"No."
It came out of him before they'd said a word. Before he'd even fully turned around. Just the one syllable, flat and hard, the way you'd say it to a dog going for the trash.
"No. Whatever it is. No."
The three old women looked at him with their ancient, patient eyes. Clotho's needles kept clicking.
"You haven't heard what we've come to ask," said Lachesis mildly.
"I don't need to." Percy's heart was slamming so hard he could feel it in his teeth. He was fourteen years old in a fourteen-year-old's body, with blue frosting on his chin, and every cell in it was screaming run. "You promised me. On that beach. You promised. A mortal life. Peace. No monsters, no prophecy, no gods. You said I'd grow old and die in my bed."
"We did," said Atropos.
"So leave." His voice cracked. "Please. Just... go away. Unfreeze them and go away. I'll pretend this never happened."
Nobody moved. The candles on the cake hung in their glassy little flames. On the couch, his mother's frozen smile was turned toward the kitchen doorway, toward him.
Clotho set her knitting down in her lap. She had never once, in either life, stopped knitting in front of him.
"Perseus," she said, very gently. "Sit down. Please."
He sat on the floor, in the end. Cross-legged on the linoleum next to his ruined slice of cake, with his back against the kitchen cabinets, because his legs wouldn't hold him. The Fates looked down at him from the couch like three grandmothers at a story hour.
"This world," said Lachesis, "is not the one you came from."
"I know that."
"No. You do not." She lifted a strand of thread from the basket, a strange, dark, iridescent thread that seemed to drink the light around it. "You know that it is gentler for you. That your mother lives, that you were born mortal, that your friends are different. You have kept your eyes closed to the rest of it. Deliberately. We do not blame you. But it is time to open them."
She drew the thread taut between her fingers, and the air above the coffee table rippled and opened like a window.
Percy saw.
He saw a Camp Half-Blood that was half the size of the one he'd known, its cabins scorched and patched, its border trees twisted and black. He saw a Thalia's pine that was dead. Not dying. Dead, gray and leafless, with the Fleece missing from its branches and the barrier flickering over the valley like a guttering candle. He saw campers training with weapons that were notched and rusted. He saw a satyr with a missing horn, and a girl from the Demeter cabin with a burn scar across half her face, and a long row of fresh graves on the hill behind the strawberry fields.
He saw monsters.
Not the monsters he remembered. Worse. A hellhound the size of a city bus, with three heads and molten iron dripping from its jaws. A drakon wrapped three times around a skyscraper in Philadelphia. An empousa with six arms, a whole swarm of them, flowing through the subway tunnels under Chicago like a black tide.
"This world is older," said Atropos. "Harsher. The monsters here are stronger, and they reform faster. The gods are crueler, and more afraid. The Titans are stirring earlier. In your first world, Kronos needed years to rise. Here, he will need months."
"An Absolute world," Clotho murmured. "Everything turned up. Everything more. We have a name for such places, and we do not say it often."
The window shifted.
Percy saw a school. A boarding school in upstate New York, all gray stone and ivy. Yancy Academy. He knew it the instant he saw it. He'd spent a year there in his first life, failing tests and getting into trouble. And there in a dorm room on the third floor, a boy was lying on his bed, throwing a tennis ball at the ceiling. Fourteen years old. Tall for his age, with sun-bleached hair and a smirk.
And sea-green eyes.
Percy's whole body went cold.
"No," he whispered.
"Ezra Coleman," said Lachesis. "In this world, as in yours, a son of Poseidon. In this world, unlike yours, the son of Poseidon. The only one. The child of the Great Prophecy." She looked at Percy steadily. "The one who will decide the fate of Olympus when he turns eighteen."
"He's—" Percy's voice came out strangled. "He's here? He's alive here? That's the same— is it the same person? Does he remember—"
"No. He remembers nothing. His thread in your world continues; it is long, and it ends poorly, as we told you. This is another weaving of the same pattern." Atropos's shears glinted. "The same soul. Here, he has not yet done anything unforgivable. He is fourteen, and arrogant, and lonely, and certain that being a god's son makes him better than everyone around him. But not yet a murderer."
"Yet," Percy said.
"Yet," Clotho agreed softly.
The window showed him the rest.
It showed him Ezra's Lightning Thief quest going wrong. It showed him Ezra's Sea of Monsters, and his Titan's Curse, and his Labyrinth. A hundred branching threads, a thousand possible futures, every one of them flickering past in an instant. And in every single one, the boy failed. Not always the same way. Sometimes it was arrogance. Sometimes cowardice. Sometimes he simply wasn't strong enough, or smart enough, or kind enough, at the moment it mattered. Sometimes he took Luke's offer. Sometimes he refused it and died anyway.
In every single one, at the end, Olympus burned.
And then the fire spread.
"We have tried," said Lachesis, and for the first time in either life, Percy heard something like exhaustion in an immortal voice. "We have pulled every thread we may pull. We have nudged Thalia Grace into the prophecy's path. She broke under it. We tried Nico di Angelo. The Underworld took him. We tried a dozen others. The pattern is too strong, and this world is too hard, and every hero we weave into it unravels."
"Except one," said Atropos.
All three of them looked at him.
"No," Percy said again.
But it came out weaker this time. He hated how much weaker.
"Find somebody else." He was on his feet now, pacing the narrow kitchen, stepping around the cake. "You're the Fates. You can find somebody else. Some other universe, some other Percy, I don't care. I did it already. I did it twice. I held the sky. I fought Kronos. I fell into Tartarus twice, the second time because the gods threw me there for something I didn't do. And you know what they did to me. You were there. You watched it."
"We did," said Clotho.
"I've got a life now." He flung his arm out at the room, at the frozen party. "Look at it! Look at them! Mom's alive. Paul's alive. I've got friends. Real friends, who don't know anything about gods or monsters or prophecies, and they love me anyway. I got into Goode. We're starting in September. I'm going to be a normal kid and go to high school and be bad at math and maybe I'll get a girlfriend and maybe I won't and I'm going to die in my bed, you promised—"
He stopped. He was crying. He hadn't noticed.
The Fates waited.
He looked at his mother's face. At her frozen smile.
"If I say no," he said, very quietly. "What happens to her? Here?"
The silence went on for a long time.
"The fire spreads," said Lachesis finally. "It reaches the mortal world. Not at once. But it reaches it. In four years, perhaps five."
Percy closed his eyes.
You knew, he thought. You knew the moment they said Ezra. You knew they'd come to the one place you couldn't say no to.
They didn't even have to threaten her. They just had to tell the truth.
"I want things," he said, opening his eyes. His voice was steady now. Cold. The voice from the amphitheater, from a lifetime ago. "If I do this. I want things. And I want them promised. Properly this time. On the Styx, or whatever it is you three swear on."
The Fates exchanged a look. Something in it might almost have been approval.
"Name them," said Atropos.
It took a long time. He was fourteen, but he'd been twenty-eight, and he'd spent eight years in the Pit learning exactly how much a bad deal could cost. He didn't let them get away with anything.
"First," he said. "My family. Mom and Paul. They're protected. I don't care what it takes. No monster touches them. No god touches them. No half-brother touches them. Ever."
"Granted," said Clotho. "Their threads will be warded. As will the threads of your three friends."
He hadn't even asked for that yet. He blinked. "...Okay. Good. Second. I don't work for the gods. I don't answer to Zeus, or Poseidon, or any of them. I'm not anyone's errand boy. You want me to save this world, fine. I'll save it my way. I go where I want. I do what I want. If I think the gods are wrong, I say so, and nobody throws me in a pit for it."
"Your freedom," said Lachesis slowly, "is the very thing we require. A hero bound to the gods cannot save them from themselves. Granted. You will be free, Perseus. Freer than any mortal or demigod has ever been."
"Third." He hesitated. This was the one he'd been thinking about since the window opened. Since he'd seen the dead pine. "In my old life. At the trial. There were people who stood up for me."
"Ten," said Atropos. "We remember."
"They're here too. Right? Other versions of them. Grover. Tyson. Nico, Thalia. Clarisse." He swallowed. "Rachel."
He looked at Rachel, frozen mid-laugh with her cup in the air.
"I want them to remember," he said. "Not everything, if it'll hurt them. But me. Who I was to them. What they did for me. I don't want to walk into camp and have Grover look at me like a stranger. I can't—" His voice wobbled. He steadied it. "I can't do that again. Have the people I love look at me like they don't know me. I can't."
The three sisters were quiet for a long moment.
"It will not happen all at once," Clotho said. "Memory is a heavy thread. It will return to each of them as they meet you, and as they are ready to bear it. Some sooner. Some later. Some will remember everything. Some only dreams and feelings." She inclined her head. "But they will remember you. That, we swear."
"And Rachel?"
Clotho smiled, the first real smile he'd seen from her. "Rachel Elizabeth Dare," she said, "has been remembering you in her dreams since she was eleven years old, Perseus. Why do you think she said she knew you?"
Percy sat down hard on the kitchen floor.
"Is there anything else?" Atropos asked.
He thought about it. He thought about the trial. About Annabeth's shaking hands. About his father on his throne of coral, abstaining.
"No," he said finally. "That's it. That's what I want."
"Then we swear it," said the three Fates together, and their voices rang through the frozen apartment like a great bell, "upon the Thread and the Loom and the Shears. Upon the will of Chaos, who made all things. So shall it be woven."
Thunder rolled, somewhere very far away. Not Zeus's thunder. Something older.
"Now," said Lachesis briskly, picking up her measuring rod. "The gift."
"What gift?"
"You are mortal, Perseus. Entirely. We will not take that from you; it was a promise, and it is part of what you are now. But a mortal boy cannot stand in the path of the Titans. So you will be given a way to grow." She reached into the basket and drew out something that wasn't thread at all. It was light. A small, perfect sphere of blue-white light, humming softly, like a star someone had shrunk to the size of a marble.
"This was not made by us," said Atropos. "It was made by the one who made us. By Chaos, at the beginning and the end of everything. We are only the messengers. The gods know nothing of it. They will never know, unless you tell them. It will rewrite small corners of the world around you, so that what it gives you seems natural. It will set you tasks. It will reward you. It will make you stronger than you have ever been, if you are willing to work for it."
"How much stronger?"
"That," said Clotho, "depends entirely on you."
Lachesis held out the sphere.
Percy looked at it for a long moment. Then he looked over his shoulder, at his mother's frozen smile. At Paul's arm around her waist. At Rachel and Nancy and Matt, and the banner on the wall, and the blue cake with its frozen candles.
Okay, he thought. Okay. For them.
He reached out and took it.
The light went into his palm like water into sand. It flowed up his arm, cold and then hot. It hit his heart and his brain at the same time, and the world went white.
[DING!]
[Connection established.]
[Scanning host...]
[Host identified: Perseus Jackson. Species: Human (Mortal). Age: 14.]
[Soul anomaly detected: Host soul bears records of a prior incarnation. Records sealed. Access permitted to host only.]
[Initializing...]
[The Evolutionary System of the Primordial Loom has been installed.]
[Welcome, Host.]
The voice wasn't a voice. It was text, glowing blue letters hanging in the air in front of his eyes, and at the same time it was something he heard, flat and cool and mechanical, in the back of his skull. It had no personality at all. No warmth. It sounded like a calculator would sound, if calculators could talk.
Percy blinked. The letters stayed where they were, floating in front of the frozen party. When he turned his head, they moved with him.
Okay, he thought. That's new.
[Analysis Unit online. Designation: Great Sage.]
[Great Sage will assist the Host in all matters of data, analysis, and growth. Great Sage has no opinions. Great Sage has no preferences. Great Sage exists to optimize the Host.]
...Right, Percy thought. Super comforting.
[Acknowledged.]
He jumped. "You can hear me thinking?"
[Affirmative. Surface thoughts directed at the System are received. Private thoughts remain private. Great Sage does not pry. Prying is inefficient.]
Behind him, on the couch, Clotho made a sound that was almost a laugh.
[Generating Host Status...]
[STATUS]
Name: Perseus Jackson
Age: 14
Race: Human (Mortal)
Level: 1
EXP: 0 / 100
Title: None
Divine Parentage: — (Unassigned)
HP: 100 / 100
MP: 20 / 20
Faith Points: 0
STR: 8
AGI: 9
VIT: 8
INT: 11
WIS: 14
CHA: 12
Free Stat Points: 0
Skills: None
Inventory: Empty
Percy stared at the numbers.
I'm a level one, he thought. I fought Kronos. I'm a level one with eight strength.
[Correction. The Host's prior incarnation fought Kronos. The Host has never fought anything. The Host's current body has been in two physical altercations, both in the second grade, both lost.]
Thanks, Great Sage.
[You are welcome.]
"It does not do sarcasm yet," Lachesis said, apparently reading his face. "It will grow. As you grow."
[Notice: Host's WIS score is unusually high for Level 1. Cause: sealed soul records. Effect: Host learns combat skills 40% faster than baseline.]
So the years in the Pit are good for something.
[Affirmative.]
[Tutorial Event: DIVINE PARENTAGE]
[The Host is mortal and possesses no divine bloodline. To stand among the children of the gods, the Host must be Adopted.]
[A god will be selected by the Wheel of the Loom. The selected god will recognize the Host as their own. Their affection, protection, and regard will be rewritten to match that of a true parent. The Host will gain the inherited powers of the selected god's children. The Host will remain mortal.]
[Restriction placed by Host's Terms of Contract: Poseidon is excluded from the Wheel.]
Percy hadn't said that. He hadn't even thought it, not in words. But there it was, written in glowing blue letters.
He looked at the Fates.
"We know you, Perseus," Atropos said simply. "We knew you would not want to be his again."
Percy didn't answer. He didn't trust his voice.
[Do you wish to spin the Wheel?]
[YES / NO]
He stared at the two words for a long moment.
If it's Ares, I'm going to be so mad.
[Noted.]
Yes.
The Wheel appeared in the middle of the kitchen.
It was enormous, nearly as tall as the ceiling, a great disc of bronze and gold divided into glowing segments. Each segment bore a symbol. A lightning bolt. An owl. A sun. A crescent moon. A spear. A dove. A hammer. A caduceus. A peacock feather. A sheaf of wheat. A grapevine. A hearth flame. Dozens more: minor gods, a skull for Hades, a torch for Hecate, a rainbow for Iris, a pair of wings for Nike. Where the trident should have been, there was a blank black space, dull and dark.
The Wheel began to spin.
It made a sound like a carnival game, a fast clicking ratchet, tik-tik-tik-tik-tik, and the symbols blurred into a whirling smear of gold. Percy watched it with his heart in his throat. In the frozen living room behind him, the Fates watched it too, needles still.
It began to slow.
Sun. Owl. Skull. Wheat.
Not Ares, not Ares, not Ares—
Spear. Percy flinched. It ticked past.
Dove. Hammer. Hearth.
Lightning bolt.
The wheel shuddered. Ticked. Almost went past.
Stopped.
[DING!]
[Divine Parentage Selected: ZEUS, King of the Gods, Lord of the Sky.]
The kitchen was very, very quiet.
Percy stared at the lightning bolt glowing on the wheel. His mind had gone completely, perfectly blank.
Zeus.
Zeus, who'd read the charges. Zeus, who'd said every hero turns, eventually. Who'd pronounced the sentence, and opened the floor, and watched him fall into the dark without a flicker of doubt in his thunderstorm eyes.
Of every god on that wheel, every single one. It had to be him.
And then, slowly, against every ounce of his will, Percy Jackson started to laugh.
He laughed until he had to sit down again. He laughed until his ribs hurt and tears ran down his face. Great Sage hung a polite little blue box in the air that said [Host's vital signs indicate hysteria. Recommend deep breathing.] and that only made him laugh harder.
"Of course," he gasped. "Of course it's him. You know what? Fine. Fine. He threw me in a pit. Now he gets to be my dad. Let's see how he likes it."
On the couch, Atropos was smiling. Really smiling, a thin sharp curve like the edge of her shears.
"The Loom," she said, "has a sense of humor."
[Rewriting relevant threads...]
[Zeus, Lord of the Sky, now recognizes Perseus Jackson as his adopted son. The recognition is complete and sincere. Zeus will not question its origin.]
[Bloodline registered: Children of Zeus.]
[Bloodline Status: DORMANT.]
[A mortal vessel cannot yet hold the sky. The bloodline will wake when the Host proves his body can survive it.]
[Passive acquired: Sky's Favor (Lesser) — The wind is slightly kinder to the Host. That is all, for now.]
Percy blinked at the screen. Dormant?
[Affirmative. The Host is fourteen, mortal, and has eight strength. If the bloodline of the Lord of the Sky woke inside the Host's current body, the Host would explode.]
...Like, metaphorically?
[No.]
Cool. Love that. Let's leave it asleep.
[Title acquired: Adopted Son of the Sky.]
[Tutorial complete.]
[A NEW STRUCTURE HAS BEEN UNLOCKED: THE LOOM]
[Chaos stitched The Loom from torn threads of other realities, other histories, and other stories. Each floor is one Thread. Defeating a floor's boss ties that Thread off.]
[The Loom contains 50 Floors, in five Strata of ten. Every tenth floor is a Gate Floor. The Guardian of the 50th Floor is unknown.]
[GATES: The Host may summon a Gate anywhere private. It opens only to floors he has unlocked, plus the next locked floor.]
[TIME: One hour in the real world equals one full day inside The Loom. The Host's body does not age inside. Hunger, fatigue, and injury are real.]
[WARNING: Three or more tower-days in a single run inflicts THREAD-WORN: -20% INT and WIS for one real day.]
[DEATH: If the Host dies inside The Loom, he is ejected through the Gate at 1 HP. All loot from that run is lost. The floor relocks to its start. The Host may not re-enter for 24 real hours.]
[Ten percent of all injuries taken inside The Loom carry over to the Host's real body.]
[VESSEL RANK: F. Rank is earned with Faith, in the real world. The Loom has no audience. It will not make the Host famous among the gods. It will only make him strong.]
[The Loom is training. It is not a game.]
Percy read the last line twice.
Not a game, he thought.
[Affirmative. Great Sage does not lie. Lying is inefficient.]
[MAIN QUEST ISSUED]
[Quest: The Boy Who Would Be Hero]
[Ezra Coleman, son of Poseidon, will be attacked by a Greater Fury on a school trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in fourteen days. In this world, the Fury is not Alecto. It is something worse.]
[Objective: Ensure that Ezra Coleman survives and reaches Camp Half-Blood.]
[Time Limit: 14 days.]
[Reward: 1,000 EXP. Camp Half-Blood Access Key. ??? ]
[Failure: The thread of the child of prophecy is cut. The world burns.]
[Accept? YES / NO]
Percy looked at the screen for a long time.
Protect Ezra. Keep him alive. The boy who, in another world, had drowned his mother in her own bedroom and written his name on the mirror in seawater.
He hasn't done it yet, the Fates had said. Not here. Not yet.
Damasen, Percy thought. You said the rage would keep me alive but it wouldn't keep me living. I think this is what you meant. I think this is the test.
He reached out and touched the glowing word.
[YES.]
[Quest accepted.]
When he looked up, the couch was empty. The Fates were gone. There was nothing on the cushions but a single strand of sea-green thread, coiled in a neat loop.
And then the candles on the cake flickered, and the music started mid-note, and Nancy landed on the couch with a whoop, and Matt sneezed, and Rachel laughed, and his mother looked across the room at him in the kitchen doorway, on his knees in a puddle of blue frosting, and her smile turned to concern.
"Percy? Sweetheart? Did you drop your cake?"
Percy looked down at the mess on the floor. Then up at his mother. Alive. Smiling. Worried about cake.
"Yeah, Mom," he said, and his voice only shook a little. "Yeah. I dropped it. Sorry."
"Oh, honey, don't worry about it, there's plenty." She was already coming over with a dish towel and a fresh plate. "Here. Have another piece."
He took it. He ate every bite, and it tasted like blue, and like home, and like the last normal night of his life.
Across the room, Rachel Elizabeth Dare had stopped laughing. She was staring at him with a strange, faraway look, rubbing her temple like she had a headache. Her eyes, just for a second, flickered faintly green.
He didn't notice.