The council met in the rec room of the Big House at eight o'clock the next evening, and Percy knew it was going to be bad the moment he walked in, because nobody had saved him a chair.
There were always chairs. Folding chairs around the ping-pong table, one for every head counselor, plus a couple extra for whoever was in trouble or whoever had brought snacks. Tonight the chairs were full. Every one of them. Counselors from all twenty cabins, Chiron in his wheelchair at the head, Mr. D slouched beside him in a leopard-print shirt with a Diet Coke sweating in his hand. Ezra sat at Chiron's right, in the spot that had been Percy's since the Titan War, in a clean orange camp shirt, his hair still damp from the lake.
Annabeth sat beside him. She had a folder in front of her. A thick one.
Percy stood at the foot of the table with his hands in his pockets and waited for someone to tell him where to go.
No one did.
"Well," Mr. D said, after a long and deeply uncomfortable silence. "Peter Johnson. How nice of you to grace us."
For nine years that line had been a joke. Mr. D's way of saying hello without admitting he knew Percy's name. Tonight he said it without the eye-roll, and without the half-buried smirk, and it landed like a stranger's insult.
"Let's just do this," Percy said. "Whatever it is."
Chiron cleared his throat. He looked older than Percy had ever seen him. "Percy. Several serious charges have been brought against you by members of this camp. You will be allowed to answer each one. I ask everyone to remember that this is a council, not a trial, and that—"
"Let's not pretend, Chiron." Annabeth opened the folder. "We all know what this is."
She started reading.
It took forty minutes.
Forty minutes of Percy standing at the foot of a ping-pong table, listening to the smartest person he had ever known build a case against him, brick by brick, in a calm clear voice.
The Hermes boy who'd broken his arm in a training accident in February, while Percy was two hundred miles away taking midterms. Annabeth said Percy had been there. She had a camper who'd seen him. The canoe that had capsized in March, drowning a twelve-year-old daughter of Iris who'd only been at camp for three days. Annabeth said the lake had turned. Annabeth said only one person at camp could turn the lake.
"Two people," Percy said. "Two people can turn the lake now. He's sitting right there."
"Ezra was in the infirmary," Will Solace said quietly from halfway down the table. He didn't look up. "I treated him myself. He had a fever."
"I wasn't even here!"
"Then explain this." Annabeth slid a photograph across the table.
It was a picture of the lake on the day the girl drowned. Gray water. A capsized green canoe. And on the far shore, half hidden in the reeds, a figure in a blue hoodie with dark hair and his hands raised toward the water.
Percy had a blue hoodie. Everybody knew he had a blue hoodie. He'd worn it every winter since he was fifteen.
He stared at the photo. The face was turned away. It could have been anyone. It could have been him. That was the horror of it, the thing that made his skin crawl: for one long, sick second, looking at that blurry figure, he wasn't sure.
No. He shook his head hard. No. I was in a lecture hall. I was in a lecture hall in New Rome and I fell asleep and Frank poked me with a pen. I was there. I know I was there.
Frank would vouch for me. Frank, Hazel, Reyna. They'd all—
"I want to call someone," he said. "I want Frank Zhang to testify. He was with me. He can—"
"The Romans don't have jurisdiction here," Annabeth said. "And they'd lie for you anyway. You're their hero, remember? Praetor Jackson. They'd say anything."
"You're my hero," he wanted to say. You were. You were, and you're sitting there with his hand on your knee under the table, and I can see it.
He didn't say it.
She kept going. Theft from the camp store. Threats against younger campers. A drachma found at the scene of a satyr's disappearance with a trident scratched into it. Each charge on its own was flimsy. Together, read out loud in Annabeth Chase's voice, with Ezra nodding solemnly at her side, they sounded like a pattern. Like a person.
Like a monster.
And the worst part, the part that would wake him screaming years later in the dark, was the counselors' faces. He watched them while she read. He watched people he'd fought beside, people he'd carried off battlefields, people whose siblings he'd pulled out of rubble in Manhattan, nod along. Not with relish. With sadness. Like they'd always half expected this. Like he was a dog they'd loved that had finally bitten someone.
Only two faces didn't nod.
One was Chiron's. The old centaur sat very still with his hands folded, his eyes moving between Annabeth and Ezra and back again, and there was something in his expression that Percy couldn't read. A frown, deep and troubled, like a man listening to a familiar song played slightly wrong.
The other was Clarisse La Rue.
She sat at the far end with her chair tipped back on two legs and her arms crossed, chewing a toothpick, and every time Annabeth said the word witness, Clarisse's jaw got a little tighter.
"The charges are serious," Chiron said at last. "Percy. Do you wish to answer them?"
Percy looked at the table. At the folder. At the photograph of a dead girl's canoe.
"I didn't do any of it," he said. His voice was steady now, steadier than he felt. "I don't know what's happening here. I don't know how. But I know what this camp is. I know what I've done for it. I know what you know about me. Every single one of you." He looked around the table, face by face. "Travis. I carried you out of the Williamsburg Bridge fight with a spear in your leg. Katie. I held the line at the Plaza while your cabin got the wounded out. Will. We sat up for three nights with Nico when he was fading. You know me."
Travis looked away. Katie's eyes were wet. Will's hands were shaking on the table.
And Percy saw it then, clearly, for just a second. On Will's face. A flicker. A hitch, like a skipping record. His brow creased and his mouth opened like he was about to say something, like some buried part of him had heard Nico and woken up.
Then Ezra shifted in his chair. Percy caught a glint at his throat: a pendant on a leather cord, tucked half under his shirt, gold and pale green, shaped like a little coiled shell. The light caught it and seemed to ripple.
Will's face smoothed out. Blank again.
"I'm sorry, Percy," he said. "I really am."
What was that? Percy's eyes stuck to the pendant. What is that thing?
"We'll vote," Mr. D announced, and drained his Diet Coke. "Banishment. All in favor of throwing Peter Johnson off my strawberry farm, raise your sad little hands."
The hands went up. One by one, then in a wave. Annabeth's first, quick and certain. Then Malcolm. Then the Stolls, together, not looking at each other. Then Hephaestus, Apollo, Iris, Hecate, Nike, Hypnos, the minor cabins all in a ragged line. Will's hand went up last of the big cabins, slowly, like it weighed fifty pounds.
Eighteen.
"Opposed?"
Clarisse's chair came down onto all four legs with a bang.
"Opposed," she said loudly, and stuck her hand straight up. "And I want it on record that this whole thing stinks worse than my brother's socks."
Every head turned. Ezra's smile flickered, just slightly, at the corner.
"Ms. La Rue," Mr. D said. "I didn't realize you were such good friends with Prissy here."
"We're not friends. I can't stand him. He's a self-righteous little punk who broke my spear when I was thirteen and never let me forget it." Clarisse spat the toothpick onto the floor. "He also took a drakon for my cabin when Silena died. He also walked into my dad's temple with nothing but a stick to get me out. Prissy Jackson's a lot of things. A kid-drowner isn't one of 'em. And I don't trust anybody who shows up out of nowhere in March and has half the camp eating out of his hand by April." She jerked her chin at Ezra. "Including that one."
The room went very quiet.
"Noted," Chiron said softly. He looked at Clarisse for a long moment with something that might have been gratitude. Then he looked at Percy. "And... I abstain."
"Chiron," Annabeth said sharply.
"I abstain, Annabeth. It is my right." The centaur's voice didn't rise, but it didn't bend either. "I am not certain. I find I am not certain of a great many things this summer."
It didn't matter. Eighteen to one.
Mr. D set his empty can on the table with a little click. "Well. That settles that. Perseus Jackson, you are hereby banished from Camp Half-Blood. The barrier will not admit you again. If you set foot on this hill, you'll be treated as a hostile. Off you go, then. Shoo."
He walked down Half-Blood Hill alone at nine o'clock at night with a cardboard box under one arm and Riptide in his pocket.
Nobody walked him out. He hadn't expected them to. But near the bottom of the hill, under Thalia's pine, he heard heavy footsteps crunching behind him and turned to find Clarisse jogging down, scowling.
"Don't," she said, before he could say anything. "Don't get mushy, Prissy. I'll punch you."
"I wasn't going to."
"Good." She stopped beside him and glared at the dark road. "Something's wrong with them."
"Yeah."
"Like, wrong wrong. Chris looked at me yesterday like he didn't remember our anniversary. We've been together four years. I had to remind him. And then he looked at Ezra and smiled like a lost puppy." Her fists clenched. "I keep thinking it's the Mist. But the Mist doesn't work on demigods like that. Not this much."
"He's got a necklace," Percy said. "A shell. Did you see it?"
Clarisse's eyes narrowed. "Gold one? Yeah. He never takes it off. Not even in the lake."
They looked at each other.
"I'll keep an eye on it," she said finally. "You go home. Hug your mom. Figure out who you know that's smart and isn't blond and get them on it. Rachel, maybe. Or that weird Hecate girl in Manhattan." She paused. "And Jackson? Whatever this is... I don't think it's done with you yet."
She punched him in the shoulder, hard enough to bruise, and walked back up the hill without another word.
It was, Percy thought, the nicest thing anyone had done for him in two days.
The drive back to Manhattan took two and a half hours. He didn't remember any of it.
He remembered the lights of the expressway sliding past. He remembered gripping the steering wheel so hard his knuckles ached. He remembered calling his mom three times from a rest stop in Commack and getting her voicemail all three times, which was strange, because Sally Jackson always picked up. She picked up in the middle of the night. She picked up in the shower. She had picked up, once, while Percy was dangling off the side of a mountain in Alaska, and talked him through it.
She's asleep, he told himself. It's late. She went to bed early. She's got a book signing Saturday, she's tired.
He called Paul. Voicemail.
They're both asleep.
He parked on East 104th at eleven-forty and looked up at the fifth floor of their building. The windows were dark. That was normal. That was fine. People slept at eleven-forty.
The front door to the building was propped open with a brick.
It was never propped open.
He was running before he knew it. Up the stairs, two at a time, three, Riptide already in his hand and uncapped, the bronze blade throwing faint gold light on the peeling paint of the stairwell. Fourth floor. Fifth.
The hallway outside their apartment was wet.
Not a little wet. Soaked. Water pooled on the cheap linoleum, an inch deep, seeping out from under the door of 5C, and it smelled like brine. Like the bottom of the ocean. Like seaweed and salt and something cold and dead.
"Mom?"
His voice cracked on it. He hadn't called her Mom like that, small and scared, since he was nine.
The door wasn't locked. He pushed it open.
I am not going to tell you everything he saw.
He would never tell anyone either, not in all the years that came after. Not in Tartarus, not in the long quiet of the life that came later. He kept it locked away in a room inside himself, and he never opened the door, and some nights he could still feel it there behind him, waiting.
But some things got through. Some things always do.
The kitchen floor, flooded. The blue cookies from the photo on the counter, scattered and soaked into gray paste. The living room, where the Wall of Things Percy Wasn't Supposed to Survive had been torn down, every frame smashed, his diploma floating face-down in two inches of salt water.
Paul, by the window, where he'd been standing between the door and the hallway that led to the bedroom. Where he'd been standing in front of her.
And his mother.
Sally Jackson, who had married a monster to hide her son's scent. Who had driven through a storm to Montauk to save him. Who had faced down Hades in his own throne room. Who had made blue food for twenty years because a man named Gabe once told her there was no such thing as blue food, and she had decided, out of sheer quiet stubbornness, to prove him wrong forever.
She was on the floor of her bedroom. The water had come up from the drains. From the pipes. From the faucets, the toilet, the radiator. From every vein of water in the walls of the old building, all at once, pouring in and rising, and there had been nowhere to go.
Percy knew what that kind of water felt like. He knew exactly what it took to call it. He had never once in his life done it to a living thing.
He dropped to his knees beside her in the water. He gathered her up. She was so cold. She'd always run warm. She used to joke that she was a furnace, that she kept him warm through every winter in that drafty little apartment when Gabe had spent the heating money on poker.
"Mom," he said. "Mom. Mom. Come on. Mom."
He pushed the water out of her lungs. He knew how. He'd done it for drowning campers a hundred times. He reached into her with every scrap of his father's power and pulled, and the water came out of her, all of it, in a long silver rope that splashed onto the floor.
She didn't breathe.
He did it again. And again. He did it until his hands shook and his nose bled and the room spun, until there was not a single drop of water left in her, until she was as dry and still as stone.
She didn't breathe.
That was when he saw the message.
It was on the bedroom mirror, above her vanity, where she put on her lipstick every morning. Written in water. Not fog, not condensation. Water, held in the shape of letters by a will that was still there, still fresh, still sticky with power. Percy could feel it like a fingerprint. He'd felt it on the beach two days ago, sniffing at him from the sand.
SHE CALLED ME A MONSTER. GUESS SHE WAS RIGHT ABOUT ONE OF HER SONS.
NOW WE'RE EVEN, BIG BROTHER. NOW YOU'VE GOT NOTHING.
— E.
Percy looked at the words for a very long time.
He didn't scream. That surprised him, later. He'd always thought that if the worst thing happened he would scream. Instead something inside him went very quiet and very cold and very, very clear, like the sea before a hurricane, when the water pulls back from the shore and the birds go silent and the whole world holds its breath.
He laid his mother down gently on her bed. He closed her eyes. He went and knelt by Paul and closed his too, and took the man's hand, the hand that had handed him car keys that morning, and held it for a minute.
"Thank you," he whispered. "For standing in front of her. Thank you."
Then he stood up.
The water in the apartment stood up with him.
It rose from the floor in a slow, shuddering sheet. It pulled out of the carpets and the drywall and the soaked couch cushions. It pulled from the pipes. It pulled from the building, from the block, from the storm drains under East 104th Street and from the East River four avenues away, and every faucet in a three-block radius coughed and went dry as the water answered its master and came home.
Across the city, in hundreds of apartments, sleepers stirred and didn't know why. In the harbor, tugboats rocked on a sudden, swelling tide. Somewhere off Montauk, a pod of whales surfaced all at once and lifted their heads toward the west, toward a grief so huge it was bleeding into the water.
Percy Jackson stood in the ruins of his childhood home with the ocean gathering around his shoulders like a cloak, and he picked up Riptide from the floor, and he looked out the broken window toward Long Island.
You wanted me to have nothing, he thought.
You should have been more careful what you wished for.
A man with nothing has nothing left to lose.