The thing about Tartarus—and Percy had spent enough time there to have developed quite a few opinions on the subject—was that it had a sense of humor. Not a *good* sense of humor, mind you. More the sort of humor favored by sadistic philosophy professors and that one uncle who always asks if you've found a "real job" yet at family gatherings.
The Doors of Death exemplified this perfectly.
Percy had been walking toward them for what he estimated was the better part of three months. Or possibly seven years. Time in Tartarus moved like a drunk slug with commitment issues—sometimes racing forward, sometimes crawling backward, occasionally stopping entirely just to spite you.
The Doors themselves looked rather like someone had taken the gates of a maximum-security prison, forged them from divine metal, and then let them sit in a blender on the "apocalypse" setting. They hung at an angle, chains dangling uselessly like the punctuation marks from an angry god's run-on sentence.
"Well," Percy said to no one in particular—he'd gotten quite good at talking to no one in particular over the past century or so—"that's not ominous at all."
His voice emerged from the helmet strange and hollow, processed through enchanted metal and divine rage into something that sounded like it belonged to someone else entirely. Someone older. Someone tired.
Someone who probably should have died a long time ago.
Percy flexed his gauntleted hand, watching the scales shift and realign. Each scale came from a different monster, and if he focused, he could still remember killing every single one. The empousai who'd tried to sweet-talk him in the voice of Annabeth. The drakon who'd ambushed him at the Phlegethon. The various nameless horrors that had learned, too late, that Percy Jackson held grudges the way dragons held gold.
The armor hummed against his skin, a sensation he'd grown so accustomed to that its absence would probably feel like nakedness now. Each piece told a story. The right pauldron: forged from the skull of a laistrygonian giant. The left gauntlet: claws from the Nemean Lion's considerably less famous (and considerably more dead) cousins. The cape—ah, the cape was special. The cape wasn't made of anything at all, really. It was made of *absence*, of the spaces between shadows, of the dark that existed before light thought to show up and ruin everything.
It moved when he didn't want it to. It had opinions.
Annabeth would have been fascinated by it.
Annabeth would have told him it was dangerous.
Annabeth would have—
Percy stopped that thought with the practiced ease of someone who'd had a lot of practice stopping thoughts. You didn't survive Tartarus by dwelling. You survived by moving forward, killing whatever got in your way, and absolutely, definitely, certainly not thinking about gray eyes going dim in the darkness.
"Right then," he said, taking a step toward the Doors. "Let's see where you lead, shall we?"
"I wouldn't," said a voice like rocks grinding in an industrial garbage disposal.
Percy didn't sigh, because sighing would require caring enough to express exasperation, and he'd run out of exasperation somewhere around his forty-seventh year in hell. Instead, he simply turned, slowly, and regarded the massive shape that had materialized from the darkness behind him.
Kampê looked different every time she reformed. This time she'd gone for a sort of "nightmare centipede meets dragon meets your worst Tuesday" aesthetic. Impressive, really. Percy almost wanted to compliment her on the effort.
"Kampê," he said, with the tone one might use to greet an unwanted but persistent door-to-door salesperson. "Haven't I killed you recently?"
"Twice last week," the daemon agreed, sounding almost cheerful about it. Multiple eyes blinked at him from various parts of her anatomy. "You're getting slower."
"Or you're getting faster at respawning. Have you been taking vitamins? Power supplements? Sacrificial offerings?"
"Funny." Kampê's laugh sounded like an avalanche having second thoughts. "The son of Poseidon makes jokes. Tell me, child—do you even remember how to smile under that helmet?"
Percy considered this. When *had* he last smiled?
"1987," he said, though he was fairly certain that wasn't right. Time, again. Drunk slug. "Good year for smiling, '87. Or possibly it was yesterday. Hard to say."
"You've gone mad."
"Mad?" Percy tilted his helmet slightly. The horns caught what little light existed in Tartarus and seemed to drink it. "No, Kampê. Mad would imply a departure from sanity. This is just... extended vacation from it. Sabbatical. I'm taking a mental health century."
"You're talking to yourself."
"I'm talking to you."
"I only just got here."
"Are you sure?" Percy let shadows coil around his arms like affectionate serpents. They were getting more independent lately. He probably should have been concerned about that. He added it to the list of things he wasn't concerned about, which was roughly the length of the Odyssey at this point. "Time is funny here. Maybe you've been here the whole time. Maybe I killed you yesterday and you're the ghost. Maybe we're both ghosts. Maybe—"
"The Doors are broken," Kampê interrupted, because apparently even ancient daemons of torture had limits to their patience. "Surely even you, in your fractured state, have noticed."
Percy looked back at the Doors of Death. The vortex beyond them swirled with colors that seemed wrong. Too bright. Too sharp. Like reality had been turned up several notches past comfortable and into the realm of "please make it stop."
"Noticed," he confirmed. "Also noticed I don't particularly care. Broken doors still lead somewhere, don't they? That's rather the point of doors. Leading to somewhere."
"Not somewhere you want to go."
"I've been in Tartarus for a century. Everywhere is somewhere I want to go more than here."
"Even if it's not your home?"
Percy went very still. The shadows around him went still too, which was impressive given that shadows weren't generally known for their ability to hold positions. The blue crystal in his chest—made of concentrated essence from all five rivers of the Underworld, a substance that shouldn't exist but did because Percy had *insisted*—pulsed once, hard, like a second heartbeat.
"How do you know it's not—"
"I know many things, son of the sea." Kampê moved closer, and Percy noticed for the first time that she was keeping her distance, staying just outside the reach of his shadows. Interesting. "I know that when you killed Nyx—yes, killed, not defeated, not banished, but ended the primordial goddess of Night—you changed things. Broke things. The barriers between worlds are thinner now. Weaker. Those Doors once led to the mortal world. YOUR mortal world. Now?" She gestured with what might have been a claw or possibly a tentacle. "They lead somewhere else. Some*when* else. Another world entirely, perhaps."
Percy processed this. Tried to process it. Found that the part of him that processed things had gone on break somewhere around year thirty and never quite clocked back in.
"So you're saying," he said slowly, "that if I go through those doors, I'll end up in a different world. Not my own. Possibly very different from my own."
"Yes."
"But definitely not Tartarus."
"Well. No. Not Tartarus."
"Sold," Percy said, and started walking toward the Doors.
"Wait—" Kampê sounded almost concerned, which was rich coming from a literal torture daemon. "You don't understand. You've *changed*, half-blood. Look at yourself. You command the shadows of Night herself. You wear death as armor. The darkness has soaked into your bones, your blood, your—"
"My soul?" Percy glanced back. His eyes, behind the helmet, glowed with light that wasn't quite divine and wasn't quite mortal. Something new. Something Nyx had given him when her ichor mixed with his blood, whether she'd meant to or not. "Yes, I'm aware. I'm very aware, actually. Probably too aware. Awareness is not in short supply."
"Then you know you don't belong up there anymore. In the light. With the living."
"I know," Percy said softly, and for just a moment, his voice sounded young again. Scared. Human. "I know I've become something else. Something that would make my friends flinch. Something that would make my mother cry. I know that when Annabeth told me not to let this place change me, she didn't mean—"
He stopped.
Started again.
"But here's the thing, Kampê. Here's the thing about doors and destinations and all that philosophical nonsense. I'm going to walk through those doors because staying here means I've let Tartarus win. It means Nyx's last act was successful—trapping me here forever, making me part of this place. And I'll be damned—more damned than I already am—if I let that happen."
"Noble," Kampê said. "Stupid, but noble."
"Story of my life." Percy turned back to the Doors. "Well. One of my lives. I think I'm on my second or third by now. Lost count."
"And if the world on the other side fears you? Hunts you? Sees you as the monster you've become?"
Percy reached the Doors. Placed one armored hand against the twisted adamantine. It thrummed under his touch, responding to the power radiating from him like a tuning fork finding its note.
"Then I'll prove them wrong," he said. "Or I'll prove them right. Either way, I'll be doing it under a real sky."
"The girl," Kampê called out. "The Chase girl. What would she think of what you're about to do?"
Percy froze. The shadows around him went absolutely wild, lashing out at nothing, at everything. The temperature dropped twenty degrees. Somewhere in the distance, a monster that had been approaching thought better of it and changed direction.
When Percy spoke again, his voice was colder than the Styx, harder than adamantine, older than anything that young should sound.
"Her name," he said, "was Annabeth. And she would tell me to stop being a dramatic seaweed brain and get moving, because standing around contemplating choices is just another way of making no choice at all."
He paused.
"Also, she'd probably make fun of my cape. She was good at that. Making fun of things. Making me laugh. Making me feel like—"
Percy's armored fist clenched.
"She was good at a lot of things," he finished quietly.
"I'm sorry," Kampê said, and she might have actually meant it. Even torture daemons had moments of unexpected compassion. It was one of the strange truths about the universe that nobody liked to talk about.
"No, you're not," Percy replied without rancor. "You're Tartarus. You don't do sorry. But it's a nice thought."
He straightened his shoulders. The armor shifted with him, scales sliding over scales, shadows billowing, the crystal in his chest burning bright as a distant star.
"Right then," Percy Jackson said. "Let's see what fresh hell awaits. Or fresh heaven. Or fresh something-in-between. I'm honestly not picky at this point."
"One more thing," Kampê said. "When you killed Nyx—how did you do it? How did a demigod, even one as persistent as you, manage to end a primordial force?"
Percy looked back one last time. Through his helmet, his smile was invisible, but Kampê could hear it in his voice.
"I didn't fight like a hero," he said. "I fought like someone with absolutely nothing left to lose. Turns out that's much scarier."
And with that, Percy Jackson stepped forward into the swirling vortex of the Doors of Death.
---
**The sensation was like being slowly unraveled and then hastily knit back together by someone who'd never actually learned to knit.**
Percy felt himself stretched across dimensions like taffy with delusions of grandeur. Colors he was fairly certain weren't supposed to exist outside of mushroom-induced hallucinations blazed past. Sounds that would have made synesthesia pack its bags and quit assaulted his ears. Time hiccupped, stuttered, did a little tap dance, and fell over drunk.
The darkness inside him—Nyx's final gift, her final curse—recoiled like a cat tossed into a bathtub. Then, remembering it was supposed to be protecting its host, it surged forward and wrapped Percy in a cocoon of shadow that was probably the only reason he arrived on the other side with all his limbs pointing in the correct directions.
**Then: impact.**
Percy hit the ground with enough force to crack concrete, create a small crater, and announce his arrival to anyone within a three-block radius with functional hearing.
He lay there for a moment—or possibly several moments, time still being somewhat negotiable after dimensional travel—and simply breathed.
Air.
Real air.
Not the sulfur-choked, rage-flavored atmosphere of Tartarus. Not the poisonous miasma that passed for oxygen in the deepest pit of creation. This was actual, genuine, probably-not-trying-to-kill-him air.
It smelled like car exhaust and garbage and something cooking nearby and a thousand other things Percy couldn't immediately identify. It was the most beautiful thing he'd smelled in a century.
Slowly, carefully, Percy pushed himself to his feet. The armor clinked and adjusted, scales realigning, cape pooling around him like spilled midnight before remembering it could defy gravity and billowing appropriately dramatically.
He looked up.
And stopped breathing entirely.
The sky was *blue*.
Not yellow-red. Not poisonous. Not filled with the angry faces of Titans who really needed to learn to let grudges go. Just... blue. With clouds. Actual, fluffy, white clouds that looked like they were going about their cloud business without any malicious intent whatsoever.
And the sun. Oh, the sun.
Percy stared at it for a solid thirty seconds before his helmet's enchantments decided his retinas probably wanted to keep working and dimmed his vision slightly.
"I'd forgotten," he whispered. "I'd actually forgotten what the sun looked like."
Then he looked down, and around, and felt his moment of wonder crumble like a sandcastle at high tide.
He was standing in an alley—that much was familiar. Alleys existed in every world, apparently, which said something profound about urban planning across dimensions. But everything else was *wrong*.
The buildings were too tall, too clean, too geometric. All glass and steel and sharp angles that seemed to mock the very concept of classical architecture. Signs flickered in languages Percy couldn't read, advertising things he couldn't identify. Strange vehicles hummed past the alley entrance on what appeared to be cushions of air, because apparently gravity was just a suggestion in this world.
And the people—
Percy caught a glimpse of someone walking past. They were staring at a glowing rectangle in their hand with the intensity of a prophet receiving divine visions. The rectangle showed moving pictures. Everyone he could see had one.
"This," Percy said slowly, "is either very advanced or very wrong. Possibly both."
A small sound behind him. A whimper.
Percy spun, hand going to the sword at his hip—a blade forged from the fang of a dragon that had thought ambushing the son of Poseidon in his sleep was a good idea, right up until it became a very dead dragon with a pressing sword-shaped problem.
But he stopped.
A child. A girl, seven or eight, with dark hair in pigtails and a lunch box decorated with characters Percy didn't recognize. She was crouched behind a dumpster that definitely hadn't been there when Percy arrived, which meant either it had materialized spontaneously or Percy's perception of time was even worse than he'd thought.
The girl stared at him with eyes so wide they could have given anime characters a run for their money.
Percy realized, with the sort of sinking sensation usually reserved for people who've just set their kitchen on fire trying to make toast, what she must be seeing.
A seven-foot-tall figure in armor that looked like it had been assembled from nightmares and bad decisions. Glowing blue eyes. Horns. A cape made of animate shadow. Standing in a crater of his own making, surrounded by darkness that moved with disturbing independence.
Oh, and he'd just appeared out of thin air in a flash of dimensional instability.
That too.
"Hey," Percy said, very gently, very carefully, raising his hands slowly like someone trying to convince a wild animal they weren't a threat. "It's okay. I'm not going to hurt you."
His voice, filtered through the helmet, sounded like a demon trying to do customer service. Not ideal.
The girl's eyes went to his hands—clawed gauntlets that had personally ended more lives than smallpox. Then to the crater. Then to the shadows writhing around his feet like loyal puppies made of cosmic horror.
Her face crumpled.
"Monster," she whispered.
The word hit Percy somewhere in the center of his chest, right where the crystal pulsed with captured river water.
*Don't let this place change you, Seaweed Brain.*
"No," Percy said, and his voice cracked. The shadows froze. "No, I'm not—I mean, I am, but I'm not—it's complicated—"
The girl screamed.
It was a good scream. Loud. Piercing. The sort of scream that said, in no uncertain terms, "There is a monster in this alley and it is trying to talk to me which is somehow worse than if it were just trying to eat me."
Then she ran.
Fast.
Kids were good at that, Percy remembered. Running from things. Being afraid. He'd been afraid once too, hadn't he? A long time ago. Before the armor. Before the darkness. Before Annabeth—
He shut that thought down hard.
Percy stood alone in the alley, in a world that wasn't his own, under a sun he'd forgotten existed, and listened to the girl's screams fade into the distance.
"Monster," he repeated softly.
The shadows around him trembled. The cape curled in on itself, almost protectively.
From his chest, the crystal pulsed once. Twice. Three times.
Like a heartbeat.
Like guilt.
Somewhere above—and Percy looked up to find the buildings so tall they seemed to claw at the sky—an alarm began to wail. It had a different quality than the alarms he remembered. More electronic. More insistent. More "we-have-detected-an-anomaly-and-are-responding-with-extreme-prejudice."
Percy Jackson, hero of Olympus, survivor of Tartarus, killer of Nyx herself, stood in the shadows of an alley in a world that didn't know him, wouldn't welcome him, and would probably try to put him down like a rabid dog.
And he wondered—not for the first time, but perhaps for the first time that mattered—if the monsters he'd been killing in Tartarus had wondered the same thing before he killed them.
If they'd had moments of doubt.
If they'd remembered being something other than what they'd become.
"Well," Percy said to the empty alley, to the too-bright sun, to the universe that seemed determined to test his capacity for ironic punishment, "this is going well."
The shadows said nothing, but they nodded their agreement anyway.
Above, the sound of sirens grew louder.
Percy Jackson, who had once been a hero, took a step backward into the darkness of the alley and disappeared.
After all, he'd learned a few things in Tartarus.
And the first lesson was this: when the world calls you a monster, the polite thing to do is let them have trouble finding you.
At least until you figure out whether they're right.
---
The thing about the ocean—and Mera had spent her entire life in it, which gave her a certain authority on the subject—was that it had a *voice*.
Not in the way surface-dwellers understood voices. Not words or sounds or anything so crude as actual communication. The ocean spoke in currents and pressures, in the ancient language of tides and temperatures, in the subtle harmonics of water that had been water since before the continents had decided to be continents.
Mera had been trained since childhood to hear that voice. To interpret its moods, its warnings, its whispers. The Masters of Xebel had made certain of that, because Mera wasn't just another student. She was *the* student. The prodigy. The girl who could make water dance before she could walk, who could hear the ocean's secrets before she could speak.
At twenty-three, she was already considered one of the finest hydrokinetics in Xebel's history.
Which is why, when the ocean *screamed*, Mera was the first to hear it.
---
She'd been practicing in one of the deep trenches south of Xebel—the sort of place where the pressure could crush submarines like aluminum cans and the darkness was absolute enough to have philosophical implications. Mera liked it there. It was quiet. Private. The sort of place where she could work on the more *experimental* aspects of her abilities without her instructors clicking their tongues and muttering about "traditional methods" and "respect for the ancient ways."
Mera had opinions about the ancient ways, and most of those opinions involved the ancient ways learning to keep up with the times or getting out of the way.
She'd been shaping water into increasingly complex geometric forms—a dodecahedron within an icosahedron within a sphere, all rotating at different speeds—when the ocean convulsed.
That was the only word for it. *Convulsed*.
The water around her *flinched*, like a living thing recoiling from pain. The pressure spiked, then dropped, then spiked again. Temperature fluctuations rippled through the deep in patterns that made no sense, following no current, obeying no natural law.
And then—
*Then*—
Mera felt something that made her geometric constructs collapse and fall away like forgotten thoughts.
A presence.
Not just any presence. A *divine* presence.
The ocean knew this presence. Recognized it. *Remembered* it, the way very old things remember very old names.
"Poseidon," Mera whispered, and the word felt strange in her mouth. Ancient. Heavy. Like speaking a language that had died before her grandparents were born.
But that was impossible.
The gods had left this plane of existence millennia ago. Everyone knew that. It was historical fact, taught to children alongside their letters and numbers and the proper way to manipulate water molecules. The gods had departed, taken their power and their drama and their tendency to turn people into various animals for minor slights, and gone... somewhere else. Another dimension. Another reality. Somewhere that wasn't *here*.
The ocean didn't lie.
But the ocean was insistent.
*Poseidon. Poseidon. POSEIDON.*
No—not quite.
Mera closed her eyes and *listened* harder, extending her senses through the water, following the disturbance to its source. It was coming from... above. Far above. The surface world. That chaotic, dry place that Mera had visited exactly twice and both times concluded that air was vastly overrated.
And the presence wasn't quite *Poseidon*. It was... related. Connected. Like an echo or a reflection. Like a child's voice carrying notes of their parent's.
"Son of Poseidon," Mera breathed. "There's a *son of Poseidon* up there."
Which was impossible for several reasons, not least of which was that Poseidon would have needed to be on this plane of existence at some point in the last, oh, several thousand years to have a son.
Unless—
"Oh," Mera said, understanding clicking into place with the sort of satisfaction usually reserved for solving particularly stubborn equations. "Oh, that's *interesting*."
---
She found Master Thetis in the Council Chamber, which was really just a pretentious name for "large room with decent acoustics where people argued about things." The Master was studying ancient texts—actual physical texts, carved into treated kelp-paper, because Thetis believed that if knowledge wasn't difficult to access, it wasn't worth having.
Mera had opinions about that too.
"Master Thetis," Mera said, swimming into the chamber with perhaps more speed than was strictly polite. "I need to go to the surface."
Thetis looked up from her texts with the expression of someone who had just been informed that their student wanted to set fire to the library for science.
"No," she said.
"You haven't heard my reasons yet."
"I don't need to hear your reasons. The answer is no. The surface world is dangerous, chaotic, and full of air-breathers who would sooner dissect you than speak with you. We've discussed this."
"Yes, but—"
"Furthermore," Thetis continued, in the tone that meant she was building up to a proper lecture, "you are one of Xebel's finest assets. We cannot risk you on whatever impulsive—"
"There's a demigod up there," Mera interrupted.
Thetis stopped mid-sentence. Her eyes—pale green, like sea glass—narrowed.
"What did you say?"
"A demigod. Son of Poseidon, unless I'm very much mistaken, which I'm not because the ocean is being very clear about this and the ocean doesn't generally lie about divine parentage."
"That's impossible."
"Yes, I thought so too. And yet."
Thetis set down her texts carefully, the way one might set down a live grenade. "The gods left this plane thousands of years ago. There hasn't been a child of the gods in—"
"I'm aware of the timeline, Master. I'm also aware of what I felt. The ocean felt it too. It's still feeling it. The whole deep is resonating with it." Mera gestured broadly, and as if to punctuate her point, a tremor ran through the water around them. "Whatever this is, whoever this is, they're *powerful*. Strong enough that their mere presence is causing disturbances."
"Or it's a weapon," Thetis said sharply. "The surface world has been developing stranger and stranger technologies. Perhaps this is some new device meant to mimic—"
"It's not a device." Mera was certain of this in the way she was certain water was wet. "Devices don't have *souls*. This presence has a soul. I can feel it. And it's..." She paused, trying to find the right words. "It's *wounded*. Hurting. Like something that's been broken and badly mended."
"All the more reason to stay away from it."
"Or all the reason to investigate. Master, if there's truly a child of Poseidon up there—a *god-born*—we need to know. We need to understand how it's possible, what it means, whether there are others—"
"What we *need*," Thetis said, "is to not involve ourselves in surface affairs. We've maintained our isolation for good reasons, Mera. The moment we reveal ourselves is the moment we become targets."
Mera felt her jaw tighten. This was an old argument. Ancient, really. Xebel had hidden itself away so thoroughly that most surface dwellers didn't even believe Atlanteans existed anymore. And there were days when Mera understood the reasoning.
This wasn't one of those days.
"With respect, Master," Mera said, with the tone that meant she was about to be spectacularly disrespectful, "isolation is just another word for cowardice."
Thetis's expression went very, very still.
"That," she said softly, "was unwise."
"But not untrue. We hide in the deep, studying texts about ancient glories, while the world moves on without us. When was the last time Xebel did something that *mattered*?"
"We survived. That matters."
"Does it?" Mera leaned forward. "Master, there's a son of Poseidon up there. Do you understand how *impossible* that is? This isn't just interesting, it's not just unusual—this rewrites everything we know about the gods, about their departure, about—"
"About nothing that concerns us," Thetis finished. "Mera, I understand your curiosity. Truly, I do. But curiosity killed the cat, drowned the sailor, and generally made life difficult for everyone involved. You're brilliant, but you're young. You don't remember the last time the surface world discovered something unusual. They don't study it. They weaponize it."
"Then they won't discover it from me." Mera straightened. "I'm not asking permission anymore, Master. I'm informing you. I'm going to the surface. I'm going to investigate this. And when I return with information that changes everything we think we know about the gods, you can decide whether it was worth it."
Thetis regarded her for a long moment. Then, surprisingly, she smiled.
"You're absolutely going to get yourself killed," she said. "But you're right about one thing. This is too important to ignore."
Mera blinked. "Wait, you're... agreeing with me?"
"Don't sound so shocked. I do have occasional moments of reason." Thetis pulled out a small crystal from her robes—a communication device, tied to the Council. "But you're not going alone. If you're determined to do this foolish thing, you'll do it with backup. And you'll report everything you find."
"I can work with that," Mera said, trying not to sound too triumphant.
"And Mera?" Thetis's expression went serious. "If this son of Poseidon is as powerful as you say, and as damaged... be careful. The most dangerous things in the ocean are the ones that are wounded. They'll bite without thinking."
"I'll keep that in mind," Mera said.
She was already planning her route to the surface.
---
**Three hours later**—which in Xebel terms meant she'd attended a briefing, gathered supplies, argued with two more Masters, and nearly gotten into a physical fight with a guard who thought "backup" meant "escort"—Mera broke the surface in what appeared to be a coastal city.
The air hit her like a slap. She'd forgotten how *dry* it was. How it tasted wrong. How breathing it felt like drowning in reverse.
But she adapted quickly. That was one of her talents. Adaptation.
The city was massive, sprawling, full of lights and noise and the sort of chaotic energy that made Mera's teeth itch. Surface dwellers seemed to think that if they weren't making noise, they might cease to exist. It was exhausting just to look at.
But the presence—the *divine* presence—was here. Somewhere.
Mera closed her eyes and reached out with her senses, feeling for the disturbance in the water. It was harder up here, with less water to work with, but the city was coastal. There was moisture in the air, pipes running beneath the streets, a bay not far from where she'd surfaced.
There.
*There*.
The presence burned like a cold star, drawing her attention the way a whirlpool draws debris. It was coming from... she turned, oriented herself... that direction. Inland. Maybe half a mile.
And it was moving.
"Well," Mera muttered, pulling herself fully onto the dock and letting her body shift fully to air-breathing, "at least this won't be boring."
She'd worn her combat suit—practical, form-fitting, designed for mobility in water but functional on land. Her red hair was tied back. Her hands tingled with barely contained hydrokinetic energy.
Somewhere in this city, a son of Poseidon was walking around, probably causing chaos just by existing.
Mera smiled.
This was *definitely* going to be interesting.
She set off toward the presence, moving through the city's shadows with the sort of fluid grace that came from spending your entire life underwater. Surface dwellers were loud, obvious, clumsy. They didn't notice her passing.
The presence grew stronger. More defined. And as she got closer, Mera began to pick up other details.
Power, yes. Immense power, barely contained.
But also: darkness. Actual, tangible darkness, clinging to the presence like oil. Not Poseidon's domain at all. That was ocean, storms, earthquakes. This was something else. Something...
"Wrong," Mera whispered. "Something's wrong with him."
The ocean agreed, its voice a distant whisper in the moisture around her.
*Wounded. Changed. Not-quite-right.*
"Fantastic," Mera muttered. "I'm hunting a damaged demigod who's apparently been marinating in something that isn't supposed to exist. This is exactly how horror stories start."
But she didn't stop. Couldn't stop. Because whatever this was, whoever this was, they were *important*. The ocean was never wrong about that.
She turned a corner into an alley—surface dwellers had so many alleys, it was like they were deliberately creating spaces for dramatic encounters—and stopped.
The presence was *right here*. Close. So close she should be able to see—
Shadows moved.
Not the normal movement of shadows, the kind caused by lights and objects. These moved with *intent*, slithering across the walls like living things.
And from those shadows, a figure stepped forward.
Mera's breath caught.
The armor was impossible to miss—layered scales that looked like they'd been assembled from nightmares and divine wrath, gleaming with an oily iridescence. A cape of pure shadow that moved independently. A helmet with horns, and behind its slits, eyes that glowed electric blue.
A crystal in the center of the chest, pulsing with power that made Mera's hydrokinetic senses *scream*.
"Oh," Mera breathed. "Oh, you're absolutely *drenched* in seawater. Ancient seawater. Wrong seawater. What *happened* to you?"
The figure froze.
Then, slowly, tilted its head.
"You can sense that?" The voice was hollow, filtered through the helmet, carrying echoes that didn't quite fit the words. "You can feel the rivers?"
"Rivers?" Mera took a step closer, fascinated despite herself. "Those aren't rivers. That's—" She reached out with her senses, analyzing the water signature. "That's water from the Underworld. Multiple sources. How is that even—wait." Her eyes widened. "You're carrying water from *all five* rivers? That should kill you. That *would* kill you. What are you?"
"That," the figure said, "is an excellent question."
He took a step back, shadows gathering around him like a cloak.
"Who are you?" he asked. "And why can you sense things that shouldn't be sensed?"
Mera straightened, letting her own power rise to the surface. Water vapor in the air began to swirl around her hands, glowing faintly with bioluminescent energy.
"Mera," she said. "Of Xebel. Hydrokinetic. Student of the deep. And you're avoiding the question."
"So are you," the figure pointed out. "You said 'Xebel.' I don't know what that is."
"It's—" Mera paused. "You really don't know? What, do surface dwellers not teach history anymore?"
"I'm not from the surface."
"Neither am I, obviously."
They stared at each other.
"This is going well," the figure said dryly.
"Spectacularly," Mera agreed. "Right. Let's try this again. You're a son of Poseidon, yes?"
The figure went very, very still.
"How—"
"The ocean knows its own. Even..." Mera gestured at him. "Even when they're covered in whatever *that* is. Tartarus? That feels like Tartarus. Oh gods, you were in *Tartarus*?"
"I—" The figure seemed to struggle with words. "Who are you? Really? Because people who can sense Tartarus don't just walk around asking questions. They usually run. Or attack. You're doing neither."
"Should I be running?"
"Probably."
"Are you going to hurt me?"
"I—" Another pause. "No. No, I don't think so. I'm trying very hard not to hurt anyone."
"Well, that's encouraging." Mera took another step closer. The figure didn't retreat. "You're trying not to hurt people but you look like you were assembled from a nightmare catalog. That's sending mixed messages."
"I'm *aware*."
"And you're a son of Poseidon who's been to Tartarus and is now in the surface world looking like death warmed over. That's quite the résumé."
"It wasn't voluntary."
"The Tartarus part or the looking-like-death part?"
"Both."
Mera found herself almost smiling. There was something darkly funny about this—two people from the deep, meeting in a surface alley, both completely out of their element.
"I have so many questions," she said.
"I have very few answers," the figure replied. "Also, there are sirens. I can hear sirens. People are looking for me."
"Yes, well, appearing in a crater of your own making tends to attract attention."
"You saw that?"
"I *felt* that. The ocean felt it. Every sensitive creature in a hundred-mile radius felt it. You don't exactly do subtle."
The figure made a sound that might have been a laugh or might have been a sob. "Subtle. Right. That's definitely what I'm known for."
The sirens were getting closer.
"You need to hide," Mera said decisively. "Or run. Or—actually, do you have a plan? Please tell me you have a plan."
"My plan was 'survive.' I hadn't gotten much past that."
"Fantastic. I'm dealing with an impulsive demigod. My favorite kind."
"I'm not—" The figure stopped. "Actually, impulsive is fair. That's fair."
The sirens were very close now.
Mera made a decision.
"Come with me," she said.
"What?"
"Come. With. Me." She grabbed his armored hand before he could protest. The metal was cold, colder than it should be, and she could feel the water-signature pulsing through it like a heartbeat. "I know a place. Underwater. They won't follow us there."
"I don't know you."
"And I don't know you, son of Poseidon. But we're both out of place, both being hunted, and both very clearly in need of answers. So we can stand here arguing until the authorities arrive, or we can go somewhere safer and have a proper conversation. Your choice."
The figure looked at her. Behind the helmet, those glowing blue eyes studied her with an intensity that made Mera feel like she was being weighed and measured.
Then: "Percy."
"What?"
"My name. It's Percy. Percy Jackson."
Mera smiled. "Well then, Percy Jackson. Let's go for a swim."
And before the sirens could round the corner, before the authorities could arrive, Mera pulled Percy toward the nearest water source—a stormwater grate—and plunged them both into the city's hidden depths.
The ocean welcomed them home with a whisper that sounded like relief.
*Finally. The lost son returns.*
*Finally. The story can continue.*
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