Chapter Text
The armband. I hadn’t taken my eyes off it since I’d found it wrapped in dark green tissue paper on my bed.
I turned it over in my fingers. Thin, dark metal gone almost black, like it had spent a long time somewhere the sun didn’t reach. I knew exactly where that was, and exactly who ruled it.
Presents like this weren’t supposed to happen twice. Nobody had ever posted it on the Big House bulletin board, but I’d never seen anyone break it. Annabeth had her Yankees cap. Luke had his shoes, before he cursed them. Clarisse had her electric spear. One gift each. And gods didn’t hand out gifts because they were nice. Ask Perseus. He got a helmet, a sword and a pair of winged sandals, and then he got Medusa. Gods gave you just enough to stay alive long enough to do their dirty work.
I already had two. I looked up from the armband, and my eyes found the compass on the shelf beside my bed, where it had sat since Santa Monica. The comb was in my hair right now, the way it always was — I hadn’t gone a single day without it within reach since the night Willa healed my jaw. It wasn’t the kind of thing I packed away. It was the kind of thing I kept on my body, because I didn’t take chances with my safety.
Three gifts. Either somebody up there had stopped counting, or somebody was planning something big.
The engraving on the band ran in one continuous line: a river, or maybe smoke, curling back on itself so there was no clear beginning or end. Three small stones were set into it, black and glassy, so dark they seemed to swallow light instead of reflecting it. I pulled the comb out of my hair to check, and my stomach did a slow, strange flip. The same stones, set the same way. Not similar. Matched. Like somebody had made them as a pair and only given me one half at a time.
The pressure started behind my sternum the moment my fingers closed around it, the way it always did around anything divine — different for every god, like telling two people apart by their footsteps before you ever see their faces. Poseidon’s things always felt like the sea does from very far under the surface, deep and patient and a little bit crushing. The comb felt like the Underworld: cold, still, present in a way that made the hair on my arms stand up. The armband felt like that too, and I sat with it a second longer than I needed to, waiting to place the part that was different. It took me a moment. It was the same cold, the same stillness. But this time it didn’t feel like a wall. It felt like a hand, reaching out toward me.
I slid it onto my wrist to see how it sat, and it settled snug against my skin, closer than I expected, like it had been sized for exactly this arm and no other. I turned it once, looking for a hinge, a catch, anything that would let me take it off again.
There wasn’t one. No seam, no clasp, nothing my fingers could find no matter how many times I worked them around the band. I tugged. Pulled. Twisted until the skin on my wrist went pink.
It was stuck. Permanently.
Any other kid at camp would have been halfway to the Big House by now, yelling for Chiron to check it for curses. I stayed exactly where I was. I closed my other hand over the band, thumb pressed against smooth, unbroken metal, and felt no horror at all. It felt, I’ll admit, really good.
There was more in the tissue paper than I’d noticed. When I smoothed it flat, a small piece of paper slid out of the folds. Plain, folded once.
Think about me.
That was it. No name. It didn’t need one.
I sat on the edge of my bed in the empty cabin — everyone else was still down at the pavilion for the New Year’s sing-along — and stared at that sentence for longer than I want to admit. Four words, and somehow they managed to sound like an order and an invitation and a joke all at once, which was, infuriatingly, very him.
I wasn’t going to tell anyone about this. That wasn’t even a decision so much as a reflex. I tugged my sleeve down until the fabric brushed my knuckles, and my hand stayed wrapped around the band the whole time. Nobody needed to know. It was mine.
I told myself I wasn’t going to think about him. Then I thought about him anyway.
The meal. The quiet shift of air behind my chair, and then his hands in my hair before I’d understood what he was doing. I’d gone rigid. I’d waited for the tug, the impatient yank, the sharp comment about how I looked — that was what hands in my hair had always meant before. It never came. He worked through the tangle slowly, like there was no hurry in the world, and I sat there with my hands knotted in my lap, not breathing, not knowing what to do with a grown-up who was being careful with me. I hadn’t known what to say. I’d only known I wanted it to last.
Sitting on my bed in that empty cabin, I wished I was back in that chair. Not a stray wish. A real one. I wished I was there.
The floor dropped out from under me.
I stumbled forward, my knees buckling. One second there had been the warm, salt-and-pine cabin around me, and the next, icy, stale air slammed into my face. I threw a hand out and caught a pillar of polished obsidian, freezing under my palm, and stayed there a second, breathing deeply.
“Careful,” said a familiar voice, entirely too pleased with itself. “Most people fall on their first try.”
I straightened up, heart still hammering, and glared across the throne room at Hades, who was lounging in his bone throne like he’d been expecting me for exactly this long and not a second more.
The first time I’d stood in this room, the air had felt like it wanted to smother me — thin and ash-dry, and I’d been homesick for the sea within minutes. Now the cold was still there, but it didn’t press me into the floor anymore. It felt almost cozy. A little like coming home, which was a really creepy thing to think about the Underworld.
“You could have warned me,” I said.
“I did.” His eyes flicked to my wrist. “Four words, if I recall.”
“That’s not a warning, that’s a riddle.”
“It worked, didn’t it?”
I looked down at the armband and turned my wrist over. “It brings me here. When I think about you.”
“When you think about me and mean it,” he corrected. “A stray thought wouldn’t do it — you’d be tripping in here every time my name crossed your mind otherwise, and neither of us wants that. It has to be deliberate.” He stood without hurry and came down the dais steps. The shadows in the room followed him like obedient dogs, leaning in whichever direction he moved. “It will also take you back. The exact spot you left — down to the inch.”
“And it only works for me.” My other hand had already closed around my wrist, over the band, the way you’d close it around something someone might reach for.
“Only you,” he confirmed, and his gaze dropped to my hand, and something in his face looked amused. “I imagine you’ve already found the part of that you like best.”
I didn’t answer that. He wasn’t wrong, and he didn’t need me to say so.
“Why give it to me at all?” I asked instead. “I already have the comb.”
“Does it need a reason beyond wanting to give it to you?” he said, and let that sit a moment before he studied me further, the way he did when he was deciding how much to actually say. “Consider it insurance. You have a talent for finding yourself in the middle of things that want you dead. I’d rather you had a door out of the worst of it than not.” He paused. “And you will no longer need an excuse to visit, or to charm Charon out of his fare every time you wish to. I would like your company, Lyra. I would rather it be easy for you to give.”
The words landed somewhere low and quiet, and I stopped breathing. He’d told me I was always welcome here twice now. Once last summer, right before he let me leave, and again at the solstice celebration on Olympus. Both times I’d nodded, changed the subject, and let it slide right past me, because words were easy to take back. This wasn’t words. This was a band of metal fused to my wrist and a door I could open any time I wanted. My eyes found the nearest pillar and stayed there. Wanting a thing like that was dangerous. The more I wanted it, the more it would hurt when it went away.
“That’s not the only reason,” I said, to the floor, because it was easier than saying it to his face. “Insurance doesn’t come with a note that says think about me. And it doesn’t come from someone standing there looking like he already knows I’m going to use it.”
“No,” he agreed. “There is also another reason. Less sentimental, if that reassures you.”
“It doesn’t. But go on.”
He didn’t answer right away. He turned, walked back up toward the throne, and for a second I thought that was it, that he was done — and I caught myself hoping he was. Less sentimental, from a god, meant strings. Strings I at least knew how to deal with. My pulse picked up anyway, and I pressed my hand over the band again, as if that could hold it steady. Then, without looking back at me:
“I find myself in need of a favor.”
I went very still.
“A favor,” I repeated slowly. “Not a quest.”
“I didn’t say quest.” His voice was mild, almost bored, but I’d spent enough hours in this room to know that mild was exactly the tone he used when something mattered a great deal. “Quests go through channels. Prophecies, the Oracle, announcements. A quest doesn’t stay secret, and suddenly everyone knows what’s going on, and everyone has opinions about my business. Tedious.” He finally turned, and whatever had been idle in his expression a moment ago was gone. “This is smaller. Quieter. Between us.”
“Nothing’s ever that simple with you.”
“No,” he admitted. “It rarely is.”
He didn’t say anything else. He just looked at me, waiting.
The silence stretched. I counted my own heartbeats, then lost count. Silence from a grown-up never meant nothing. It meant something was coming, and I never knew what, and it was always worse when I had to wait for it. I lasted maybe five seconds.
“Please, uncle,” I said, “just — tell me. What is it?”
The last word slipped out wrong, way too high and breaking in the middle. I bit my tongue. Great. I’d wanted to sound cool and distant, like a camp half-blood who had everything under control. Instead I sounded like a scared little kid. I only realized I’d stepped toward him when my sneakers squeaked on the stone. My fingers were wrapped so tightly around the armband that my knuckles had gone white.
Hades tilted his head, and something in his expression shifted — not quite surprise, but close to it. He was quiet for a second too long, like he was deciding whether to let the moment pass without comment.
“Sit,” he said instead, and a second chair rose out of the black stone floor beside his throne, high-backed and cold-looking, though when I lowered myself into it, it wasn’t cold at all. “You’re shaking.”
“I’m not.”
“You are,” he said. “It’s the jump. It does that, the first several times. It will stop eventually.”
I wasn’t shaking from the teleport. Okay, maybe a little. But the rest was plain panic over that sentence from before. I clung to his explanation like a life ring. “Right,” I said, way too fast. “The jump.”
He’d seen. And he hadn’t looked away, the way the older Hermes kids always did when somebody started falling apart. He’d just handed me a reason to hide behind. My shoulders came down an inch. I pulled my knees up onto the chair, arms wrapped around them, and didn’t bother straightening into anything more dignified. Let him think it was the jump.
“Okay,” I said, once my heartbeat had settled into something closer to normal. “Favor. Tell me.”
Hades studied me a moment longer, then sat back in his throne, one hand draped over the armrest like he had all the time in the world, which, I supposed, he did.
“How much do you know,” he said, “about the oath the Big Three swore on the River Styx?”
I frowned, confused by the change in topic. “That you and your brothers agreed not to have any more demigod children. After the second World War. Because you’d all gotten a little too — enthusiastic — and it kept nearly ending the world.”
“A generous way of putting it, but yes.” Something old and tired settled into his face. “I had two children before that oath was sworn. A son and a daughter, born only a few years apart, to a mortal woman I cared for a great deal. Bianca and Nico di Angelo.”
His voice didn’t change when he said the names. His hand did — the one on the armrest, fingers curling around the carved bone until the knuckles went pale.
“When the oath was made,” he went on, “it didn’t only stop us from having more children. Over time, it became a threat to the ones who already existed. If anyone learned that they had been born before the oath, it would look like proof that the three of us had been breaking faith all along. Zeus is not known for waiting patiently to find out whose fault a thing is before deciding someone must be punished for it.”
My stomach turned cold. “You hid them.”
“I hid them where nothing that moves through time normally could ever think to look.” He waved a hand, and for a moment the black stone above the throne shimmered like disturbed water, resolving into an image — two children, a girl who looked maybe eleven and a boy of about nine, dark-haired, dark-eyed, dressed in clothes that looked decades out of fashion even to me. The girl had her arm slung protectively over the boy’s shoulders, and both of them were caught mid-laugh at something outside the frame, easy and unguarded. They looked so safe. So completely without fear, as if nothing in the world could ever touch them. I couldn’t look at it for long. “The Lotus Hotel and Casino. Time doesn’t move properly inside it. I placed them there myself, and had their memories of who they were, and of me, wiped clean before I did it. As far as they know, they are ordinary children on an extended, extraordinary vacation. They don’t know their mother is gone. They don’t know what they are. They don’t know I exist.”
I stared at the picture a long moment before I trusted myself to speak. “How long.”
“Decades, by the outside world’s count. To them, it will have felt like a single very pleasant, very long month.” A muscle jumped in his jaw, and was gone. “I could not simply leave them there forever, and I could not simply walk in and retrieve them either — not without every immortal with a grudge against me learning exactly where to strike to hurt me. And not without them waking into a world they have no memory of, with no one to explain it to them gently.”
“So you need someone who isn’t you,” I said slowly. “Someone small enough, human enough, to walk in, get them past that place’s tricks, and get them out — without Olympus ever hearing a word about it.”
“No quest board. No prophecy. No council of gods discussing my private history over ambrosia.” His eyes found mine, steady. “Just you.”
I sat with that for a long moment. Two kids who didn’t know their last name, their parents, or where they’d come from. A little boy and a big sister who protected him without even knowing what from. I knew what it was like to have nobody. If I left them in there, they’d be alone forever.
“And you trust me with them,” I said. “With Bianca and Nico. Alone.”
“Yes.”
“Just like that.”
“Not just like that.” Something almost like a smile touched his mouth, brief and not entirely amused. “I have watched you fight my Furies and win, argue Charon out of his fare, and lie to armed mortal police officers well enough to walk out of custody with a thank-you card. I have also watched you give away your only way out of the Underworld to save a woman you had never met, and ask for nothing in return.” He paused. “I don’t trust easily either, Lyra. I trust you because I have watched you, closely, and you have never once given me a reason not to.”
Suddenly I was hot all over. But it was different this time. It felt like he’d laid something heavy across my shoulders. He trusted me. Really trusted me. Which meant I could not mess this up. I turned away from his gaze and stared at the picture of the two of them again, Bianca’s arm around her little brother, both of them laughing at nothing.
“Okay,” I said, fast. “I’ll do it.”
“You don’t want time to think it over?”
I put my feet on the floor and sat up straight. Hades didn’t move, but something in his gaze changed. The mild, amused edge was gone. He wasn’t looking at a heap of misery hiding in its chair anymore. He was looking at a soldier.
“They’ve been stuck in there for decades, and they don’t even know who they are. I’m not making them wait one more minute just so I can think about it.” I stood, took a deep breath, held it, and let it out slowly. “What happens to them once I get them out? Where do I even say they’re from?”
“Leave that to me. I’ll see the Mist arranges a plausible story before you reach camp — a surviving relative, a boarding school that lost track of them, whatever the world needs to believe to leave them alone. Your job is harder. Get them out of that building, keep them safe, and bring them to camp.” He raised a hand, and a bag appeared on the floor between us — plain dark canvas, sturdier than it looked, the kind of thing that wouldn’t draw a second glance on a Greyhound bus. “You won’t be going through camp channels for this. No quest funding, nothing signed off by Chiron. Which means no camp resources, either. Whatever you need, you carry yourself.”
I crouched and opened it. Inside: a folded stack of clothes, dark like everything else he seemed to favor, but plain this time. Three thick pullovers and a pair of dark jeans that looked tough enough to survive days of sleeping on bus-station floors. Exactly my kind of thing. Nothing anyone would look at twice.
Underneath the clothes lay a thick pouch of mortal cash. When I saw the stack of bills, my eyebrows went up on their own, and my brain started rattling immediately. Bus tickets to Vegas and back, food for three, emergency money in case something went wrong… It was more than enough. Some of the tension in my shoulders let go.
Beside the cash sat a smaller drawstring pouch that jingled when I picked it up — a handful of golden drachmas, more than I usually carried, for Iris-messages or tolls or whatever else the road might demand. And tucked into a padded inner pocket, careful as something breakable: a small vial of nectar, faintly golden and warm even through the glass, and a handful of squares of ambrosia wrapped individually in wax paper.
“In case any of you are hurt,” Hades said, watching me turn the vial over in my fingers. “Use it sparingly. Too much, even on a demigod who needs it, can do as much harm as good. I trust you already know that.”
“I know.” The stupid rhyme the Apollo kids drilled into everyone at camp ran through my head on its own, until you could sing it in your sleep: Nibble to heal and sip to mend, gulp it down and that’s the end. Terrible poetry, but true. I tucked the vial carefully back into its pocket.
I zipped the bag shut and slung it over one shoulder. It was heavier than it looked, or maybe my shoulders were just tense, and my stomach had gone hollow and fluttery the way it did before a fight.
“Their names are Bianca and Nico,” Hades said again, quieter this time, like he needed to hear himself say it once more before he let me go. “I don’t know what shape they’ll be in when the fog of that place finally clears, or how they’ll take learning who they are. Be patient with them. And be careful — the Lotus doesn’t like to give people up.”
“I know exactly how much it doesn’t like to give people up,” I said. “I’m the one who broke a magic seashell to break the spell on Percy and Grover.”
“Then you’re already better prepared for this than most demigods twice your age.” He held my gaze a moment longer than was strictly comfortable, and I remembered, with a small jolt, the first time he’d done that — the very first time I’d stood in this room and looked him in the eye, and he’d known, just from that, exactly what I could do. “That ability of yours should serve you well in there, if it comes to that. The Lotus works by pulling you into itself, by feel, the same way any strong enchantment does — and your talent means that you feel the divine before it ever gets close enough to touch you. That won’t make you immune. Nothing makes anyone immune to a place like that. But you’ll notice it reaching for you before most would, and noticing is most of the fight.” He finally looked away. “Go home first. Pack whatever you actually need, tell whatever lie keeps Chiron from asking questions you don’t want to answer. Leave when you’re ready — not before.”
“And when it’s done?”
“Think about me,” he said, and this time it wasn’t a note left on a bed, it was just him, plain and simple, “and you’ll come back to tell me how it went.”
The floor dropped out from under me one more time, gentler this time, like he’d done it on purpose — and then I was sitting back on my bed, exactly where I’d started, the canvas bag heavy and real across my knees. The sing-along down at the pavilion had wound down to a few stubborn voices, and when I stared at the little battered clock on the shelf by the door, my heart skipped. Almost a whole hour was gone. Just like that. Spent in a throne room most of camp didn’t even know existed. Nobody had come looking for me yet. That, at least, was something.