months.”

Annabeth got up and went to the window, because she needed somewhere to put her body that wasn’t a chair.

She wiped an oval clear with the side of her fist. Outside the green was going blue in the dusk. Silver parkas moved between the cabins in twos and threes. Out at the center of it the camp’s hearth burned low and steady in its ring of stones, the way it always did, small and orange and reaching further into the cold than a fire that size should have been able to reach.

One hundred and ninety-three hours, said the arithmetic, unasked. Six months is four thousand three hundred and eighty more.

“I want to say one thing about Hera,” she said.

“My dear—”

“No. I’ve earned this one.” She turned around. “That woman has hated me since I was twelve. She’s said so to my face, in her own throne room, with witnesses. Least favorite. Fine. Goddess of marriage takes against the girl who won’t be told what to do — I understand the joke, I’ve had years with it.”

Nobody moved.

“But she took him.” Her voice didn’t rise. It went the other way, down and level and awful. “She reached into my life and lifted him out of his bed. She put a stranger on a school bus in Nevada. And then she stood back and watched me spend eight days searching a state I already knew he wasn’t in.” She was gripping the windowsill. “She could have written it on a napkin. Four words. He’s on the west coast. That infuriating Goddess.”

She looked around at all of them.

“And now every one of you is going to tell me to be patient with her.”

“No,” said Chiron.

Annabeth blinked.

“No,” he said again. “I will tell you she is a goddess, and that goddesses are not weather one argues with, and that you may hate her as comprehensively as you like on your own time. I will not tell you she was kind.” His tail flicked once, sharp. “She was not. What she has done may yet prove necessary and it was also cruel, and both of those can be true at once, and I am far too old to pretend otherwise to a student of mine.”

Something in Annabeth’s chest came loose and reseated a little to the left.

“Thank you,” she said, thickly.

“Sit down, please. There is one more item, and then you may all go.” Chiron drew a folder out from under the maps. “It is a smaller matter. It has been sitting on my desk for nine days and I have not had the room in my head for it, which is not an excuse I enjoy making.”

“What is it?” said Will.

“Monsters.” He opened it. “Sighting reports out of Brooklyn. They have roughly tripled since the twelfth of the month, which I initially attributed to the solstice and the general — stirring — that we have all felt.” He turned a page. “But it isn’t a general increase. It’s a migration. Everything in the borough is moving southeast toward the coast. The dracaena who has been running a bodega on Court Street for nine years has closed up and gone. The Laistrygonians have abandoned a scrapyard they have held since the seventies.”

“Monsters don’t move house,” said Clarisse.

“That’s not a thing,” said Will.

“No,” Chiron agreed. “It is not.”

“Something’s calling them,” Nico said.

Everyone looked at the corner again.

“You’d know,” said Clarisse.

“I’d know,” Nico said, without heat.

“That is the first oddity. Here is the second.” Chiron laid a subway map out over the ping-pong table, covered in red X’s and cramped, hoofed handwriting in the margins. “Two-thirds of these are struck through. A satyr logs a sighting, files it, goes back a day later to confirm — and there is nothing there. No monster. No trail out. Nothing to suggest it went anywhere. It has simply stopped being where it was.”

Annabeth leaned over the map without meaning to.

“How many?”

“Fourteen, since the fourteenth. And the ones still turning up are worse than the ones that vanished.” He tapped the paper as he went. “A hellhound pack behind a laundromat in Bed-Stuy. A drakon under Flatbush, which frankly ought to have made the evening news. A sphinx near Canarsie. Every week the reports get shorter and the things in them get larger, and every one of them is closer to the water than the last.”

“Wait,” said Will. “Fourteen monsters just — stopped existing? In New York? And nobody noticed anything?”

“That is the difficulty. Something that vanishes leaves no evidence of vanishing.” Chiron closed the folder. “I have two possibilities and I do not favour either. They are being killed, and killed so cleanly that a satyr walking the same block the next morning finds nothing. Or they have fled somewhere far.”

“Both are undesirable,” said Leo.

“Indeed,” said Chiron.

Then the door banged open and a satyr fell into the room.

He came in with a gust of freezing air and half the porch’s worth of leaf litter, in a horse blanket and one boot, and he was so out of breath that he got out three words of nonsense before Will was on his feet and steering him into a chair by both shoulders.

“Breathe. Breathe first—”

“Coney Island,” the satyr got out.

Chiron went still.

“Millard,” he said. “Slowly.”

“I was doing the boardwalk sweep. Down past the aquarium, under the pilings.” His fists were knotted in the blanket. His pupils were enormous. “The Cretan Bull’s down there.”

Clarisse’s boots came off the coffee table. “The Cretan Bull hasn’t been seen in decades—”

“Well, not anymore,” Millard said. “It’s on the island. It walked past me.”

The room went quiet.

“Past you,” said Thalia.

“Six feet away.” Millard’s voice thinned out. “I froze. I couldn’t get to my pipes, I couldn’t get behind anything, there’s nothing on that beach in December, it’s just flat. I stood there and I looked right at it.” He swallowed. “It looked back. It made eye contact. I know it did, I could see myself in it.”

“And?”

“It kept walking.” He said it like he still didn’t believe it. “It turned its head and it went east past the trees like I was a lamppost. I was standing in the open, I hadn’t even hidden, and it just — it had somewhere to be.”

Nobody said anything.

“Monsters don’t do that,” said Clarisse.

“They don’t do that,” Millard agreed, too loud. “That thing has killed satyrs. That’s the one thing it’s famous for. And I stood there for about a minute waiting to die and then I ran three miles and got the train.”

“How fast was it moving?” Annabeth said.

Everyone looked at her. She was still leaning over the map.

“I don’t— fast. Not running. Steady.” Millard blinked. “Why?”

“Because there’s a difference,” she said, “between a thing that’s been called and a thing that’s hunting.”

The words landed on the table and sat there.

“Say that again,” said Thalia.

“Something that’s been summoned moves in a line. It doesn’t stop, it doesn’t hunt on the way, it doesn’t care what it passes.” Annabeth’s finger traced the X’s, down and east, down and east. “It ignored him because it was told to be somewhere. That’s one option.”

“And the other,” said Jason.

“The other is that it’s tracking something better.” She looked up. “It walked past a satyr in the open because a satyr wasn’t worth the detour. Because there’s something it wants more.”

Nobody spoke for a moment.

“I don’t know which of those I like less,” said Leo.

“Neither,” said Annabeth.

“No, I mean I actually can’t decide. Like, genuinely. Option one, somebody’s calling every monster in Brooklyn down to the coast, which is bad, that’s a lot of monsters and somebody wants them.” He counted on his fingers. “Option two, nobody’s calling anything and the Cretan Bull independently decided there’s better prey on Coney Island than a satyr standing in the open. Which means—”

“Which means whatever it’s after is still alive,” said Will.

“Yeah. That’s the one. That’s the sentence I didn’t want to say out loud.”

Chiron had gone quite still at the head of the table.

“Demigods leave a mess,” said Piper.

“That’s the thing.” Annabeth was staring at the map now, and she could feel her pulse in her throat. “That’s exactly the thing. Percy took out a hellhound in the middle of camp and everyone was talking about it for a week.”

“There is one more thing,” Chiron said, “Millard did you catch any other scent?”

Millard’s ears went flat against his skull.

“That’s what I came here about,” he said. “It’s not a trail. A trail’s a line. You get a line and you follow it, that’s the job — that’s all the job is.” He looked up, and his eyes were huge and wet. “This is like standing next to a fire. It’s everywhere at once. It’s the strongest thing I have ever smelled and I couldn’t tell you which direction it was coming from, because it’s coming from all of them. I lost my bearings three times. I had to sit down on the boardwalk.”

“How strong?” said Chiron.

“Sir, I’ve been near Percy Jackson, and Thalia’s standing right there.” Millard shook his head slowly. “It’s not the same. It’s not — bigger, exactly. It’s older. That’s the only word I’ve got and I know it doesn’t mean anything.”

“Wait,” said Thalia.

She had come off the wall. That was the first thing Annabeth noticed — Thalia had stood in the same spot with her arms crossed for the entire meeting, through the Romans, through her brother saying praetor, and now she was walking toward the ping-pong table.

“Say the vanishing part again.”

“Horde of monsters,” said Chiron. “Weeks. Nothing left after a new sighting.”

“Yeah.” Thalia put both hands on the edge of the table. “We found one too.”

Chiron’s head came around.

“When?”

“A week ago. Maybe six days, I’d have to check with Phoebe, she keeps the log.” Thalia’s jaw had gone tight. “We were three days into running Lycaon’s pack out of the Bitterroots and we crossed something else. Big track. Wrong shape for a wolf. Phoebe put her hand in one of the prints and it went past her wrist.”

“What was it,” said Clarisse.

“The Kalydonian Boar.”

Leo, who had been mostly upside down on the pool table, sat up. “The what now.”

“It’s a boar,” said Piper.

“That is clearly not a normal boar, based on the way everybody’s face just did that.”

“Artemis sent it,” Annabeth said. Her mouth had gone dry. “The original one. A king forgot to sacrifice to her and she put it in his kingdom and it flattened the vineyards and killed everybody they sent at it. It took a hunting party of about fifty heroes to bring it down, and they lost people doing it, and then they had a war over who got the hide.”

“Cool,” said Leo. “Great. Love that. Continue.”

“We tracked it two days,” Thalia said. “Which — understand, we weren’t hunting it. We had orders. But that’s the kind of thing you don’t just leave in a national forest, so I put four girls on it and we followed the sign north.”

“And?”

“And we found the end of the trail.” Thalia looked up. “Gold dust. About forty feet of trampled scrub, some blood that wasn’t ours, and gold dust all over the snow. Somebody had already killed it.”

The room was very quiet.

“How long before you got there?” Annabeth said.

“Half a day. Maybe less — the dust hadn’t blown off yet, and it was windy.” Thalia shook her head slowly. “Thirty of us with silver arrows, and I would have thought hard about taking that thing on. Yet something put it down in the woods, possibly on their own and walked off without leaving a body, a camp, just a battered area.”

“Montana,” Annabeth said. She’d pulled the map toward her without noticing. “That’s — Chiron, that’s two thousand miles from Coney Island.”

“I’m aware.”

“In a week.”

“I am aware of that also.”

“So it’s a demigod,” said Will.

“It has to be a demigod,” said Piper. “Right? That’s the only thing it can be. Monsters don’t kill each other and leave the dust, and a god wouldn’t bother, a god would just—” she made a small gesture, “—and there wouldn’t be a fight at all. Somebody fought it. That’s what forty feet of trampled ground is.”

“Then whose,” said Clarisse.

Nobody answered.

“No, seriously. Whose.” She sat forward, spear across her knees. “Because it’s not ours. There is nobody at this camp who could take the Kalydonian Boar solo, and if there were, we’d know, because they’d be insufferable about it. Maybe Percy but he’s at some Roman camp.”

“It isn’t a camper,” Chiron said.

“Fine. So it’s Roman.” Clarisse looked at Jason. “You said they’ve got a legion. Legions have — I don’t know what legions have. Champions.”

“Cohorts,” said Jason. “And no.”

“Why no?”

“Because they don’t come here.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “I can’t tell you where there is, but I can tell you the shape of the place, and the shape of the place is inside a wall. You don’t leave without orders. You leave without orders, you’re a deserter, and they have a word for what happens to deserters and I remember the word.” He shook his head. “And nobody’s sending a two-man detachment across the entire continent to kill livestock in Montana and then take the subway to Brooklyn. That’s not how they do things.”

“Then it’s neither,” said Annabeth.

“Then it’s neither,” Jason agreed.

“So it’s unclaimed.” Piper looked around the table. “It’s someone nobody’s found yet.”

“For someone that strong?” said Will. “Come on. Somebody that can kill that many monsters without training, not a single satyr has caught their scent? They should’ve picked them up out of a stroller.”

“Millard said older,” Annabeth said slowly. “He said the scent was older. Not bigger. Older.”

“I don’t know what I meant by that,” Millard said from his chair, wretchedly. “I’ve been thinking about it the whole train ride and I still don’t.”

“Or it’s not a demigod at all,” said Nico.

They all turned. He hadn’t moved out of the corner.

“That’s the other option and nobody’s saying it,” he said. “There are things that leave gold dust when they kill and don’t leave a trail when they walk. There are a lot of them, actually. And most of them aren’t on anybody’s side.”

“That’s not comforting,” said Leo.

“It wasn’t meant to be.”

“Okay, but hang on.” Clarisse put her spear down against the chair and leaned in, and her whole face had changed — she’d stopped being angry and started being interested, which Annabeth privately found more alarming. “Say it is a demigod. Then it’s another big three kid. It has to be. Kalydonian Boar, Cretan Bull, bunch of monsters — nobody else is doing that at our age.”

“That’s what I’d have said,” Annabeth said.

“So think about the scent.” Clarisse jabbed a finger at the map. “You two. You and Jackson.” She turned to Thalia. “When you three were running around the country being famous — what came at you?”

Thalia frowned. “A lot.”

“Not a lot. What.”

“Minatour,” said Annabeth. “Medusa. Echidna. The Chimera. Ares, technically. Harpies — a lot of Harpies.”

“That’s after Percy was claimed,” Clarisse said. “Before that. This person is getting way more monsters than a son of Poseidon had to face. Thalia, you were walking around unclaimed and stinking to high heaven and you got the Furies, chasing you for days.”

Nobody said anything.

“But this mysterious demigod took down the Kalydonian Boar in less than a day,” Clarisse went on. “Everything in the borough packing up and heading southeast. The Cretan Bull walking past a satyr in the open like he’s furniture.”

The stove ticked into the silence.

“How is this demigod still alive,” Annabeth said quietly. “They must have only known of their lineage recently but yet so skilled”

“Could their Godly parent be helping them kill the monsters?” asked Piper.

“I doubt it,” said Nico. “There are still laws in place.”

Chiron had gone very still at the head of the table, and Annabeth realized, with a small cold drop in her stomach, that he had not asked a single question for several minutes.

He was not working it out.

He was listening to them work it out.

“And so, Annabeth—”

“No.”

The room turned.

“My dear—”

“No, I heard where that sentence was going. I’m answering it early.” She was on her feet again. “You just spent an hour telling me that Percy is alive, somewhere on the other side of the continent, with no memory and no name, in the general vicinity of an army that would execute him on a schedule. And that I can’t go for six months. And that the queen of the gods has kicked a wall down and likely planning some scheme.”

“Annabeth.”

“And want me to go find another Demigod.”

“My plan for you is a task within your reach.”

“It’s a pickup.” It got away from her; she let it. “That’s what it is. Some demigod and a monster problem. Send Clarisse — Clarisse wants to hit something, look at her.”

“I do want to hit something,” Clarisse said. “That part’s accurate.”

“Send the Stolls, they know the boroughs, Connor has a cousin in Red Hook. Send Butch. Send anyone.” She flung a hand at the room, at the fogged windows, at the whole warm crowded impossible ping-pong table. “Every single person in here can do this one. There is exactly one thing in this world that only I can do, and it is find him, and you’re asking me to spend the winter running errands under the Belt Parkway instead—”

“Annabeth, your wit would be crucial—”

“Another camper should take the quest,” she said. “Not me. I’m not—”

Suddenly, the window went white.

It didn’t shatter. That was the first wrong thing. The light came through the fogged glass without breaking it and without warming it, a hard clean white with no gold anywhere in it, and it went through the rec room the way a scalpel goes through paper. Annabeth’s shadow slammed onto the wall behind her, black and enormous. Clarisse was out of the armchair with her spear already up. Somebody’s mug hit the floor.

Then the sound arrived: one note, very high, very far off, like a bowstring at the instant before release — held far longer than any string could hold it.

And the smell. Bay laurel. Hot stone in summer.

And underneath both, faint and unmistakable, the flat chemical bite of a sickroom.

Will Solace made a small noise and stood up so fast he knocked his first-aid kit off the couch.

The light didn’t fade. It folded, drawing itself inward, condensing down into a shape at the foot of the stairs, and the temperature in the room dropped four degrees while it did.

Tall. Broad through the shoulders. Gold hair — but the wrong gold, cold as coin, combed straight back with nothing careless in it anywhere. A cloak the deep red of old blood, pinned at one shoulder with a disc of dull metal. A bow held down and away in his left hand, the way you hold something you have no intention of explaining.

His face was beautiful and his golden irises glowed bright.

Annabeth’s brain, which had spent six years building a filing system for exactly this, went completely silent for the first time in one hundred and ninety-three hours.

Because she knew who this was. However, something felt different. The energy was not as playful as it usually was for this God.

She just could not work out why he was wearing himself so wrong.

“Dad?!” Will squeaked.

And then, because they had all been trained since they were seven years old and the body does what it was taught before the mind catches up, half the room bowed.

Clarisse got her spear down and her chin with it. Millard went to one knee on the floorboards without appearing to decide to. Leo said, “Uh — hi. Sir. Lord. Lord Sir,” and made a gesture that was somewhere between a salute and a wave, and looked immediately like he wanted to be dead.

“Dad,” said Will once more, on his feet, and there was something so naked in it — so much hi, it’s me, it’s been a while — that Annabeth had to look away.

“Not quite,” said the god.

Nobody moved.

It was the voice that did it, Annabeth thought afterward. Not the eyes, not the cold hair, not the four degrees the room had dropped. The voice was pitched exactly right, and it had all the shape of the god she’d known since she was seven — the one who wrote limericks about his own vehicle and was proud of them — and the warmth had been taken out of it the way you’d take the sugar out of a recipe and change nothing else.

It sounded like Apollo. It sounded like Apollo standing about thirty feet further away than he was.

She glanced at Thalia and found Thalia already looking at him with her head tilted very slightly, the way a Hunter looks at a track that doesn’t match the animal.

“You’re different, today,” Thalia adds.

“Lieutenant.” He gave her something that was almost a smile. It went as far as his mouth and stopped there. “You’ve spent three years around my sister. You know when one is wearing a different skin.”

“Lord Apollo.” Chiron gave a slight bow. “It’s a pleasure, however, you should also know not to enter this camp in this aspect.” He suddenly sounded tired.

The golden eyes came around.

“Chiron,” said Apollo.

“There is an oath. You know its terms better than I do, because you swore it and I only enforce it. The two halves are kept apart. That is the whole of it. It has held for three thousand years and it has held because none of you have ever done what you are doing right now in a room full of Greek children.”

“It’s held because nobody’s had a reason to test it.”

“It has held because it was sworn.” His hands were flat on the arms of his chair. “And beyond that, my lord, you are barred from speaking to demigods at all. Your father’s edict came down at the solstice.”

“Yes,” Apollo agreed. “But Zeus does not hold as much control over me as does Jupiter. Besides, Juno has already played with the board too much for me to care about the oath.”

Annabeth has heard more Roman names than Greek in the past hour. It was unsettling.

“She took a serving praetor out of the legion,” Apollo said, “unmade him, and set him down on your lawn. She has been sitting in a cage in the Wolf House for a month letting all of you walk into it. And whatever she is building, she did not ask permission for any of it, and she is not going to.” He shrugged, and it was an entirely human gesture and looked obscene on him.

Chiron didn’t answer.

Leo raised a hand about six inches. “Sorry. Sorry, I know this is a moment. Are we talking to a Roman god right now?”

“Yes,” said Nico in slight exasperation.

“Okay.” Leo sat down very slowly. “Cool.”

“You’re colder,” said Annabeth.

“I’m honest.” The gold eyes settled on her and it felt like standing under a lamp. “You’ve only ever met me in summer, daughter of Athena. You’ve had the poetry and the appalling driving and the god who rhymes badly on purpose because it makes children less frightened of him.” He tipped his head. “I’m also the one who shoots from very far away, and the arrows carry plague, and I don’t always give a reason first. That has never stopped being true. It simply isn’t what I choose to be at a campfire. But don’t forget my greek form has had his fair share of terrors as well.”

Will made a small sound.

Apollo’s gaze moved to him, and for half a second something behind that empty face almost surfaced — the way a shape moves under ice.

“You’ve been sleeping badly.”

“I—” Will’s voice cracked. “Yeah.”

“Stop taking the night shifts. You’re no good to anyone at four in the morning and you know it.” A pause, then, flat, like a man reading a line he hadn’t rehearsed: “You’re doing well. Considering.”

Will opened his mouth and nothing came out.

Then Apollo turned his head and found Jason Grace, and stopped.

Jason stood up. He didn’t seem to decide that either. His shoulders went back, his chin came level, his heels came together — and Annabeth watched a boy who had spent five days being carefully, apologetically Greek snap to attention in front of a Roman god like a switch had been thrown somewhere inside him.

“Ah,” Apollo said softly. “There you are.”

“Sir.”

“Do you know, you’re the only person in this room who looks correct to me. The rest of them slouch.” He came a step closer, and the light in the room leaned with him. “It’s charming. It’s why the poetry’s better over here.” The gold eyes went over the ruined shirt, the butterfly closures at his hairline. “Jupiter’s son. Praetor of the Twelfth. A roman in a room full of orange, and so well-behaved about it.”

“I’m trying to be useful, sir.”

“You’ve been used. That’s for sure.” The mouth curled. “She lifted you out of your fort, unmade you, set you down in the enemy’s summer camp, because you are precisely what she needed you to be. My stepmother is very good at this. Take that as a compliment to her and not to you.”

“Juno,” Jason said.

“Yes,” Apollo agreed. “She went to considerable trouble to be wearing that face when she took you, and when the ledger balances she will be wearing the other one.” He turned away. “It’s going to cost more than any of you expect. It will also have been worth it.”

Then he rolled his shoulders once, like a man setting down luggage, and became businesslike, and the room got colder again.

“But I see the centaur has already been briefing you on what I came for,” he said. “Which saves me the tedious part.”

“The monster sightings,” said Chiron.

“Precisely.” His head tipped. “Understand what this is. It is a message. My Greek self sent it, and he sent it with me because he had no one else to send, and I usually don’t do things on the Greek side.” A pause. “But I can’t help but be intrigued of what is to come from this.”

Annabeth did not like that.

“Annabeth Chase.” He said the whole name, and the room seemed to rearrange itself around it. “You will lead this quest. Take two. Choose them at the soonest and leave by the hour, do so with haste.”

“I already said—”

“You said another camper should take it. I heard you from Olympus, and that is not a figure of speech.” The corner of his mouth moved. “I suggest you bring one of Dad’s kids, you might need their lightning.”

Annabeth knew by now she had no choice, even she would not defy a direct order from a God.

“I’ll go,” Thalia said immediately, “Jason just came back from a quest and I’m dying for some answers. I’ll have Phoebe take charge in my absence.”

Annabeth gave her a nod. She would ask for Thalia no matter what, she missed her.

Then the light went up.

It came off him with no warning at all — no gathering, no swell. The room simply filled, white and total, and the note came with it, that one held bowstring, and under it hot stone and bay laurel and, threading through, the sickroom.

And when he spoke, his voice came from every direction at once, and there was nothing of the campfire in it whatsoever:

“You shall go where the storm lies down upon the water,

Two embers shall kindle, of Sun and Hearth,

To find what Fate kept hidden, but now revealed.”

The light folded.

Apollo was gone with it.

“Okay,” said Leo, into the silence. “So I have follow-up questions.”

Nobody answered him. The mug finished rolling and bumped against the leg of the pool table, and that was the only sound in the room for a good five seconds.

Annabeth turned around and pointed at the corner.

“You’re coming.”

There was a pause.

“Ugh,” said Nico.

“That’s not a no.”

“It’s a precursor to a no. It’s the noise you make while you’re building one.” He tipped his head back against the wall. “Annabeth, I got here an hour ago. I have not sat down. I have slept twice in the past five days and I was personally shouted at by a Fury for standing in the wrong queue, and coming up that hill the only thing I wanted in the world was some food and a nice bed where nobody would tell me to go on a quest.”

“There’s food at the pavilion.”

“That’s not the—” He gestured, exasperated. “There’s a difference between going somewhere and being sent somewhere, and the difference is that one of them involves a storm. And a beach. And, if I’m reading the room correctly, a train.”

“You can shadow-travel.”

“I can also lie down,” Nico said. “That’s free.”

“You currently smell like the Fields of Punishment,” Will said, from the couch.

“Thank you, Solace. Deeply useful.”

“Nico.” Annabeth crossed the room and stopped in front of him. “You came up that hill this afternoon to tell me the Underworld was wrong. Furniture two inches to the left. Your father in a mood you’d never catalogued. And now a Roman god walks into a rec room in December to say the Fates hid something and it isn’t hidden anymore.”

Nico stopped.

“That’s annoying,” he said.

“Yes.”

He glared at her with real feeling. Then he looked at the ceiling for a while, with the specific expression of a man being asked to help someone move house.

“Fine.”

“You’re so easy, Death Boy,” Thalia added with a slight smirk.

“I liked you better when you were a tree.”

“You didn’t even know me when I was a tree.”

“Well, we should have kept it as that.”

Thalia could only laugh.

“Thank you,” said Annabeth.

“Don’t. This is under protest.” He shoved his hands back in his pockets. “And when it goes wrong—”

“If.”

“When,” Nico said. “Because it’s the Fates, and the Fates have exactly one move, and it’s let them think they’re doing fine.” He slumped back against the wall. “I hate the beach.”

“Nobody’s making you swim.”

“I hate the concept of the beach.”

“Alright, now with that settled,” said Will. “Any idea what the Prophecy means?”

“Right.” Piper wrapped her arms around her knees. “First line’s the easy one.”

“First line’s the easy one,” Annabeth agreed. “Storm on the water. Likely Rockaway Beach. That’s the shoreline. That’s exactly where the map’s been pointing for days.”

“Could just be weather,” said Clarisse.

“He said there’s weather coming that isn’t weather. So it’s both.” Annabeth pulled the subway map toward her and set two fingers on the coast. “There’s going to be a storm out there and there’s going to be something in it.”

“What kind of something,” said Leo.

“Sea monster,” said Annabeth and Thalia, at exactly the same time.

“Oh, great, a sea monster, just what I wanted,” Nico sarcastically added.

“It’s the shape of the line,” Annabeth ignored him. “Where the storm lies down. Storms don’t lie down. Something’s out there under it.”

“Then that’s what’s been calling everything southeast,” said Piper.

“No,” said Nico.

Everyone turned.

“You don’t call a sea monster.” He didn’t move out of the corner. “Nothing calls a sea monster. It’s the biggest thing in the water and it goes where it likes and it does not take instructions.” He nodded at the map without approaching it. “So it isn’t the one doing the calling. It’s just the last thing to show up.”

Nobody enjoyed that.

“Great,” said Clarisse. “So there’s a sea monster. And no son of Poseidon.”

“Thanks, Clarisse.”

The room went quiet.

“Sorry,” said Clarisse, which Annabeth had heard her say maybe three times in six years.

“No. You’re right.” Annabeth pressed her thumbs into her eyes.

“Second line’s the problem,” said Will.

He’d been quiet a long while. He had his kit on his knees and both hands flat on top of it, which Annabeth had learned meant Will was thinking rather than fussing.

“Two embers shall kindle, of Sun and Hearth. What does that even mean?”

“It means two of something catch,” said Piper.

“Two of what, though.”

“Us?” said Jason. “He said take two. Right before he said it.”

“That’s what I thought at first.” Annabeth turned it over. “But then it’s of Sun and Hearth, and there’s nobody here it fits. Sun would be Apollo — fine, that part’s not subtle, he came and stood in this room to deliver it. But nobody going out there is a child of Apollo.”

“I could go,” Will said.

“You’re not going, Jason definitely needs a proper check up after this, and so do Leo and Piper.”

Will subsided.

“And even if he did,” said Clarisse, “there’s still the other half of it. Nobody is a child of the hearth. That’s not a thing. There’s no cabin. There’s no such person.”

“Hestia,” said Thalia.

“Right. Who has no kids. Ever. On purpose. Swore it on the Styx.” Clarisse spread her hands. “So what’s she doing in a prophecy?”

Nobody had anything.

“Does she play a part in this?” said Piper. “Like — genuinely. Is that what it’s saying? Apollo’s obviously in it, he gave the prophecy, he broke two laws to be in the room. Is she in it too?”

“She doesn’t do that,” said Annabeth.

“Doesn’t do what?”

“Anything. She doesn’t intervene.” Annabeth pushed her hair back. “That’s not me being dismissive, it’s the actual shape of her. She stepped down from the Olympian council so the others wouldn’t fight over the seat. She’s the fire in the middle of camp. That’s the whole relationship, and it’s been the whole relationship for three thousand years.”

“She talked to me once,” said Nico.

Everyone looked at him. He immediately regretted it.

“Two summers ago. At the fire in the Big House, before Percy and I went down. Looked about eight.” He shrugged. “She talked about family. Mostly mine. It was not a fun conversation. Then she let us go.”

“And?”

“And she didn’t want anything,” Nico said. “That’s the only bit I remember properly. Everybody up there wants something and she just wanted me to sit down.”

“So that’s a no,” said Thalia.

“That’s a strong no,” said Annabeth. “She’s the least likely god in the pantheon to be moving pieces. Apollo I can build a theory around — Apollo’s nosy, Apollo’s got eleven agendas and nine of them are about being interesting.”

“And yet,” said Will.

“And yet,” Annabeth admitted. “Her domain is in it.”

“So we don’t know,” said Jason.

“So we don’t know.” She rubbed her eyes. “I’ve got a line with two gods in it, one of whom just broke an oath to hand it to me and one of whom— Chiron, any idea?”

Chiron considered.

“You are all describing her by what she declines to do,” said Chiron.

He hadn’t raised his voice. He rarely had to.

“Which is not incorrect. It is simply the least interesting fact about her.” He was looking at the fogged window rather than any of them. “Hestia was the first child of Kronos. The first swallowed. Which makes her, by every reckoning the gods themselves use, the eldest of that generation — older than Poseidon, older than Hades, older than your father, Thalia, by an order none of them enjoy having pointed out.”

“She’s older than Zeus?” said Leo.

“She is older than all of them, and none of them have ever contested it, and I want you to sit with how strange that is.” Chiron’s hands settled on the arms of his chair. “Precedence is the only currency on that mountain. They have fought wars over the order of a procession. And there is one seat nobody argues about, because she vacated it before anyone could, and everyone since has found it more comfortable to remember her as the quiet one who tends the fire.”

“Great.” Annabeth exhaled. “Fantastic. Moving on. Third line.”

“Yeah, that one’s nothing,” said Clarisse.

“It’s not nothing—”

“What does it tell you to do?” Clarisse spread her hands. “You were already going. You were already going to find whatever’s down there. That line just says the thing you find will have been hidden.”

“Which we’d work out about four seconds after finding it,” said Jason.

“So we find out on the quest,” said Piper.

“So we find out on the quest,” Annabeth agreed, and let it go, because there was nothing else in it to hold.

“Great,” said Leo. “So the Fates are in this now. That’s — I mean, that’s them, right? That’s the actual Fates. The scissors ladies.”

“Don’t call them that,” said three people at once.

“Noted, noted.” He rubbed his hands together. “But like — what do you even hide? What’s worth hiding? From everybody? For however long?”

Nobody had anything.

“That’s the part,” said Annabeth quietly. “Whatever it is, it was worth three of the oldest things in existence keeping it out of sight. And now they’ve stopped.”

“Or they’ve been made to stop,” said Nico.

“That’s worse.”

“Usually is.”

Jason had been quiet for a while. He was frowning at the middle distance in the specific way he did when he was checking something against the fog.

“This might be nothing,” he said.

“Say it anyway.”

“Hera said something’s waking up that neither camp can beat alone. She said she needed a bridge, and she pulled me out of my whole life to build one.” He looked up. “And now the Fates take their hand off something and a god breaks two laws to make sure we get to it first.”

The room went quiet.

“You think it’s the same thing,” said Piper.

“I think everything’s moving at once, and it’s been moving at once for exactly ten days, and I’ve stopped believing in coincidences this week.” He shrugged, uncomfortable. “That’s all. It’s not a theory. It’s a feeling.”

“Seven half-bloods shall answer the call,” said Annabeth slowly.

“Yeah.”

“Three of us are going out there but we aren’t completely sure yet who exactly the seven are besides you three.”

“I know. It doesn’t fit. That’s why I said it might be nothing.” Jason rubbed the back of his neck. “But if you find something on that beach and it turns out to matter — I’d want somebody in this room to have said it out loud first, so we’re not all sitting here in June going huh.”

“Noted,” said Chiron. “And well said.”

“Or,” said Leo, “it’s completely unrelated, and it’s just a big month.”

“Or that,” Jason agreed.

“Because that also happens. Sometimes stuff just — happens. Near other stuff.”

“That has never once happened,” said Thalia.

“It could!”

“Then that is enough,” said Chiron.

He said it gently, and everyone stopped, which was one of several thousand things about him Annabeth had never fully accounted for.

“You will not solve it in this room. Prophecies are not solved in rooms; they are solved in the places they describe, and the journeys they bring forth.” He rolled back from the table. “And you were told not to wait. Apollo is not the most patient of Gods.”

⸻

The thing about the D train at seven at night in December was that it was warm, and Annabeth had forgotten how much she’d needed that until they got off it.

“Never again,” said Nico.

“You said that at Coney Island Avenue.”

“I’m saying it again. It’s a policy now.” He came up the stairs behind her, hunched into his jacket with his hood up like a man being extradited. “Forty minutes. Underground. With people.”

“That’s what a train is.”

“There was a man asleep on my shoulder.”

“He was very peaceful,” said Thalia.

“He was breathing on me—”

“That’s usually what peaceful people do.”

Thalia had her hands in her pockets and was grinning at the sidewalk, and Annabeth thought — not for the first time that evening — that she looked about six years younger than she had that afternoon.

“Poor baby,” She added.

“I hate you.”

“You’ve had a hard day,” Thalia said, in a voice you’d use on a spooked horse.

“I have had—”

Annabeth let them go. It was easier than she’d expected, walking with the two of them; it filled up the space where her own head would otherwise have been running numbers.

The street was empty in the way outer Brooklyn gets at night in the winter, wide and orange under the sodium lights, all the shutters down. Snow moved through the streetlamp cones in loose skeins and didn’t settle. Somewhere off to the south she could hear the ocean, which she had never once heard from this far up before, and she made a note of that without knowing what to do with it.

“Left at the corner,” she said. “Then east on the service road. Millard’s coordinates put the Bull about half a mile in, off the parkway, in the scrub.”

“And the plan when we find it?” said Thalia.

“We don’t.”

“Sorry?”

“We don’t find it. We find where it’s been.” Annabeth pulled her scarf up over her mouth. “It walked past a satyr in the open eight hours ago, and I want to know what direction it was going and how fast, and if I can get that from tracks I never have to be in a field with it.”

“And if it’s still there?”

“Then we’re extremely quiet and we go around.”

“Around,” said Thalia with a smirk.

“Around.”

“You’ve met me, right?”

“That’s exactly why I said it twice.”

⸻

They smelled it before they saw it.

That was the wrong order and Annabeth knew it was the wrong order about a second too late. She’d been braced for sound — she expected the Cretan Bull to have a bellow you could hear across two boroughs — and instead what came up the service road on the cold air was earth. Turned earth, and torn green wood, and something under it, sweet and metallic.

Thalia’s bow was in her hands, shield on her back. Ready to be used in an instant.

“That’s not old,” Thalia said.

They came through the scrub at the edge of the lot and stopped.

It looked like a plane had come down.

That was Annabeth’s first coherent thought, and she couldn’t improve on it afterward. A hundred feet of woodland had simply been removed. Not burned — pulled apart. Four trees were out of the ground entirely, root plates standing on end like dinner plates set in the dirt, and one of them had come down across the chain-link at the parkway edge and folded it flat. The ground between was ripped into long furrows, some of them a foot deep, thrown up in ridges the way a plough leaves a field.

And there were cracks.

Two of them, running out from the middle of the clearing, black and jagged in the frozen dirt. One was wide enough to put her hand in.

“Okay,” said Nico. “Something hit something.”

“Something hit something very hard,” said Thalia.

And in the middle of it, hanging in the freezing air, catching the parkway lights and the last of the falling snow —

Gold.

It hung in a column about the size of a delivery truck. It wasn’t drifting. It was turning, slow and lazy in the cold, a great suspended cloud of it, and the streetlight came through it and made the whole clearing look like the inside of a lamp. Where it had settled on the churned earth it lay in a shining crust. Where it touched the snow it had melted little pinholes straight through.

Nobody said anything for a while.

Annabeth stepped out into it, and it went over her sleeves like pollen, and she watched the motes go through the beam of the parkway lights.

“An hour,” she said.

“What?”

“Less. Look at it.” Her voice sounded strange to her. “It’s still airborne. Monster dust falls out of the air in — I don’t know, twenty minutes, half an hour, it’s heavy. And there’s a wind off the water.” She turned in a slow circle. “This is less than an hour old. This might be thirty minutes old.”

“That’s the Cretan Bull that Poseidon unleashed—” Thalia stopped. She lowered her bow slightly and looked at the root plate of the nearest tree, which stood higher than she did. “Annabeth, that thing is seventeen feet.”

“I know.”

“I’ve seen it. Not up close, thank the gods, but I’ve seen it, and it goes through a stone wall like a wall’s a suggestion.” Thalia’s jaw had gone tight. “It’s been alive since before the alphabet. And something took it apart in a park in Brooklyn and then left.”

“Two somethings,” said Nico.

He was crouched at the edge of the churned ground with his fingers spread just above the dirt, not touching it. He hadn’t gone into the gold. Annabeth noticed that and filed it.

“Say that again.”

“There’s two sets.” He nodded at the ground without looking up. “One’s over there and one’s — everywhere. All through the middle of it. Whatever the second one was doing, it was doing it fast.”

“Prints?”

“Not really. Scuffs.” He straightened, and there was something in his face she didn’t like. “Annabeth, there’s no blood.”

She looked again.

He was right. That was what had been wrong since they’d stepped through the scrub, the thing her brain had been flagging and failing to name. There was gold, and there was torn ground, and there were four trees out of the earth by their roots.

And there was nothing else. No blood, no scraps of clothing, no dropped weapon, no gouge in the dirt where a body had gone down and been dragged. Nothing to say that anything that fought here had been hurt.

“They walked away,” she said.

“They ran,” said Nico. “Look at the spacing.”

“Which direction?”

He pointed east, across the parkway, toward the black.

Toward the water.

Annabeth’s phone buzzed against her hip.

She almost didn’t take it out. It was the third buzz in an hour; the first had been Malcolm, the second had been Malcolm again, and demigods carrying phones was such a spectacularly bad idea that she’d only brought it because Chiron had insisted and the Hephaestus cabin had done something to it.

She looked at the screen.

The light of it was very white in all that gold.

NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE — NEW YORK, NY
HURRICANE WARNING
Extreme wind event. Rockaway Peninsula, Jamaica Bay, Breezy Point.
Sustained 90+ mph. Storm surge. Seek shelter immediately.

“That’s not possible,” said Thalia, reading over her shoulder.

“No.”

“It’s December. Hurricanes don’t— you don’t get hurricanes in—”

“I know.”

“There’s no system. There’s nothing on the radar, I’d have—” Thalia stopped, because she was arguing meteorology with a daughter of Zeus’s own instincts and losing. She could feel it. Annabeth could see her feel it: the way her head came up and turned east, like a compass needle finding a magnet.

“It’s already there,” Thalia said. “It’s not coming. It’s sitting on top of the peninsula and it’s not moving.”

You shall go where the storm lies down upon the water.

“Rockaway,” Annabeth said.

She was already turning around. “Nico—”

“Yeah.”

“How far is it?”

“Ten miles. Across the bay.” He was rolling his shoulders, and his face had gone gray and set. “Annabeth, I can do it, but I’m telling you now — two of you is a lot. It’s not the distance, it’s the passengers. I’ll be no good to you for a bit on the other side.”

“How long is a bit?”

“Don’t know. Depends how bad it is when we land.”

“Can you do it?”

“I said I can do it.” He held out both hands. “I’d just rather you knew what you were buying.”

Thalia took one. Annabeth took the other.

“For the record,” Nico said, “I want it noted that this is the second time tonight I’ve agreed to something under protest.”

“Noted.”

“And the trains were worse.”

⸻

Shadow travel was like being swallowed.

Annabeth had done it four times and disliked it every time; you didn’t move so much as get taken, the cold going through you the way water goes through cloth, and there was a stretch in the middle — she had never worked out how long, three seconds, maybe less — where there was nothing at all. No up. No breath. No sound but a kind of enormous patient silence, like standing in a room with something very large that was asleep.

And under her hand, Nico’s fingers, going colder and colder and gripping harder.

Then wind.

It hit them so hard that Annabeth went to one knee in wet sand and pine needles, and the noise arrived a half-second behind it — a roaring that wasn’t wind, or wasn’t only wind, a deep continuous thunder that came up through her palms out of the ground itself.

They’d landed in the scrub pines at the edge of the dunes. Salt spray was coming through the branches sideways. The temperature had dropped so far in ten miles that her wet gloves went stiff in seconds.

Nico was down on all fours beside her, breathing badly.

“Nico—”

“‘M fine.” He was not fine. His skin looked like paper in the dark. “Give me — a minute. Ten minutes. Don’t let anything eat me.”

Thalia hauled him upright by the back of his jacket, one-handed, without appearing to notice she’d done it. She wasn’t looking at him.

She was looking through the pines.

“Annabeth,” she said.

The sky over Rockaway was a wound.

That was the only word Annabeth could find. There was a wall of black cloud standing over the water in a ring perhaps a mile across, and it was turning, visibly, fast enough to see, and in the middle of it there was a hole. A perfect ragged circle of clear night sky, with stars in it, sitting in the middle of a hurricane in December.

The sea underneath it was not behaving like the sea.

It was heaped. Piled up in a mound at the center, twenty feet above the line of the water on either side, the way water piles over something rising.

“Get down,” Thalia said.

They went flat at the edge of the treeline, on their bellies in the frozen sand, and the spray came over them, and Annabeth wiped her eyes twice before she trusted them.

The mound broke.

It came up out of the water the way an island would come up — not fast, that was the horror of it, not fast at all, an unhurried and enormous rising that went on and on and did not stop when it should have. Water poured off its flanks in sheets that turned to fog before they hit the surface. A back like a capsized ship, ridged, barnacled, black-green and running with light where the lightning caught it. Then the neck. Then the neck kept coming.

The head cleared the water thirty feet up and turned, and Annabeth saw the eye — flat, pale, the size of a car door — and the jaw opening, and the double row of teeth inside it going back and back into the dark.

It screamed.

The sound went through the ground and through her chest and through the pines behind them, and every window in the beach houses a quarter mile down the peninsula went out at once.

Thalia’s hand closed on Annabeth’s wrist hard enough to grind bone.

“That’s not a sea monster,” she shouted, over the roar. “That’s the sea monster—”

“I know—”

“Annabeth, that’s Cetus—”

“Oh, fantastic,” said Nico.

He’d gotten as far as his knees. He was still the color of paper, and he had one hand fisted in the frozen sand for balance, and he was looking out at the thing in the water with an expression of pure, exhausted grievance.

“Of course,” he said. “Of course. The one time we need him. Perseus Jackson, patron saint of things that come out of the ocean, currently unavailable — because that is literally the monster his namesake is famous for, directly from his own myth, and he’s on a mountain somewhere possibly with amnesia.”

“Nico—”

“Andromeda got a hero,” Nico said. “Andromeda got a hero and a flying horse. We’ve got a subway card.”

“Nico, shut up.”

Thalia had already stopped listening.

She’d gotten one look at the spray coming off the top of the breakers and made the call — Annabeth watched her do it, watched her hand come off the bowstring and drop to her wrist instead. Aegis unfolded down her arm with a sound like a door slamming in another room, and even in the dark the Gorgon’s face on the front made Annabeth’s eyes slide off it.

“Arrows are useless,” Thalia shouted. “Ninety miles an hour of crosswind. I’d be lucky to hit the ocean.”

Annabeth didn’t answer, because she was still looking at it.

She had spent six years learning how to look at a thing and immediately begin taking it apart. Height, reach, weight, joints, where it was blind, where it was slow, what it wanted. It was the single most reliable machine in her head and it had never once refused to start.

It refused now.

Because Cetus filled the horizon. Because the neck alone was longer than the Big House. Because there was no angle on it, no flank, no ankle, no eye she could reach with anything she owned — because the eye was thirty feet up and the whole thing was standing in an ocean that it appeared to be commanding, and every instinct she had was returning the same flat answer, over and over, like a jammed key.

We’re supposed to fight that.

Apollo sent three of us to fight that.

“Annabeth.”

I mean we survived Kronos, what was this—

“Annabeth.” Thalia grabbed her shoulder. “There’s people on the beach.”

Oh.

She hadn’t seen them.

They were maybe two hundred yards out — halfway down the beach, past the wrack line, well out onto the flat wet sand where the tide had pulled back into the mound. The rain came across in sheets so thick that they’d disappear for whole seconds at a time and then resolve again, two dark shapes against a black sea, and they were not running.

That was the first thing wrong.

They were standing side by side, close, facing the water. One of them was gesturing with an arm — not panicking. Pointing. Talking.

“Teens,” said Thalia. “Like us.”

“How can you—”

“Height. Shoulders.” Aegis came up, and Annabeth felt the wind change around them. “Fifteen, sixteen. Our age.”

Lightning went off inside the cloud wall and lit the whole beach the color of bone, and for one flat second Annabeth saw them properly.

Blond hair on the taller one, plastered dark with rain. The other one’s was brown — dark brown, she thought, though everything was black and silver in that light and heavy downpour.

They were soaked. No coats. One of them wasn’t even wearing shoes.

“They’re going to die,” Annabeth said. “We have to do something—”

Then the brown-haired one opened his hand.

There was fire in it.

Not a lighter. Not a flare. A fire — a live flame the size of a grapefruit, sitting cupped in his bare palm, in a hurricane, in horizontal rain, burning a steady orange that didn’t gutter and didn’t lean and did not go out.

Thalia said something that got lost in the wind.

“Is that guy holding fire?”

“He’s—”

“Nico, he’s holding fire, in the rain—”

The boy turned his hand over and the flame went out. Just like that; no snap, no puff, no smoke. It stopped being there.

And the blond one began to glow.

It came up through him the way heat comes up off a road — faint at first, a wash of gold along the line of his shoulders and down both arms, and then more, until Annabeth could see the shape of him clearly at two hundred yards through driving rain. It threw his shadow out long across the wet sand behind him. It caught the rain around him and made every falling drop a thread of light.

He rolled his neck. Annabeth saw it. He rolled his neck like a man loosening up before a race.

“What,” said Thalia, “is happening.”

The two of them were talking. She could see it even now — the blond one saying something, the other one shaking his head, the blond one saying something else. The brown-haired boy reached out and put a hand flat on the middle of his chest, and held it there, and said something short.

And Cetus screamed again.

It came across the water like a physical wall. Annabeth felt it in her back teeth, in the roots of her hair, in the sand under her ribs. Half the pines behind them shed their needles at once. Somewhere far off, a lightning alarm started and then stopped.

And the blond boy went at it.

A spear in his hand.

Annabeth did not see where it came from. One frame he was standing on the sand with the other boy’s hand on his chest and the next he was already six strides into a sprint at the ocean with a spear in his right hand, eight feet of it, the point throwing back the light he was giving off.

He hit the surf and did not slow down.

The brown-haired boy started walking after him. Not running. Walking — steady, unhurried, his eyes never leaving the other one, the way a person crosses a room they know in the dark.

Annabeth twisted around in the sand.

“Okay,” she said. “Okay. What the hell am I looking at?”

Nico had gotten to his feet. He was leaning on a pine and he still looked like he’d been dug up, but his eyes were entirely clear and they were fixed on the beach.

“Demigods,” he said.

“Obviously demigods! Nobody else has hands like that—” Annabeth wiped rain out of her eyes. “I don’t know whether they’re brave or the stupidest people alive. Nobody fights that. There’s no version of this where two fifteen-year-olds—”

“Holy crap,” said Thalia.

Out on the water, the blond boy had hit Cetus.

Annabeth turned back in time to see the second strike. He’d gone up the flank — up it, on it, hand over hand across an animal the size of a warehouse — and driven the spear in somewhere under the base of the neck, and the monster had reared, and instead of being thrown he’d gone with it. Rode it up. Twenty feet, thirty, standing on a shoulder of living muscle that was heaving underneath him like a ship in a swell, and he pulled the spear out and put it back in a foot to the left.

Gold blood came out in a sheet. The water lit up.

“How is he—” Thalia was up on one knee now, Aegis forgotten in her hand. “How is he jumping around on it like that? That’s — you can’t do that. There’s nothing to hold. It’s wet—”

Cetus rolled.

It went over sideways in the shallows with a noise like a building collapsing and threw up a wave that came all the way to the dune line and soaked the three of them where they lay. Annabeth came up spitting salt and found the boy already back on his feet in three feet of surf, a hundred yards from where he’d been, spear still in his hand, still glowing.

“That’s not a normal demigod,” Nico said.

“You think?”

“No — listen to me.” He said it flatly enough that Annabeth actually turned. “I’ve been standing here two minutes. He hasn’t missed. Not once. Not a stumble, not a bad landing, nothing.” Nico’s jaw worked. “Percy’s the best I’ve ever seen and Percy fights like a person having a very good day. That’s not what that is.”

“What is it, then?”

“That’s somebody doing something they’ve done a thousand times.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” said Annabeth. “He’s probably only known of his demigod status in the past few months, and started fighting in the last two, according to our sightings.”

“Exactly, that’s the point.” Nico’s eyes locked on the sea monster. “It doesn’t make sense.”

All this while the other boy just kept walking.

That was the part Annabeth couldn’t stop watching, even with a monster the size of a city block coming apart in the surf. The brown-haired one had waded out to his knees and stopped, and he wasn’t fighting, and he wasn’t hiding, and he wasn’t running away.

He was watching.

His head tracked the blond boy the entire time. Every leap, every fall, every time Cetus went under and came back up somewhere else — his chin came around and found him first, before Annabeth’s eyes did, every time. Twice he moved sideways down the tide line without ever looking where he was putting his feet, repositioning, keeping himself between the fight and the beach.

Once, when the blond boy went under a wave and stayed under two seconds too long, the brown-haired boy took three fast steps into deeper water with one hand already coming up—

—and the blond head broke the surface, and he stopped, and went back to standing.

“He’s spotting him,” said Thalia quietly.

“What?”

“Look at his feet.” Thalia’s voice had changed. “He keeps closing the distance. Every time. He’s not watching a fight, he’s marking him. That’s what you do when you’ve got one person out on a ledge and you’re the one who has to get to them.”

Annabeth looked, and saw it, and something went cold in her that had nothing to do with the water.

Because it was practiced. Because the two of them had a system.

“Right,” she said, and got up out of the sand.

“Annabeth—”

“No. We’re not doing this.” She was already moving down the dune, half-sliding in the wet sand, wind trying to take her sideways. “I’m not lying in a treeline watching two idiots do that alone. Thalia, take the one on the beach—”

“Yeah.”

“Get him back to the dunes, get him behind something. Nico—”

“I’ve got about one more thing in me,” Nico said, hauling himself off the pine. “Tell me what it is and I’ll do it.”

“Stay up here. When I shout, put us all somewhere else.”

“That’s the plan?”

“That’s the plan—”

They came down onto the flat sand at a run, all three of them, into the full force of it — the wind hitting Annabeth broadside hard enough to stagger her, the rain coming through her jacket like it wasn’t there. Thalia broke off left, Aegis up, angling for the boy standing in the shallows, forty yards, thirty—

And none of them saw it.

That was the thing. Every one of them was watching the wrong place, because the fight had moved. It wasn’t out on the water anymore. Cetus had come in — hauled itself up into the breakers, into three feet of water, into the churn of the tide line where the blond boy was on his feet on actual sand and the two of them were fighting on the beach, and the whole horizon of the thing had swung sideways as it turned.

The forelimb came out of the surf.

Annabeth had not known it had forelimbs. It came up and out and around in a flat arc, thirty feet of it, three sharp claws at the end like ships’ anchors, and it wasn’t aimed at the boy with the spear at all.

It went over him.

Behind him.

Into the shallows where the brown-haired boy was standing with his hand half-raised.

The sound it made when it hit was not loud. That was the obscene part; Annabeth had expected something enormous and what she heard through the storm was a short wet crack, almost polite, and then the boy came off his feet.

He went backward through the air for what her brain insisted was much too long. Fifteen feet. Twenty. He hit the wet sand shoulder-first and rolled twice and stopped, and even from eighty yards Annabeth could see the dark spreading across his chest, black in the lightning, and the water running away from him toward the sea already going the wrong color.

He screamed.

It was thin and young and it cut through ninety-mile-an-hour wind like the wind wasn’t there.

And the blond boy turned around.

“NO—”

His spear hit the sand.

That was the part Annabeth’s brain snagged on — that he dropped it. Eight feet of shaft going into the wet sand at an angle and standing there quivering, and the boy who’d been holding it already three strides gone, running with his back to a living monster the size of a city block.

He didn’t look at it. He didn’t circle. He didn’t do any of the four things every demigod is taught in their first summer, and he did not appear to know that he wasn’t doing them.

He ran at the shape on the sand like there was nothing else on the beach.

“Get down—” Thalia screamed, and it went nowhere in the wind.

The forelimb came out of the water again.

It came low and flat and fast, sweeping in across the tide line at ankle height with all three claws spread, and it would have taken his legs off at the knee — and he went over it.

Not gracefully. That was the thing. It wasn’t a stunt. He didn’t vault or roll or do anything that looked practiced; he simply saw it in some fraction of a second no human being should have had, and got both feet off the ground at an abnormal speed, and the claw went under him close enough that the water it threw up hit his chest.

He landed badly, went down on one hand, and came up already turning.

And he was between it and the boy on the sand.

And he stopped.

Then the beach changed.

Not the light. Not the weather. The rain kept coming and the wind kept coming and Cetus was still standing in the surf with its neck up and its mouth open.

The air changed. The way a room changes when someone in it stops being polite.

He roared.

There was no other word for it and Annabeth hated every word for it. It wasn’t a shout. It wasn’t the noise a person makes when they’re frightened or angry or hurt. It came up out of a fifteen-year-old boy’s chest and it went across that beach and through the pines and it did not sound like it had come from anything with a human shape.

It sounded dangerous. It sounded like a thing that had been done before.

And Annabeth Chase — who had walked into the throne room of the gods at twelve, who had held the sky, who had stood in front of Kronos — felt her whole body go cold and heavy, and her stomach drop, and every human part of her say, very clearly, do not be here.

Beside her Thalia had gone completely still with Aegis half-raised.

Behind them, up in the pines, she heard Nico say something that was not a word.

The monster screamed back.

And the boy went at it barehanded.

Now, the three of them had seen fights, many in fact.

They’d seen Clarisse take three campers at once and enjoy it. Seen Percy in the East River. They’d seen Gods fight, which was still the most beautiful and most horrible thing one could ever watch.

This was not a fight.

He went up it. Straight up the front of the thing, hand over hand into the wall of its chest, up an animal that was actively trying to shake him off — and he had nothing in his hands. He punched. That was what she was seeing, in flashes, in the strobe of the lightning: a boy of fifteen driving his bare fists into something the size of a warehouse, over and over, in the joints, in the gills, in the soft place under the jaw, and the monster was coming apart under it. Something tore. Gold blood came out of a seam in its throat in a sheet and went over him and lit up the whole tide line.

He got both hands into the wound and pulled.

Cetus rolled sideways into the surf and he went with it, and Annabeth lost him for a second and then found him again, on top, on the neck, riding a thing the size of a ferry as it thrashed thirty feet of water into fog.

And the spear was back in his hand.

She hadn’t seen it come. It hadn’t come from the sand nor had he picked it up. Yet it was simply there, gripped and reversed, and he put it through the base of the skull.

Then he pulled it out and put it back.

Then again.

Then again.

Cetus screamed and the sound had changed in it — the pitch had gone up and thinned out — and Annabeth realized with a slow, awful lurch that she was listening to something in pain that could not get away.

It thrashed. It couldn’t reach him. It was thirty feet of neck trying to bend back on itself and he was riding the exact place it couldn’t turn, and it knew, and it kept trying anyway.

He put the spear into its eye.

The scream went to a register that shattered every remaining window on the peninsula and stopped being a sound and started being a pressure. Annabeth’s ears popped. Somewhere down the beach a chunk of boardwalk went end over end into the dunes.

He drove it in to the crossbar and leaned on it.

It took a minute.

Annabeth timed it. Not on purpose — her brain simply did that, filling the silences, and she has never been able to stop knowing this — it took about a minute, maybe ninety seconds, from the roar to the end, and for the entire time the three of them stood eighty yards down a hurricane-wracked beach and did absolutely nothing.

They didn’t shout. They didn’t move. Thalia’s shield stayed half up. Annabeth’s hand was on her knife and she never took it out.

There was nothing to help with.

It wasn’t a battle they had arrived too late for. It was a battle they had no say or part in. But to merely see it take place. They would’ve been useless to the boy in the fight.

At the end it just stopped moving.

The great neck went slack in the water and the head sank, and for a second the whole enormous shape of it lay in the shallows steaming.

Then it let go all at once.

Cetus came apart into gold — a column of it, blowing up and out into ninety-mile-an-hour wind and going everywhere, over the water, over the dunes, over the three of them eighty yards away, so that Annabeth was breathing it, so that it caught in her eyelashes and in her hair and turned the whole black beach the color of a lamp for three full seconds.

Two hundred feet of sea monster, gone.

The wind dropped like something had been switched off.

Not all of it. But the shriek went out of it, and the wall of cloud began to unwind, and up above them, through the ragged hole in the storm, Annabeth could see stars.

And in the middle of the settling gold, a boy landed in six inches of surf, and did not stop, and did not check himself, and did not look at what he had just done.

He was already running.

He hit the sand where the other one lay and went down on both knees hard enough that Annabeth heard it, and got a hand under the boy’s head, and started saying something.

She couldn’t hear the words yet. She was eighty yards away and her ears were still ringing.

But she could hear the sound of it.

He was saying it over and over, the way you say a name.

For a while nobody said anything.

The wind had dropped to something that was merely a gale. Gold dust was still coming down out of the air in the last of it, settling on the wet sand, going out in the surf.

“Holy shit,” said Thalia.

Annabeth said nothing. Her ears were ringing.

“Holy — no, like what the hell.” Thalia lowered Aegis. “That was — wow, that was intense. I’ve been with the hunt for three years. I’ve watched my Lady put things down. That was not—” She stopped and started again. “How is that kid standing.”

“Is the other one alive?”

“That’s what I’m— gods, yeah, is brownie okay? He took that in the chest, that was a hard hit—” Thalia craned. “And blondie’s gone crazy. Blondie has gone completely, comprehensively crazy, and I say that as a compliment and also as a warning.”

Down the beach, a hundred yards off, the kneeling shape had gathered the other one up against him and was hunched over him, and hadn’t moved in twenty seconds.

“Come on,” said Annabeth, and started walking.

“Whoa.” Nico came off the treeline behind them, unsteady, one hand out. “Whoa — hey. Careful.”

“He’s bleeding out.”

“Yeah, and the other one just took apart a two-hundred-foot sea monster with his hands, and I don’t think he’s finished.” Nico caught up and got in front of her, walking backwards, which she’d have found funny at any other moment of her life. “Annabeth. Listen to me. That is a person who is extremely volatile right now. If three strangers just appear next to him—”

“We can’t leave them on a beach.”

“I didn’t say leave them.”

“Then what?”

“I said careful,” Nico said. “Slowly. Hands where he can see them. Don’t come at him from behind and don’t get between him and the other one, ever, for any reason.”

Thalia looked sideways at him. “You’ve thought about this a lot for four seconds.”

“I’ve met a lot of people who’ve just lost someone,” said Nico. “It’s most of my social life.”

⸻

So they went slowly.

Aegis stayed up and out. Nico took the left, Annabeth the middle, Thalia the right, and they came down the wet sand at a walk with the tide sliding in and out over their boots and a hundred yards of open beach between them and the two boys.

Eighty yards. Sixty.

Close enough, now, to see it properly.

The blond one was on his knees in the sand with the other boy half in his lap, one arm behind his shoulders, his other hand pressed flat and hard over the middle of his chest — and even from here Annabeth could see the black spreading out under his fingers, could see it moving down into the wet sand and running away toward the water in a thin dark thread.

He was still glowing. Faintly. It was fading in and out like something failing.

He was talking. She still couldn’t hear the words. She could hear the shape of them, the same three syllables over and over.

Forty yards.

“Okay,” Annabeth said. “I’ll do the talking. Nobody draws anything. I’m going to say we’re demi—”

He looked up.

⸻

She had time to see his face.

That was the only thing she had time for. He was twenty yards away and she had a whole second, and what she saw in it she would be able to draw six months later: a boy’s face, young, hollowed out, streaked with gold dust and blood that wasn’t his — and his eyes.

There was rage in them. That she’d expected.

What she hadn’t expected was that he was crying. Openly, hard, the way a small child does, and the tears were cutting clean lines down through the gold on his face, and the rage sat on top of that without in any way cancelling it out.

Annabeth opened her mouth to say we’re not going to hurt you.

She never got the first word out.

She saw it happen — that was the horror of it, she saw the whole thing — she saw him rise off his knees in one movement without appearing to have used his legs, saw the spear come around and level, saw the step, and had time to think, with total clarity:

I cannot move fast enough for this.

Then Thalia was in front of her.

Annabeth didn’t see her arrive either. There was a body where there had not been a body, and the Gorgon’s face swung around, and Aegis came up—

The impact was like being hit by a car.

There was a crack — bronze and something under bronze — and Thalia went backward into Annabeth’s chest, and the two of them left the ground together and came down four feet back in the wet sand with Annabeth underneath.

The air went out of her completely. Her vision went white at the edges. Somewhere very far away her elbow hit something hard.

For a second she just lay there in six inches of freezing seawater with a hundred and twenty pounds of Hunter on top of her, making a noise like a punctured tire.

“I told you so,” said Nico, from somewhere.

“Nn,” said Annabeth.

“I’m just — I’m noting it. For the record.”

“Nn.”

Thalia rolled off her and onto her side and got up onto one elbow, wheezing.

“Okay,” she managed. “Okay. Okay.”

“Are you—”

“Winded.” Cough. “Winded. Nothing broken.” She dragged in a breath that whistled. “Wait, never mind, might have a cracked rib. Holy shit, you are one strong guy.”

She said it out loud, to the beach, with something almost like admiration in it.

Then she looked down at her arm.

Aegis lay in the sand three feet away.

It had not been knocked out of her hand — Thalia Grace did not get disarmed, not by anything, that was a fixed point in Annabeth’s understanding of the world. It had come off her arm because it was in two pieces.

It had gone through the middle. Straight through, from the top rim down past the Gorgon’s brow, through metal that had turned aside a Titan’s blade at the doors of Olympus. The two halves lay in the wet sand with the tide moving around them, and as Annabeth watched, they shivered and folded down and became a silver bracelet.

In two pieces.

Thalia picked them up. She did it slowly, one half in each hand, and turned them over, and for a moment she just knelt there in the surf looking at them.

“Huh,” she said.

“Thalia—”

“That’s Zeus’s,” said Thalia. Her voice had gone strange and flat. “That’s my father’s shield, Annabeth. He gave that to me. Athena put that face on it.” She looked up at the boy standing over them with the spear. “You snapped it.”

The boy didn’t answer.

He hadn’t advanced. That was the only thing keeping Annabeth’s heart inside her chest — he’d struck once and then stopped, and he was standing between them and the body on the sand with his weight on his back foot, the spear low and level, breathing like a bellows.

Waiting to see what they did.

He’s not attacking, Annabeth thought, through the ringing. He’s guarding.

She got her elbows under her. Everything hurt.

“We’re not monsters!” she shouted.

The spear didn’t move.

“We’re not monsters — look at me, look at my face, monsters don’t look like this—” She got a knee under herself and put both hands up, empty, palms out, and stayed on the ground, because standing up seemed like the fastest way to die that she had ever considered. “We’re like you! We’re demigods! Half-bloods, children of the gods, whatever you’ve been calling it in your head — that’s what we are, that’s what you are—”

Blondie stared harder.

“I’m a daughter of Athena,” Annabeth added quickly. “She’s a daughter of Zeus and broody guy over here is Hades’ son.”

Something happened in his face.

It was very small. But she’d been reading faces since she was seven and she caught it: a flicker, gone almost at once, on the word demigods.

Not recognition.

Confirmation.

“We were sent here to help you,” Annabeth said. “That’s it. That’s all. Somebody sent us to find you and bring you somewhere safe, and we came as fast as we could, and we got here a bit late.”

The wind moved over the beach.

On the sand, the other boy made a small sound.

And the boy with the spear stopped existing in their direction entirely.

He turned — not carefully, not covering himself, just looked down, three strangers and a broken shield forgotten between one breath and the next — and went back down onto his knees in the sand so hard that Annabeth heard it.

“Hey. Hey — I’m here.” He got an arm under the other boy’s shoulders and lifted him against his chest. The spear lay where he’d dropped it for the second time in five minutes. “I’m here, I’m right here.”

Long wet blond hair swung forward and hid his face completely.

“You’re okay,” he said. “You’re okay. You have to be.”

He had one hand cupped along the other boy’s cheek. The whole hand — palm to jaw, thumb up near the eye, holding his head still and steady out of the sand — and it was covered in gold dust and blood and it did not shake at all.

“You’re okay,” he said again, into the hair hanging between them. “You’re okay, tell me you’re okay—”

And the boy on the ground smiled.

Annabeth saw it from ten feet away and did not understand it. It was small and crooked and tired and it was aimed straight up at the face above him, and it was — she had no other word for it, kneeling in freezing water on a beach full of monster dust — fond.

He got his hand up. It took him a second. Then he reached and hooked the wet blond hair out of the other boy’s eyes and tucked it back behind his ear, thumb along the temple, the way you’d do it a thousand times without ever thinking about it once.

“I think I’m okay,” he said.

His voice was thin. Annabeth could hear the wet in it.

“I’m going to need fire, though.” A breath that clearly hurt. “Definitely need some fire.”

“Yeah. Yeah, okay—”

“What about you.” The hand stayed against the side of his face. “Anything? Look at me. Anything broken?”

“No.”

“Look at me—”

“Nothing. Nothing serious, I’m fine, I don’t have anything.” The blond boy shook his head hard, once. “Don’t. Don’t do that, don’t do me, just — do you. Do yourself. Please just do yourself.”

“Do what?” Annabeth wondered.

The dark-haired boy looked at him a moment longer.

Then he nodded, and let his hand drop, and closed his eyes.

Annabeth had spent her whole life around demigod power. She had seen the sea stand up. She had seen the ground open. She had once watched a boy she loved hold up a portion of the sky.

She had never seen anything like this, and it was the smallest thing on that entire beach.

He went still. That was all. He lay back against the other boy’s chest with his eyes shut and his face slack and he concentrated — she could see the concentrating, could see him going down into himself after something — and after a moment his right hand turned over, palm up, on the wet sand.

A flame came up in it.

Steady and gold-orange, cupped in his hand like something set there. In the wind, on a soaked beach, out of nothing.

Beside her, Thalia stopped breathing.

He lifted it — carefully, both hands now, the way you carry something full — and brought it against his own chest, and pressed it into the wound.

He made a sound through his teeth.

And the gash began to close.

Annabeth watched it. It was dark and unreal yet she watched it happen: the black seam across his chest drawing in at the edges, the flesh coming together, the terrible spreading dark on his shirt stopping where it was. The flame didn’t burn him. It didn’t burn the fabric. It sank in the way heat sinks into cold hands.

“That’s not fire,” Thalia whispered.

“It’s fire.”

“Annabeth, fire doesn’t do that—”

The flame guttered.

It went thin, and low, and orange-blue at the edges, and then it went out entirely, and the boy’s hand fell open and empty against his own chest.

“Ah,” he said. “Hm.”

“Hey—”

“It’s fine.”

“That is not fine, that’s still—”

“It’s closed. It’s mostly closed.” He got his eyes open. “I don’t have enough. That’s all. There’s nothing left in me to pull on.” His head tipped back against the blond boy’s shoulder. “I need a source.”

“A what?”

“A fire. A real one.” A weak breath of a laugh. “Something already burning. I can’t make it out of nothing twice in one night, apparently, or maybe not after being hit by a monster—”

“We have a fire,” said Thalia.

They both went rigid.

Annabeth couldn’t blame them. Thalia had said it from twenty feet away in the dark with half a shield in each hand, and the effect on the blond boy was immediate: he was up on one knee with the other boy gathered against him and the spear back in his fist, and Annabeth genuinely did not see him pick it up.

“Whoa.” Thalia opened both hands, halves of Aegis and all. “Whoa, whoa. Look. Look at me, kid, I’m sitting in the water. Nobody’s coming any closer.”

“Then say it from there.”

“Fine by me.” Thalia stayed exactly where she was. “There’s a fire. That’s what I’m telling you. There’s a place about forty miles from here, and there’s a fire burning in the middle of it that never goes out. Never. Not in winter, not in rain, not ever. It’s been lit longer than anybody’s been alive.”

The dark-haired boy’s head came up.

Annabeth was watching his face and so she saw it land — saw something go through him, quick and complete, like a struck string.

“A hearth,” he said.

“…Yeah,” said Thalia, slowly. “Yeah, that’s — that’s actually what people call it.”

“Where.”

“Long Island. Camp Half-Blood.” Thalia jerked her chin at Annabeth. “That’s her camp. She practically runs it, whatever she tells you.”

“What is it?” said the blond boy.

“It’s a place for people like us,” Annabeth said. She stayed on her knees. She’d worked out ten minutes ago that this was the correct height. “Kids with a god for a parent — I’m assuming you know you are demigods — There’s a border nothing gets through. There’s food, there are beds, there’s a healer — an actual one, he’s about your age and he’s very annoying about follow-up appointments.”

“Nothing gets through?”

“Nothing has. Not once in this century.”

“And you want to bring us there.”

“I want you to be somewhere that isn’t a beach.”

Blondie shifted his grip on the spear.

“Let me tell you what I know,” he said. “I know that two months ago things started coming for us. We were kicked out by the orphanage and left with nothing but each other. Wherever we went monsters came. They get bigger and more dangerous every time. I know that thing—” a short jerk of his chin at the empty water, at all that settling gold “—came up out of the sea for us tonight. What I don’t know is why things are coming for us and why is it only happening now. And now you three appear—”

“Yes,” said Annabeth.

“So you’ll understand—”

“That’s completely fair,” she said.

He stopped.

“It’s fair,” Annabeth said again. “You’ve had weeks of everything on earth trying to kill you and then we turned up. If I were you I wouldn’t believe me either.” She spread her empty hands. “So don’t. Don’t believe me. Believe that the fire’s real, and your friend needs one.”

Under his arm, the dark-haired boy shifted.

“Hey,” he said.

“No.”

“I didn’t say anything yet.”

“You’re going to say we should go with them.”

“I’m going to say I can’t do this again tomorrow,” the dark-haired boy said, patiently, “and something worse is coming tomorrow. That’s been the pattern. It’s always the pattern.” He got a hand up and closed it around the other boy’s wrist — the one holding the spear — and did not pull it, just held on to it. “We can’t fight forever. Don’t tell me you can.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re shaking.”

“I’m cold.”

“You’ve never been cold in your life,” said the dark-haired boy. “Not once. You run hot as a stove and you know it.”

There was a silence.

“I don’t like it,” said the blond boy, very quietly.

“I know.”

“If it’s wrong—”

“Then it’s wrong and you’ll do what you always do.” A tired, crooked half of a smile. “But my mother did say that we will meet others and to trust them when it comes.”

The blond boy shut his eyes.

Mother.

Annabeth’s brain snagged on it and pulled hard.

Brownie had a mother. Not had — the tense was wrong, he’d said it the way you say something about a person who exists, present and ordinary, the way Percy said my mom about a woman in an apartment in Manhattan. And she had told them they would meet others. She had told them when, not if.

Which meant someone had known, a Goddess had known.

Who, Annabeth thought, with her ribs aching and her knees in the surf.

She opened her mouth.

Then she closed it again.

Later, she decided. Not on a beach. Not six minutes in, not with him standing over you holding a spear, not when the answer might be the wrong one.

The blond boy opened his eyes and looked at her.

“All right,” he said. “We’ll come with you.”

Something went out of Annabeth’s shoulders that she hadn’t known was in them.

“Okay,” she said. “Okay. Good.”

But he’d already stopped listening to her, because he was looking down again.

“Hey,” he said, much quieter. “Up we go.”

“I can walk.”

“I know you can walk.”

“I’m serious, I can—”

“I know,” said the blond boy, and picked him up anyway.

He did it in one movement, an arm behind the shoulders and one under the knees, and there was no effort in it at all — no adjustment, no bracing, no shifting of grip. He simply stood, and the other boy came up with him, as though weight were a thing that had been mentioned to him once and hadn’t stuck.

Brownie made a noise of profound long-suffering and let his head fall against the blond boy’s collarbone.

“You always do this.”

“You always let me.”

“Why would I not?”

“Noted,” said the blond boy, and started up the beach, and something in his face had come loose for the first time since Annabeth had laid eyes on him.

“Huh,” said Thalia.

“What?”

“The spear.” Thalia was watching his hands. “Where’d the spear go?”

Annabeth looked.

There was no spear. There was no shaft on the sand, no weapon slung, no eight feet of anything anywhere on that beach — and around the blond boy’s right wrist, catching what was left of the light, there was a plain gold band that had absolutely not been there ninety seconds ago.

“That’s a bracelet,” said Thalia.

“That’s a bracelet,” Annabeth agreed.

“That was a spear.”

“Yes.”

“It’s like Aegis, and Riptide. It’s a gift from a God.”

“I know,” Annabeth said. “That’s the part I don’t like.”

“Why?”

“Because gifts come after.” She watched the gold band catch the last of the light. “You get claimed, and then you get given something. That’s the usual order.” She wiped salt off her face. “Nobody’s claimed him. But he is already armed”

Then, unexpectedly, Nico went up to the both of them.

Annabeth hadn’t seen him move; he’d come up the sand on the seaward side, keeping wide, keeping visible, hands out of his pockets — and he stopped a good six feet short and held something out on his open palm.

Two squares of it, wrapped, gone slightly soft with seawater.

The blond boy stopped dead.

“It’s food,” said Nico.

“What kind of food.”

“The kind that helps.” He didn’t step closer. “It’s called ambrosia. It’s what we eat when we’re hurt — all of us, everyone like us. It will replenish your energy and help with the injuries”

“And what does it do to him if he’s not—”

“If he’s not one of us it kills him,” Nico said, flatly. “It burns you up from the inside. Even for us, if we eat too much.” He shrugged. “He’ll be fine. Look at his hand. Nobody makes fire out of nothing and then dies of a snack.”

There was a pause.

“Take one. Give him the other one.“ Nico pushed.

Annabeth watched the blond boy think.

Then the boy in his arms said, “Thank you,” and reached out and took it.

“Hey—”

“You were going to take an hour.”

“I was going to take a minute—”

“You were going to take an hour, and I’m cold, and it’s rude to leave someone standing there.” He got the wrapper off with his teeth, one-handed, and bit a corner off it, and his eyebrows went up. “Oh.”

“What. What’s oh—”

“It tastes like the bread from the place on Neptune Avenue.” He looked genuinely delighted, which on that gray face with that shirt was almost unbearable to look at. “The seeded one. With the — you know the one, the one you always—”

“I know the one.”

“It tastes exactly like it.”

The blond boy looked at the second square for a moment longer.

Then he took it, and ate it, and said, gruffly, to the sand, “Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it,” said Nico.

⸻

They turned up the beach.

The last of the gold was going out on the water behind them. It had settled over everything — the wrack line, the broken boardwalk slats, the three long furrows in the shallows where something enormous had thrashed — and now the wind was lifting it off the sand in low sheets and carrying it out over the surf. The surf took it. After a minute there was nothing at all to show that Cetus had ever come up out of the Atlantic.

Just a beach. Wet sand. Ordinary December cloud unravelling overhead, stars coming through the gaps in it, and the streetlights of the peninsula finding their way back on one by one down the length of the shore.

Annabeth walked half a pace behind. She wanted them where she could see them. Her ribs hurt. And she’d been carrying one question since the treeline, turning it over, waiting for a moment where it wouldn’t sound like an interrogation.

There wasn’t going to be one. There never was.

“Hey,” she said. “I never got your names.”

It was the smallest thing she’d said all night.

The dark-haired boy turned his head against the other one’s shoulder. Even now — grey-faced, half-healed, being carried up a beach by somebody who plainly had no intention of being argued out of it — he had the manners to look like she’d asked a perfectly ordinary question, and to take a second over the answer, the way you do when you’re being introduced properly.

The wind dropped.

Annabeth would think about that afterward, too. It just — dropped, the way it does at the very end of a storm, so that for a few seconds the only sound on the entire peninsula was water sliding up the sand and sliding back.

“Patroclus.”

Her foot came down slightly wrong.

She corrected it. She didn’t say anything. The name was familiar, likely after one of the demigods from the ancient days. Half the camp was named after the dead anyways — there was obviously Perseus, there were three Jasons, there was a nine-year-old Hercules in Cabin Eleven who still cried at thunder. Greek parents gave Greek names. It meant nothing. It happened constantly.

She was aware, somewhere behind her, that Thalia had stopped walking.

“And you?” Annabeth said.

The blond boy didn’t look at her.

He hadn’t looked at any of them for a while. He was watching the dunes, and the road past them, and the black spaces in between — the same flat, ceaseless, sweeping attention he’d had on him since he came out of the water, since before that, probably for ten days, probably for longer.

Gold dust in his hair. Blood on his hands that wasn’t his. A boy in his arms and a bracelet on his wrist where a spear had been.

“Achilles,” he said.