He summoned the Gate in Cabin One at midnight, between the empty bunks, under the scowling marble statue of his adopted father.
It felt strange, doing it here. In his bedroom on 104th Street, the golden door had always looked out of place next to his laundry pile. Here, in the great cold marble hall, it looked like it belonged. The thread glowed and the light spilled across the floor and climbed the statue's legs, and for a second it looked almost like the marble Zeus was frowning down at it in curiosity.
Don't tell anyone, Percy thought at the statue, and walked through.
[FLOOR 4: THE HOWLING FOREST]
[Rank: F]
[Enemies: Lv 15–27]
[Main Quest: Defeat the Alpha Lycan.]
[Side Quest: LONE WOLF — Slay 50 wolves without resting at the lodge.]
[Hidden Quest: ???]
It was winter on Floor 4.
He came out of the Gate into knee-deep snow under black pines a hundred feet tall, so dense that the gray sky only showed through in scraps. The cold hit him like a slap. His breath froze on his lips. Somewhere far off, through the trees, something howled, long and low and rising, and was answered from three directions at once.
[Environmental Effect: Extreme Cold. Stamina regeneration -30%.]
Great, Percy thought, pulling his hood up. Love that.
He'd thought, after the Minotaur, that he was ready for anything the F-rank floors could throw at him. He was Level 30 now. Vessel Rank E. He had six shadows and two classes and a god's blessing.
The wolves taught him otherwise in about an hour.
They weren't like the slimes or the goblins or the undead. They were fast. Faster than anything he'd fought. They came in packs of four to six, gray and silent through the trees, and they never attacked from the front. They circled. They waited. One would dart in at his heels, and when he turned to meet it, two more would hit him from behind.
[Timber Wolf — Lv 18]
[Timber Wolf — Lv 19]
[Timber Wolf — Lv 17]
[-34 HP]
[-41 HP]
He fought back to back with Thing Two and his shield. He let Gorrath hold the left side and Asterion the right, and the wolves broke against them. The shadows were a wall the pack couldn't get around.
Then he stopped.
He stood in the snow with blood on his sleeve and five dead wolves around him, and he looked at his shadows, and he thought about the Spindle Room. About the iron-gray thread that had wrapped around his wrist. About what it had said. The Host's body is untrained.
If I let them fight everything for me, he thought, I never get better. I just get an army.
He called them back. All of them.
[Great Sage notes that the Host's survival probability has decreased by 41%.]
I know, Sage.
[Great Sage requests clarification of the Host's reasoning.]
An army's no good if the guy in charge can't fight, Percy thought. Gorrath and Asterion are stronger than me right now. That's backwards. I need to be the strongest one in the room. Not because I have to win every fight. Because one day they'll all be down and it'll just be me.
There was a long pause.
[...Reasoning logged.]
So he fought the Howling Forest alone.
It took him five nights. Ten tower-days.
He learned the wolves the way he'd learned everything else in The Loom: by getting hurt until he stopped getting hurt. He learned they always sent one in at his heels first, to make him turn, and he stopped turning. He learned to keep a tree at his back, always, so they could only come at him from three sides instead of four. He learned to listen to the snow, the soft crunch that came a half second before a lunge, and to move a half second before that.
The Monk class grew faster than it ever had. Fighting wolves was all speed and evasion and footwork, and the Focus pool filled and drained and filled again until it was second nature.
[Monk Lv 7 → Lv 12]
[Monk Lv 10: FLURRY OF BLOWS unlocked. Spend Focus to strike twice in the time of one.]
[Monk Lv 12: STEP OF THE WIND unlocked. Spend Focus to dash or leap twice your normal distance.]
He found the ruined hunting lodge on the second day. It was a stone shell with half a roof and a fireplace that still worked, the only safe zone on the floor. He sat in front of the fire with Hestia's warmth soaking into him, healing three times as fast as anywhere else in The Loom, and he looked at the side quest still glowing in the corner of his vision.
[LONE WOLF — Slay 50 wolves without resting at the lodge. (Failed: rested at lodge.)]
Oh, come on.
He started over on the next run. Fifty wolves. No fire. No rest. Two tower-days in the snow with nothing but healing potions and stubbornness, sleeping in the crook of a fallen pine with his shield over his face. He came out of it with frostbite on two fingers. A tenth of it followed him back to his bunk in Cabin One, and Will Solace frowned at it the next morning and didn't ask.
[SIDE QUEST COMPLETE: LONE WOLF. 50 / 50.]
[Reward: Beast Hide Armor (Rare) [Fighter] — DEF +18, Cold Resistance.]
[Reward: Fang Daggers (Rare) x2 — Inflict Bleed.]
He found the cub on the fourth night.
It was lying in a snowdrift at the bottom of a ravine, half-buried, with a deep gash in its side. Gray fur. Too-big paws. It couldn't have been more than a few weeks old. When it saw him, it bared its tiny teeth and growled, a pathetic little rattle of a sound, and tried to get up, and couldn't.
[Wounded Wolf Cub — Lv 2]
Percy stood at the top of the ravine and looked down at it for a long time.
He'd killed eighty wolves on this floor. Maybe more. He'd stopped counting. They were monsters. They were a story the Loom was telling, and they came back every time the floor reset.
But the cub was shaking.
He climbed down the ravine. He knelt in the snow a few feet away and held out his hand, the way he'd held it out to the Golden Slime a lifetime ago.
"Hey," he said. "Hey, little guy. I'm not gonna hurt you."
The cub growled. Then it tried to bite him, and missed, because it could barely lift its head.
Percy took off his jacket. He wrapped the cub in it, very carefully, ignoring the teeth, and carried it up out of the ravine against his chest. He walked it all the way back to the hunting lodge, two tower-hours through the snow, and laid it in front of the fire, and poured half a Minor Healing Potion down its throat.
It bit him three times on the way. He let it.
By morning, it was sleeping in his lap.
[HIDDEN QUEST COMPLETE: THE ONE YOU DIDN'T KILL.]
[The Host spared and healed a wounded wolf cub.]
[Companion acquired: Wolf Cub (Tower-Born). It may leave The Loom with the Host.]
[Reward: Summon Card: Wolf (x3).]
[Slime Ring HP Regeneration +1.]
The cub woke up, yawned enormously, showing all its needle teeth, and licked his chin.
"Okay," Percy said. "Okay, okay. You need a name."
He thought about it for a long time. Then he thought about a pack of wolves in another life, in California, in the snow. Lupa, the mother wolf, who'd trained him when he had no memory of who he was. Who'd told him he was weak, and then made him strong.
"Lupe," he said. "It's short for something. You'll get it when you're older."
Lupe sneezed on him.
The Alpha Lycan never fought alone.
Percy learned that the hard way, the first time he found the den on the cliff. The Alpha was there, huge and gray and scarred, eight feet tall on its hind legs, half wolf and half man, with steel-capped fangs and eyes like yellow lanterns.
[FLOOR BOSS: ALPHA LYCAN — Lv 30]
[HP: 4,200 / 4,200]
[Abilities: Pack Call, Howl of Frenzy, Steel Fang]
And behind it were the Steel-Fanged Lycans, four of them, and behind those, a dozen timber wolves. When Percy stepped into the clearing, the Alpha didn't even move. It just howled, once, and the whole pack came at him together.
He lasted ninety seconds. Then he ran.
It's the pack, he thought, sitting in the lodge with Lupe licking a cut on his hand. I can't fight it with the pack there. I have to split them up.
How do you separate a wolf from its pack?
He thought about it for a long time, staring into the fire. Then he thought about the frozen river.
It ran along the bottom of the valley below the Alpha's cliff, wide and white and still. He'd crossed it a dozen times. The ice was thick near the banks and thin in the middle, where the current still moved underneath. He'd fallen through once, on the second day, up to his waist, and nearly frozen.
Wolves are heavy, he thought. And they chase.
He went back on the fifth night, and he didn't go to the den.
He went to the river. He walked out onto the ice, testing every step, to the place in the middle where it was thinnest, where he could see the dark water moving underneath like a shadow. He stood there and drew his sword and banged it against his shield, again and again, as loud as he could, until the whole valley rang with it.
The pack came.
They poured down off the cliff and out of the trees, gray shapes against the white. The Alpha came last, loping on all fours, its yellow eyes fixed on him. They reached the bank. They didn't stop. They came out onto the ice at a full run, all of them, the timber wolves first and the Steel-Fanged behind them and the Alpha at the back, driving them.
Percy waited.
He waited until the first wolves were twenty feet away. Until he could hear the ice groaning under all that weight. Until the pack was spread across the thin ice in the middle of the river, and the Alpha was right behind them, still on the thick ice near the bank.
Then he raised his sword, and brought the pommel down on the ice at his feet.
[ACTION SURGE!]
Once. Twice.
The crack went out from his feet like lightning. It ran across the ice in every direction, branching and spreading, and the groaning became a roar, and the ice under the pack simply gave way.
The wolves went into the black water all at once. Timber wolves and Steel-Fanged together, thrashing, howling, clawing at the broken edges, and the current took them under.
Percy was already moving. He leapt from floe to floe with Monk speed in his legs, the ice heaving under his feet, toward the bank. Toward the only thing left standing on the river.
The Alpha Lycan stood alone on the thick ice by the shore, staring at the black water where its pack had been. For the first time, it looked uncertain.
Then it looked at Percy, and the uncertainty became rage.
[ALPHA LYCAN: Howl of Frenzy! STR +50%. DEF -30%.]
The fight lasted eleven minutes, and it was the best fight he'd had in The Loom.
The Alpha was faster than him and stronger than him. But it was alone, and it was angry, and it had never had to fight anything by itself in its whole Thread-born life. Percy fought it on the ice with everything he'd learned in ten tower-days of wolves. Tree at his back on the bank. Listening for the crunch. Moving before the lunge. Shield up, Riposte, Flurry of Blows, the Fang Daggers in his off hand, opening wounds that bled and bled.
[-488 HP]
[SECOND WIND!]
[FLURRY OF BLOWS! -312 damage. Target Bleeding.]
And at the end, when the Alpha came at him with its steel fangs bared and its claws wide, Percy didn't dodge. He stepped in, inside the claws the way he'd stepped inside the Orc King's punch. He drove his xiphos up under its jaw, into the soft place where wolves were always soft, and held it there.
The Alpha Lycan looked at him. Its yellow eyes dimmed.
It went down on the ice, and lay still, and dissolved into gray dust that blew away across the frozen river.
[FLOOR BOSS DEFEATED: ALPHA LYCAN.]
[FLOOR 4 CLEARED. Thread tied off.]
[+9,800 EXP]
[LEVEL UP! Level 31 → Level 32]
[LEVEL UP! Level 32 → Level 33]
[Loot: Fenrir Core (Epic) — Passive: BERSERK. Below 25% HP, the Host's damage +40%.]
[Loot: Wolf Pelts x18. Steel Fangs x4.]
[Extraction available. Window: 60 seconds.]
Percy stood over the drifting dust and thought about it.
[Shadow Army: 6 / 8.]
An Alpha. A pack leader. Something that knew how to hunt in a group, that knew how to command.
"Arise," he said.
[EXTRACTION SUCCESSFUL!]
[Shadow Soldier acquired: Alpha Lycan — Rank: KNIGHT]
[Shadow ability retained: PACK CALL — may summon 4 lesser shadow wolves for 60 seconds.]
It rose up out of the dark of the river, a great gray-black wolf-man of shadow with violet lantern eyes, and dropped to all fours, and bowed its head.
On the bank, Lupe sat in the snow and watched with enormous eyes. Then the little cub trotted out onto the ice, sniffed the huge shadow-wolf's nose, and sneezed on it.
The Alpha's shadow made a sound Percy would have sworn was a laugh.
"Fang," Percy said. "You're Fang."
Floor 5 took him three more nights, and it was the first floor that made him think.
[FLOOR 5: THE ELEMENTAL RUINS]
[Rank: F]
[Enemies: Lv 25–35]
[Main Quest: Defeat the Elemental Guardian.]
[Side Quest: FOUR KEYS — Clear all four temple wings.]
[Hidden Quest: ???]
It was a temple. A huge ruined temple of white stone on top of a mountain, open to the sky, with four great wings stretching out from a central rotunda like the arms of a compass. Each wing belonged to an element, and each one wanted to kill him a different way.
The fire wing had lava vents that opened under his feet without warning, and Fire Sprites that burned through his armor. The earth wing had pillars that fell when he walked past, and Earth Golems that hit like trucks and didn't feel pain. The wind wing had gusts that tried to throw him off the open ledges into a thousand-foot drop, and Wind Shades that were almost invisible. He nearly went over twice.
The water wing was the one he kept coming back to.
It was a long, low hall of white columns, with channels cut in the floor where water ran in narrow streams. Water Wisps drifted through it, pale blue and glowing, and every room had a great bronze sluice gate at the far end, holding back something huge and heavy. He could hear it, behind the gates. The roar of a lot of water, waiting.
[Note: The sluice gates of the water wing may be opened. This will flood the wing.]
Percy stood in front of the first gate for a long time.
In his first life, water had been his. Every drop of it. He'd breathed it, commanded it, called it from the sea and the sky. If he'd seen this hall back then, he'd have opened every gate without thinking.
Now he was a mortal with a sword. Water could drown him like anyone else.
That's the point, isn't it, he thought. That's what this floor wants to know. Whether I can fight somewhere I'm not strong anymore.
He cleared the other three wings first. Fire, earth, wind. He got the keys, one from each wing's guardian spirit, and with each key the shimmering shield around the central rotunda grew dimmer.
[FOUR KEYS: 3 / 4.]
Then he came back to the water wing, and he opened the gates.
The water came in like a freight train.
It filled the hall in seconds, chest-deep, then neck-deep, cold and fast and furious. He fought the Wisps in it, with his feet barely touching the floor, his armor dragging him down, his lungs burning. He went under twice. The second time, he didn't think he was coming back up.
But he did. He kicked off a column and broke the surface, gasping, and the Water Wisps were all around him, and he fought them anyway. Slow, heavy, half-drowning, but fighting. Because the water didn't care who his father was. It only cared whether he gave up.
He didn't.
[HIDDEN QUEST COMPLETE: INTO THE FLOOD.]
[The Host chose to fight in the element where he is weakest.]
[Reward: Water Breathing Charm (Rare) — the Host may breathe underwater for 10 minutes per day.]
[Reward: VIT +5.]
[FOUR KEYS: 4 / 4. The Guardian's shield has fallen.]
The Elemental Guardian waited in the rotunda, and it was beautiful.
[FLOOR BOSS: THE ELEMENTAL GUARDIAN — Lv 40]
[HP: 6,500 / 6,500]
[Abilities: Elemental Shift, Immunity (current element)]
It was a giant made of light, twenty feet tall, standing in the center of a great round hall under an open sky. Its body flickered and changed as he watched. Fire, then stone, then wind, then water, never the same for more than a few seconds. And whatever it was, nothing of that element could touch it.
The Guardian was the hardest fight he'd had yet. It wasn't because it was strong, though it was. It was because he had to think. When it was fire, he had to hit it with something that wasn't hot. When it was stone, he had to hit it with something that could break stone. When it was wind, he couldn't touch it at all. He just had to survive until it changed.
He used everything. Fang Daggers when it was stone, to find the cracks. The Orc King's Cleaver from his inventory, the heaviest thing he owned. Lupe, who darted between its legs and distracted it. His shadows, finally, Asterion and Gorrath holding it in its stone form while he climbed it like a cliff.
And at the end, when it shifted to water, he did the thing he'd been afraid of.
He let it take him.
It swallowed him whole. He was inside it, inside twenty feet of glowing water, and he couldn't breathe, and the pressure was crushing him, and he triggered the Water Breathing Charm and could. He swam up through the Guardian's body to the bright pulsing heart of light in the center of its chest, where all four elements met.
He drove his sword into it.
[CRITICAL HIT! -1,840 damage.]
[The Guardian's core has been pierced. Elemental Shift disabled.]
The Guardian came apart like a wave breaking on a beach. Light and water and fire and wind, all at once, exploding outward through the rotunda. Percy came down with it in a rush of cold water, and landed on the white stone floor, coughing and laughing.
[FLOOR BOSS DEFEATED: THE ELEMENTAL GUARDIAN.]
[FLOOR 5 CLEARED. Thread tied off.]
[+14,000 EXP]
[LEVEL UP! Level 33 → Level 34]
[LEVEL UP! Level 34 → Level 35]
[LEVEL UP! Level 35 → Level 36]
[Loot: Elemental Essences x4. Resistance Rings x2.]
[Loot: PRISM CORE (Epic) — Elemental affinity +25%. Note: Effect will be amplified when the Host's bloodline wakes.]
Percy held the Prism Core up to the open sky. It was a crystal the size of a walnut, and light moved inside it, every color at once.
When the bloodline wakes, he thought.
Floor 6 was next. He'd read the Bible of it in the System's index, the little the System would tell him. The Lizardmen Swamp. Half underwater. A sunken temple.
He was starting to think The Loom had a plan for him. He just didn't know what it was yet.
[STATUS]
Name: Perseus Jackson
Vessel Rank: E
Level: 36
Classes: Fighter (Lv 36) · Monk (Lv 15)
Divine Parentage: Zeus (Bloodline: Dormant — Stirring)
Patron Blessings: Hestia
Titles: Adopted Son of the Sky · Bane of the Labyrinth · Warden of Half-Blood Hill
HP: 860 / 860
Stamina: 470 / 470
Focus: 150 / 150
STR: 41
AGI: 43
VIT: 39
INT: 20
WIS: 26
CHA: 27
Faith Points: 211
Shadow Army (7 / 8): Asterion (Elite Knight) · Gorrath (Knight) · Fang (Knight) · Lazarus (Elite) · Gloop (Elite) · Thing One · Thing Two
Companions: Lupe (Wolf Cub) · Varka Ironjaw (Floor 2 Waypoint)
Waypoints: Floors 1–5
He came out of The Loom on the third morning with 211 Faith, and he spent a hundred of it before breakfast.
[Faith Gacha: Standard Pull. -100 Faith.]
The capsule was gold and blinding, like a little sun, and when it cracked open the light that came out of it was warm and sharp and smelled like summer.
[PATRON BLESSING ACQUIRED!]
[BLESSING OF APOLLO, God of the Sun, Prophecy and Truth]
[Apollo remembers granting you this blessing. He does not question why. He thinks, vaguely, that it was a really good idea, and is a little proud of himself.]
[Active: DIVINE EYE (Lesser) — Look upon a being and see the thread of its lineage: its godly parent, its blood, its true nature. Cost: 20 Focus.]
[Passive: SUNLIT — Minor healing while in direct sunlight.]
Percy read it twice, sitting on his bunk in Cabin One. Then he looked out the window, across the green, at the Hermes cabin. At the fifty-three undetermined kids spilling out onto its porch, sleeping in its doorways, waiting. Some of them had been waiting for years.
He grinned.
He did it at lunch.
He could have just walked up to each of them and told them quietly. That would have been the sensible thing. But he remembered how it had felt, in his first life, to sit at the Hermes table, unwanted, unclaimed, wondering if your parent even knew you existed. And he thought the kids at that table deserved better than a quiet word in a corner.
So he stood up on the bench at the Zeus table, which was a table for one, and banged his cup with a spoon until the whole pavilion went quiet.
"Okay," he said. "Hermes table. Raise your hand if you don't know who your godly parent is."
Fifty-three hands went up. Slowly. Some of them uncertain. Some of them angry.
"Great," Percy said. "We're gonna play a game."
He called it Guess Who's Your Parent. Clarisse called it the stupidest thing I've ever seen and then sat in the front row the whole time.
He'd point at a kid. The kid would stand. Then the whole pavilion got to guess, shouting out names, while Percy looked at the kid with the Divine Eye and saw the thread of their life glowing in the air around them. A color, a symbol, a warmth that told him who'd made them.
The first was a skinny girl with wild curly hair, maybe eleven, who'd been at camp for two years. "Hephaestus!" someone yelled. "Demeter!" "Hermes! She's always stealing my socks!"
Percy looked at her. The thread around her glowed silver, cool and clear, and smelled faintly like rain on a river.
"Nope," he said. "Your mom's a river goddess. One of the naiads of the Hudson. That's why you always end up at the canoe lake when you're sad."
The girl stared at him. Then she burst into tears. Then she laughed, and the two kids on either side of her grabbed her and hugged her, and the whole pavilion cheered.
The second was a big quiet boy who never said a word to anyone. The pavilion guessed Ares, Hephaestus, Ares again. Percy looked. "Hypnos," he said. "God of sleep." And the boy, who'd been falling asleep in every activity for a year and getting yelled at for it, put his face in his hands and laughed until he cried.
The third was a girl who'd been fighting with everyone, all the time, for months. Everybody shouted Ares! Clarisse shouted ARES! louder than anyone and pointed at her own cabin's table, like, we'll take her.
"Nike," Percy said. "Victory. You don't fight because you're angry. You fight because you can't stand losing."
The girl went very, very still. Then she nodded, slowly, like something had finally clicked into place.
He went down the table, one by one. Fifty-three kids. A son of Iris. Two daughters of Nemesis. A son of Hecate who'd been accidentally setting things on fire for months. A pair of twins whose father was a minor wind god. Three real children of Hermes, who'd been in the right cabin the whole time and never knew it. He spent his Focus until it was empty, and then he sat there with a Hestia-warmed mug of cocoa until it came back, and kept going.
And something happened that he hadn't planned for.
After the fifth kid, as the girl whose mother was Nike sat back down, the air over her head shimmered. A symbol appeared there, faint and gold. A pair of wings.
The pavilion went dead silent.
After the sixth, it happened again. A rainbow, over the son of Iris.
After the seventh, a little silver river, over the crying girl from the Hudson.
[Great Sage notes: Divine attention detected. Multiple deities are observing the dining pavilion.]
Percy looked up at the sky through the hole in the patched roof, and he started to laugh.
They were watching. Up there, on Olympus, the gods were watching a mortal boy stand on a bench and name their children out loud in front of everyone. One after another. Children they'd forgotten, or ignored, or been too busy to claim. And every time he said a name, every time a kid's face lit up, every time the whole camp cheered, some god somewhere was being shamed in front of their whole family.
And they were claiming them. Fast. Before he could do it for them.
By the end of lunch, thirty-one of the fifty-three had symbols hovering over their heads.
[FAITH EARNED: The Host restored identity to the forgotten children of the gods.]
[+480 Faith Points.]
[Title acquired: Namer of the Unclaimed.]
Percy climbed down off the bench into a crowd of kids. Crying, laughing, hugging him, slapping his back. A tiny girl with a rainbow over her head grabbed him around the waist and wouldn't let go.
Across the pavilion, Chiron sat very still in his wheelchair at the head table. He was looking at the glowing symbols over all those heads. He looked like he was about to cry.
At the Hermes table, Luke Castellan was sitting alone at the end of a bench that had been packed an hour ago. His cabin had just lost more than half its people to their real parents. He didn't look angry. He looked at the empty seats around him, and then up at the hole in the roof, at the sky, for a long, long time.
Percy saw the look on his face, and thought he understood it.
They only came because I shamed them into it, Luke was thinking. Nine years, and it took a mortal kid on a bench.
"The camp," Chiron said that afternoon, very carefully, "was built as a dedication to the gods."
They were in the Big House: Percy, Chiron, Annabeth, and Beckendorf, around the ping-pong table, which was now covered in maps and sketches and Annabeth's frantic notebooks. Annabeth had drawn the walls of the new camp four times already. Beckendorf had done the math on how much celestial bronze they'd need for the forges and gone very pale.
"Every cabin," Chiron went on. "Every hearth. The very ground of this valley. It was consecrated to them. To move it— Percy, the gods may see this as an insult."
Percy snorted. "Then they should have done a better job."
Annabeth's pencil stopped. Beckendorf's eyebrows went up. Chiron closed his eyes.
"I'm serious," Percy said. "Chiron. Look at the hill. Look at the graves. If this camp is a dedication to the gods, it's the saddest dedication in history. They let it die. They let the tree die and the walls fail and the kids sleep under tarps. I'm not insulting them by moving it. I'm saving it. If they want to be insulted, they can come down here and tell me to my face why their kids were sleeping in the rain."
Chiron opened his eyes and looked at him for a long time.
Then, very slowly, the old centaur smiled.
"You sound like someone I knew once," he said quietly. "A long time ago."
You have no idea, Percy thought.
"The real problem," Annabeth said, "isn't the gods. It's money." She tapped the map. "Plum Island is federal land. The government's been trying to sell it for years, but it's tied up in red tape and environmental reviews, and the price is enormous. And Gardiners Island has been owned by the same family for three hundred and fifty years. They've never sold an inch of it. I looked it up. We'd need tens of millions of dollars. Maybe more. And lawyers. And somebody the mortal world would actually take seriously."
She looked at Percy. "We're a bunch of teenagers on a strawberry farm."
Percy thought about his System card. It had about forty thousand dollars on it now from the Broker. Wolf pelts and elemental essences and the Orc King's cleaver. A lot of money for a fourteen-year-old. Not close to an island.
Then he thought about a girl with paint on her jeans, lying on a roof in Manhattan. Matt would be a jerk to everyone, and I'd be at boarding school in Switzerland being miserable.
Her father owned half of the Upper East Side.
Her father was a land developer.
"I need a phone," Percy said. "And an Iris message, or whatever we use here. I need to call a friend."
Rachel picked up on the second ring.
"Percy?" Her voice was crackly, far away. He was standing on the porch of the Big House with Chiron's ancient cell phone, the only one at camp, which was technically forbidden because phones attracted monsters. Percy had said he'd take the risk. Chiron hadn't argued. "Percy, is that you? Are you okay? Are you hurt? Nancy says you've got a pet slime—"
"I'm okay," he said, and was surprised by how much he wanted to laugh. "Rach. I need to ask you something huge. Like, the biggest favor anyone's ever asked anybody."
There was a pause. Then her voice changed. Got careful. Older.
"Is this about the dreams?"
"Kind of. Yeah."
"Then ask."
So he told her. About the camp, and the graves, and the dead tree. About New Rome. About Plum Island and Gardiners Island, and a city where kids like him could grow up and grow old.
Rachel didn't say anything for a long time after he finished.
"My dad," she said finally, very quietly. "You want my dad."
"I know how you feel about him. I know you hate his business. I know you hate the parties and the money and the way he bulldozes things. I know, Rach. I wouldn't ask if it wasn't—"
"He's been trying to buy Gardiners Island for six years," Rachel said.
Percy stopped talking.
"It's his white whale," Rachel said. "He wants to put luxury condos on it. Golf courses. The family keeps saying no. He's obsessed with it. He talks about it at dinner." Her voice was getting faster, the way it did when an idea grabbed her. "Percy. If I told him I wanted to help, if I told him I wanted to get involved in the business, finally, after years of telling him I'd rather die— he'd give me anything. He's been waiting my whole life for me to want anything he has."
"Rachel. I'm not asking you to—"
"You're not asking. I'm offering." A shaky laugh. "I'll be the most annoying heiress in New York. I'll tell him I want Gardiners Island as a nature preserve, for some charity, as my project. He'll think it's a phase. He'll do it just to make me happy. And then we'll have it."
Percy sat down on the porch steps. His legs weren't working right.
"Why would you do that?" he said. "For me?"
"Because you walked into a throne room for me once," Rachel said. "Didn't you? In the dream. No. I walked into one for you. I remember that now. I'm just— I'm finishing what I started." Her voice went soft. "And because you said a place where kids like you can grow up. And I want to see it, Percy. I want to see it so bad."
[DING!]
[LINKED QUEST UPDATE: Those Who Stood Beside You]
[Rachel Elizabeth Dare has chosen to stand beside you again.]
[LEGENDARY QUEST UPDATE: THE CITY OF THE UNCLAIMED]
[Stage 1 Progress: A path to Gardiners Island has been found.]
Percy sat on the porch steps of the Big House with the old phone pressed to his ear, listening to Rachel Elizabeth Dare make plans at a hundred miles an hour, and he looked out across the camp. At the cabins. At the kids on the green, a dozen of them with brand-new glowing symbols over their heads, running and laughing in the sun. At the dead tree on the hill.
For the first time since the Fates had come into his kitchen, he let himself believe it might actually work.