"No Mist," Percy said.
The four of them were sitting around the big glass table in the conference room of Argo Holdings, LLC. The company occupied exactly one office, on the fourteenth floor of a building on Park Avenue that Rachel's father owned. It had a view of the Chrysler Building, a coffee machine that cost more than Percy's mom's car, and a framed nautical chart of Long Island's East End hanging on the wall with two islands circled in red.
It was a Thursday afternoon in November. Outside the window it was raining.
Matt looked up from his laptop. "What do you mean, no Mist?"
"On the deals," Percy said. "The islands. The lawyers, the government, the Gardiner family. We don't use the Mist on any of it. Not once. Not even a little."
Nancy put down her spiral notebook, which had grown into three spiral notebooks and an Excel spreadsheet that made Matt's eyes water.
"Percy," she said, very patiently. "We can make a doorman see a cleaning crew. Rachel can make a security guard think she's the Secretary of the Interior. We could have both these islands by Christmas if we just—"
"No," Percy said.
"Why?"
Percy looked out the window at the rain.
"Because the gods are watching," he said. "All of them. More every day. Hecate. Athena. Hermes. Zeus." He turned back to them. "And someday, one of them is going to come and look at what we built. A whole city full of their kids, that nobody asked them about. And they're going to ask how we got it."
The room went quiet.
"If the answer is we tricked a bunch of mortals with magic," Percy said, "they'll take it away. And they'd be right to. A city built on a lie is just one more thing the gods get to break." He shook his head. "But if the answer is we bought it, fair and square, with lawyers and paperwork and taxes, the same way anybody else would... then it's ours. Nobody can touch it. Not a god, not a Titan, not anybody."
Nancy stared at him.
"We use the Mist to hide it," Percy said. "Once it's ours. The temples, the triremes, the pegasi. That's what it's for. But we get it honestly. Proper channels. All the way."
Matt took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.
"Do you have any idea," he said, "how many proper channels there are?"
There were a lot.
Gardiners Island had belonged to the Gardiner family since 1639. Lion Gardiner had bought it from the Montaukett people for a large black dog, some gunpowder, some rum, and a few blankets. It was the largest privately owned island in the United States, and the family had been fighting over it, in and out of court, for about three hundred years.
The current owners were three cousins. Two of them lived in Manhattan and had refused to sell to anybody for any price, including Rachel's father, who had been trying for eleven years. The third lived in a small, drafty farmhouse in rural Connecticut, raised goats, and hated the other two with a pure, burning, generational hatred.
Her name was Margaret Gardiner-Hollis. She was seventy-eight years old. And she owned exactly one-third of the family trust.
"Which means," said Mr. Pemberton, the lawyer, "that she can force a sale."
Mr. Pemberton was a small, round, extremely cheerful man of about sixty, with half-moon spectacles and a different bow tie every day of the week. Today's was purple, with tiny gold anchors on it. He had worked for Matt's father for twenty years, and he had never once in all that time had clients who paid him up front, in full, in advance, without arguing about the bill. He was the happiest Percy had ever seen a lawyer.
"A partition action," he went on, steepling his fingers. "If one co-owner of a property wishes to sell, and the others refuse, the court may order the property divided, or sold outright and the proceeds split. The other two cousins would fight it, of course. Tooth and nail. It would take months. Possibly a year." His eyes twinkled behind his spectacles. "But Mrs. Gardiner-Hollis would have to want to sell. And to sell to us."
"So we ask her," said Rachel.
"Many people have asked her, my dear," said Mr. Pemberton gently. "She has turned down every one. She hates developers almost as much as she hates her cousins."
Percy thought about a god on a rooftop in Las Vegas. I'd tell her to start with the third cousin in Connecticut. The one who hates the other two.
"Then we don't go as developers," he said.
They drove up to Connecticut on a Saturday in November, Percy and Rachel and Mr. Pemberton, in the back of one of Rachel's father's cars, through a long gray landscape of bare trees and stone walls and wet fields.
Margaret Gardiner-Hollis met them at the door of her farmhouse with a shotgun.
It wasn't loaded. Probably. She held it the way some people hold a cup of coffee, casually, as if she'd forgotten it was there. She was small and wiry and fierce, with white hair cut short as a boy's and a face like a walnut and eyes as sharp as broken glass. A goat was standing behind her in the hallway, chewing on a dish towel.
"Lawyer," she said, looking at Mr. Pemberton. Then her eyes moved to Rachel. "Dare. You're the Dare girl. Your father's been sending me letters for ten years. I burn them." Then her eyes landed on Percy, and narrowed. "And who in God's name are you?"
"Percy Jackson, ma'am," Percy said. "I'm the one who wants to buy your island."
She stared at him.
"You're a child."
"I'm fifteen."
"That's a child."
"Yes, ma'am," Percy said. "Can I tell you why I want it anyway?"
Margaret Gardiner-Hollis looked at him for a long, long moment. The goat behind her finished the dish towel and started on the hem of her cardigan.
Then she lowered the shotgun, and stepped back from the door.
"Wipe your feet," she said. "And don't touch the goat."
He didn't use the Mist. Not once. Not even a little.
He sat at her kitchen table, which was covered in old newspapers and goat-feed catalogs and a jigsaw puzzle of the Battle of Gettysburg. He drank the terrible coffee she made him. And he told her the truth.
Not the whole truth. Not gods and monsters and Fates. But the truth anyway. The part of it that was true in any world.
He told her there were kids out there. A lot of them. Kids who didn't have anywhere to go. Kids whose parents had left, or died, or just never come back. Kids who got bounced from school to school and foster home to foster home and never belonged anywhere. Kids who were different, in ways that made other people afraid of them.
He told her he wanted to build them a place. A real place. Not an orphanage, not a group home. A town. With schools and houses and gardens and a harbor, where they could grow up, and stay as long as they wanted, and come back to whenever they needed to. A place that would be theirs.
"And the island," he said, "is perfect. It's big enough. It's private. It's protected. It's got woods and fields and a harbor. And nobody's going to put a golf course on it, or a resort, or a bunch of mansions. We'd keep the woods wild. Leave the old windmill, and the family cemetery, and the house. All of it." He looked at her. "It'd still be the Gardiner island. It'd just have kids on it."
Margaret Gardiner-Hollis didn't say anything for a long time.
She sat at her kitchen table with her terrible coffee, looking at Percy over the rim of her mug with her sharp, broken-glass eyes. Behind her, out the window, the goats were wandering around a muddy field in the gray November light.
"I grew up on that island," she said at last. "Summers. When I was a girl. My grandfather was still alive then. He'd take me out in the rowboat, and we'd fish off the north point, and he'd tell me stories. About pirates. Captain Kidd buried his treasure on that island, did you know that? They dug it up, but my grandfather swore there was more." Her mouth twisted. "Then he died. And my cousins' fathers took over the trust. And they never let me set foot on it again. Forty years. Not once." Her voice was very quiet. "I've been hating those people for forty years, young man. Hating them so long I'd almost forgotten why."
She looked out the window at her goats.
"Kids," she said. "On my grandfather's island."
"Yes, ma'am."
"Kids who don't have anywhere else to go."
"Yes, ma'am."
She was quiet for a very long time.
Then she put down her coffee mug, and looked at Mr. Pemberton, and said, "Where do I sign?"
It wasn't that easy. Of course it wasn't.
Margaret Gardiner-Hollis filed her partition action in the New York State Supreme Court, Suffolk County, on the second of December. Her two cousins fought it exactly the way Mr. Pemberton had said they would: tooth and nail, with a team of very expensive lawyers from a very expensive firm. They filed motion after motion. They argued that she wasn't mentally competent. They argued that the island was a historic landmark and couldn't be sold. They argued that the trust's original terms from 1639 forbade any sale outside the family. Mr. Pemberton said this was "a delightfully creative piece of fiction."
Nancy kept the books. Every dollar. Every billable hour, every filing fee, every expert witness. She had a separate spreadsheet just for Mr. Pemberton's bow ties, which she said was "for morale."
Matt read everything. Every filing, every motion, every precedent Mr. Pemberton cited. He read New York property law at two in the morning. He read the history of the Gardiner family going back to Lion Gardiner and the black dog. He started showing up at Mr. Pemberton's office after school with questions. After a month, Mr. Pemberton started asking him questions. After two months, he hired Matt as an unpaid intern, and started introducing him to other lawyers as "my associate."
Rachel went to see her father.
She told Percy about it afterward, sitting on the roof of her house in the cold, wrapped in three blankets, with paint on her fingers.
"I told him I needed his help," she said. "Really needed it. Not money. Him. His name, his connections, his people. I told him it was the most important thing I'd ever done." She was quiet for a moment. "He asked me why. And I told him the same thing you told Mrs. Gardiner-Hollis. About the kids."
"What did he say?"
Rachel laughed a little, shakily.
"He didn't say anything," she said. "He just sat there in his big office for like a whole minute. And then he picked up his phone and called his head of government relations and said, Clear my calendar for the next six months."
Plum Island was harder.
Plum Island didn't belong to a family. It belonged to the United States government. It had belonged to the government since 1899, when the Army had bought it to build a fort to guard the entrance to Long Island Sound. Now it belonged to the Department of Homeland Security, which ran a high-security animal disease research center there. The center was full of things Matt wouldn't even describe out loud.
The government didn't sell islands with secret laboratories on them to companies run by teenagers.
But it did sell surplus property.
"The lab is old," Matt said, at another Thursday meeting in the conference room in December. He had a stack of printouts in front of him a foot high. "Really old. It was built in the 1950s. It's falling apart. And there's been talk in Congress for years about building a new one somewhere else, in Kansas, someplace with a big agriculture school, and closing this one down."
"How long has there been talk?" Percy asked.
"Like, ten years."
"So it's never going to happen."
"It's going to happen," said Matt. "Eventually. The building's literally rotting. And when it does, the law says the government has to sell the island. Through the General Services Administration. Public auction." He tapped the stack of paper. "That's our channel. The only one. We can't make them close the lab. But we can be ready when they do. And we can make sure that when they think about what happens to the island afterward, they're thinking about us."
And so they did.
It was the most boring work Percy had ever done in two lifetimes. And it was the most important.
Rachel's father's government relations people set up meetings. Meetings with the local town government in Southold. Meetings with conservation groups who wanted to protect Plum Island's beaches and marshes, which were a nesting ground for endangered birds and full of rare plants. Meetings with historic preservation societies who wanted to save the old Army fort, and the century-old lighthouse on the island's western tip.
Percy went to some of them. He wore a suit that Rachel's father's tailor had made him. He sat in the back of town council meetings in Southold, under fluorescent lights, while old men argued about zoning. He sat across from very serious women from the Audubon Society, and listened to them talk about piping plovers and roseate terns.
And he made promises.
We'll protect the beaches. We'll keep the marshes wild. We'll restore the lighthouse. We'll preserve the fort. We won't build a single thing on the nesting grounds. We'll let researchers come and count the birds every year.
All of it was true. All of it was stuff he'd planned to do anyway. Demigods needed wild places too, and Demeter's kids would kill him if he paved over a marsh.
The conservation groups started writing letters. To their congressman. To the Department of Homeland Security. To the General Services Administration. If Plum Island is ever sold, the letters said, we urge you to consider the proposal from Argo Holdings, which has committed to preserving the island's unique natural and historic heritage.
Mr. Pemberton read one of the letters aloud at a Thursday meeting in January and then took off his spectacles and wiped his eyes.
"Do you know," he said, "in forty years of practicing law, I have never once seen a client win the Audubon Society to their side." He beamed at Percy. "Young man, I don't know what you're really planning to do with these islands. And I suspect it's much stranger than you're telling me. But I am going to enjoy every minute of finding out."
In between, there was the Mist.
And the tower.
Percy took the three of them in for the first time on a Friday night in December. All four of them, lying on the floor of Rachel's room, holding hands, while Lupe snored on the bed.
[COMPANION ENTRY: The Host brings three Thread-Bound companions into the Loom.]
[Companions will enter the Spindle Room for class assignment.]
He'd been worried about it for weeks. About what the tower would do to them. Whether they'd be ready.
He needn't have worried.
The Spindle Room took one look at Nancy Bobofit and wound her a thread of solid iron-gray.
[NANCY BOBOFIT: Class assigned — FIGHTER (Protection).]
[Reason: The subject has spent her life standing between those she loves and the things that would hurt them.]
Nancy read the screen, and went very quiet, and didn't say anything for a while.
Matt got WIZARD, which surprised no one. He was so excited about the spellbooks that he forgot to be scared of the slimes on Floor 1. Then one landed on his head, and he remembered.
Rachel's spindle was green.
[RACHEL ELIZABETH DARE: Class assigned — BARD (College of Visions).]
[Reason: The subject paints what has not yet happened.]
They fought slimes on Floor 1 for a whole tower day. Nancy punched them. Matt read spells at them very slowly, with Percy, who could read Ancient Greek better than English, helping him sound out the words. Rachel stood behind them both and painted. She actually painted, with a brush that glowed, on the air itself. Where her colors touched the other two, they moved faster and hit harder.
At the end of the day they sat on the edge of the Slime Nest's last cave, covered in green goo, laughing so hard they couldn't breathe.
[Companions: Nancy Bobofit (Lv 4) · Matt Sloan (Lv 3) · Rachel Elizabeth Dare (Lv 4).]
[FAITH: Companion witnesses observed the Host in combat. +30 Faith.]
"That," said Nancy, wiping slime out of her eyebrows, "was the most fun I've ever had in my life."
"I'm going to have nightmares about slimes for a year," said Matt.
"Same time next week?" said Rachel.
Percy grinned.
Christmas came and went.
They spent it in the little apartment on the Upper East Side, all of them. Percy and his mom and Paul. Nancy and her mother, who was two years sober now and had brought a pie. Matt and his parents, who had brought far too much food and a bottle of wine Paul said cost more than his car. Rachel and her father, who looked deeply out of place in the cramped little living room with his expensive suit. But he stayed for four hours, and laughed at Paul's jokes, and at one point Percy saw him wipe his eyes when Rachel gave him a painting she'd made.
It was a painting of an island. Green, with white cliffs, and a harbor full of strange old ships. And a city on the hill, all white marble and terracotta roofs, glowing in the sunset.
Rachel hadn't told anyone what it was.
She didn't have to.
Later that night, after everyone else had gone home, an Iris message shimmered into the air above the kitchen sink. Two faces looked out of it, grinning.
"Merry Christmas!" said Annabeth and Ezra at the same time.
They were at camp. Annabeth stayed year-round, and Ezra had spent the holidays there too, rather than go back to his mother's apartment. They were sitting on the porch of the Big House, wrapped in blankets. There was snow on the ground behind them, and the strawberry fields were white under the moon.
They talked for an hour. Annabeth told him about the architecture books Chiron had found for her. Ezra told him about training.
"Every day," he said, very seriously. "Like I said. Every single day. Sword in the morning, water in the afternoon, Chiron in the evening." He hesitated. "My dad came. Twice. To the beach. He showed me some stuff."
"What kind of stuff?"
Ezra just grinned. "You'll see."
And as the Iris message flickered and faded, Percy had a sudden, strange feeling. That the boy on the other side of the rainbow wasn't quite the same boy he'd left on the beach in August.
[Great Sage notes: Ezra Coleman's thread has grown thicker.]
The first week of February, Mr. Pemberton called Percy at seven in the morning, before school, so excited he could barely speak.
"The judge has ruled," he said. "In Mrs. Gardiner-Hollis's favor. On every count. The partition is granted. The cousins' lawyers are already talking about an appeal, but it won't go anywhere. I've read their briefs. They're grasping at straws." He took a breath. "And young man... their lawyers have just called me. The cousins want to settle. Out of court. They'll sell their two-thirds to us, along with hers, at a fair price, if we agree to let the family keep the right to visit the old house and the cemetery once a year."
Percy stood in his kitchen in his pajamas with the phone pressed to his ear, and couldn't say anything at all.
"Mr. Jackson?" said Mr. Pemberton. "Are you still there?"
"Yeah," Percy said hoarsely. "Yeah. Tell them yes. Tell them they can visit whenever they want. As often as they want."
"I'll draw up the papers."
"And Mr. Pemberton?"
"Yes?"
"Tell Mrs. Gardiner-Hollis she can come too," Percy said. "Every summer. For as long as she wants. She can fish off the north point."
There was a pause on the other end of the line.
Then Mr. Pemberton said, very quietly, "I'll tell her."
[LEGENDARY QUEST UPDATED: CITY OF THE UNCLAIMED.]
[Stage 1: Foundations. Gardiners Island: Ruling secured. Closing pending.]
[Plum Island: Federal relocation of the research facility under review.]
And three days later, on the evening news, buried at the end of a segment about the federal budget, a reporter announced that the Department of Homeland Security had finally approved the construction of a new animal disease research facility in Manhattan, Kansas. The aging Plum Island Animal Disease Center in New York would be phased out.
The island would be declared surplus federal property, and sold.
Matt called Percy at nine o'clock that night, screaming so loud Percy had to hold the phone away from his ear.
"THEY'RE CLOSING IT! THEY'RE ACTUALLY CLOSING IT!"
Percy sat on his bed in the dark, with Lupe in his lap, and laughed until he cried.
Proper channels, he thought.
All the way.