He did the two blessing pulls on the train to Long Island, in a window seat, with Lupe asleep in his backpack and the gray outskirts of Queens sliding by.
The first came up quicksilver, fast and bright and laughing, smelling of road dust and new sneakers.
[PATRON BLESSING ACQUIRED!]
[BLESSING OF HERMES, God of Travelers, Messengers, Thieves and Commerce]
[Hermes granted this blessing freely. He remembers why. A bench by a lake. A boy who stayed.]
[Passive: TRAVELER'S GRACE — Movement speed +20%. The Host never becomes lost. Any road he walks, he can find again.]
[Passive: SILVER TONGUE (Commerce) — In any negotiation, bargain or trade, the Host knows when he is being cheated.]
Percy smiled at the second one. Would've been handy with the Gardiner cousins.
The second came up purple.
Deep, rich, grape-skin purple, and it smelled of wine and crushed leaves and summer evenings, and faintly, unmistakably, of Diet Coke.
Percy stared at it.
Oh no, he thought.
[PATRON BLESSING ACQUIRED!]
[BLESSING OF DIONYSUS, God of Wine, Festivity, Theater and Madness]
[Dionysus remembers granting you this blessing. He does not question why. He is deeply irritated about it. He has decided it was probably someone else's fault.]
[Passive: CLEAR HEAD — Immunity to intoxication, poison-induced confusion, and lesser madness.]
[Passive: THE VINE — The Host may command grapevines and other climbing plants within 20 meters to grow, bind, or wither.]
Percy put his face in his hands and laughed until the woman across the aisle moved to a different seat.
[Patron Blessings: Hestia · Apollo · Hecate · Zeus · Athena · Hephaestus · Artemis · Hermes · Dionysus]
[Great Sage notes: Nine.]
I know.
[Great Sage notes: That is three-quarters of the Olympian council.]
I know, Great Sage.
[Great Sage notes that the Host is about to walk into a meeting with one of them.]
Percy stopped laughing.
Camp Half-Blood in June looked exactly the way it always did.
The strawberry fields were green and heavy with fruit. The canoe lake glittered. The climbing wall was pouring lava down one side, and somebody from the Apollo cabin was shooting arrows at a target shaped like a hydra, and missing. Satyrs were chasing wood nymphs through the trees. And at the top of Half-Blood Hill, Thalia's pine stood tall and green against the blue sky, with the boundary humming faintly around it, warm and gold and steady.
Percy stood at the top of the hill for a long moment, looking down at it all.
In a few months, if everything went right, none of this would be here.
It would be somewhere better.
He thought he'd feel triumphant about that. He didn't. He felt something more complicated. This valley had been his home in two lives. He'd learned to fight in that arena. He'd been claimed at that campfire. He'd almost died on that beach, and in those woods, more times than he could count.
It's not the place, he thought. It's the people. The place is just where they happen to be right now.
[Great Sage notes: The Host is being sentimental.]
Let me have this one, Great Sage.
[...Very well.]
He walked down the hill.
The first person who saw him was a kid from Cabin Eleven, an unclaimed boy of about ten named Marcus, who'd started showing up at Percy's morning training sessions last August. He dropped the bucket of strawberries he was carrying and screamed "PERCY'S BACK!" at the top of his lungs, loud enough to scare a flock of harpies off the roof of the dining pavilion.
After that, it was chaos.
The meeting was that evening, in the rec room of the Big House.
Percy had asked for it the second he got to camp. Chiron had looked at him for a long moment, with his ancient dark eyes. Then he'd said, very quietly, "I've been expecting this, I think. For some time." And he'd sent Argus to gather the counselors.
They came in one by one, and sat around the battered ping-pong table, and looked at Percy.
Clarisse, from Ares, with her arms crossed and her chin up, grinning at him like a shark.
Annabeth, from Athena, with her blond curls tied back and her gray eyes sharp and curious, holding a sketchbook.
Charles Beckendorf, from Hephaestus. Big and broad and calm, with burn scars on his forearms and his hands folded on the table.
Silena Beauregard, from Aphrodite. Pretty and dark-haired and surprisingly sharp-eyed, sitting next to Beckendorf, a little closer than she needed to.
Lee Fletcher, from Apollo. Tall and lanky, with a bow on his back he never seemed to take off.
Katie Gardner, from Demeter. Small and fierce, with dirt under her fingernails and a leaf in her hair.
Castor and Pollux, the twins from Dionysus, who looked bored.
And Travis and Connor Stoll, the new counselors of the Hermes cabin. They'd taken over after Luke left, and they still looked a little surprised to be there, like they kept expecting someone to tell them it was a mistake.
The Poseidon cabin's chair was empty. Ezra was still at school in the city, until the end of the week.
The Zeus cabin's chair was Percy's.
At the head of the table, in his wheelchair, sat Chiron. And next to him, in a lawn chair, wearing a leopard-print Hawaiian shirt and purple jogging pants, holding a Diet Coke and looking like he would rather be absolutely anywhere else in the world, slouched the god of wine.
Dionysus looked at Percy over his can of soda with bloodshot purple eyes.
"Peter Johnson," he said flatly.
"Mr. D," said Percy.
"I have a strange feeling," said Dionysus, "that I did something very stupid recently. And that it was your fault."
Percy kept his face perfectly straight. "I have no idea what you're talking about, sir."
The god of wine narrowed his eyes. Then he sniffed, and took a long drink of Diet Coke, and slumped further down in his lawn chair.
"Get on with it," he said. "Whatever this is. I'm missing my program."
Percy got on with it.
He'd brought things. Matt's maps, rolled up in a cardboard tube: huge, detailed, color-coded surveys of both islands. Every road and building and marsh and beach and cliff. Nancy's numbers, in a binder an inch thick: costs, timelines, budgets, supply chains. And Rachel's paintings, a dozen of them, carefully wrapped in brown paper.
He unrolled the maps across the ping-pong table. He propped the paintings up against the walls of the rec room, one by one.
And then he told them.
He told them about Plum Island. Eight hundred and forty acres of wild green land in the middle of the Sound, with cliffs and beaches and woods and a harbor. Bought fair and square from the United States government, with the deed in a safe in an office on Park Avenue, and a veil of Mist already laid over it like a blanket.
"This," he said, putting his finger on the map, "is the new camp."
The room went completely silent.
He walked them through it. The way Rachel had painted it, standing on the bluff, before any of them had known what she was painting.
The Big House on the highest ground, at the center of the island. You'd be able to see the whole Sound from its porch, Long Island Sound and Block Island Sound, in every direction. The dining pavilion out on the western cliff, facing the sunset over the water. The cabin circle. Not twenty cabins in a half-ring anymore, but a great ring of them, all the way around, around a huge open-air amphitheater. Room for every god's kids. Every god's. Major and minor. With beds.
"With beds," Connor Stoll repeated faintly. He was staring at the map. Behind him, his brother had his hand over his mouth.
"With beds," Percy said. "Nobody sleeps on the floor anymore. Not ever again."
The eastern end of the island, the wild woods, would be the new training grounds. Monsters, obstacle courses, room for capture the flag games that could last for days. The old Army bunkers, deep and steel-lined and buried under the hills, would become a forge, for the Hephaestus cabin. Beckendorf's head came up sharply when Percy said that. The flat clearings on the coast would become an airfield for the pegasi. And there'd be a hidden harbor, in the strong currents of Plum Gut, for ships.
And the defenses.
The boundary wouldn't be a single tree anymore. It would wrap around the whole island, from coast to coast. The old artillery emplacements would get ballistae, tracking and tipped with celestial bronze, to knock down anything that flew. And the currents of Plum Gut would be reinforced, so nothing could come at them by sea.
"And then," Percy said, "there's this."
He moved his finger south. Across the water. To the other island. The big one.
"Gardiners Island," he said. "Thirty-three hundred acres. This one's not a camp." He looked up at them. "It's a city."
He told them about New Athens.
A city for demigods. Not a summer camp, not a training ground, not a place you went for a few months and then left to fend for yourself in the mortal world. A real city, where you could live. Grow up. Go to school. Get a job. Fall in love. Have kids of your own. Grow old. Retire. Die in your bed, of old age, surrounded by your grandchildren, instead of in a ditch somewhere at seventeen with a monster's claws in your chest.
An Acropolis on the high bluffs, with temples. Real ones, marble ones, for every god. A great council hall below them, where demigods could govern themselves.
An Agora, a marketplace, with businesses run by demigods. A shipping company run by Hermes kids, with pegasus couriers. A foundry district run by Hephaestus kids, making tech that didn't attract monsters. A design house run by Aphrodite kids. A university, with professors who were Athena legacies, teaching architecture and magical theory, and Demeter and Poseidon legacies teaching biology.
Neighborhoods, spiraling out from the center. Houses, with terracotta roofs and courtyards and gardens. A harbor with a fleet of triremes. And wild woods and marshes all around it, left for the satyrs and the nature spirits to watch over. A living wall that nothing could get through without them knowing.
When he was done, nobody in the room said anything for a very long time.
Annabeth was staring at the paintings against the wall. At the white marble city on the hill, glowing gold in a sunset that hadn't happened yet. Her lips were parted. Her eyes were very bright. Her sketchbook had fallen open on the table in front of her, and she didn't seem to notice.
Beckendorf was looking at the map of the bunkers. He was very still. His big scarred hands were flat on the table.
Katie Gardner was crying. Quietly. She didn't seem to notice that either.
Clarisse was looking at Percy, with her arms crossed, and an expression on her face he couldn't read.
And Chiron.
Chiron was looking at Percy with his ancient eyes. He was sitting very straight in his wheelchair, his hands folded in his lap, and his face was perfectly calm. But his knuckles were white.
"Percy," he said quietly. "How long have you been planning this?"
Percy thought about the answer.
"Since the first day I came here," he said. "Kind of. Since before that, really." He met Chiron's eyes. "I didn't want to say anything until we had the islands. I didn't want to promise something I couldn't do."
"And now you have them."
"Now we have them."
Chiron looked at him for a long, long time.
Then he turned his wheelchair slightly, and looked at the paintings against the wall. At the white city on the hill, glowing in the sunset.
"I have trained heroes for three thousand years," the old centaur said softly. "I have watched them come to me as children, and leave me as warriors, and die. So many of them. So young. Achilles. Jason. Heracles. I have watched them all." His voice was very quiet. "And not once, in three thousand years, did it ever occur to me to build them a place where they could simply... live."
He looked back at Percy. His eyes were wet.
"Thank you," said Chiron.
And then Dionysus spoke.
He'd been silent the whole time. Slumped in his lawn chair, sipping his Diet Coke, looking bored. Percy had half-thought he'd fallen asleep.
He hadn't.
"No," said the god of wine.
Everyone turned to look at him.
Dionysus put down his can of soda. He sat up in his lawn chair. And for the first time since Percy had known him, in either life, the god of wine didn't look bored, or annoyed, or hungover. He looked dangerous. His purple eyes were glowing faintly, and the air in the rec room smelled suddenly of crushed grapes and wild, dark forests.
"No," he said again. "I don't think so."
"Mr. D—" Chiron began.
"I was sent here as a punishment, Chiron." Dionysus's voice was very soft. "A hundred years, in this valley, babysitting brats. Because I chased the wrong nymph. Because my father was in a mood." His eyes moved to Percy. "And now this... this mortal boy comes along, my father's newest pet, and wants to move my prison to an island. And expand it. A whole city. Full of brats." His lip curled. "Tell me, Peter Johnson. Why in the name of every vine on Olympus would I agree to that?"
The room was very quiet.
Percy looked at the god of wine.
He thought about the god he'd known in his first life. Bitter, petty, cruel, bored. Who'd spent a hundred years in exile at a summer camp, and hated every minute of it. Who'd lost a son in the Titan war and never really recovered. Whose only real friend at camp had been Chiron.
And who, deep down, under all of that, was the god of theater. Of festivals. Of joy, and music, and wild nights under the stars. Of people coming together to tell stories, and laugh, and cry, and forget their troubles for a while.
"Because of the amphitheater," Percy said.
Dionysus blinked.
"The new camp has a big amphitheater," Percy said. "In the middle of the cabin ring. The biggest one on the East Coast. Stone seats, carved into the hill, room for a thousand people, looking out at the water." He pointed at one of Rachel's paintings, at a great stone bowl of seats glowing in torchlight. "And it needs a name."
The god of wine stared at the painting.
"And there's a theater in New Athens too," Percy went on. "In the Agora. And a festival. Every spring. The Dionysia, they called it in the old Athens. Plays, and music, and dancing, and wine, for the grown-ups. For days." He paused. "And somebody's going to have to be in charge of that. Somebody who actually knows what they're doing."
Nobody in the room was breathing.
Dionysus looked at the painting for a long time.
"A theater," he said slowly. "And a festival."
"And a temple," said Percy. "On the Acropolis. Next to your dad's. Same size."
The purple glow in the god's eyes flickered.
"Same size," Dionysus repeated.
"Same size."
"Not smaller."
"Not smaller."
Dionysus sat back in his lawn chair.
He picked up his Diet Coke. He looked at it. He put it down again. He looked at the painting of the amphitheater, glowing in the torchlight, full of people. Then at Percy. Then at Chiron, who was watching him with an expression of very carefully hidden astonishment.
"The Theater of Dionysus," said the god of wine finally. Very quietly. "That's what you'll call it. The amphitheater. Not the Dionysus Amphitheater, not the Mr. D Pavilion, not any of that vulgar modern nonsense. The Theater of Dionysus. Like in Athens. Like it used to be."
"Deal," said Percy.
Dionysus glared at him.
"I still don't like you, Peter Johnson," he said.
"I know, sir."
"I am going to find out why I blessed you. And when I do, there will be consequences."
"Yes, sir."
The god of wine sniffed. He picked up his Diet Coke again and slumped back down in his lawn chair, and the smell of grapes and dark forests faded out of the room.
"Well, don't just stand there," he snapped, waving a hand. "Go build your ridiculous city. I'm missing my program."
[DIVINE PACT: DIONYSUS, GOD OF WINE AND THEATER.]
[Terms: The amphitheater of the new camp shall be named the Theater of Dionysus. A festival of Dionysus in New Athens each spring. A temple on the Acropolis equal in size to that of Zeus. In exchange: The Camp Director's consent.]
[FAITH: Chiron believes in the Host. +150 Faith.]
[FAITH: The Counselors of Camp Half-Blood believe in the Host. +620 Faith.]
[LEGENDARY QUEST UPDATED: CITY OF THE UNCLAIMED. Stage 2: The Building. The Camp Director has consented.]
After that, it moved fast.
They talked until two in the morning. Chiron had Argus bring in hot chocolate, and then pizza, and then more hot chocolate. The counselors crowded around the ping-pong table, arguing, sketching, pointing at maps, shouting over each other. Dionysus fell asleep in his lawn chair around midnight, snoring.
The plan they came out with was simple.
Camp first. New Athens could wait. It would take years to build a city, and it would need hundreds of hands. But a camp, the core of a camp, could be ready in a year if they worked fast. A Big House. A dining pavilion. Cabins. Defenses. A forge. Enough to move everyone, and the Fleece, and the tree. Thalia's pine had to come with them, somehow. Nobody knew how yet.
And for that, they needed a crew. Older campers, who could stay on the island over the summer and through the fall, to start building.
Percy picked them that night, one by one.
Beckendorf first. "The bunkers," Percy said. "The forge. I need it running before anything else. Every bolt and beam and nail on that island has to come from somewhere. And Hephaestus..." He hesitated. "Your dad likes me. Kind of. He might help."
Beckendorf looked at him for a long moment, with his calm dark eyes. Then he nodded, once. "I'll take six of my cabin," he said. "The best ones. We'll go tomorrow."
Katie Gardner next. "The orchards," Percy said. "The gardens. The marshes. We promised the bird people we wouldn't touch the nesting grounds. I need somebody who can grow food on that island without ruining it."
Katie wiped her eyes and laughed. "I've been waiting my whole life for somebody to ask me that."
Travis Stoll, for logistics. Somebody had to get the supplies there, and everything Beckendorf's people couldn't make. "You'll have a budget," Percy said. "A real one. Nancy's going to send you a spreadsheet." Travis looked a little terrified at that.
Silena, for design. Somebody had to make it beautiful, not just practical. And Silena, it turned out, had been sketching houses and gardens in the margins of her notebooks for years and never shown anybody.
Lee Fletcher, for healing. A construction site full of demigods would need one.
And Annabeth.
Percy saved her for last.
She'd barely said a word all night. She'd just sat at the end of the table with her sketchbook, drawing. Furiously, page after page, while the others argued. When Percy said her name, she looked up, and her gray eyes were enormous.
"You're the architect," Percy said simply.
Annabeth stared at him.
"Of the camp first," he said. "And then the city. All of it. Every building. Every temple. Every street. I want you to design it." He held her eyes. "Nobody else. You."
Annabeth didn't say anything. She couldn't, Percy thought. Her mouth opened, and closed, and opened again. Her hands were shaking around her pencil.
"Why?" she whispered finally. "Why me? I'm thirteen."
"Because you're going to rebuild Olympus someday," Percy said. "I told you that in the Lotus. Remember? You thought I was being silly." He smiled. "Consider this practice."
Annabeth Chase looked at him for a long, long time.
Then she turned her sketchbook around and slid it across the ping-pong table to him.
It was the Big House. The new one. On the bluff. Drawn in fast, careful pencil, with every column and window and rafter in place. A porch that wrapped all the way around, so you could see the water from every side.
"I've been drawing it since you started talking," she said. "I couldn't stop."
Percy looked at the drawing. Then at her.
"It's perfect," he said.
And Annabeth smiled, slow and wide and luminous. It was the happiest Percy had ever seen her. In either life.
[FAITH: Annabeth Chase believes in the Host. +120 Faith.]
[QUEST UNLOCKED: THE FIRST BUILDERS. Send the camp's first construction crew to Plum Island.]
They left two days later, at dawn, from the camp beach.
Beckendorf and six Hephaestus kids, with their tools and their forge-bags. Katie and four Demeter kids, with crates of seeds and saplings and a very grumpy dryad who'd volunteered to supervise. Travis Stoll, with a clipboard and a phone and a look of grim determination. Silena, with three sketchbooks. Lee Fletcher, with a medical bag the size of a suitcase. And a dozen others, older kids from half the cabins in camp, who'd heard what was happening and begged to come.
Annabeth would follow at the end of the summer, Chiron said. She needed one more year of training first. But she'd already given Beckendorf thirty pages of drawings.
The boat was a trireme. A real one. Old and battered and beautiful, which Beckendorf's cabin had been secretly restoring in the woods for two years, for no reason they could explain. Now they knew the reason. It was sitting in the shallows off the camp beach, with its oars out and its sail furled. On its prow, freshly painted, was a name in Ancient Greek.
ΑΡΓΩ. Argo.
"Rachel's idea," Percy explained to Chiron, who was looking at it with an unreadable expression. "She said a ship full of heroes needed the right name."
"Rachel," said Chiron slowly. "The mortal girl."
"She's not exactly mortal anymore," said Percy. "Not all the way."
Chiron looked at him very sharply. But he didn't ask.
Percy stood on the beach with half the camp and watched the Argo row out into the Sound, low and dark against the rising sun. Beckendorf was standing at the prow, looking back at them. Katie was waving. Travis was already on his phone.
Go, he thought. Go build it. Make it real.
And then a sound went off in his head, like a fire alarm.
[URGENT QUEST NOTIFICATION.]
[EMERGENCY QUEST: THE SCHOOL ON THE HILL.]
[Ezra Coleman is in danger. Meriwether College Prep, Manhattan. Last day of school.]
[Threat: Laistrygonian Giants (x3). Lv 70–75. Cannibals.]
[Time until engagement: 54 minutes.]
[Reward: ???]
[Failure: ???]
Percy's heart stopped.
The dodgeball game, he thought. The last day of school. The Laistrygonians. In my first life, they came for me at Meriwether, and Tyson saved me.
They're coming for Ezra.
"Percy?" Chiron said. "What is it?"
Percy was already running.
"Ezra," he shouted back over his shoulder. "His school. He's in trouble. I have to go!"
"Manhattan is two hours from here!" Chiron called after him. "You'll never—"
But Percy wasn't listening anymore. He was sprinting across the sand toward the dark under the trees at the edge of the beach. The deepest shadow he could find. And he was reaching for something he had never tried before, not over distances this long, not without the tower to help him.
Shadows connect, he thought, desperately. Every shadow touches every other shadow. That's what Nico said, in the other world. You just have to know where you're going. And I know where Meriwether is. I walked those halls for a whole year.
[WARNING: The Host is attempting long-range Shadow Travel. This ability has not been unlocked.]
[Estimated success: 31%.]
[Estimated cost: All MP. Severe exhaustion.]
Do it anyway.
[...Understood.]
Percy hit the shadows under the trees at a dead run.
And the world went black.