The first thing he knew was warmth.
Not the burning heat of the Phlegethon. Not the clammy wet cold of the Cocytus. Just warmth. Soft and close and all around him, and a heartbeat under his ear, slow and steady, and a voice humming something tuneless and happy.
He knew that voice.
He couldn't open his eyes properly. Everything was blurry, shapes and smears of light. His body was wrong, tiny and boneless and impossibly heavy, and he couldn't lift his head. But he knew that voice. He'd heard it humming in the kitchen at 104th Street every Saturday morning of his first life. He'd heard it in his nightmares every night of eight years in the Pit.
"Hi," Sally Jackson whispered. "Hi, baby. Hi. Look at you. Oh, look at you."
Someone was crying. He realized after a second that it was him. Newborns cry. That's what they do. But this wasn't the thin angry squall of a baby who's cold. It was something else, something that came from far down in a soul that was much, much older than the body it was in. He couldn't stop it.
"Oh, hey, hey, it's okay," his mother murmured, rocking him. "It's okay. I've got you. I've got you, sweetheart."
A second shape leaned over them both. Tall, blurry, with a deep gentle voice that cracked down the middle.
"He's perfect, Sal."
"He is, isn't he?"
"Have you decided?"
"Perseus," his mother said. "Perseus Jackson. Jackson for my family. I know we talked about Blofis, but..." She laughed softly. "I don't know. It just feels like his name. Like he's had it before."
Paul Blofis laughed too, and kissed her hair, and then very carefully he put one big finger into the baby's tiny fist.
Percy grabbed it and held on with everything his newborn body had.
You're here, he thought, through the haze of new nerves and new lungs and a brain that couldn't hold a thought for more than a second. You're both here. You're both alive.
Thank you.
Then he fell asleep, because he was a baby, and that's also what babies do.
He'd worried, a little, in the last moments in Tartarus, about what it would be like. Being a baby with a twenty-eight-year-old's memories. He'd imagined something horrible: a grown man screaming silently inside a body that couldn't walk or talk.
It wasn't like that. The Fates had been kinder than that.
He was a baby. He was a baby who was hungry and sleepy and fascinated by the ceiling fan. Then he was a toddler who liked dinosaurs and hated broccoli. Then he was a little boy who fell off his bike and cried and wanted his mom. His mind grew with his body, just like any other kid's. The memories were there, underneath, like a deep sea under a sunlit surface. He could dive down into them when he wanted to. But most of the time he swam in the shallows, and he was just a kid.
A kid who knew things he shouldn't.
He knew, at three, that his mother needed to finish her novel, and he'd climb onto her lap at the kitchen table and say write, Mommy, write the story until she laughed and did. He knew, at five, that there were no monsters under his bed, and slept with the light off from the very first night, which baffled Paul. He knew, at six, to hold the door for old ladies and to keep his hands to himself on the subway. He knew how much a bag of groceries cost and how much rent was and how tired his mom got by Friday.
And he knew, the very first time he saw the ocean, at age four, on a day trip to Montauk, that it didn't know him.
He stood on the sand in his little blue swim trunks with his toes in the foam, and he waited. He waited for the tug. The hum. The deep, endless, welcoming murmur that had been in the back of his head every second of his first life.
Nothing.
The waves came in, cold and gray and indifferent, and washed over his feet, and went back out again. Just water. Just the sea.
Paul found him like that ten minutes later, still standing in the same spot, crying without making a sound.
"Hey, buddy." Paul crouched down beside him. "What's wrong? Water too cold?"
Percy shook his head. He couldn't explain. He'd never be able to explain. So he just turned and buried his face in Paul's shirt, and Paul picked him up without another word and held him, and walked him up and down the beach, and pointed out the gulls and the crabs and a funny-shaped rock, until he stopped.
On the drive home, half asleep in his car seat, he heard his mom say quietly, "Sometimes he looks at the water like he's lost something."
"He's four, Sal."
"I know. I know. It's just... I don't know. Sometimes I look at him and I think he's a lot older than four."
Percy kept his eyes closed and pretended to be asleep.
I'm not him anymore, he told himself. That's the deal. That's the whole point. No more ocean. No more monsters. Just this. Just them.
It's enough.
And for a long, long time, it was.
He met Nancy Bobofit on the first day of second grade, when she shoved him off the monkey bars.
It was a familiar enough experience. In his first life, Nancy had been his own personal tormentor at Yancy Academy, a freckled redhead with a cruel streak and an endless supply of insults and ketchup sandwiches to throw at Grover. So when a small, freckled, red-haired girl with skinned knees and a scowl planted both hands on his back and pushed, he wasn't really surprised.
What surprised him was what happened after.
He landed in the wood chips, hard, and lay there for a second looking at the sky. Then he looked up at her. She was standing on the platform above him with her fists clenched, waiting. Waiting for him to cry, or to tell the teacher, or to come up swinging.
And Percy, who had fought hellhounds and Titans and the darkness at the bottom of the universe, looked at seven-year-old Nancy Bobofit and saw something he'd never noticed in his first life, because he'd been too young and too angry to look.
Her sneakers were a size too big, held together with duct tape. Her shirt was faded and had someone else's name markered out inside the collar. And there was a bruise on her arm, a yellowish-green bruise with a shape he recognized, because he'd seen it on his own mother's arm, years ago, in another life, in an apartment that smelled like Gabe Ugliano's cigars.
Four fingers and a thumb.
He got up slowly, brushed the wood chips off his pants, and climbed back up the ladder. Nancy took a step back, startled.
"You can go first," Percy said. "I don't mind."
She stared at him like he'd grown a second head. "I pushed you, dummy."
"Yeah. It kind of hurt." He shrugged. "You can still go first."
She went first. She didn't say thank you. But at lunch she sat down across from him without asking, and stole his pudding cup, and he let her. The next day she sat there again. He brought two pudding cups.
She noticed. She didn't say anything about it. But she noticed.
It took him three years to get the whole story out of her. Her mom's boyfriend. The yelling. The nights she slept in the bathtub with the door locked. Percy listened to every word of it, ten years old and sitting on the stoop of her building, and then he did something he'd never have known how to do in his first life.
He told his mom.
Sally Jackson listened to every word too. Then she made some phone calls. Then she made some more. It was messy and slow and frightening, the way these things always are. There were social workers and court dates and a terrible night when Nancy showed up at their door at midnight with a split lip and a backpack. Sally took one look at her, pulled her inside, and made up the couch, and she stayed for a week.
The boyfriend went away. Nancy's mom got help, eventually, and got better, mostly. And Nancy Bobofit never forgot whose door she'd knocked on at midnight.
"You're such a sap, Jackson," she told him, years later, at twelve. They were sprawled on the floor of his room doing homework, and she threw an eraser at his head. "You know that? A total sap. You'd be friends with a rabid raccoon if it looked sad enough."
"I'm friends with you," he pointed out.
She threw her whole pencil case.
Matt Sloan came next, in fourth grade, and he came with a black eye.
In his first life, Matt Sloan had been a Yancy kid, a rich jerk with a big mouth who'd made Percy's life miserable for a year. In this one, he was the new kid in a Manhattan public school in the middle of the year. A skinny, mouthy kid with expensive sneakers and a dad who'd lost everything in some kind of financial scandal, which every other kid in class had already heard about from their parents.
They ate him alive. Percy watched them do it for two weeks, and he watched Matt fight back with the only weapon he had, which was his mouth. Matt said cruel things, cutting things, every insult he could think of, until the other kids stopped calling him names and started using their fists instead.
Percy found him behind the dumpsters after school on a Thursday, sitting on the ground with a bloody nose and a cracked phone, trying very hard not to cry.
"What do you want?" Matt snarled. "Come to get a hit in too?"
Percy sat down next to him on the asphalt.
"Nah," he said. "My friend Nancy says you're a jerk."
"I am a jerk."
"Yeah, I noticed." Percy handed him a pack of tissues. His mom always made him carry them. "I think you're a jerk on purpose, though. So people leave you alone. That's kind of smart. It's just not working."
Matt stared at him. Then, slowly, he took a tissue and pressed it to his nose.
"Who even are you?"
"Percy. I sit two rows behind you. I'm the one who doesn't laugh when you mess up in math."
It took a while. Matt's walls were higher than Nancy's and built out of sharper stuff. But Percy was patient. He'd learned patience on the black shore of the Cocytus, fighting the same drakon every day for years. By fifth grade, Matt Sloan was eating dinner at the Jackson-Blofis apartment twice a week. By sixth, he was sleeping over every Friday. By seventh, Paul was helping him with his history essays and Sally was making him a separate batch of cookies without walnuts because he didn't like walnuts. He never said thank you for that either.
He didn't have to. The first time she did it, he went into the bathroom for twenty minutes, and came out with red eyes, and nobody said anything.
Rachel Elizabeth Dare, he met on purpose.
He went looking for her. He was eleven, and he'd been thinking about it for months. He knew she was out there somewhere in the city. He knew where her family's house was, and that she'd be about his age, and that in his first life she'd been one of the ten people who walked out into the throne room of the gods for him.
I saw it. Last week. I saw the water. I tried to call you.
He'd never gotten to thank her for that. Not properly.
So one Saturday in October he took the subway to the Upper East Side by himself, which his mother would have killed him for, and walked to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He'd remembered, from his first life, that Rachel used to sketch the Greek statues there on weekends when she was skipping her private tutors. He found her in the sculpture garden, a skinny girl with wild red hair and paint on her jeans, sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of a statue of Athena, scowling at her sketchbook.
He sat down next to her.
"Her nose is wrong," he said, nodding at the drawing.
Rachel looked at him. Looked at the statue. Looked back at her sketchbook.
"Her nose is wrong," she agreed, outraged. "Who are you?"
"Percy."
"Do you draw?"
"Nope. Terrible at it. I just like the statues." He shrugged. "I like the stories, I guess."
She narrowed her eyes at him. Rachel Elizabeth Dare had a way of looking at people like she was seeing something behind them. It was a little unsettling even when she was eleven. Especially when she was eleven.
"That's weird," she said finally. "I feel like I know you."
"Maybe you do."
"That's even weirder." Then she grinned, sudden and bright, and shoved her sketchbook at him. "Fix her nose, then. If you're so smart."
He made it worse. Much worse. She laughed so hard a security guard told them to keep it down.
They were best friends by Thanksgiving.
The four of them were a strange crew, and they knew it. The rich girl who hated being rich. The poor girl who was angry at the world. The kid whose dad was in prison. And Percy, who didn't seem to belong anywhere in particular, and who somehow held the whole thing together.
They did everything together. They spent summers at the public pool and winters sledding in Central Park. They did their homework on the floor of the Jackson-Blofis apartment while Sally cooked and Paul graded papers at the kitchen table. They went to Rachel's family's ridiculous house in the Hamptons and spent the whole weekend hiding from her dad's business parties in the pool house, eating stolen canapés. They fought, sometimes, like friends do. Nancy and Matt fought about everything. Rachel and Nancy fought about whose turn it was to pick the movie. They always made up. Percy usually made sure of it.
"You're like the glue," Rachel said once, at thirteen. They were lying on the roof of her house at night, looking up at the four or five stars you could see over Manhattan. "Like, I don't think any of us would even be friends without you."
"Sure you would."
"No. We wouldn't." She turned her head to look at him. Her green eyes were serious. "Matt would be a jerk to everyone, and Nancy would beat him up, and I'd be at boarding school in Switzerland or something being miserable. You found all of us. Like you knew where to look."
Percy didn't say anything for a long moment.
"Maybe I did," he said quietly.
Rachel didn't ask what he meant. She just reached over and took his hand, and they lay there on the roof in the cold not saying anything, and it was one of the best nights of his life.
Either life.
The acceptance letter from Goode High School came in the mail on a Tuesday in May.
Paul taught English at Goode. He'd been there for years, and he'd never once used it to put in a good word for Percy. Percy had made him swear. He'd wanted to get in on his own. He'd studied like crazy for the entrance exam, sitting with Rachel in her library while she tutored him in math and Matt quizzed him on history and Nancy threw popcorn at both of them every time they got too serious.
All four of them got in.
They found out on the same day, all four letters arriving in the same afternoon mail. Nancy called first, screaming so loud Percy had to hold the phone away from his ear. Then Matt, trying to play it cool and failing completely. Then Rachel, who didn't say anything at all for ten full seconds, then said, "Percy. We did it," in a small, stunned voice.
Sally declared a party.
It was a Saturday night in the middle of May, two weeks before school let out. The little apartment on East 104th Street was packed. Rachel's dad had sent a ridiculous catered spread, which Sally pretended to be annoyed about and secretly loved. Nancy's mom came, sober for two years now, and cried when she saw the banner Paul had painted. Matt's mom came with him and stood awkwardly by the window until Sally pulled her into the kitchen and put her to work, and after that she was fine.
There was music. There was too much food. Sally had made a cake, a huge three-layer monster of a cake, and it was blue. Blue frosting, blue cake, blue candles. It said CONGRATS GOODE KIDS across the top in wobbly white letters.
Percy stood in the doorway of the kitchen with a slice of it on a paper plate and watched.
He watched Matt and Nancy argue about whether the cake tasted blue, which was apparently a thing that could be argued about. He watched Rachel laughing with Paul about some book. He watched Nancy's mom and Matt's mom washing dishes side by side, chatting like old friends. He watched his mother move through the crowded little apartment, filling cups and hugging kids, glowing.
She caught his eye across the room and smiled. The same smile. The exact same smile she'd given him on a beach at Montauk, once, a whole universe ago.
Be careful, she used to say.
He had been. For fourteen years, he'd been so careful. He'd never gone near the ocean. Never looked for camp. Never tested whether a celestial bronze blade would pass through his hand, or whether he could see through the Mist. He'd turned away from every strange shadow and every stray dog with too many teeth. He'd built a small, quiet, human life, and he'd filled it with people he loved. And it had been good. It had been so good.
Fourteen years, he thought. Fourteen years of peace. I never thought I'd get one.
Thank you, he thought, to no one in particular. To three old women knitting on a black beach. Thank you. This is enough. This is everything.
Rachel caught his eye from across the room and grinned at him, and lifted her cup in a toast. Matt and Nancy saw her and lifted theirs too. Then everyone in the room was doing it, cups and plates and forks held up in the air, a whole crowded apartment toasting to the four Goode kids and the boy in the kitchen doorway with blue frosting on his chin.
Percy laughed, and raised his paper plate.
And the world stopped.
It was the silence he noticed first.
One second the room was roaring with music and laughter. The next, it was gone. Not faded. Gone, cut off like someone had hit a switch. The record on Paul's old turntable had stopped mid-note. The candles on the cake had stopped flickering, their flames frozen solid, like little drops of orange glass.
Rachel was frozen with her cup raised and her mouth open in a laugh. Matt was frozen with his eyes squeezed shut, halfway through a sneeze. Nancy was frozen in midair, actually in midair, both feet off the ground, caught in the middle of jumping onto the couch. Paul was frozen with his arm around Sally's waist. Sally was frozen looking at Percy, still smiling.
Every single person in the room was perfectly, utterly still.
Except him.
Percy's paper plate slid out of his hand and hit the floor.
That moved. The plate fell and the cake spattered across the linoleum, blue on white, and that was the only sound in the whole silent world.
Then he heard it. Faint. Coming from the living room.
Click. Click. Click.
Knitting needles.
He turned around very slowly.
They were sitting on his mother's couch. Three old women in gray shawls, with a basket of yarn between them, in the middle of his party, surrounded by frozen people, knitting a long strand of sea-green thread.
The Fates looked up at him all at once.
"Hello, Perseus," said Clotho. "We're so terribly sorry to interrupt."
And the floor of Percy Jackson's second life dropped out from under him, exactly the way the first one had.