They were exactly the way he remembered them.
That was the first thing that hit him. Not that they were here, because he'd known they would be. It was that they were exactly the same. Same faces. Same clothes. As if the world hadn't moved at all since he last saw them, which, for them, it hadn't.
Nico di Angelo was ten years old. He was small and skinny, with a mop of dark hair and olive skin and huge, bright, excited eyes. He was wearing a green cap pushed back on his head, and he was leaning so far across the table that his elbows were in the cards. He was talking a mile a minute. He looked nothing at all like the boy Percy had known later: pale and silent, dressed in black, with a sword of Stygian iron and shadows that followed him everywhere like a dog.
He looked happy.
Across from him sat his sister. Bianca was twelve, maybe. She had the same dark hair, pulled back, and the same olive skin. But her eyes were older, quieter, the eyes of somebody who'd been taking care of a little brother for a long time. She was wearing a green velvet hat and a dark coat that was decades out of style. She was holding her cards like she had no idea what any of them meant, and smiling at Nico with a patient, fond exasperation that made Percy's chest hurt.
The last time he'd seen Bianca di Angelo, in his first life, she'd been walking into the belly of a broken bronze giant in a junkyard in the desert. She was a Hunter of Artemis, with a silver bow on her back, and she was saying, Tell Nico... tell him I'm sorry.
She never came out.
She's alive, Percy thought. She's alive. She's right there. She's playing Mythomagic.
He walked toward the table. His legs were not working right. That might have been the Thread-Worn, or it might not.
The other kids at the table looked up at him with glassy Lotus smiles and then looked away, uninterested. Nico didn't look up at all. He was too busy explaining, with tremendous patience, why Bianca could not play a Minotaur against a Hades card.
"Because Hades is a god," he said. "Gods beat monsters. That's the whole point. Bianca. Are you even listening?"
"I'm listening," Bianca said, smiling. "I just think it's silly. Why would anyone want to play Hades? He's the bad guy."
"He's not the bad guy," Nico said, outraged. "He's misunderstood. Everybody's mean to him just because he has the dead people. Somebody has to have the dead people."
Percy made a sound. He didn't mean to. It was something between a laugh and a sob, and it came out of him before he could stop it.
Bianca looked up.
She looked at him for one second with polite, puzzled Lotus-softness. Who's this strange boy staring at us?
And then her face changed.
It didn't change all at once. It was slow, like watching ice crack. Her eyes found his face and caught there, and something moved behind them. Something deep and buried, pushing up through the gold fog of the Lotus. Her smile faded. Her lips parted. The cards slipped out of her hand one by one and fluttered down onto the table.
"You," she whispered.
Nico stopped talking and looked up, annoyed. "Bianca, you dropped your—"
Then he saw Percy too.
And Nico di Angelo, ten years old, went white as paper.
[WARNING: Thread resonance detected.]
[Subjects: Bianca di Angelo, Nico di Angelo. Bloodline: Hades.]
[The subjects' threads have brushed the Host's thread in another weave. Children of death stand closest to the place where the threads are spun. Echoes of that weave are surfacing.]
[Great Sage advises caution. The subjects are experiencing memories of lives they have not lived in this world.]
"I know you," Bianca said. Her voice was shaking. "I know you. I... how do I know you?"
"Percy," Nico said.
He said it like it was the answer to a question he'd been asking his whole life. He was staring at Percy with his mouth open and his eyes huge. His hands had gone still on the table, in the middle of the scattered cards.
"You're Percy," he said. "You're Percy. I dreamed about you. I've been dreaming about you for... for..." He stopped. His face crumpled in confusion. "How long have we been here? Bianca. How long have we been here?"
Bianca wasn't listening. She was standing up, slowly, her chair scraping back on the carpet, staring at Percy like he was a ghost.
"There was a school," she said. "In the snow. A dance. A manticore." Her hand went to her chest, like it hurt. "And girls in silver. With bows. And a lady... a goddess, with eyes like the moon. She asked me to follow her, and I said yes. I said yes and I left Nico behind..."
She was crying now. Tears running down her face. She didn't seem to notice.
"And a junkyard," she whispered. "A giant. Made of metal. And I went inside it, and I..." She looked at Percy, white-faced. "I died. Didn't I. I died in there. And you were the one who told Nico."
Percy couldn't say anything. His throat had closed up completely.
He nodded.
Nico made a sound like he'd been punched. He scrambled around the table and grabbed his sister's arm with both hands, holding on like she might disappear.
"No," he said. "No, no, no, that was a dream. That was just a dream. You're right here. You're right here, Bianca."
"I'm right here," Bianca said, and put her arm around him without looking away from Percy. "I'm right here, Nico. It's okay."
The other kids at the table had drifted off, wandering toward the arcade without a backward glance. The Lotus didn't like crying. It didn't like anything that wasn't happy, so it pulled its people away from it, gently, like a tide.
Percy pulled out a chair and sat down, because his legs had finally given up.
"Sit down," he said hoarsely. "Both of you. Please. I'll explain. As much as I can."
He gave them the gist.
He didn't give them all of it. There wasn't time, and some of it was too heavy for a ten-year-old and a twelve-year-old to carry in one afternoon. But he gave them enough.
He told them they'd been in the Lotus Hotel since 1939, and that it was the twenty-first century now. Bianca put her hand over her mouth. Nico just stared.
He told them who their father was.
Nico wasn't surprised. "I knew it," he whispered, staring down at the Hades card in the middle of the table. "I knew it. In the dream, I knew it." Bianca closed her eyes, like she'd always known too and had just been waiting for someone to say it out loud.
He told them about their mother. Not the details. Just that she'd died protecting them, and that their father had loved her, and that he'd hidden them here to keep them safe from the god who'd killed her.
"Zeus," Bianca said quietly.
"Yeah." Percy looked down at the table. "About that. There's something I have to tell you, and you're not going to like it."
He told them about the Fates.
About another world, a world where a boy named Percy Jackson had been a son of Poseidon, and had found two kids in a school in the snow and brought them to camp. And had promised to keep one of them safe, and failed. About a war against the Titans, and how the boy who lost his sister grew up into somebody dark and lonely and brave, who'd saved the world more times than anyone ever thanked him for.
About how that world ended. How the Fates had pulled Percy out of it, and dropped him into this one. With a new father, and a tower in his head, and a second chance to get it right.
"Zeus is my dad now," he said. "In this world. I didn't pick it. It just happened. I know what he did to your mom. I know. And I'm not going to pretend that's okay." He looked up at them. "But I'm not him. I swear I'm not. And I'm not going to let anybody hurt either of you. Not him. Not anybody. Not this time."
There was a long silence at the little card table, in the middle of the gold and noise of the Lotus.
Then Nico said, very small, "In the dream. When I got older. Were we... were we friends? You and me?"
Percy thought about it. About a boy who'd hated him for a year. Who'd led him into the Labyrinth and the Underworld, and dragged him into the River Styx, and stood beside him in the final battle with an army of the dead at his back. Who'd told him, years later, in a quiet voice, things he'd never told anyone else.
"Yeah," he said. "Eventually. It took us a while. You were really mad at me for a long time."
"Why?"
"Because of Bianca."
Nico looked at his sister. Then back at Percy. And something in his face set, hard and stubborn, in a way that was so much like the older Nico it was almost scary.
"I'm not going to be mad at you this time," he said firmly.
Percy laughed, wet and shaky. "Okay."
"I mean it."
"I know you do."
[FAITH: Nico di Angelo believes in the Host. +60 Faith.]
[FAITH: Bianca di Angelo believes in the Host. +55 Faith.]
[Note: Faith from children of the Big Three carries additional weight.]
"So you're taking us with you," Bianca said. "Right? Out of here?"
Percy had been dreading that question.
"Not yet," he said.
Nico's face fell so fast it was like watching something break.
"Listen to me," Percy said, leaning forward. "Both of you. Please. I'm in the middle of a quest. A really bad one. In two days I have to walk into the Underworld. Your dad's place. And then I have to fight a god, and then I have to go to Olympus and stand in front of Zeus, the guy who killed your mom. If I take you with me now, he'll find out about you. And I don't know what he'll do."
Bianca's jaw tightened. She understood. He could see it. She didn't like it, but she understood.
"And when I get back," Percy went on, "I'm going to be at camp, and the whole camp is going to be full of gods watching me. It's not safe yet. There's no place for you yet. But there will be."
"What do you mean?" Nico asked.
Percy told them about the islands.
About Gardiners Island, and Plum Island, and three fourteen-year-olds in Manhattan who'd just opened envelopes from a god in a delivery uniform. About a city. A real one. With walls and houses and schools and a place for every kid nobody had ever claimed. A place where children of the Big Three didn't have to hide in a hotel for sixty years because the people who were supposed to protect them were the ones they had to be protected from.
"It's going to take a while," he said. "A few years. But when it's ready, I'm coming back here. And I'm taking you home. Both of you. I promise."
"A few years," Nico repeated. He looked around at the Lotus, at the lights and the games and the endless golden noise. "In here?"
"It won't feel like years," Percy said gently. "That's the thing about this place. It'll feel like a couple of days. You'll play some games. You'll eat some fries. And then I'll come walking through that door, and it'll feel like I only just left."
Bianca was quiet for a moment.
"But we'll forget," she said. "Won't we. The Lotus. It makes you forget. We'll forget you came. We'll forget the dreams. We'll forget all of it."
"No," Percy said. "You won't."
He opened his inventory.
[INVENTORY]
[Select items to withdraw.]
The first thing he took out was a staff.
It was about as long as Nico was tall. It was made of some pale gray wood that looked almost like bone, carved all over with tiny spiraling patterns, and capped at the top with a smooth black stone that seemed to drink the light around it. Even in the gaudy gold of the Lotus, the staff was quiet. Still. Like a held breath.
[ITEM: STAFF OF THE QUIET DEAD (Rare)]
[Origin: The Tower of Trials.]
[A necromancer's focus. Amplifies the wielder's connection to the shades. Grants resistance to mind-altering effects and the fear of death. Grows with its bearer.]
He'd gotten it on the Tower's fourth floor, in a crypt at the end of a long dark corridor, from a skeleton king who'd tried very hard to kill him. He hadn't used it since. It had never felt right in his hands. It had always felt like it was waiting for someone else.
He held it out to Nico.
Nico stared at it. Then, slowly, reverently, he reached out and wrapped both his small hands around the gray wood.
The black stone at the top flickered.
It was barely anything. A tiny pulse of darkness, like a heartbeat. But the air around the table went cool, and the sound of the casino dimmed, just for a second. And Nico gasped, like somebody had opened a window in a stuffy room.
"I can hear them," he whispered. "Percy. I can hear them. They're so quiet. They're... they're saying hello."
"Yeah," Percy said softly. "They do that."
Nico hugged the staff to his chest. The gold Lotus haze in his eyes had cleared completely. He looked more awake than Percy had ever seen him.
"As long as you're holding that, the Lotus can't touch your memories," Percy said. "You'll still feel like time's going fast. But you'll remember. Me. The dreams. Everything. Keep it close. Don't let anybody take it."
Nico nodded fiercely.
The second thing Percy took out was a small wooden box.
Inside it, nestled in dark velvet, were five cards. They looked a little like Mythomagic cards, actually, which made Nico lean over with sudden fierce interest. But they were older and thicker, edged in silver, and each one had a painting on its face of a great gray wolf, howling at a silver moon.
[ITEM: WOLF SUMMON CARDS x5 (Rare)]
[Origin: The Tower of Trials.]
[Tear a card to summon a spirit wolf of the moonlit hunt. Each wolf will defend the summoner until dawn, or until destroyed. Cards regenerate at the rate of one per full moon.]
He'd won them on the Tower's second floor, from a pack of shadow wolves he'd fought for a whole night in a forest that never ended. Lupe had stirred in her sleep every time he so much as looked at them.
He gave the box to Bianca.
She opened it and looked at the wolves for a long time. Something moved on her face. Something wistful and sad and a little bit fierce.
"Wolves," she said quietly. "The girls in silver had wolves. Hunting dogs, and wolves. They ran beside us in the snow."
"I know," Percy said. "They're for protection. If anything ever comes for you here, any monster, anybody, you tear one of those, and something will come and fight it for you. Until I get here."
Bianca closed the box very carefully and held it in both hands.
The last thing he took out was a ring.
It was small and simple. Silver, with a single tiny pale-blue stone set into it, shaped like a forget-me-not flower. He'd bought it at the Market three weeks ago, with almost every coin he had, from a Broker who'd smiled in a way Percy hadn't liked at all. He'd bought it without knowing why. Something had just told him to.
Now he knew why.
[ITEM: RING OF THE UNFORGOTTEN (Epic)]
[The bearer cannot be made to forget by magic, curse, or enchantment. Once per year, the bearer may send a single dream to one person they love, no matter where they are.]
He held it out to Bianca.
"This one's yours too," he said. "Nico has the staff. You have this. The Lotus can't make you forget while you're wearing it. And once a year, you can send me a dream. Just one. Tell me how you're doing. Tell me if anything's wrong." He swallowed. "Or just tell me you're okay. That'd be enough."
Bianca took the ring. She slid it onto her finger. The little blue stone caught the light.
She looked at it for a long time. Then she looked up at Percy, and her eyes were wet again. But she was smiling.
"In the other world," she said. "Did you ever get to say goodbye? To me?"
Percy shook his head. He couldn't speak.
Bianca di Angelo got up, came around the table, and hugged him.
She was small and thin and she smelled like old velvet and the faint sweetness of the Lotus. She hugged him hard, the way you'd hug someone you'd known a long time, someone you'd missed. And Percy hugged her back. He put his face in her shoulder and held on, and didn't say anything at all, because there was nothing to say. She was alive. She was here.
After a moment, Nico climbed in too, staff and all, and wrapped himself around both of them.
[HIDDEN QUEST UNLOCKED: THE CHILDREN WHO WAITED]
[Return to the Lotus Hotel and Casino and bring Bianca and Nico di Angelo home.]
[Time limit: Before the Lotus releases them on its own.]
[Reward: ???]
[Great Sage notes: The Host is crying.]
I know.
[Great Sage will not mention it again.]
[Real time elapsed: 3 hours, 26 minutes.]
[The Host has exceeded the planned duration. Great Sage recommends immediate departure.]
Percy pulled back and wiped his face on his sleeve.
"I have to go," he said. "My friends are still here. They're stuck in the Lotus, and if I leave them too long, it'll be days."
"Go," Bianca said. She stepped back and squared her shoulders, and she was a big sister again. Calm and steady, the way she must have been for Nico all those years. "We'll be okay. We've been okay for sixty years, apparently." A little smile. "We can do a few more."
Nico was holding his staff in both hands, looking up at Percy with a face that was trying very hard not to cry.
"You'll come back?" he said. "For real?"
Percy knelt down in front of him so they were eye to eye.
"Nico," he said. "In the other world, you were the one who always showed up. When nobody else did. When everybody else gave up on me, you showed up. Every time." He put a hand on Nico's shoulder. "So this time, I'm going to show up for you. I promise. On the Styx, if you want."
Nico's eyes went huge. "You can't swear on the Styx. That's the most serious promise there is."
"I know," Percy said. "I swear on the River Styx. I'll come back for you. Both of you."
Thunder rumbled, somewhere far away, out over the desert. Even inside the Lotus, they heard it.
Nico stared at him. Then he threw his arms around Percy's neck and squeezed so tight it hurt.
"Okay," he whispered into his shoulder. "Okay. I'll wait."
[OATH SWORN: ON THE RIVER STYX.]
[The Host has sworn to return for Bianca and Nico di Angelo. The oath is binding.]
Getting the others out of the Lotus was much, much harder.
Grover was in the arcade, three games further down the row, and when Percy grabbed his arm he blinked up at him with a happy, glazed smile and said, "Percy! We just got here! Look, I got the high score!" Percy had to physically pull him off the stool and carry him half the way down the walkway, and Grover bleated in protest the whole way.
Annabeth was still in the gift shop, still turning the pages of her architecture book. When Percy took it out of her hands, she looked at him with a slow, puzzled frown, like she couldn't quite remember who he was. Then something sparked in her gray eyes, a tiny flicker of real Annabeth fighting through the fog.
"Percy," she said slowly. "What... what day is it?"
"June eighteenth," Percy said. "Still. Barely. Come on."
The date hit her like a slap. He watched it happen. Her eyes cleared, and she went white. "The solstice. The quest. Percy, how long have we—"
"Three and a half hours. We're fine. Help me get Ezra."
Ezra was the worst. He was still at the blackjack table, and he'd won so many chips they were piled up around him like a fort, and he did not want to go. When Percy took his arm, he shook it off. When Annabeth shouted his name in his ear, he just laughed.
"Ten minutes," he said, beaming. "Just ten more minutes. I'm on a streak, guys. I've never been on a streak before. I've never won anything before."
Percy stopped.
He looked at Ezra. Really looked at him. At the big, glazed, happy smile. And underneath it, he saw the thing he'd been starting to see ever since St. Louis. A kid who'd never had a streak. Who'd never won anything. Whose mom had never stayed and whose dad had never called and who'd never, in his whole life, been anybody's first choice.
The Lotus knew that. That was why it had given him the table.
Percy sat down next to him.
"Ezra," he said quietly. "Your dad wants to see you."
Ezra's smile flickered.
"Ares said so," Percy said. "Remember? Santa Monica. The beach. Your dad, Poseidon, the god of the sea, wants to talk to you. You. He's never asked to talk to anybody. He's asking for you."
The glaze in Ezra's eyes cracked. Just a little.
"And the thing in the Tunnel of Love," Percy went on. "With the water. You stopped a flood. A god's flood. By listening. I've never seen anybody do that. That's better than any blackjack streak in the world, Ezra. That's real."
Ezra stared at him. The stacks of gold chips glittered under the lights. Then, slowly, his hand opened. The chip he'd been holding fell onto the felt with a little click.
"My dad," he said. His voice was thick and strange. "My dad wants to see me."
"Yeah."
Ezra blinked. Hard. Then he stood up so fast his chair fell over.
"Let's go," he said. "Let's go right now. Before I change my mind."
They went.
They walked out of the Lotus Hotel and Casino at 11:15 in the morning, blinking in the desert sun like four moles coming out of a burrow. The doors hissed shut behind them, and the smell of cinnamon and summer faded, and the heat of the real world hit them like a wall.
Grover sneezed. Annabeth shuddered all over, hard, like a wet dog. Ezra stood on the sidewalk with his hands over his face for a while.
Percy looked back once, at the giant neon flower over the doors. Pink. Gold. Pink. Gold.
A few years, he thought. Hold on. Both of you. Hold on.
Then he pulled a green-and-gold card out of his pocket and walked to the curb and waved down a taxi.
"Los Angeles," he told the driver, a tired-looking man with a Dodgers cap. "Santa Monica. The beach."
The driver snorted. "Kid, that's a four-hour drive. That'll cost you more than—"
Percy held up the LotusCash card.
The driver looked at it. His eyes went faintly, briefly glassy.
"Get in," he said.
They piled into the back seat, four kids and a wolf cub, with a god's shield wrapped in a moving blanket across their knees. The taxi pulled out into traffic and turned west, toward the mountains and the sea and the gates of the dead.
Grover was asleep before they hit the highway. Annabeth followed him a few minutes later, her head tipping onto Grover's shoulder. Ezra lasted the longest. He stared out the window at the desert going by, his jaw tight, his hand wrapped around the pen in his pocket.
"Percy," he said, eventually. Quietly, so he wouldn't wake the others.
"Yeah?"
"Those two kids. At the card table. The ones you were hugging." Ezra didn't look at him. "Who were they?"
Percy leaned his head back against the seat and closed his eyes. The Thread-Worn fog was rolling back in, thick and heavy, now that the adrenaline was fading.
[THREAD-WORN (Compounded): Remaining: 17 hours.]
"Family," he said. "Kind of. It's complicated."
Ezra was quiet for a while.
"Everything's complicated with you," he said finally.
"Yeah," Percy agreed, already falling asleep. "I get that a lot."
The taxi rolled west across the desert, toward Los Angeles, toward a beach where a god was waiting. Toward a recording studio in West Hollywood, and a ferryman who wanted cash, and a three-headed dog, and a throne of bones. Toward a bolt that had to be found and a war that had to be stopped.
In Percy's pocket, a single white feather stirred faintly, as if in a breeze.
And three thousand miles away, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, a red-haired girl with paint on her fingers stood at her front door in her socks. She was holding a thick cream envelope with a gold lotus on the corner. A delivery man in winged sneakers was already strolling away down the block, whistling. She read the letter once. Then she read it again. Then she ran upstairs, two steps at a time, to find a phone.
"Nancy," Rachel Elizabeth Dare said breathlessly, the second the line picked up. "Did you get one too?"
On the other end of the line, very faintly, Rachel could hear pages flipping. Fast. Like somebody was already paging through a jet ski catalog.
"Rachel," said Nancy Bobofit. "Get Matt. We're starting a company."