The station wagon died in Pennsylvania.
It died quietly, with a cough and a shudder and a sad little puff of black smoke, on the shoulder of I-70 somewhere west of Harrisburg. Ezra had been driving. Ezra was fourteen and had never driven anything in his life, but nobody had been able to talk him out of it. The Mist had apparently decided that a teenager behind the wheel of a 1987 Buick was perfectly normal.
"It's the car," Ezra said, getting out and kicking the tire. "It's a piece of junk."
"You drove it in second gear for two hundred miles," Annabeth said.
"There's a second gear?"
They took a train.
Percy bought the tickets in Harrisburg with his System card, four sleeper berths on the Amtrak to St. Louis. Ezra watched him do it with narrowed eyes.
"Where'd you get money?" he demanded. "You're a mortal. From a normal family. Your stepdad's a teacher."
"I sell slime," Percy said.
Ezra stared at him. Percy didn't elaborate.
Annabeth, behind Ezra, put her hand over her mouth and looked away very fast. Her shoulders were shaking.
They saw themselves on the news in the dining car.
There was a TV in the corner, playing a cable news channel with the sound off. And there they were. A grainy security camera photo of the four of them in the Greyhound station in Manhattan. Then footage of a burning bus on the New Jersey Turnpike. Then a still photo of Percy, looking straight at the camera, under a headline that said WANTED FOR QUESTIONING: TEEN IN TURNPIKE BUS EXPLOSION.
"Oh no," Grover said.
"That's your picture," Ezra said. He sounded delighted. "Just yours. They think you did it."
"I did do it," Percy said. "Technically."
"Ha!"
Percy didn't laugh. He was staring at the TV, at his own face, and thinking about his mother. About Sally Jackson in the apartment on East 104th Street, sitting at the kitchen table with her coffee, turning on the morning news.
He went out to the vestibule between cars, where it was loud and cold and private, and called her on Chiron's phone.
She picked up before the first ring finished.
"Percy."
Her voice was shaking. Not crying. Past crying. The terrible calm.
"I'm okay, Mom," he said. "I'm okay. I swear. Everyone got off the bus. Nobody got hurt. It wasn't— it's not what it looks like."
Silence on the line. Then, very quietly: "Did you blow up a bus?"
Percy closed his eyes.
"Yes," he said. "But there were three monsters on it. Trying to kill my friend. And I made sure everybody else got off first. I promise, Mom. I promise."
A long, long silence.
Then his mother laughed. A small, shaky, completely helpless laugh.
"Oh, Percy," she said. "Oh, sweetheart. What am I going to do with you?"
"I don't know," he said, and his throat closed up. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry I'm scaring you."
"I've been scared since you were four years old," Sally said quietly. "Since the beach. I've always known something was coming for you. I just didn't know what." A pause. "Are you safe right now?"
"Yeah. On a train. With my friends."
"Are you eating?"
He laughed. It came out wet. "Yeah, Mom. I'm eating."
"Okay." He heard her take a breath. "Okay. Then I'll handle the police. Paul and I will tell them you're at camp and you've been there all week and the boy in the photo looks nothing like you. Which is true, by the way. It's a terrible picture. Your hair looks crazy."
"It's static," Percy said.
"What?"
"Nothing. I love you, Mom."
"I love you too." A pause. "Come home."
"I will."
He hung up and stood in the cold rattling vestibule for a long time, with his forehead pressed against the window, watching Ohio slide past in the dark.
They got to St. Louis at noon the next day.
The train had a two-hour layover, and Annabeth wanted to see the Arch. Of course she did. She'd been talking about it since Indiana: the engineering, the catenary curve, the way it had been built from both ends at once and joined at the top with a margin of error less than the thickness of a dime.
"It's six hundred and thirty feet tall," she said, walking backward along the riverfront in front of them with her eyes shining. "The tallest monument in the country. It sways eighteen inches in high winds. Eighteen inches. And they built it in 1965 with slide rules."
"Fascinating," said Ezra, who was clearly only coming because Annabeth was.
Percy walked behind them, slower, with Lupe in his jacket and a bad feeling crawling up the back of his neck.
He remembered the Arch.
He'd been here at twelve. He'd ridden the little egg-shaped elevator car to the top. And at the top, in the observation deck, a fat old lady with a chihuahua had turned out to be Echidna, the Mother of Monsters. Her chihuahua had turned out to be the Chimera. The Chimera had poisoned him with its snake tail and blasted a hole in the side of the Arch with its fire breath. With nowhere else to go, he'd jumped six hundred feet into the Mississippi River.
He'd survived because the river loved him. Because he was the son of the sea, and the water had caught him and healed him and held him like a mother.
He looked at Ezra, walking ahead with his hands in his pockets, trying to look cool for Annabeth.
It'll catch him too, Percy thought. He's Poseidon's son here. The water will love him the way it loved me.
He hoped.
[Storm Sense: Unusual pressure detected at the summit of the Gateway Arch.]
[Great Sage notes: The Host has reached a 'have walked this road before' event with high confidence.]
Yeah, Sage, Percy thought. Yeah, I know.
He tried to talk them out of it. He really did.
"What if we skip the top?" he said, in the line for the tram. "We could just look at it from the outside. It's really nice from the outside."
"Are you scared of heights?" Ezra asked, grinning.
"Yes," Percy lied.
"Ha! The big hero's scared of heights!"
Annabeth looked at Percy. Not the way Ezra was looking. The puzzle look. And something else behind it, something sharper, because she'd seen him in the warehouse. She'd heard him say I've been here before.
"Percy," she said slowly. "Is something going to happen up there?"
Percy hesitated.
That was all it took. She saw it in his face.
"Okay," she said quietly. "Then we should go now. While you're with us. Instead of later, when you're not." She turned to the others. "Grover. Ezra. Weapons ready. Stay close to Percy."
Ezra stared at her. "What? Why? What's going to happen?"
"I don't know," Annabeth said. "But he does."
The tram car was a tiny white pod like an egg, with five seats and a little round window, and it clanked and rattled up the inside of the Arch's leg for four minutes. Grover spent the whole ride with his eyes squeezed shut, clutching his reed pipes.
The observation deck at the top was a long narrow curved room with little windows along both sides, looking down six hundred feet to the city on one side and the Mississippi River on the other. It was crowded with tourists. Families. A school group.
And a fat old woman in a flowered dress, with a tiny chihuahua on a rhinestone leash.
She was standing at the far end of the deck, by the windows on the river side. When they came in, she turned and smiled at them. Her teeth were very small and very pointed.
The chihuahua looked at Ezra and started to growl.
[ENEMY IDENTIFIED: ECHIDNA, Mother of Monsters — Lv 71]
[ENEMY IDENTIFIED: THE CHIMERA — Lv 62 — Currently disguised.]
[Abilities (Chimera): Fire Breath, Serpent Tail (Venom), Lion's Roar]
[Abilities (Echidna): Summon Brood, Serpent Coil]
[WARNING: Enclosed space. Civilians present: 31.]
Thirty-one civilians, Percy thought. In a metal tube six hundred feet in the air.
Great. Perfect. Love this.
"Ahhh," said the old woman. Her voice was soft and dry and rattled like a snake's tail. "The son of the sea god. At last. My master said you would come this way." Her small black eyes moved past Ezra and landed on Percy. They narrowed. "And you've brought... something else. How curious. My baby will want to try you both."
The chihuahua was growing.
Its tiny body swelled and stretched and split open, and the thing that came out of it was not a chihuahua. It was the size of a pickup truck. It had the head of a lion with a bloody mane, the body of a goat, and a twelve-foot diamondback rattlesnake for a tail. Its eyes were molten gold. When it opened its mouth, Percy could see the fire building in the back of its throat like a furnace.
The tourists started screaming.
Percy moved first.
He couldn't throw lightning. Not in here. Not in a steel tube with thirty-one civilians, where it would arc through the whole structure and fry every person in it. He couldn't call Asterion or Gorrath. They'd barely fit, and they'd crush the tourists in the panic.
So he called Thing Two.
The shadow-hobgoblin came up out of the floor of the observation deck between the Chimera and the screaming school group, tower shield already planted. The Chimera's first gout of fire hit the shield dead center and splashed off it in a blinding wave of orange, scorching the walls and the ceiling. It didn't touch a single child.
"Annabeth!" Percy yelled. "Get them to the tram! All of them! Grover, help her! GO!"
Annabeth was already moving. She grabbed the nearest kids and shoved them toward the tram doors, yelling at the teachers, and Grover was right behind her, playing a high frantic tune on his pipes. Percy didn't know what it did, but the panicking tourists suddenly started moving in an orderly line, like they were being herded.
Echidna laughed.
"Shadows," she hissed, watching Thing Two hold the line. "A mortal with shadows, and the sky in his veins. My master will want to know about you." Her body was changing too, the flowered dress splitting, her legs fusing into the coils of an enormous serpent. "But my baby only wants the son of the sea. Sic him, darling."
The Chimera turned.
Ezra was standing alone in the middle of the observation deck with Riptide in his hand. He'd drawn it. He was holding it out in front of him in both hands, the way Percy had taught the new campers to hold a sword on their very first day. His face was white. His knees were shaking.
But he didn't run.
"Come on," he whispered. "Come on. Come on."
The Chimera lunged.
Ezra did better than Percy had, at twelve.
He dodged the first lunge. He was fast, and the lion jaws closed on air. He swung Riptide and caught the Chimera across the shoulder, and it bit deep, and the monster roared. He dodged the second lunge, and the third. He was good. Raw and untrained and terrified, but good.
But he forgot about the tail.
Percy saw it coming from ten feet away. The rattlesnake tail, whipping around behind Ezra's legs. He yelled. Ezra didn't hear him.
The snake struck.
It buried its fangs in Ezra's calf, through his jeans, and held on.
Ezra screamed. He went down on one knee. Riptide clattered out of his hand and skidded across the floor.
[ALLY STATUS: Ezra Coleman — POISONED (Chimera Venom). Lethal in 4 minutes.]
The Chimera opened its mouth. Fire was boiling in its throat, white-hot, aimed straight at Ezra's face from three feet away.
Percy was too far away. He was ten feet away, on the wrong side of Thing Two's shield. He wasn't going to make it.
And Ezra did what Percy had done, once, at twelve. The only thing there was to do.
He looked at the window behind him. At the river, six hundred feet down. At the water.
And he threw himself backward into the glass.
The window shattered. Ezra went through it in a spray of glass and vanished.
The Chimera's fire hit the empty air where he'd been, and roared out through the broken window in a long orange tongue over the Mississippi.
Percy didn't think.
He heard Annabeth scream his name from the tram doors. He heard Echidna laugh. He heard the Chimera turn toward him with a roar.
He didn't care about any of it.
He ran across the observation deck, past the Chimera's snapping jaws, past Echidna's coils, and dove through the broken window after Ezra.
Six hundred and thirty feet is a long way to fall.
It's long enough to think. Long enough to see the whole world turning below you. The silver ribbon of the river, the green parks, the tiny cars on the bridges. Long enough to see Ezra, a hundred feet below, tumbling end over end, limp, not trying to slow himself down. Not trying anything. Poisoned and unconscious and falling.
Long enough to call the sky.
[AEROKINESIS!]
The wind came. It came howling up off the river and caught Percy like a hand, and he shaped it. He bent it and pushed it and rode it down. Not slowing. Speeding up. Diving like a hawk, arms tucked, straight down toward the tumbling boy below him.
[MP: 180 / 260]
[MP: 120 / 260]
He caught Ezra two hundred feet above the river.
He slammed into him in midair and wrapped both arms around his chest and held on, and they were tumbling together. Then Percy threw everything he had into the wind. Every scrap of MP, every drop of the sky in his blood.
[AEROKINESIS — OVERCHARGE!]
[MP: 120 → 0]
The wind became a wall.
It came up off the Mississippi in a great roaring column, and the two of them hit it like hitting a mattress. And they slowed. A hundred feet. Fifty. They were drifting, spinning slowly, like two leaves in a storm. Twenty feet.
They hit the river.
The water was brown and cold and fast.
It closed over Percy's head and dragged at him, and he felt the old instinct kick in, the one from his first life. Breathe. Let the water hold you. And it didn't. The water didn't know him anymore. It pulled at his clothes and his limbs and tried to take him down.
But the sky did.
[BREATH OF THE SKY.]
A bubble of air wrapped around his head, sweet and clean and cold. He breathed. And he held onto Ezra, and kicked, and kept them both from going under.
And then the river noticed Ezra.
It was like a light switching on. The current around them changed. It stopped dragging and started carrying. The brown water went still and warm around Ezra's body. It wrapped around him like a blanket, and lifted him gently up to the surface, and held him there, floating, his face to the sky.
Percy surfaced beside him, gasping.
It still loves them, he thought, and something twisted in his chest that he didn't want to look at too closely. The water. It just doesn't love me anymore.
He pushed the thought away. It didn't matter. Ezra mattered.
Ezra wasn't waking up.
His face was gray. His lips were blue. And on his calf, where the Chimera's tail had bitten him, the skin was black and swollen and spreading. Dark veins crawling up his leg like ink in water. The river was trying. Percy could feel it, the water pouring itself into the wound, trying to heal him the way it had once healed Percy. But it wasn't enough.
[ALLY STATUS: Ezra Coleman — POISONED. Lethal in 1 minute, 40 seconds.]
[The river's healing is slowing the venom, not stopping it.]
Percy dragged him toward the riverbank. A muddy stretch under a bridge, out of sight of the Arch. He hauled him up onto the mud on his back and knelt over him, panting.
"Ezra," he said. "Ezra. Come on. Wake up."
Nothing.
[Lethal in 1 minute, 10 seconds.]
Percy's hand went to his inventory before he'd decided anything. His fingers closed around something small and cold and smooth.
A glass vial. Two chambers. Dark red on one side. Dark green on the other.
From the right side, Medusa had said, it can heal any wound. Even bring back the dying, if you're quick.
[BLOOD OF THE GORGON (Right) — Resurrection (Lesser). 1 dose. Cannot be replaced.]
Percy looked at the vial in his hand.
It was the only one. The only one there would ever be. Medusa had given it to him. To him. For the day when somebody he loved was dying, and there was nothing else.
He thought about his mother. About Paul. About Rachel, Nancy, Matt. About Grover and Annabeth, up on that Arch. About all the days coming. The Underworld, and the Titans, and the war. All the times he might need this.
He looked down at Ezra Coleman.
The boy who had drowned his mother in another world.
He hasn't done it, he told himself. Not here. Not yet.
[Lethal in 40 seconds.]
And if I let him die, he never gets the chance to be anything else.
Percy broke the wax seal on the red side of the vial with his thumb, tipped Ezra's head back, and poured it down his throat.
For three long seconds, nothing happened.
Then Ezra arched off the mud like he'd been shocked. The black veins on his leg receded. They drew back down his calf like ink sucked back into a pen, faster and faster, until they were gone, until the wound was just two small red punctures and then nothing at all. His face went from gray to white to pink. His lips went from blue to red.
And he gasped, a huge, ragged, whooping breath, and his eyes flew open.
They were sea-green, and wild, and terrified, and alive.
[ALLY STATUS: Ezra Coleman — HEALED.]
[Item consumed: Blood of the Gorgon (Right).]
Ezra stared up at the sky. Then at the bridge overhead. Then at Percy, kneeling over him, soaking wet, with an empty vial in his hand.
"What..." he croaked. "What happened? I jumped. I remember jumping. And the snake... my leg..."
"You got poisoned," Percy said. His voice was shaking. He didn't know why. "You were dying. I fixed it."
Ezra looked at the empty vial. Then at his leg. Then back at Percy. And slowly, the way someone figures out a really big math problem, it came into his face.
"That was the thing the Gorgon gave you," he said. "Wasn't it. I saw her give it to you. On the steps." His voice went strange. "Annabeth said what it was. In the car. She said it could bring people back from the dead. She said it was the only one in the world."
Percy didn't say anything.
"You used it on me?"
"Yeah."
Ezra sat up. He was staring at Percy like he'd never seen him before. Like Percy was a puzzle in a language he didn't speak.
"Why?" he said. "You don't even like me. I've been a jerk to you since the museum. I tried to take credit for the Minotaur. I told everyone you were a liar. I—" He stopped. His face twisted. "Why would you waste that on me?"
Percy looked at him for a long time.
He thought about all the true answers. Because in another world you killed my mother, and I need to know if you're the same person here. Because the Fates said you'll destroy the world, and I want to prove them wrong. Because I watched you walk out into the road to fight the Minotaur for your mom, and I can't stop seeing it.
He didn't say any of them.
"Snack guy," he said. "Remember? It's my job to carry the stuff you need."
Ezra stared at him.
Then his face crumpled.
It happened all at once. One second he was fourteen and furious and confused. The next his face just fell apart. He put his hands over his eyes, sitting in the mud under a bridge in St. Louis, and he cried. Big, ugly, heaving sobs, like a little kid. Like nobody had ever done anything for him in his whole life, and he didn't know what to do with it now that somebody had.
Percy sat down in the mud beside him and didn't say anything. He just sat there, while the river ran past, and let him cry.
[Hidden Achievement: The Snack Guy.]
[The Host spent an irreplaceable treasure to save someone who had given him every reason not to.]
[CHA +3. WIS +3.]
[Note: Ezra Coleman's hostility toward the Host has decreased.]
[Note: Ezra Coleman's confusion toward the Host has greatly increased.]
The Chimera found them twenty minutes later.
It came down the riverbank from the Arch, sniffing, lion's nostrils flared, with fire leaking out between its teeth in little curls of smoke. Echidna was slithering behind it on her serpent coils. They'd followed the scent of poison.
"There," Echidna hissed, pointing. "Under the bridge. The sea-spawn. Alive. How?" Her black eyes found Percy, and narrowed. "You. Again. Kill them both, darling. Kill them now."
The Chimera roared and came down the bank toward them at a run.
Percy stood up.
He was soaked. He was out of MP. He'd just used his only resurrection on a boy who'd hated him a week ago. And he was standing in the shallows of the Mississippi River, ankle-deep in water, with mud everywhere and the whole wide-open sky above him.
No steel tube. No tourists. No reason to hold back.
And the sky was already sending him more power. He could feel it, trickling back into the empty MP pool. Not enough for a lightning bolt. Not yet.
But enough for his shadows.
"Asterion," Percy said quietly. "Gorrath. Fang. Lazarus. Gloop. Everybody."
They came up out of the river.
All of them, all seven, rising out of the brown water of the Mississippi one after another. The Minotaur with his black axe and his one horn. The Orc King with his cleaver. The Alpha Lycan with his pack. The Necromancer with his staff, already raising the bones of drowned things out of the river mud. The great black dome of the Slime King. The two Hobgoblins with flail and shield.
The Chimera skidded to a halt on the bank.
Echidna stopped too, her coils rearing up.
"What," she breathed, "are you?"
"Everyone keeps asking that," Percy said.
Beside him, Ezra had stopped crying. He was sitting in the mud, staring up at the army of shadows rising out of the river around Percy. His mouth hung open.
The Chimera lunged.
And Percy's shadows hit it from every direction at once.
It was over in ninety seconds. Thing Two took the fire on his shield. Fang and his summoned wolves pinned the snake tail. Asterion and Gorrath took the lion head from both sides at once, axe and cleaver. Gloop swallowed the goat body whole up to the shoulders. And when the trickle of power from the sky had filled the MP pool just enough, Percy raised his hand from where he stood in the river.
[LIGHTNING CALL!]
The bolt came down out of the clear blue sky over St. Louis. Thousands of people saw it, and the evening news called it a freak strike on a cloudless day. It hit the Chimera dead center. It ran through the monster and through the shallows and into the river.
[In water: x2. CRITICAL.]
The Chimera exploded into a cloud of golden dust and smoke that hung over the riverbank.
Echidna screamed.
It was a terrible sound, the scream of a mother who had just watched her child die, and for one second Percy almost felt sorry for her. Then she turned and fled, slithering up the bank and away into the city, howling. Her voice echoed back off the bridges: "My master will hear of this! He will know your name, sky-boy! He will KNOW YOUR NAME!"
Percy watched her go.
Then he looked at the cloud of golden dust drifting over the riverbank.
[THE CHIMERA HAS BEEN DEFEATED.]
[+38,000 EXP]
[LEVEL UP! Level 44 → Level 45]
[LEVEL UP! Level 45 → Level 46]
[Extraction available. Window: 60 seconds.]
[Shadow Army: 7 / 12.]
He held out his hand.
"Arise."
[EXTRACTION FAILED. The target's will resisted.]
He frowned. He thought about it. What did a Chimera want? It had been a chihuahua five minutes ago. A pampered little dog on a rhinestone leash. Its mother had called it darling.
It had wanted its mother.
Percy knelt in the shallows by the drifting dust.
"I'm sorry," he said quietly. "She ran. She left you. I'm sorry." He held out his hand. "I won't leave you. Come with me."
"Arise."
[EXTRACTION SUCCESSFUL!]
[Shadow Soldier acquired: THE CHIMERA — Rank: KNIGHT]
[Shadow ability retained: Fire Breath (Shadowflame), Serpent Tail (Venom), Lion's Roar.]
It rose up out of the river in black and violet, lion and goat and serpent. It looked around at the other shadows, and then at Percy. And then, very slowly, it lowered its great shadow lion's head and pressed its nose against his chest. Like a dog that had been lost and finally found someone to belong to.
Percy put his hand on its mane.
"Chi-Chi," he said. "Your name is Chi-Chi."
The Chimera's shadow made a sound that might have been a purr.
Behind him, from the mud under the bridge, Ezra Coleman said, in a very small voice: "You named the Chimera Chi-Chi?"
"It used to be a chihuahua," Percy said.
Ezra stared at him.
Then, for the first time since the museum, for the first time ever, Ezra Coleman laughed. Not at Percy. With him. A real laugh, startled out of him, wet and cracked and exhausted, sitting in the mud of the Mississippi with his knees pulled up to his chest.
Percy laughed too.
That was how Annabeth and Grover found them, twenty minutes later, after they'd gotten every tourist safely down from the Arch and come running along the riverbank in a panic. They found the two sons of the Big Three sitting side by side in the mud under a bridge, soaking wet, laughing so hard they couldn't breathe, while a lion-goat-snake made of living shadow curled up in the shallows beside them and purred.
Annabeth stopped dead on the bank.
"What," she said slowly, "did I miss?"
Neither of them could answer her.
That night, on the train to Denver, Ezra came and found Percy in the vestibule between cars.
Percy was standing at the window again, watching Missouri slide by in the dark. He heard the door open behind him, and turned, and there was Ezra. He stood in the doorway with his hands in his pockets, not quite looking at Percy.
"Hey," Ezra said.
"Hey."
A long, awkward silence. The train rattled.
"The Nereid," Ezra said finally. "In the river. While I was out. I think I dreamed it. There was a woman in the water. All green and silver. She said my dad wanted me to go to Santa Monica. To the beach. She said he'd meet me there. Before the Underworld." He paused. "Do you think that's real?"
"Yeah," Percy said. "I think it's real."
Another silence.
"You knew," Ezra said. "About the Arch. About the Chimera. About the river. You knew all of it was going to happen. Didn't you."
Percy didn't answer.
"The prophecy," Ezra said. "The son of the sky has walked this road before. That's real too. Isn't it?"
Percy looked at him.
"Yeah," he said quietly. "It's real."
Ezra nodded slowly. He looked down at the floor of the vestibule.
"Did I," he said. Stopped. Started again. "Last time. On this road. Was I... was it me? Was I the one who went?"
Percy looked at the boy in front of him. Fourteen, sea-green eyes, hands in his pockets, scared. Asking a question he didn't understand, about a life he'd never lived.
"No," Percy said. "Last time it was somebody else."
"Did they make it?"
Percy thought about it.
"Yeah," he said. "They made it. They got the bolt back. They stopped the war." He paused. "And then a few years later, everybody they loved turned on them, and they lost everything."
Ezra stared at him.
"That's not gonna happen to you," Percy said. "I won't let it. To you, or anybody."
He meant it. He realized, saying it, that he actually meant it. Even for Ezra. Especially for Ezra. Whatever this boy might become, whatever he was in another world, he was fourteen now, and scared, and standing in a train vestibule asking if he was going to be okay.
Ezra looked at him for a long, long time. Then he nodded. Once. Short. Like it cost him something.
"Thanks," he said. "For the river."
He turned and went back into the train car.
Percy stood alone in the vestibule and watched Missouri go by in the dark, and didn't know what he felt. Not anger, not exactly. Not forgiveness, not yet. Something in between, that didn't have a name.
He thought about the Fates, and their window over his mother's coffee table, and a thousand possible futures. Every one of them ending in fire.
Change one, he thought. Just one.
Maybe that's how it starts.