The closing on Gardiners Island happened on the fourteenth of March, in a conference room on the thirty-second floor of a law firm on Madison Avenue, and it took four hours and eleven minutes.
Percy wasn't allowed to sign anything. He was fifteen. Rachel's father signed, as the managing partner of Argo Holdings. Rachel signed underneath him, as president. Matt and Nancy signed as witnesses. Mr. Pemberton signed so many things that by the end he had ink on his bow tie.
The two cousins sat on the other side of the long table with their very expensive lawyers and didn't look at anyone.
Margaret Gardiner-Hollis sat at the end of the table in a tweed jacket that smelled faintly of goat, and looked at everyone. Especially Percy. When the last page was signed, and the lawyers started shuffling their papers into their briefcases, she got up and walked around the table and stood in front of him.
She was so small she barely came up to his shoulder.
"The north point," she said. "Where my grandfather fished. There's a rock there, shaped like a whale. If you build anything on that rock, young man, I'll come back from the dead to haunt you."
"I won't, ma'am," Percy said. "I promise."
She looked up at him with her sharp, broken-glass eyes for a long moment.
Then she reached up, and patted his cheek. Twice. The way a grandmother would.
"Good boy," she said gruffly. And walked out.
[LEGENDARY QUEST UPDATED: CITY OF THE UNCLAIMED.]
[Stage 1: Foundations. Gardiners Island: ACQUIRED. (1/2)]
[+10,000 EXP.]
[FAITH: Margaret Gardiner-Hollis believes in the Host. +60 Faith.]
That night, the four of them went up on the roof of Rachel's house with a bottle of sparkling cider and four plastic cups. They toasted, and screamed, and danced around in the cold like idiots, until the doorman came up to see what was going on. Rachel made him see four very quiet teenagers doing homework.
One down.
One to go.
The General Services Administration announced the public sale of Plum Island in April.
It was supposed to take years. Environmental impact studies. Public comment periods. Congressional review. Matt had shown Percy a timeline from the last time the government had sold an island, and it had taken six.
It didn't take six years this time.
Percy didn't use the Mist. Not once. But he didn't have to. He had something better.
He had the Audubon Society.
And the Nature Conservancy. And the Long Island Historical Society, and the Southold Town Board, and the Lighthouse Preservation League, and three different universities with marine biology programs. And a congressman who had received, over the course of the winter, eleven hundred letters from his constituents about piping plovers.
All of them had a proposal on file. All of them had the same proposal. Argo Holdings will protect the beaches, preserve the marshes, restore the lighthouse, save the fort. All of them had written to the GSA. All of them had been very, very loud.
And the government, which had been dreading years of lawsuits from every environmental group on the East Coast, took one look at the single bidder that every environmental group on the East Coast actually supported. It decided to move fast.
"They're structuring it as a sealed-bid auction with conservation covenants," Matt said, at the last Thursday meeting in April. He'd been awake for two days. His eyes were red and his hair was sticking up and he had never looked happier. "Any buyer has to agree to the same environmental and historic protections we already promised. Which means every developer who was going to bid against us just... dropped out. Nobody else wants an island they can't build condos on."
"So it's just us?" Nancy said.
"It's just us." Matt grinned. "And one other bidder. Some company out of Delaware. Nobody's ever heard of them. Mr. Pemberton thinks it's a shell."
Percy frowned. "A shell for who?"
"No idea. He's looking into it."
The bids were due on the thirtieth of May.
Percy had four weeks.
And a floor to climb.
He went up on the first of May, on a Friday night, alone.
He'd thought about taking the others. They'd gotten good, over the winter. Nancy was Level 19, Matt was 16, Rachel was 18, and the three of them had cleared Floors 1 and 2 together without him. But Floor 12 was Rank D. Enemies in the eighties. A boss at Level 90. One mistake in there and they'd be ejected at 1 HP with ten percent of whatever killed them carried home to their real bodies.
He wasn't ready to see that happen to them. Not yet.
[FLOOR 12: STORMVEIL CASTLE]
[Rank: D]
[Boss: Lv 90]
[Host Level: 86]
[MAIN QUEST: Slay the Lord of Stormveil.]
[SIDE QUEST: Free the Prisoners.]
[HIDDEN QUEST: ???]
The castle was a nightmare.
It wasn't the soldiers, though there were plenty of those. Gray, rusted, grim men who fought from the ramparts with spears and crossbows, and wouldn't stop. It wasn't the ballistae on the walls, great iron-tipped bolts as long as a car that came screaming out of the mist with no warning, and punched holes in solid stone. It wasn't even the knights, though the Castle Knights were Level 85 and fought in pairs like the Banished Knights had, only better.
It was the things.
The Grafted Soldiers. Men who'd had other men's arms sewn onto them. Three arms, four, five, sprouting from their shoulders and their backs and their sides, all holding swords. The Flesh Beasts in the castle's lower levels, things that had once been dogs or wolves or men, so twisted and stitched together that you couldn't tell anymore. They didn't scream when they died. They sighed. Like they were relieved.
Percy had fought a lot of monsters in two lifetimes. He'd never fought anything that made him feel sick before.
[Great Sage notes: This floor's threads are spun from cruelty. Great Sage recommends the Host remember that it is not real.]
It was real somewhere, Percy thought, wiping black blood off Proteus in a corridor full of the dead. That's the point of the tower. Every floor is a thread from somewhere real.
[...Yes.]
So somebody really did this. To real people.
[Yes.]
Percy didn't say anything else. He just kept going.
He found the prisoners on the second day.
They were in the castle's dungeons, deep below the great hall, in a long row of iron cages hanging from chains over a pit. There were twenty of them. Men and women and a few who were barely more than kids. Gaunt and filthy and silent, with dead eyes, hanging there in the dark, waiting.
Waiting to be grafted.
[SIDE QUEST: FREE THE PRISONERS. 20 prisoners awaiting the grafting table. Release them.]
He got them out. It took most of a day. The cages were enchanted and the locks were cursed, and every time he opened one, something came screaming up out of the pit to stop him. He fought it all with his teeth gritted and Hecate's Unravel burning through his MP, curse after curse after curse. He had Asterion and Gorrath hold the stairway while Lazarus raised skeletons out of the pit to fight whatever came up it. He had Chi-Chi breathe fire across the chains, and Rime freeze the locks until they shattered.
And one by one, he got them out.
The last prisoner was a girl. Maybe twelve. With matted dark hair and huge eyes, and a thin silver chain around her neck with a tiny charm on it. When Percy lifted her out of the cage, she didn't say anything. She just held on to his jacket with both fists, and wouldn't let go.
He carried her up the stairs himself, all the way out of the dungeons, out of the castle, to the broken bridge at the gate where the others were waiting.
When he set her down, she finally looked at him.
"Are you going to kill him?" she whispered. "The king. The one who sews people."
"Yeah," Percy said. "I am."
The girl looked at him for a long moment. Then she took the silver chain off her neck, and pressed it into his hand.
"For luck," she said.
And she faded into gold. All twenty of them did, one by one, standing on the broken bridge in the rain, smiling.
[SIDE QUEST COMPLETE: FREE THE PRISONERS.]
[+40,000 EXP.]
[LEVEL UP! Level 86 → Level 87.]
[Item acquired: THE PRISONER'S CHARM. +10% resistance to curses and corruption. A gift freely given.]
The hidden quest, he found almost by accident.
He was on his way to the great hall where the boss was waiting. He took a wrong turn on the ramparts and ended up in a small round tower room he hadn't meant to find. It was full of shelves of jars. Jars with things floating in them. Hands. Eyes. Wings. A dragon's head the size of a refrigerator, floating in green liquid, its eyes half-open.
And in the middle of the room, a table.
It was a long, heavy stone table, carved with grooves and channels for blood, and covered in tools. Needles, and knives, and saws, and spools of thick black thread. And it was humming. Faintly. A low, sick, buzzing sound, like a fly against a window.
[HIDDEN QUEST UNLOCKED: THE GRAFTING TABLE. Destroy the source of the Grafted King's power before you face him.]
Percy looked at the table for a long time.
Then he lifted his hand, and called the sky.
It took seven Lightning Calls, and his entire MP pool, and a crack of thunder that brought half the tower roof down on his head. But when it was done, the grafting table was a pile of smoking, shattered stone. The humming had stopped. And the jars on the shelves had all burst, one by one, and the things inside them had faded into gold.
All except the dragon's head.
It sat in its broken jar in a puddle of green fluid, eyes half-open, looking at him.
And Percy could have sworn it looked grateful.
[HIDDEN QUEST COMPLETE: THE GRAFTING TABLE.]
[The Lord of Stormveil has lost access to his grafting. He cannot graft new limbs during the battle.]
[+30,000 EXP.]
Godrick the Grafted was waiting in the great hall.
He was enormous. Fifteen feet tall at least, on a throne of bones, in golden armor that was cracked and stained and too small for him. And he was covered in arms. They sprouted from his back, his shoulders, his sides. Dozens of them. Arms of every size and color, twitching and grasping, all sewn on with thick black thread. His face was old and gaunt and proud, with a gold crown on his head and eyes that were mad.
He was holding an axe. A great golden one, as big as a door.
[BOSS: GODRICK THE GRAFTED, LORD OF STORMVEIL]
[Level: 90]
[Host Level: 87]
[Note: Phase 2 grafting disabled.]
"Ah," Godrick said. His voice was high and thin and cracked. "A lowly thing has crawled into my hall. Kneel, worm. Kneel before the lord of all that stands. I am the blood of the Golden Line. My ancestors ruled this world when yours were grubbing in the mud."
Percy looked at him.
At the arms. At the black thread. At the twenty prisoners in their cages who would never come back, in whatever world this had really happened in.
"No," he said quietly. "I don't think I will."
And he brought everything.
The fight with Godrick was not like the fight with Margit.
It wasn't patient. It wasn't clever. It wasn't a dance.
It was a war.
Godrick fought like a storm of limbs and gold. The great axe came down, and the arms on his back grabbed and clawed and punched, and every time Percy got close, a dozen hands tried to pull him in. At half health, the Grafted King roared and wheeled toward the tower where his grafting table had been. He reached for something that wasn't there anymore. And he screamed, when he understood.
"My table! My TABLE! What have you DONE!"
"I broke it," Percy said. "Like you broke them."
The fight went on for most of a day. It was the longest boss fight Percy had ever had. His shadows fought. All nine of them, in a great swirling melee across the great hall. Asterion and Gorrath hacking at the grasping arms. Fang and Chi-Chi tearing at the legs. Rime freezing the floor until the giant king slipped and fell and crashed into his own throne. Lazarus raising the dead knights of the castle to fight against their own lord.
And Percy used every weapon he had.
Arondight for speed. The Fell Omen's spectral blade for reach, and the golden daggers from Margit's rune, flickering into his hand mid-swing to stab at the grasping fingers. Pridwen to take the axe. The Banished Knight's greatshield when Pridwen wasn't enough. The Stormveil crossbow from the rafters, picking off arms one by one. The Unclaimed Bolt, three times, until his MP was gone and his hands were burned and blistered from it.
[HP: 2,960 → 1,870]
[HP: 1,870 → 920]
[HP: 920 → 341]
[MARGIT'S CLOAK: Lethal blow absorbed. Decoy deployed.]
That was the moment that saved him. Godrick's axe came down in a killing blow, and hit an illusion. A shimmering copy of Percy, left behind as the real one blinked three feet to the left. And the axe was buried in the floor, and the Grafted King was leaning over it, off-balance, with his throat exposed.
Percy didn't hesitate.
[PROTEUS: Realm of the Spear. Form: Lance of Camelot.]
He put the lance through Godrick's throat.
The Grafted King made a sound like a bell cracking. All the arms on his back went rigid at once. Then, one by one, they fell away from him, the black threads snapping like overstretched strings, and crumbled into gold on the floor of the great hall.
Godrick fell to his knees. Without the arms, he was smaller. Much smaller. Just an old, gaunt, broken man in a cracked golden crown.
He looked up at Percy with his mad eyes going dim.
"I only wanted," he whispered, "to be... worthy... of them..."
And he crumbled away too.
[BOSS DEFEATED: GODRICK THE GRAFTED, LORD OF STORMVEIL (Lv 90).]
[FLOOR 12 CLEARED.]
[+110,000 EXP.]
[LEVEL UP! Level 87 → Level 90.]
[Loot acquired:]
[SHATTERED RUNE OF CHIMERISM — Lesser Grafting. Absorb one non-human physical trait from a defeated monster (scales for armor, wings for short flight, claws, gills). One trait at a time. 24-hour cooldown to switch.]
[THE DRAGON-HEADED FIST — A gauntlet that sprays a cone of intense flame for 5 seconds. Scales with STR and Faith.]
[PROTEUS: Weapon copied. THE DRAGON-HEADED FIST. Stored in Realm of the Fist.]
Percy sat down on the steps of the shattered throne, among the gold dust, and looked down at his hands. They were blistered and burned from the Unclaimed Bolt, and shaking. In one of them, he was still holding a thin silver chain with a tiny charm on it.
He sat there for a long time, holding it.
[Great Sage notes: The Host has been silent for 14 minutes.]
I was thinking about the girl, Percy thought.
[The prisoner.]
Yeah. And the others. All twenty. He turned the charm over in his fingers. Somewhere, somebody did that to real people. And nobody came for them.
[...]
That's why we're building it, he thought. The city. That's why. So that when somebody comes for kids like that, there's a place they can run to. And people there who'll fight for them.
[Great Sage understands.]
[Great Sage notes: The Host is doing the thing again where he cries a little and pretends he is not.]
Percy laughed. It came out wet.
Shut up.
[Great Sage will remain here.]
The bids were opened at nine in the morning on the thirtieth of May, in a plain government office in New York City, by a tired-looking woman from the General Services Administration with reading glasses on a chain around her neck.
There were two.
The first was from a company in Delaware called Kronion Holdings. Percy's whole body went cold when Mr. Pemberton read the name out loud. It had bid twenty-six million dollars.
The second was from Argo Holdings, LLC. It had bid thirty-two million dollars. It had attached seven hundred pages of conservation commitments, historic preservation plans, and letters of support from every environmental and historical organization on the East End of Long Island.
The tired woman from the GSA looked at the two bids for a long time.
Then she looked up over her reading glasses at the small group of people sitting in plastic chairs across from her. Rachel's father, in his expensive suit. Mr. Pemberton, in a bow tie with tiny lighthouses on it. Three teenagers in their best clothes, holding hands so tight their knuckles were white. And a fourth teenager, with messy dark hair and a faint, strange static crackle in the air around him, sitting very, very still.
"Well," she said dryly. "This one's not hard."
And she stamped the paper.
[LEGENDARY QUEST UPDATED: CITY OF THE UNCLAIMED.]
[Stage 1: Foundations. Plum Island: ACQUIRED. (2/2)]
[STAGE 1 COMPLETE: FOUNDATIONS.]
[+100,000 EXP.]
[LEVEL UP! Level 90 → Level 91.]
[Reward: Founder's Seal (Unique). Both islands are now bound to the Host's thread. Mist cast upon them by the Host or those he has kindled lasts tenfold longer.]
[Reward: Patron Blessing Gacha x2.]
[STAGE 2 UNLOCKED: THE BUILDING. Raise the camp. Raise the city. Time remaining: 4 years, 1 month.]
[Note: Kronion Holdings is a thread Great Sage cannot follow. Someone was watching. Someone wanted this island too.]
Percy read that last line, and looked out the window of the government office at the bright May morning. Somewhere out there, in a building with a name that meant son of Kronos, someone had just lost an island to a fifteen-year-old.
Good, he thought.
Let them know.
They went out to Plum Island two days later, on a ferry that the government still ran out of Orient Point, with a man from the GSA who handed Rachel's father a ring of keys and a stack of paperwork and then left on the same ferry, looking relieved.
And then they were alone.
Percy walked up the long dirt road from the ferry dock, past the crumbling old brick buildings of the Army fort and the rusting gun emplacements. Past the shuttered lab buildings, with their chain-link fences and their faded government signs. Up through the woods and the fields to the highest point of the island, a grassy bluff on the eastern end. From there you could see everything. The whole island, green and wild and empty. The lighthouse on the western tip, white and old. The marshes, and the beaches, where the piping plovers were nesting. Long Island Sound to the west, glittering in the sun. Block Island Sound to the east. And far to the south, low and green on the horizon, the long dark shape of another island.
Gardiners.
Rachel and Nancy and Matt came up the bluff behind him and stood beside him, looking out at it all.
Nobody said anything for a long time.
"It's ours," Nancy said finally, very quietly. Like she didn't quite believe it. "Both of them. It's actually ours."
"Theirs," said Percy. "It's theirs. All of them. The kids."
"Theirs," Nancy agreed.
Rachel was looking at the bluff under their feet. At the long grass blowing in the wind.
"The Big House goes here," she said softly. "Right here. On the highest ground. So you can see the whole Sound in every direction." She turned slowly in a circle. "And the cabins in a ring, down there, around an amphitheater. A big one. And the dining pavilion out on that cliff, facing west, so everybody can watch the sun go down over the water at dinner."
Percy looked at her.
"Did you dream that?"
"I painted it," Rachel said. "Last week. I didn't know what it was until now."
They stood there in the wind for a long time.
Then Percy held out his hands. Nancy took one, and Rachel took the other, and Matt took Rachel's, until the four of them were standing in a circle on the top of the bluff, holding hands, the way they had on the roof in October.
"Ready?" Percy said.
"Ready," said all three.
And they reached for the Mist together.
Not to hide something amazing. To hide something boring. They pictured the most boring thing in the world. An old government island, abandoned, fenced off. Restricted. Contaminated, maybe. Keep out.No trespassing.Nothing to see here. A gray, dull, empty rock in the middle of the Sound that nobody wanted, and nobody would ever look at twice.
They offered it to the world.
And the world believed them.
Percy felt it spread out from the four of them like a ripple in a pond. Across the bluff. Across the fields and the woods and the old brick fort. Across the beaches and the marshes and the lighthouse. Out past the shoreline, over the water, over the whole island. Like a sheet of gray silk settling over a bed. The Founder's Seal caught it and held it, and made it strong.
On a fishing boat a mile out in the Sound, a fisherman glanced at Plum Island, and saw a gray rock behind a fence, and looked away, and never thought about it again.
[MIST WEAVING (Combined): The Veil of Plum Island has been cast.]
[Duration: 30 days. (Tenfold: Founder's Seal.)]
[Percy Jackson: Mist Weaving Lv 4 → Lv 6.]
[Rachel Elizabeth Dare: Mist Weaving Lv 5 → Lv 7.]
[Nancy Bobofit: Mist Weaving Lv 2 → Lv 4.]
[Matt Sloan: Mist Weaving Lv 3 → Lv 4.]
They let go of each other's hands.
And Nancy Bobofit, who never cried, who hadn't cried in front of anybody since she was seven years old and slept in a bathtub with the door locked, sat down in the long grass on top of the bluff and put her face in her hands and cried. Rachel sat down next to her and put her arms around her. Matt sat down on her other side. Percy sat down too.
And the four of them sat on top of their island, in the wind, and watched the sun go down over the water.
Exactly where, someday, a few hundred kids would be watching it from the dining pavilion.
[FAITH: The Kindled believe in the Host. +300 Faith.]
[Faith toward Rank C: 3,220 / 8,000.]
[Note: Camp Half-Blood's summer session begins in 12 days.]
Percy looked at the last line, and smiled.
Time to go tell Chiron, he thought.