Argus dropped them at the Greyhound station in Manhattan at nine in the morning, and Percy Jackson spent the first hour of the greatest quest of his new life trying to remember how to read a bus schedule.
[THREAD-WORN: -20% INT, -20% WIS. Remaining: 17 hours.]
The letters swam. They'd always swum a little, in both lives. Dyslexia didn't care which god had made you. But today it was worse. Today the words on the departure board slid around like fish in a tank, and every time he got one pinned down, the one next to it wriggled away.
"Denver," Annabeth said beside him, very patiently, for the second time. "Gate fourteen. It leaves in twenty minutes. Percy. Are you okay?"
"Fine."
"You've read that board three times."
"It's a hard board."
She narrowed her eyes at him. Then she reached out, before he could stop her, and touched his wrist. Her fingers came away tingling. She stared at them.
"You're static," she said. "Like, actually. Like you've been rubbing your feet on a carpet for a week." She looked up at him, and the puzzle look was back, sharper than ever. "What happened to you last night?"
Percy thought about the bottom of the sunken temple. About drowning, and the sky reaching down to give him a breath.
"I learned how to breathe," he said.
Annabeth stared at him for a long moment.
"That's the weirdest answer anyone has ever given me," she said finally. "And I live with the Stolls."
She walked off toward gate fourteen. Percy followed her, foggy and slow, and tried very hard not to smile.
Ezra had claimed the back of the bus.
He'd sprawled across the whole last row with his feet up on the seat, Riptide in his pocket, his headphones on. When Annabeth came down the aisle, he sat up and moved his feet and patted the seat next to him.
She hesitated. Then she sat.
Grover took the seat in front of them, nervously, clutching his backpack. And Percy, coming down the aisle last, found himself with nowhere to sit except the seat across the aisle from all three of them, next to a sleeping old man with a newspaper over his face.
He sat down. Lupe wriggled out of his jacket, turned around twice in his lap, and went to sleep.
"Is that a dog?" Ezra said loudly.
"Wolf," Percy said.
"You brought a wolf on a Greyhound?"
"She's very small."
Annabeth made a sound that might have been a laugh, and turned it into a cough. Ezra glared at her. Then he glared at Percy. Then he put his headphones back on and turned to the window.
The bus pulled out of the station and into the Lincoln Tunnel, and the city vanished behind them.
Percy leaned his head against the cool window and closed his eyes. He listened to the engine hum, and Lupe's small breathing, and the low murmur of Annabeth and Grover talking about routes. For a little while, in the fog of the Thread-Worn, he let himself drift.
[Storm Sense: Atmospheric disturbance detected.]
His eyes snapped open.
The bus was in New Jersey now. Strip malls and highway and gray morning drizzle sliding past the windows. Nothing was wrong. Everything was normal.
Except the air.
He could feel it. That was new. Since the temple, he'd been able to feel air the way he used to feel water, as pressure and movement and temperature, a constant faint hum at the edge of his senses. And the air in the bus had just changed. It had gone cold and still and heavy, like the moment before a thunderstorm breaks.
Three rows ahead, three old ladies had just gotten on at the last stop.
Percy hadn't noticed them. He noticed them now.
They were sitting together in the front row, in matching gray cardigans and enormous handbags, knitting. Their needles clicked in perfect unison. Click. Click. Click. For one terrible half-second Percy thought it was the Fates, and his heart stopped.
Then one of them turned around in her seat and smiled at him.
Her teeth were black.
[ENEMIES IDENTIFIED: THE ERINYES]
[TISIPHONE, Avenger of Murder — Lv ???]
[ALECTO, the Unceasing — Lv ???]
[MEGAERA, the Grudging — Lv ???]
[WARNING: All three Furies are present. Victory probability: <1%.]
Hi, Tisiphone, Percy thought numbly. Nice cardigan.
He didn't panic. He'd panicked the last time he was on a bus with three Furies, in another life, at twelve. He'd been trapped and helpless and Grover had been bleating and he'd thought he was going to die.
He wasn't twelve anymore. Even Thread-Worn, even foggy, he was something else.
He leaned across the aisle, very calmly, and tapped Annabeth on the knee.
She looked at him. He didn't say anything. He just tilted his head, very slightly, toward the front of the bus.
Annabeth's eyes went to the three old ladies. She went white.
"Grover," she breathed.
Grover had already smelled them. He was frozen in his seat, his face the color of milk, his nostrils flaring.
Ezra was the only one who hadn't noticed. He was still staring out the window with his headphones on, bobbing his head to music.
Percy reached across Annabeth and pulled one of Ezra's earbuds out.
"Hey!" Ezra yanked his head away. "What the hell, man—"
"Front of the bus," Percy said quietly. "Don't look. Three old ladies. They're the Furies. The one who attacked you at the museum, and her sisters."
Ezra froze.
Then, of course, he looked.
All three of the old ladies were turned around in their seats now, looking back at them. Smiling. Their knitting needles had stopped. And as Percy watched, their eyes began to glow, dull red, like coals stirred up in a fireplace.
"Ezra Coleman," said Tisiphone, in a voice like a blade on a whetstone. It carried down the length of the bus, through the engine noise, as clear as if she were whispering in his ear. "We told you we'd be watching. And look. You've brought the little mortal with you." Her burning eyes found Percy's. "How thoughtful."
The other passengers didn't notice. They were reading, sleeping, staring at their phones. The Mist was thick in the bus like fog.
"What do we do?" Grover whispered. "What do we do what do we do—"
"There's an emergency exit in the back," Annabeth said. Her voice was steady. Barely. "If we can get it open, we can jump—"
"We're going sixty miles an hour," Ezra hissed.
"I know that—"
The three old ladies stood up.
Their cardigans were tearing. Their handbags fell to the floor and turned into whips, long and black and crackling with fire. Their arms were stretching. Their faces were changing. Leather wings were unfolding from their backs, ripping through the gray wool, filling the front of the bus.
The passengers still didn't notice. The Mist was too strong.
The bus driver did. He took one look in his mirror and screamed and slammed on the brakes.
Everything happened very fast after that.
The bus slewed sideways across two lanes of the New Jersey Turnpike with a shriek of tires. Passengers flew out of their seats. Lupe yelped and tumbled off Percy's lap. Ezra slammed into the window. Annabeth grabbed the seat in front of her. Grover went flying into the aisle.
And the Furies came down the aisle toward them, wings spread, whips cracking, over the heads of the screaming passengers.
[ALECTO: Whip of Flame!]
The first whip came at Ezra. He threw up his hands and the water in every passenger's water bottle in the bus exploded upward. A clumsy, splattering wall of it. The whip hit the water and hissed and steamed and stopped.
It was a good move. A really good move. Percy saw Ezra's face. He was terrified. But he'd done it.
The second whip came at Annabeth. She ducked under it, drew her bronze knife, and slashed at Megaera's wrist. The Fury shrieked and recoiled.
The third whip came at Percy.
And Percy, Thread-Worn, foggy, slow, with every thought moving through mud, let the sky out.
He didn't think about it. There wasn't time to think. He just reached, the way he'd reached at the bottom of the temple, down into the blazing place under his ribs where the sky had woken up. And he pulled.
[LIGHTNING CALL!]
It came out of his hand in a wild, branching flash of blue-white fire that lit up the whole bus like noon.
It was the first time he'd used it in the real world. It was clumsy and huge and much, much too strong. It hit the whip, and traveled up the whip, and into Tisiphone's arm. The Eldest of the Furies screamed, a high, shocked, furious sound, and was blown backward down the aisle into her sisters, all three of them tumbling in a tangle of wings and whips.
And it also hit the bus.
Every light in the bus exploded. Every phone screen went black. The radio sparked and died. Somewhere under their feet, something in the engine went bang, and the smell of burning wire and diesel filled the air.
[-1,210 damage to Tisiphone.]
[Tisiphone HP: 94%.]
[WARNING: Collateral damage to vehicle. Fire detected in engine compartment.]
Whoops, Percy thought.
The bus was on fire.
"Everybody OFF!" Annabeth was screaming. "Off the bus! Go! GO!"
The Mist was cracking. The other passengers could see the smoke, if not the Furies. They were stampeding for the front door, shoving, tripping, screaming. The driver had already jumped out. Black smoke was pouring up from under the floor.
And the Furies were getting up.
Tisiphone rose out of the tangle with her arm smoking and her eyes blazing, and she looked at Percy. Really looked at him, the way she had at the museum. Except it wasn't hunger in her face this time.
It was something closer to fear.
"Sky," she hissed. "You have the sky in you now. You did not have it before. What are you?"
"I keep getting asked that," Percy said.
"Emergency exit!" Grover was yelling from the back. "I've got it open! Come on!"
Annabeth was already moving. She grabbed Ezra's arm and hauled him toward the back, and he let her, white-faced, staring at the burning front of the bus.
Percy didn't follow them.
He stood in the middle of the aisle between his friends and the three Furies, with smoke pouring up around his ankles and lightning still crackling over his knuckles, and Lupe growling at his feet.
"Percy!" Annabeth screamed from the back. "Come on!"
"Go," he said, without turning around. "Get them off. I'll catch up."
"Percy—"
"Go, Annabeth!"
He heard her hesitate. Then he heard the emergency door bang open, and the three of them jumping out onto the shoulder of the Turnpike.
The three Furies looked at him through the smoke.
"Brave," said Alecto, the Unceasing, in a voice like a guillotine. "Foolish. But brave. You cannot defeat us, little mortal. Not all three. Not even with your stolen sky."
"It's not stolen," Percy said. "And I'm not trying to defeat you."
He was trying to buy time. That was all. Thirty seconds. A minute. Enough for the others to get clear, into the trees beside the highway, where the Furies would lose them.
And he had an idea.
It was a stupid idea. It was probably the Thread-Worn talking, making him reckless. But the bus was on fire, and the fuel line under the floor was cracked and leaking diesel, and he was a son of the sky, and he couldn't burn. Not from his own lightning, at least.
[Great Sage notes: The Host's STATIC SKIN provides immunity to his own lightning. It does not provide immunity to exploding diesel.]
Yeah, Percy thought. That's what Aerokinesis is for.
[Great Sage strongly advises against—]
He scooped Lupe up under one arm. He backed toward the emergency exit, step by step, the Furies following him down the aisle. He reached the door. He stood in it, with the cold air of the Turnpike at his back, and looked at the three of them.
"Hey, Tisiphone," he said.
She hissed.
"I'm really sorry about this."
He threw the lightning down into the floor of the bus, into the leaking fuel line, and jumped.
[AEROKINESIS: Gust!]
The wind caught him and threw him thirty feet across the shoulder of the Turnpike into the wet grass.
And behind him, the Greyhound bus exploded.
It went up in a ball of orange fire that lit the whole gray morning and rattled the windows of the cars stopped on the highway. Black smoke boiled up into the drizzle. And out of the fire, all three Furies came screaming, their wings burning, tumbling end over end into the sky. They kept going up and up into the low clouds, shrieking, until they were gone.
Percy lay on his back in the wet grass with Lupe on his chest, staring up at the smoke.
[ERINYES repelled.]
[+8,400 EXP]
[FAITH EARNED: The Host stood alone against all three Furies so that the quest could escape.]
[+380 Faith Points.]
[Vessel Rank Progress (E → D): 1,831 / 2,000.]
[Great Sage notes: The Host's plan had a 14% probability of success.]
It worked, though.
[Great Sage notes that this is not the point.]
It worked though, Sage.
There was a long pause.
[...It did.]
A shadow fell over him. Then another. Then a third.
Annabeth, Grover and Ezra were standing over him in the grass at the edge of the woods, staring down at him. Annabeth's face was white and furious and wet, either from the drizzle or something else. Grover was shaking. Ezra was staring at the burning wreck of the bus with his mouth open.
"You," Annabeth said. Her voice was trembling. "You idiot. You complete, total, unbelievable idiot. You blew up a bus. With you on it!"
"I wasn't on it," Percy said. "Technically. I was on the door."
"Percy!"
"Everyone got off," he said. "I watched. All the passengers. The driver too. Nobody was hurt."
Annabeth stared at him.
Then she sat down hard in the wet grass next to him, put her face in her hands, and started laughing. It was a shaky, half-hysterical, completely helpless laugh, and it didn't stop for a long time.
Grover sat down on his other side and patted his shoulder awkwardly. "You threw lightning," he said. "In a bus. At the Kindly Ones. That's— Percy, that's— I don't even know what that is."
"Neither do I, G-man."
Only Ezra was still standing.
He looked down at Percy lying in the grass, at the lightning still crackling faintly in his hair, at the burning bus. His face was doing something complicated. Fear. Anger. Something underneath both of them that looked almost like awe, and that he clearly hated.
"They were after me," he said finally. "The Furies. They came for me. Not you."
"I know," Percy said.
"So why'd you stay?"
Percy looked up at him.
"Because they were after you," he said.
Ezra opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.
Then he turned around and stalked off toward the trees without another word. He was shaking, Percy noticed. His hands were clenched into fists so tight they'd gone white.
They walked.
There wasn't anything else to do. The bus was gone, and so were their bags, and police sirens were already wailing up the Turnpike. So they went into the woods, the four of them and a wolf cub, and walked west through the drizzle, through the wet New Jersey pines.
Nobody talked much. Grover played his pipes softly, a thin lonely tune, to keep them from getting lost. Annabeth walked next to Percy, close enough that their shoulders kept bumping, and didn't say anything at all. But every so often she'd glance at him sideways, and look away fast when he caught her.
Ezra walked in front, alone, hacking at branches with Riptide.
They'd been walking for two hours when the sun started to go down, and Percy's Thread-Worn fog started to lift, and Grover's nose started twitching.
"Food," the satyr said. "I smell food. Burgers. Real ones. Grilled."
They came out of the woods onto a lonely stretch of back road, two lanes, no cars. And there, across the road, sitting all by itself in a gravel lot, was a long low warehouse with a sign out front, its neon letters flickering in the dusk.
AUNTY EM'S GARDEN GNOME EMPORIUM
The lot was full of statues.
Hundreds of them. Garden gnomes and stone animals and birdbaths and cherubs, crowding the gravel in every direction. And people. Statues of people, life-sized, so real you'd swear they were about to move. A man with his hands raised to his face. A girl with her mouth open in a scream. A satyr, frozen mid-step, with his reed pipes halfway to his lips.
Grover made a tiny, strangled noise.
"Food!" Ezra said, already striding across the road. "Finally. I'm starving. Come on."
Percy grabbed his arm.
Ezra whirled on him, furious. "What?"
Percy didn't answer. He was looking at the statues. At the frozen satyr with his pipes. At the girl with her mouth open in a scream. At the man with his hands up over his face, like he'd been trying to block out something he couldn't stop seeing.
He remembered this place. Of course he did. He'd eaten a cheeseburger in that warehouse at twelve years old and almost died.
Medusa.
And in his first life, he'd cut her head off.
He'd been twelve and terrified, and she'd been trying to turn him to stone, and Annabeth had told him what to do. He'd done it. He'd swung Riptide with his eyes closed and felt it bite. Afterward he'd mailed her head to Olympus in a cardboard box as a joke. A great, hilarious joke. He'd been very proud of himself.
He'd learned a lot of things since then. On the black shore. With Damasen. About who gets called a monster, and why.
He'd learned what Medusa had been, before she was a monster. A priestess in Athena's temple. A girl who'd made a vow. And a god had come into the temple, a god who wanted her, and when it was over, it was Medusa who was punished. Not the god. Her. Cursed by the goddess she'd served, made into a thing that turned everyone who loved her to stone. Exiled to the edge of the world, to be hunted by heroes for three thousand years.
The god who'd come into the temple was Poseidon.
Percy looked at Ezra. At the son of Poseidon, standing in the road with Riptide in his pocket and his stomach growling, staring at the warehouse.
Then he looked at Annabeth. At the daughter of Athena.
Oh, this is going to go great, he thought.
"Percy?" Annabeth said slowly. She was looking at the statues too now, and he could see it dawning in her eyes. Gorgon. Stone. The old stories. "Percy, these statues—"
"I know," he said quietly.
The door of the warehouse swung open.
A woman stood in the doorway, silhouetted against the warm yellow light inside. She was tall, and dressed in a long black gown, and her head and face were wrapped in a dark veil, so that only a faint gleam showed where her eyes should be. Her voice, when she spoke, was soft and low and sad, with an accent that came from very far away and very long ago.
"Children," she said. "Out so late. Alone, on the road, in the dark." Something moved under the veil. A soft, dry hissing, like a dozen snakes waking up. "Come in. Come in out of the cold. I'll make you something to eat."
Ezra was already walking toward her.
Percy took a breath.
[ENEMY IDENTIFIED: MEDUSA, the Gorgon — Lv 58]
[Abilities: Petrifying Gaze, Serpent Crown, Venom]
[WARNING: Direct eye contact will result in instant petrification.]
[Victory probability (if fought): 31%.]
He didn't reach for his sword.
"Ezra," he said. "Wait."
He walked past him, across the gravel lot, through the crowd of frozen statues, toward the veiled woman in the doorway. He stopped at the bottom of the steps, and looked up at her. Not at her eyes. At the veil, where they would be. And he smiled.
"Thank you," he said. "We'd love to come in. But I think, before we do, you and I should talk."
The hissing under the veil stopped.
The Gorgon went very, very still.
"Talk," she said slowly. As if it were a word in a foreign language. "No one has wanted to talk to me in a very long time, child."
"I know," Percy said. "I'm sorry about that. Really."
And behind him, standing in the gravel among the statues, Annabeth Chase, daughter of Athena, stared at the back of his head with her mouth open, and didn't know what to think at all.