Ezra came down from the attic of the Big House at nine o'clock that night, and he was the color of old paper.
Percy was sitting on the porch steps waiting for him, with Lupe asleep in his lap. Grover was beside him, chewing nervously on a tin can. Annabeth was leaning against the porch rail with her arms crossed, pretending she wasn't waiting too.
The screen door creaked open. Ezra stepped out. For a long moment he just stood there under the porch light, staring at nothing.
Percy knew that look. He'd worn it himself, a lifetime ago, coming down those same attic stairs. He'd seen the mummy in the dusty corner, with her shriveled skin and her glass eyes, and the green smoke pouring out of her mouth. He'd heard that voice, which wasn't a voice so much as a snake hissing inside your head.
"What did she say?" Annabeth asked quietly.
Ezra didn't answer at first. Then he swallowed and said it, word by word, like he was reading it off the inside of his own skull.
"You shall go west, and face the god who has turned.
You shall find what was stolen, and see it safely returned.
You shall be betrayed by one who calls you a friend.
And you shall fail to save what matters most in the end."
The porch was silent.
Percy's hands had gone still in Lupe's fur. It was the same prophecy, word for word. The same four lines that had haunted him at twelve, on the road to Los Angeles. You shall fail to save what matters most in the end. He'd thought it meant his mother. He'd been wrong. It had meant choosing to trust his father over saving her.
He wondered what it meant for Ezra.
"There was more," Ezra said.
Everyone looked at him.
"At the end. After the four lines." His voice was thin. "The smoke went toward the window. Toward the cabins. And she said one more thing. Real quiet. Like it wasn't for me."
"What was it?" Grover whispered.
Ezra looked at Percy. His sea-green eyes were wide and strange and frightened.
"And the son of the sky has walked this road before," he said.
Nobody moved.
Annabeth turned her head slowly and looked at Percy. Grover's tin can had stopped halfway to his mouth.
Percy didn't say anything. He just sat there on the porch steps with the wolf cub in his lap, looking out at the dark strawberry fields, and kept his face very still.
Thanks a lot, he thought, toward the attic. Really. Great timing.
"So," Ezra said, once they'd all stopped staring at Percy. He'd gotten some of his color back, and with it some of his swagger. "I get to pick two. Right?"
"Right," Grover said. "But, um. Chiron says I have to go. Because I'm your protector. I'm supposed to get my searcher's license if this goes well, and—"
"Fine. The goat comes." Ezra turned to Annabeth. He smiled. It was a different smile from the one he gave everybody else. Warmer. More careful. Percy had seen it in another life, on a rock by the canoe dock. "Annabeth. You've been waiting your whole life for a quest, right? You told me. Come with me."
Annabeth looked at him.
Then, for just a second, she looked past him at Percy.
It was the smallest glance. Percy wasn't even sure she meant to do it. But it was there. A question in her gray eyes that he couldn't read.
Then she looked back at Ezra and nodded.
"I'm in," she said. "I've been waiting six years."
Ezra grinned. Percy felt it hit him somewhere under the ribs, the way it always did. The old glass, going down.
She's thirteen, he told himself. She doesn't know him. She doesn't know anything. She's choosing a quest, not him.
Not yet.
He swallowed it.
"Great," Ezra said, and turned to Percy, and his grin got sharper. "And you're the snack guy. Right? That was the deal."
"That was the deal," Percy said.
Luke found them at the Hermes cabin an hour later, while they were packing.
He came in quiet, with a shoebox under his arm, and he smiled at Ezra like a big brother. "Hey. Heard you got a quest. Thought you might need these."
He opened the shoebox. Inside was a pair of old white sneakers with a pair of small white wings at each heel. The wings were folded flat, and when the lamp hit them, they fluttered.
Ezra's eyes went huge. "Are those—"
"Flying shoes," Luke said. "Gift from my dad. I never use them. Figured a son of Poseidon on his first quest deserves a little style."
Percy, sitting on the bunk across the room with a half-packed duffel, went very still.
He remembered those shoes.
He'd held them, in another life, in this exact cabin. He'd given them to Grover. And on a beach in Los Angeles, with Grover screaming, they'd tried to drag him straight down into the earth. Down into Tartarus. Down to Kronos.
Maia, Percy thought. Say Maia and they fly. And under that, the thing Luke had never said. Wear them anywhere near the Pit and they'll take you all the way to the bottom.
Ezra reached for them.
"Hey," Percy said. "Can I see those for a sec?"
Luke's eyes flicked to him. The big-brother smile stayed in place. "Sure."
Percy took the shoebox. He looked at the shoes. He let his Focus pool open, and looked again.
[DIVINE EYE: Winged Sneakers of Hermes (Enchanted)]
[Enchantment: Flight (on command: "Maia").]
[HIDDEN ENCHANTMENT: Pulls the wearer toward the deepest point of the earth when in proximity to an entrance of Tartarus. Laid by: a son of Hermes, under instruction from something old and buried.]
Percy didn't look up for a long moment.
When he did, he looked straight at Luke.
He didn't say anything. He didn't need to. He just looked, steady and calm, the way Damasen used to look at him across a campfire on the black beach. The look that said I see you. All of you. The part you're hiding.
Luke's smile flickered.
It was barely anything. A tiny tightening at the corner of the mouth. A quarter-second too long before he blinked. But Percy saw it. And Luke saw him see it.
"These are really cool," Percy said lightly, closing the box. "Hey, Ezra, how about I carry them? Snack guy, remember? I'll hold onto the gear. You'll have your hands full with your sword."
"No way. They're mine. He gave them to me."
"I know. I'll give 'em to you when you need them." Percy tucked the shoebox under his arm and stood up. "Promise."
Ezra scowled, but didn't argue. He'd already been distracted by Annabeth, who was showing him a map of the route west.
Percy walked past Luke toward the door. As he passed, he stopped, close enough that only Luke could hear.
"I know," Percy said quietly.
Luke went white.
"I know about the shoes," Percy said. "I know about the hellhound. And I think I know who's whispering in your ear at night."
Luke's hand twitched toward the sword at his hip. Then stopped.
"I'm not going to tell anyone," Percy said. "Not yet. Not Chiron, not Mr. D, not the council." He held Luke's eyes. "Because I don't think you're a bad guy, Luke. I think you're angry. I think you've been angry for a long time, and you've got every right to be, and something found you and told you your anger was right. And it is. It's just wrong about what to do with it."
Luke's face was a white mask. His lips were pressed into a thin line.
"You don't know anything about me," he whispered.
"I know your dad never came," Percy said. "I know your mom's sick, and nobody helped her. And I know you've watched this camp bury kids every summer for nine years while the gods did nothing."
Luke flinched like he'd been hit.
"The city on Gardiners Island," Percy said. "That's for you too. For your cabin. For the kids nobody claimed. You could help me build it. Or you can keep listening to the thing in the dark. That's your choice. Nobody else's."
He walked out the door.
He didn't look back. But he heard it behind him: a sound like somebody sitting down very hard on a bunk. And then nothing at all.
[Great Sage notes: Probability that Luke Castellan reports this conversation to his master: 64%.]
Yeah, Percy thought. I know.
[Great Sage requests clarification. Why warn him?]
Percy walked across the dark green toward Cabin One, with the cursed shoes under his arm and the barrier flickering on the hill.
Because the last time, he thought, nobody did. Nobody ever looked him in the eye and told him there was another way. And he died with a knife in his own armpit, saying he was sorry.
Thirty-six percent is a chance, Sage. I'll take it.
There was a long pause.
[...Reasoning logged.]
The quest left at dawn.
Which gave him six hours.
He sat on his bunk in Cabin One with the Gate glowing in front of him and his status screen open, doing math.
[FLOOR 6: THE LIZARDMEN SWAMP]
[Rank: E]
[Enemies: Lv 30–40]
[Bosses: Lv 42 and 45]
Six hours real time was six tower-days. More than enough. But three tower-days in a row meant Thread-Worn. Minus twenty percent INT and WIS for a whole day. And tomorrow was the first day of the quest. The bus, the road, whatever was waiting for them on it.
Two days, he thought. Get in, scout it, get out. Do the rest when we get back.
[Great Sage notes the System's guidance for this floor: 'Hidden Quest: Something waits beneath the temple.' Great Sage notes the bloodline is waking. Great Sage estimates a 71% probability that the awakening event is tied to Floor 6.]
Percy looked at the Gate.
He thought about the Underworld. About Ares on a beach in Los Angeles, with his flaming eyes. About what was waiting at the end of this road. All the things he'd faced in his first life with the power of the sea in his veins, that he'd face this time with a training sword and eight shadows.
I'm not strong enough, he thought. Not for what's coming. Not yet.
He stood up and walked through the Gate.
The Lizardmen Swamp was half underwater, and all of it wanted to kill him.
He came out of the Gate onto a rotting wooden boardwalk in a gray-green twilight that never changed. The air was thick and hot and stinking, heavy with the smell of rot and stagnant water. All around him was swamp. Black water and twisted cypress trees hung with moss, stretching away into fog in every direction. Villages of reed huts stood on stilts out in the water, connected by sagging rope bridges and flooded causeways. And somewhere far out in the fog, at the center of it all, the top of a stone ziggurat rose out of the water like the back of a drowned giant.
[Main Quest: Defeat the Lizard Chief. Then defeat Azka-Tyk, God of the Lizardmen.]
[Side Quest: CLEAN WATER — Purify the three wells of the stilt village.]
[Hidden Quest: ???]
[Environmental Effect: Poison Bog. Movement in deep water -40%. Prolonged exposure inflicts Poison.]
The lizardmen came out of the water.
They were seven feet tall, scaled in green and black, with crocodile jaws and yellow slitted eyes. They carried spears and clubs and round shields made of turtle shell, and they didn't come at him like goblins or wolves. They came like soldiers. In lines. With discipline. And behind them, on the rooftops of the stilt huts, Swamp Hunters crouched, blending into the reeds, with blowpipes at their lips.
[Lizardman Warrior — Lv 33]
[Armored Lizard — Lv 36]
[Swamp Hunter — Lv 34 — Camouflage, Poison Darts]
The first dart took him in the neck before he saw it coming.
[STATUS: POISONED. -12 HP per second for 20 seconds.]
He called his shadows.
He hadn't, on Floor 4. He'd wanted to learn. But this wasn't learning anymore. This was a war, and he was running out of time.
"Asterion. Gorrath. Front. Fang, take the rooftops. Lazarus, bones. Gloop, eat the poison."
They came up out of the black water around him like an army rising from the deep.
The first day was the village.
He fought his way through it hut by hut, bridge by bridge. Fang and his summoned shadow wolves leaped across the rooftops, hunting the Swamp Hunters through the reeds. Asterion and Gorrath held the causeways like two walls of black iron. Lazarus raised the drowned dead out of the bog, centuries of bones, and sent them shambling at the lizardmen's flanks. And Gloop rolled through the poisoned water and ate it, swallowing the green-black poison until the shadow-slime's dome turned murky and sick and then cleared again.
Percy fought at the center of all of it. Sword and shield and Fang Daggers. Flurry of Blows. Step of the Wind, across the gaps between the bridges.
He found the three wells of the village, choked with poison and dead fish. Lizardman children were drinking from them, and getting sick, and dying. He cleared the first one with his hands, dragging out the rotting carcass of a giant eel that had been poisoning it. He cleared the second with Gloop, who swallowed the poison whole. The third was the hardest: the poison was coming up from deep underground, and he had to dive down into the well with the Water Breathing Charm to find the cracked stone pipe at the bottom, and wedge it shut with a turtle-shell shield.
When he came up out of the third well, there were lizardman children standing around it. Small and scaled and wide-eyed. They didn't attack him. They just stared.
Then one of them, a tiny one with green spots, reached out and touched his hand.
[SIDE QUEST COMPLETE: CLEAN WATER.]
[The lizardmen of the stilt village will not attack the Host on this floor again.]
[Reward: Scale Armor (Rare) — Poison Resistance +50%.]
The Lizard Chief came for him at dusk.
[BOSS: THE LIZARD CHIEF — Lv 42]
He was huge, nine feet tall, with a crown of bones and a two-handed club studded with crocodile teeth. And he was angry, because the stranger had made his village stop fighting.
Percy fought him on the central platform of the stilt village, in front of every lizardman in the swamp. It took twenty minutes. He took the club across the ribs twice and the Chief's jaws across his shield arm once. He thought, at one point, that he wasn't going to make it.
Then Fang came out of the reeds with his whole shadow pack and hit the Chief from behind. Percy drove his sword up under the crown of bones, and it was over.
[BOSS DEFEATED: THE LIZARD CHIEF.]
[+18,000 EXP]
[LEVEL UP! Level 36 → Level 37]
[LEVEL UP! Level 37 → Level 38]
[The way to the sunken temple has opened.]
And out in the fog, in the middle of the black water, the top of the stone ziggurat began to glow a sickly, poisonous green.
[Run time: 2 tower-days. Recommended: exit now to avoid THREAD-WORN.]
Percy stood on the edge of the stilt village and looked out at the glowing ziggurat in the fog.
Two days. That was the plan. Scout it, get out, come back after the quest.
But the quest was going to the Underworld. To Hades's palace, and the Fields of Punishment, and the edge of the Pit. To Ares on a beach. And Percy was a mortal boy with a training sword and a bloodline asleep in his chest. Something on this floor was going to wake it. Great Sage said seventy-one percent.
If I go into the Underworld like this, he thought, I'm a liability. I'm one more person Ezra has to protect. One more person who could die.
If I go in with the sky awake...
He thought about tomorrow. About sitting on a Greyhound bus with a head full of fog, slow and stupid, while monsters closed in.
Then he thought about the Underworld again.
One bad day, he thought, against the whole quest.
He stayed.
[Run time: 3 tower-days. THREAD-WORN will apply on exit.]
Yeah, yeah. I know.
The sunken temple was a ziggurat of green-black stone, rising out of the middle of the swamp in seven great stepped tiers. The bottom four were underwater. Poison seeped out of its cracks in slow green clouds that turned the water around it thick and oily and dead. Nothing lived within a hundred yards of it.
Percy swam to it with Gloop beside him, eating the poison out of the water as they went, so he could breathe.
The top tier had an entrance. A dark square doorway carved with crocodile jaws. It led down. Down steps slick with algae, into the temple's flooded heart, into black water and the green glow and something that hissed in the dark like a thousand snakes.
[HIDDEN QUEST TRIGGERED: BENEATH THE TEMPLE.]
[Go under the temple water. Stay there.]
Percy stood on the bottom step with the black water lapping at his knees, looking down.
Stay there, he thought. That's it? No objective? Just... stay?
[Great Sage notes: The Host is mortal. A mortal who stays underwater will drown.]
I've got the Water Breathing Charm. Ten minutes.
[Great Sage notes that the System's instruction does not mention the charm.]
Percy looked at the water for a long, long time.
He thought about the Elemental Ruins. About the water wing, and the sluice gates, and choosing to fight in the element where he was weakest. He'd used the charm there. He'd needed it.
He thought about what the System had said, way back on the night of the Wheel. The bloodline will wake when the Host proves his body can survive it.
Survive what?
He took off the Water Breathing Charm. He put it in his inventory.
[WARNING: The Host has removed his only means of breathing underwater.]
I know, Sage.
[Great Sage requests the Host reconsider.]
I know. Trust me.
There was a long, long pause. Longer than any pause Great Sage had ever taken.
[...Great Sage will remain here.]
Percy took a deep breath, the deepest he'd ever taken, and walked down the steps into the black water until it closed over his head.
It was cold. That was the first thing. Cold and black and heavy, and the green poison glow made it look like the inside of a dead star. He swam down. Down past the carvings of crocodile gods. Down past the drowned bones of lizardmen who'd come here to pray. Down to the bottom of the temple, where the stone floor was cracked and something huge and dark was moving in the shadows on the far side of the chamber.
He settled on the floor. He held onto a carved pillar so he wouldn't float back up. And he stayed.
Thirty seconds. His chest was tight.
A minute. His lungs were burning.
A minute and a half. Black spots were dancing at the edges of his vision. His body was screaming at him. Up. Go up. Breathe. UP.
He held on to the pillar.
He thought about Tartarus. About eight years on the black shore, breathing air that tasted like ash and fire. He'd survived that. He'd survived worse than this.
Two minutes. His hands were shaking. He couldn't feel his feet.
[HP: 712 / 920]
[HP: 488 / 920]
[HP: 201 / 920]
[WARNING: The Host is drowning.]
He was drowning.
He knew what drowning felt like now. He'd never known before. In his first life the water had loved him. It had held him and carried him and breathed for him. It had never once, in twenty-eight years, tried to kill him.
In this life, it was trying very hard.
And as the black closed in at the edges of his vision, he thought about his mother. Both of them. The one on the bedroom floor with water in her lungs, in another world. The one at the kitchen table in this world, with her hands on his face. Be careful.
I'm sorry, Mom, he thought. I'm sorry. I'm not being careful at all.
[HP: 38 / 920]
The hissing thing in the shadows was coming closer. He could see it now, dimly. Huge. Coiled. Eyes like two poisoned moons.
He didn't let go of the pillar.
[HP: 4 / 920]
And then, from somewhere very far above him, through a hundred feet of black water and green poison and seven tiers of stone, he heard it.
Thunder.
It wasn't a sound so much as a feeling. A deep, rolling, bone-shaking boom that came down through the water and the stone and into his chest, right into the place under his ribs where the pilot light had been flickering for weeks. The cold furnace. The sleeping sky.
And the sleeping sky woke up.
It woke up furious.
It came up out of his chest like a fire catching all at once. Not a flicker. Not a spark. A blaze, white-hot and roaring. It went into his lungs, his heart, his blood, every cell of his drowning body at once. And all of it was saying the same thing, in a voice that wasn't a voice. A voice older than the swamp, older than the Loom, as old as the first storm over the first sea.
NO.
NOT THIS ONE.
THIS ONE IS MINE.
The water around him lit up.
Lightning came out of him in every direction at once. Not the faint crackle of the Necromancer's stolen storm. Real lightning, his own. Branching, crackling, blinding blue-white bolts that ran through the black water like veins of fire, lighting up the whole flooded chamber like noon. The poison in the water hissed and boiled away. The bones of the drowned lizardmen danced in the current.
And the air came.
It came down through the water from somewhere, he never understood where. A bubble of it, then a column, then a whole sphere of clean bright air wrapping around his head and shoulders like a diving bell. The sky, reaching down into the deep to give its son a breath.
Percy breathed.
He breathed in, a huge ragged gasp, and the air was sweet and cold and tasted like rain. He breathed again. He was crying, he realized. Underwater, inside a bubble of storm-air, with lightning crackling off his skin, he was crying so hard he could barely see.
[DING!]
[HIDDEN QUEST COMPLETE: BENEATH THE TEMPLE.]
[The Host chose to drown rather than turn back. His body has proven it will not break.]
[BLOODLINE AWAKENING: CHILDREN OF ZEUS]
[The sleeping sky has woken.]
[Bloodline Status: DORMANT → AWAKENED (Stage 1)]
[New Skill: LIGHTNING CALL (Lv 1) — Call down lightning from the sky, or release it from your body. In water, damage x2. Cost: 60 MP.]
[New Skill: AEROKINESIS (Lesser) (Lv 1) — Command the air around you. Gusts, pushes, a cushion against a fall.]
[New Skill: BREATH OF THE SKY — The air will always find you. You cannot drown.]
[New Passive: STORM SENSE — Sense changes in weather, pressure, and the movement of air within 1 km.]
[New Passive: STATIC SKIN — Immunity to your own lightning. Resistance to all electrical damage +50%.]
[MP pool unlocked: 260 / 260.]
[Class Eligibility unlocked: SORCERER. (The Host's bloodline has awakened.)]
[Prism Core resonance detected. Elemental affinity (Air, Lightning) +25%.]
[HP fully restored.]
Percy hung in the black water inside his bubble of storm-air, staring at the screens, and he laughed. A wet, broken, half-sobbing laugh.
You cannot drown.
He'd been the son of the sea god, once. The water had been his.
Now he was the son of the sky. And the sky had just reached down into the bottom of a swamp to keep the water from taking him.
Thanks, Dad, he thought. He didn't know which father he meant. Maybe both.
Across the flooded chamber, in the dark, something huge uncoiled and hissed.
[FLOOR BOSS: AZKA-TYK, GOD OF THE LIZARDMEN — Lv 45]
[HP: 11,000 / 11,000]
[Abilities: Poison Tide, Coil, Venom Fang, Divine Presence]
[Note: This is the Host's first battle against a being worshipped as a god.]
It was a crocodile. A crocodile the size of a city bus, with six legs and a jaw full of black fangs, and scales that glowed a sickly poison green. Its eyes were two pale moons. Around its head floated a crown of rotting gold, and when it opened its mouth, the poison poured out like smoke. It flowed into the water in great green clouds that made the lightning-lit chamber go murky again.
YOU, it said. It didn't speak. The word just appeared in Percy's head, wet and heavy, like a stone dropped into mud. YOU BURN MY WATER. YOU SLAY MY CHIEF. YOU POISON MY CHILDREN AGAINST ME.
"You were poisoning your own kids' drinking water," Percy said. His voice came out strange inside the bubble of air. "I just fixed it."
THEY ARE MINE TO POISON.
Something in Percy's chest went very cold and very still.
He'd heard that before. Not in those words. But he'd heard it. In a throne room, from twelve thrones. They are ours to punish. From a dying camp where the gods let kids sleep in the rain. From every god who had ever decided that their children were theirs to use and throw away.
"No," he said quietly. "They're not."
The crocodile god lunged.
It was his first fight against something called a god, and it was the hardest fight of his life.
Azka-Tyk was enormous, and fast in the water, and every bite of those black fangs pumped poison into him that his new Scale Armor could only half stop. It coiled its huge body around the pillars and lashed its tail like a battering ram. It flooded the chamber with green poison until he could barely see. And it was in its element. The water was its home.
But Percy had just found out that he couldn't drown.
And the water conducted lightning.
He called his shadows. They came up out of the dark of the flooded chamber, Asterion and Gorrath and Fang and the rest, and they held the god's coils while Percy swam free. Gloop ate the poison clouds as fast as Azka-Tyk could make them. Lazarus raised the bones of a hundred drowned worshippers and sent them clawing at their god's eyes.
And Percy called the sky.
The first bolt was clumsy. It came out of his hand in a wild, branching spray that lit up the whole chamber and hit everything. Azka-Tyk, the walls, Gorrath, who dissolved and came back looking annoyed. But it hit, and in the water it hit hard.
[LIGHTNING CALL — In water x2. -1,880 damage.]
[MP: 200 / 260]
The crocodile god screamed. Its scales smoked. Its pale moon eyes went wide with something Percy had never seen in a god's eyes before.
Fear.
WHAT ARE YOU?
"Mortal," Percy said. "Mostly."
The second bolt was better. He felt the shape of it this time, the way he'd once felt the shape of a wave. He aimed it. Narrow and bright, straight into the open poisoned mouth.
[LIGHTNING CALL — CRITICAL. -3,420 damage.]
The third bolt, he didn't throw. He kept it. He pulled it into his sword, the cheap bronze training xiphos, and the lightning ran up the blade and crackled along the edge until the whole sword was blazing white. And he swam straight at the god, through the poison and the coils and the snapping black fangs, with Step of the Wind pushing him through the water like a torpedo.
[ACTION SURGE!]
He drove the burning sword into the soft place behind Azka-Tyk's jaw. The place where crocodiles and wolves and hellhounds and everything with a jaw was always soft.
And he let the lightning go.
When it was over, the sunken temple was quiet.
The poison was gone. Burned out of the water by a storm that had come up from the bottom of the swamp instead of down from the sky. The water was clear now. Clear enough that Percy could see the pale gray light of the floor's endless twilight filtering down through the open doorway at the top, a hundred feet above.
Azka-Tyk was gone too. A cloud of green-gold dust drifted slowly through the clean water. And floating in the middle of it, very small, was a single black fang the length of his forearm.
[FLOOR BOSS DEFEATED: AZKA-TYK, GOD OF THE LIZARDMEN.]
[FLOOR 6 CLEARED. Thread tied off.]
[+42,000 EXP]
[LEVEL UP! Level 38 → Level 39]
[LEVEL UP! Level 39 → Level 40]
[LEVEL UP! Level 40 → Level 41]
[LEVEL UP! Level 41 → Level 42]
[Title acquired: Godslayer (Lesser). (+10% damage against beings worshipped as gods. Gods who learn of this title will not be pleased.)]
[Loot: Azka-Tyk's Fang (Epic) — Poison weapon. Wounds inflict Venom.]
[Loot: Venom Sacs x8. Crown of the Swamp God (Rare).]
[Extraction available. Window: 60 seconds.]
[Shadow Army: 7 / 8.]
Percy hung in the clear water with the bubble of storm-air around his head, looking at the drifting dust.
He thought about the lizardman children at the well. The small one with the green spots who'd touched his hand.
They are mine to poison.
"No," Percy said quietly. "I don't want you."
He let the extraction window close.
The dust settled slowly to the floor of the temple, and was still.
[STATUS]
Name: Perseus Jackson
Age: 14
Vessel Rank: E (Faith toward Rank D: 1,451 / 2,000)
Level: 42
Classes: Fighter (Lv 42) · Monk (Lv 18)
Class Eligibility: Sorcerer · Wizard (next slot at Lv 60)
Divine Parentage: Zeus (Bloodline: AWAKENED — Stage 1)
Divine Bond (Zeus): Level 2
Patron Blessings: Hestia · Apollo
Titles: Son of the Sky · Bane of the Labyrinth · Warden of Half-Blood Hill · Namer of the Unclaimed · Godslayer (Lesser)
HP: 1,040 / 1,040
Stamina: 560 / 560
Focus: 190 / 190
MP: 260 / 260
STR: 46
AGI: 49
VIT: 45
INT: 22
WIS: 28
CHA: 31
Bloodline Skills: Lightning Call (Lv 1) · Aerokinesis (Lesser) · Breath of the Sky · Storm Sense · Static Skin
Key Items: Rune of Lightning (Fragment) · Horn of the Minotaur (given to Ezra) · Winged Sneakers (Cursed)
Shadow Army (7 / 8): Asterion · Gorrath · Fang · Lazarus · Gloop · Thing One · Thing Two
Companions: Lupe · Varka Ironjaw (Floor 2 Waypoint)
Waypoints: Floors 1–6
Next Floor: 7 — THE INFERNAL FORGE
He came out of the Gate into Cabin One forty minutes before dawn, soaking wet, smelling like swamp, with lightning still crackling faintly in his hair.
[THREAD-WORN applied. -20% INT, -20% WIS for 24 hours.]
The fog came down over his brain like a wet blanket. He stood swaying in the middle of the cabin, blinking. Words were swimming. Thoughts were slow. Lupe was whining at his feet.
He looked up at the statue of Zeus.
The marble eyes weren't glowing. But Percy could have sworn the stern stone face looked just a little different than it had six hours ago. A little less stern. A little more like a father looking at a son who'd just done something incredibly stupid, and survived it.
"Don't," Percy muttered at it. "I know. Don't."
They left at sunrise.
Argus drove the camp van to the bottom of Half-Blood Hill, a big blond guy with eyes all over his body. All four of them were waiting at the dead pine. Ezra, with Riptide in his pocket and a new backpack and a look on his face like he was setting off to conquer the world. Annabeth, with her Yankees cap and her bronze knife and her notebook full of maps. Grover, nervous, chewing a tin can, his fake feet in his sneakers.
And Percy. Thread-Worn and foggy-headed, with a wolf cub in his jacket and a bandage on his chest and a shoebox of cursed sneakers under his arm. His hair was still sticking up with static.
Annabeth looked at him. Her eyes narrowed. "Why is your hair doing that?"
"Long night."
"It's crackling."
"Really long night."
Chiron came up the hill to see them off, in his full centaur form, with the morning light on his white flanks. He looked at each of them in turn. When he got to Percy, he stopped, and his nostrils flared. He frowned.
"You smell like a storm," he said slowly. "A storm that wasn't there yesterday."
"Yeah," Percy said. "It woke up."
Chiron looked at him for a long, long time. Then he reached out one big hand and put it on top of Percy's head, the way he used to, a long time ago.
"Bring them home," he said quietly.
"I will."
They walked down the hill toward the van. Ezra was in front, of course. Then Annabeth, then Grover. Percy was last.
Halfway down the hill, Percy stopped and looked back.
The camp lay in the valley behind him, gold in the sunrise. The cabins. The pavilion with its patched roof. The arena, where forty campers were already gathering for morning training without him. Clarisse had promised to run it. The Big House, with Mr. D on the porch, playing solitaire and pretending not to watch them go.
And the dead pine on the crest of the hill. With a single green needle on one gray branch, catching the light.
He pulled out the old cell phone Chiron had let him borrow, and dialed a number he knew by heart.
It rang twice.
"Percy?" His mother's voice. Sleepy and worried and warm. "Sweetheart? It's six in the morning. Is everything okay?"
He closed his eyes.
"Everything's okay, Mom," he said. "I'm going on a trip. With some friends from camp. For a little while."
A pause. He could hear her sitting up in bed. He could hear Paul mumbling something beside her.
"A trip," Sally said slowly. "Where?"
"West."
A longer pause.
"Is it dangerous?"
Percy looked down the hill at the van. At Ezra climbing in, already arguing with Grover about the front seat. At Annabeth, standing by the open door, looking back up the hill at him with her gray eyes, waiting.
"Yeah, Mom," he said. "It's dangerous."
He heard her breathe in. Hold it. Let it out.
"Then be careful," Sally Jackson said. Her voice was steady and fierce and only shaking a little. "And come home. You hear me, Perseus? You come home."
"I will," he said. "I promise."
He hung up. He put the phone in his pocket. He walked down the hill and climbed into the van, and Argus pulled out onto the farm road, heading west.
Overhead, the morning sky was perfectly clear. Not a cloud anywhere.
But if anyone had been looking up just then, they'd have seen it. Far off, very high, a single bolt of lightning, silent and white. It flashed once across the blue, from east to west, following the road.
Like a father, walking his son to the door.