The thing about coming home, Percy Jackson had decided somewhere around the third hour of the drive, was that it always smelled the same.
He rolled the window of Paul's old Prius down the moment they crossed into Suffolk County, and there it was: salt off the Sound, cut grass, the faint sweet rot of strawberries going soft in the sun. Long Island in June. He'd smelled it at twelve with a minotaur on his heels. He'd smelled it at sixteen with the world ending. He smelled it now, at twenty, with a sunburn on the back of his neck and a duffel bag in the back seat full of dirty laundry and a college transcript he was actually, genuinely proud of.
Two more years, he thought. Two more years and I'm done. A degree. An actual degree. Gods, Mom's going to frame it.
She'd already threatened to. Sally Jackson had a wall in the apartment she called the Wall of Things Percy Wasn't Supposed to Survive, and his high school diploma hung dead center, right next to a crayon drawing of a pegasus he'd made at six. She'd cried at the dinner table last night when he told her his grades. Paul had pretended not to, which meant he'd cried too.
"You sure you don't want me to come up the hill with you?" Paul had asked that morning, handing him the keys. "I could say hi to Chiron. Bring the man some cookies. Your mother made blue ones."
"Of course she did." Percy had grinned. "Nah. I'll be back for the Fourth. You two enjoy having the apartment without me eating everything in it."
Sally had kissed his forehead at the door and held his face in her hands the way she'd done since he was small enough to be held. "Be careful," she'd said, which was what she always said, and which he'd always laughed at, because careful was never really on the menu for a son of Poseidon.
He'd laughed this time too.
He'd think about that laugh for a very long time afterward.
He parked at the bottom of Half-Blood Hill and stood for a moment with his hand on the warm car roof, just looking.
Thalia's pine was still there, enormous now, the Golden Fleece glinting in its lower branches like a tangle of sunlight. Peleus the dragon was curled around the trunk in his usual pile of scaled coils, snoring smoke. Beyond the crest of the hill, Percy could hear the distant clang of the forges, the whoop of someone on the climbing wall getting splashed with lava, the thrum of a volleyball being spiked too hard.
Home. The other one.
He grinned and jogged up the hill.
"Hey, buddy," he called to Peleus as he passed, the way he always did. The dragon cracked one huge golden eye.
And hissed.
Percy stopped. It wasn't a friendly hiss. It wasn't the sleepy rumble Peleus gave every camper he recognized. It was low and long and smoky, the sound of a guard dog deciding whether a stranger at the gate was worth getting up for.
"Whoa. Hey." Percy held up his hands. "It's me. Percy. I've scratched you behind the ear like a thousand times."
The eye stayed on him, unblinking, until he crossed the boundary line. He felt the barrier ripple over his skin, the familiar cool tingle of old magic recognizing him and letting him through. At least the camp itself still knew him.
Weird, he thought. Maybe he's sick. Dragons get sick, right?
He filed it away and kept walking.
The first person he saw was a kid from the Hermes cabin he half recognized, a skinny boy maybe thirteen, carrying a basket of laundry toward the cabins. Percy lifted a hand.
"Hey, man. Is Chiron at the Big House?"
The kid looked at him. Looked at him properly, the way you'd look at something stuck to your shoe. Then he turned and walked away without a word.
Percy's hand hung in the air for a second before he lowered it.
Okay.
The second person was harder to ignore, because it was Will Solace. Will was coming out of the infirmary with a clipboard, his blond hair sticking up the way it always did after a long shift, and he saw Percy and stopped dead on the porch steps.
"Will!" Percy's grin came back, wide and relieved. "Man, it's good to see you. Is it just me, or is everyone being—"
"What are you doing here, Jackson?"
Not Percy. Not hey. Will said his last name like it tasted bad.
"Uh." Percy blinked. "Summer? I come every summer. I told Chiron I'd help with the sword classes, like last year."
Will's jaw worked. He glanced over his shoulder toward the cabins, then back, and something passed over his face that Percy couldn't read. Not quite anger. Something closer to disappointment, which was somehow worse.
"Ezra's handling sword classes now," Will said. "You should talk to Chiron."
"Who's Ezra?"
But Will was already walking away.
Percy stood in the middle of the path with the sun beating down on his head and a cold, slippery feeling starting to coil in his stomach. It was a feeling he knew. He'd felt it in a museum in fifth grade, right before Mrs. Dodds grew wings. He'd felt it on the Princess Andromeda. He'd felt it in the dark, falling.
It was the feeling of the world quietly tilting while everyone else pretended it was flat.
He found out who Ezra was about four minutes later.
The arena was packed. That was the first strange thing. Midday sword practice was usually a dozen campers sweating through drills while the rest of camp found literally anything else to do. Today there had to be sixty people crowded around the sand, sitting on the walls, hanging off the fences, cheering.
In the center of the ring, a boy was fighting three Ares campers at once.
He was maybe seventeen. Tall and broad-shouldered, with sun-bleached hair cut short on the sides and swept back on top, and a tan that looked like it came from a yacht rather than a strawberry field. He moved well. Really well. He had a bronze sword in one hand and he was using the flat of it to slap his opponents around like he was swatting flies, and every time one of them stumbled he'd laugh, a bright easy laugh that made the crowd laugh with him.
And around his feet, the sand was wet.
Percy saw it before he understood it. A ring of dark, damp sand, spreading outward in a slow tide from the boy's sneakers. Water, seeping up out of the dry ground. Answering him.
The last Ares kid went down on his back. The boy put a foot on his chest, raised his sword to the sky, and the water around him rose in a sudden glittering column, ten feet high, and burst into spray that hung in the air and caught the light in a perfect, deliberate rainbow.
The crowd went wild.
Percy didn't hear them. He was staring at the rainbow.
He knew that trick. He'd invented that trick, at fifteen, to make Tyson laugh.
"Ezra! Ezra! Ezra!"
The boy, Ezra, turned in a slow circle, soaking it in. His eyes were sea-green. Not like Percy's. Exactly like Percy's. The color of shallow water over white sand, the color Percy saw in the mirror every morning, the color he'd only ever seen in one other face.
Poseidon's.
Then those eyes landed on Percy at the edge of the crowd, and Ezra smiled.
It wasn't a friendly smile. It wasn't a surprised one either. It was the smile of somebody who'd been waiting.
"Well," Ezra called, loud enough for the whole arena to hear. "Look who finally crawled back."
Sixty heads turned.
Percy had faced Titans. He'd faced a primordial goddess of the earth with nothing but a celestial bronze sword and a lot of bad jokes. He had walked through Tartarus with the girl he loved and come out the other side. He had never, not once, felt as exposed as he did in that moment, with sixty people he'd bled beside staring at him like he was a stranger who'd wandered in off the highway.
And some of them weren't strangers' faces. Some of them were friends'.
There was Travis Stoll, sitting on the fence with his arms crossed, not grinning for once. There was Katie Gardner beside him, looking at the ground. There was Clarisse La Rue, standing apart from the others near the weapons rack, her expression unreadable, arms folded over her chest. There was Malcolm from Athena. There were a dozen Hermes kids and half the Apollo cabin and Pollux from Dionysus, and every single one of them looked at Percy with some version of the same thing in their eyes.
Contempt. Or pity. Or both.
"Do I know you?" Percy said. He meant it to come out casual. It came out rough.
Ezra laughed and hopped down from the sand, swinging his sword lazily. Up close, he was an inch or two taller than Percy, and he made sure Percy noticed it.
"Ezra Coleman," he said, and stuck out his hand. "Son of Poseidon. I guess that makes us brothers, huh? Big brother?"
Percy looked at the hand.
Every instinct he had, every instinct his mom had raised in him, said shake it. Be nice. Be the bigger guy. Whatever this was, there'd be an explanation. Dad had kids. Dad had Tyson. A new half-brother wasn't a crime.
But the water at Ezra's feet was still moving. And Percy could feel it. The way you feel a stranger's hand in your pocket on a crowded subway. That water was reaching for him, sniffing at him, testing.
He shook Ezra's hand anyway.
Ezra squeezed. Hard. Too hard, the kind of grip a guy uses when he wants to make a point, and he leaned in close, and his voice dropped so only Percy could hear it.
"They don't love you anymore," Ezra murmured, smiling the whole time. "Did you notice? I've been here since March. Three months. That's all it took."
Then he let go, clapped Percy on the shoulder like they were old friends, and turned back to the crowd with his arms spread wide.
"Who's next?"
Chiron was in the Big House, which was the first right thing that had happened all day.
He was in his wheelchair form behind the ping-pong table, a stack of camp ledgers in front of him, and when Percy came through the screen door he looked up and something in his ancient face softened.
"Percy."
Just that. Just his name, said the way it used to be said. Percy felt his throat close up so fast it scared him.
"Chiron." He dropped into the chair across from him. "What is going on? Will won't talk to me. The Stolls looked at me like I kicked a puppy. Peleus hissed at me. And there's a kid out there doing my water tricks who says he's my brother and—"
"He is your brother." Chiron set down his pen. "Ezra was claimed in March. A late discovery. His mother kept him hidden on a boat for most of his life, sailing the Caribbean. Poseidon's sea kept the monsters off his scent."
"Okay. Cool. Great. I'm happy for him." Percy dragged a hand down his face. "That doesn't explain why everybody's treating me like I'm radioactive."
Chiron was quiet for a long moment. Long enough that Percy looked up.
The old centaur's eyes were troubled. More than troubled. They had the look Percy had seen in them only a handful of times: at the end of the Titan War, standing over Luke's shroud. The look of a teacher who had seen too many students die and was waiting for the next one.
"There have been accusations," Chiron said carefully.
"Accusations of what?"
"I would rather not discuss them until I have spoken to all parties involved. There will be a council meeting tomorrow evening. The head counselors have asked for it." Chiron hesitated. "Percy. You should know. Annabeth asked for it as well."
The cold coil in his stomach pulled tight.
"Annabeth's here? She didn't text me. She said she was staying in San Francisco until July for the internship."
Chiron didn't answer. He didn't have to.
Percy stood up so fast the chair skidded. "Where is she?"
"Percy—"
But he was already out the door.
He found her on the beach.
He should have known he would. Their spot: the flat rock past the canoe dock where the sand dipped and the Sound came lapping in gentle and gray-green. They'd sat there after the Titan War with their feet in the water and their shoulders touching, too tired to talk. He'd asked her out on that rock. He'd planned, in a box in his dorm room in a sock drawer where no one would ever look, to ask her something else there too, someday soon.
She was sitting on it now. Her blond curls were tied up the way she wore them when she was working on a problem. She had her knees pulled up to her chest.
And Ezra Coleman was sitting next to her, close, with his arm around her shoulders.
Percy stopped at the top of the dune.
For a second, his brain refused to process it. It just showed him the picture and waited, like a kid holding up a drawing, expecting him to say what it was. Two people on a rock. A boy and a girl. His girl. His brother's arm.
Then Annabeth tipped her head and rested it on Ezra's shoulder. And Ezra turned and pressed his lips to her hair, and said something that made her laugh. That small, surprised laugh she did when something caught her off guard. The one Percy had spent seven years trying to earn as often as possible.
The sea, a hundred yards out, went still.
Not calm. Still. Every wave stopped where it was. The gulls overhead went silent. Down by the canoe dock, a kid dropped a paddle and stared at the water, which had gone flat and dark as glass from the shoreline to the horizon.
Annabeth's head came up. She turned.
She saw him.
He watched it go across her face: shock, then guilt, then something that slammed down over both of them like a steel shutter. Her chin came up. Her eyes went hard and gray.
"Percy," she said.
That was it. His name. No I can explain. No it's not what it looks like. Just his name, flat, like a fact she'd been expecting to deal with eventually.
"How long?" His voice didn't sound like his. It sounded far away, scraped raw.
"Percy—"
"How long, Annabeth."
Ezra stood up, unhurried, brushing sand off his shorts. He stepped half in front of her, protective. Like Percy was the threat. "Easy, man. You're scaring her."
"I'm not talking to you."
"April," Annabeth said quietly.
April. Percy had flown out to San Francisco in April. He'd surprised her at her dorm with takeout and a bad pun written on the box, and she'd hugged him, and they'd walked along the bay, and she'd been quiet, and he'd thought she was stressed about finals. He'd held her hand the whole way back. She'd let him.
"You could have told me," he said. "You could have just—called. Anything. We've been through Tartarus, Annabeth. You don't think I deserved a phone call?"
Something flickered behind the steel. For half a heartbeat she looked like herself, like the girl who'd held his hand while they fell. Then Ezra's fingers brushed her shoulder and the steel came back down.
"You want to talk about what you deserve?" she said. "Fine. Tomorrow night. At council. Everyone will be there, and everyone's going to hear exactly what you deserve."
She got up. She walked past him, close enough that he could smell her shampoo, the same lemon one she'd used since they were fourteen. She didn't look at him.
Ezra lingered a moment longer. He looked out at the frozen sea, then back at Percy, and that smile came back, slow and private.
"Better let the water go, brother," he said softly. "People are starting to think you're unstable."
He followed her up the dune.
Percy stood alone on the beach. He stood there until the sun dropped behind the trees and the shadows went long and blue across the sand. At some point, without deciding to, he let the sea go. The waves came back all at once, crashing into the shore in a long ragged roar that soaked his sneakers to the ankle.
He didn't move.
Okay, he thought, from somewhere very far down. Okay. Something is wrong. Something is really, really wrong.
Annabeth doesn't do that. Will doesn't do that. Peleus doesn't hiss. Three months. Three months and an entire camp forgets nine years.
That's not a breakup. That's not people changing their minds.
That's magic.
He pulled his phone out with numb fingers and stared at the screen. A text from his mom, sent two hours ago. A photo of a plate of blue chocolate chip cookies with a heart emoji and Paul burned the second batch, don't tell him I told you.
He almost called her. His thumb hovered over her name.
But what would he say? Mom, my girlfriend is cheating on me with a brother I didn't know I had and everybody hates me and I don't know why? She'd drive up tonight. She'd drive up in the dark on the Long Island Expressway with Paul, three hours of worry, and stand at the bottom of a hill she couldn't fully climb.
He was twenty years old. He'd saved Olympus twice. He could handle one council meeting.
He typed back lol tell Paul it's fine, love you, and put the phone away.
Then he walked to Cabin Three, alone, under a darkening sky, and when he opened the door he found that his bunk had been stripped. His things were in a cardboard box by the door. His trident pennant was gone from the wall. His old Yankees cap, the one he'd left on the hook for three summers, was gone. On the bunk where he'd slept since he was twelve, someone had laid out a sleeping bag and a duffel that wasn't his, with an embroidered name on the side in gold thread.
EZRA.
Percy picked up the cardboard box. It was very light. Nine years, and it barely weighed anything.
He carried it out to the beach and slept on the sand, with the sea murmuring beside him like it was trying to say something he couldn't quite hear.
Somewhere out in the dark water, very far away, something vast and old turned its attention toward the shore. And did nothing at all.