The first thing Percy Jackson remembered of his second life was his mother's laugh.
He was very small, then. Small enough that the world was mostly ceiling and faces and the warm, overwhelming smell of milk and laundry soap. Small enough that the memories of the other life sat in the back of his head like furniture under dust sheets, shapes he couldn't quite make out. He was lying on a blanket on the living room floor of an apartment on the Upper East Side, and Sally Jackson was leaning over him, making faces, and he did something, he never knew what, a gurgle or a kick, and she laughed.
It was the same laugh. Exactly the same, bright and surprised, like she'd been caught off guard by her own happiness. And something enormous moved in the small body on the blanket, some old grief that was too big to fit, and baby Percy burst into tears so loud that the downstairs neighbor banged on the ceiling with a broom.
Sally scooped him up and walked him around the apartment for an hour, humming. She thought he had colic. He let her think it.
The Fates had kept their word. He remembered everything.
But they'd also told the truth about the other part: he was a child, and his mind grew the way a child's mind grows. The memories were there from the beginning, but they came to him the way a story comes to a kid who's heard it too young. At three, he knew there had been a war, and a sky that was heavy, and a girl with gray eyes, and he woke up screaming about scorpions often enough that Sally bought him a nightlight shaped like a fish. At five, he could have told you the names of all twelve Olympians and which ones were jerks, but he couldn't tie his shoes. At seven, he understood, really understood, what had happened in the kitchen of another apartment in another world, and he stopped sleeping for a week, and Paul sat up with him every night reading The Hobbit aloud until he dozed off with his head on Paul's arm.
Neither of them ever asked what the nightmares were about. Sally just held him and said, "Bad dreams aren't real, baby. This is real." And she'd put his hand flat on her cheek, so he could feel that she was warm.
And the thing was, it was real. That was what got him through. Every morning, he woke up in a room with blue walls that Paul had painted, and he went into the kitchen, and there they were. Sally, in her bathrobe with her hair in a clip, burning the toast because she was reading a manuscript at the same time. Paul at the table grading English essays with a red pen and muttering things like "Oh, Jeremy, no" under his breath. The radio playing jazz. The coffee maker gurgling. Blue pancakes on Saturdays.
They had married two years before Percy was born. There had been no Gabe Ugliano in this world. Sally had never had to sell her dreams to keep a monster's scent off her son, because her son had no scent for monsters to follow. She had finished her degree at NYU. She'd published two novels, small ones that sold modestly and got nice reviews, and she was working on a third. Paul taught English at Goode High School and coached the debate team and was beloved by every student who had ever met him, which Percy found entirely reasonable.
He was Percy Jackson. Perseus Jackson, technically, but nobody called him that except Sally when he was in trouble. He had his mother's last name, not Paul's. Paul had insisted on it the day he was born. "Jackson's a hero's name," he'd said. "Blofis is a punchline. Trust me, I've lived with it." Sally had picked the name because, she said, Perseus was the only Greek hero who got a happy ending. The first time she told him that, when he was six, he'd had to excuse himself to the bathroom for a few minutes.
He was mortal. Completely, boringly, wonderfully mortal. He couldn't breathe underwater; he found that out at age four, in the deep end of the 92nd Street Y pool, and had to be fished out by a lifeguard while Sally screamed. He didn't have ADHD, or dyslexia. Letters held still on the page. He could read The Hobbit by himself by the time he was eight, and he did, cover to cover, in a single weekend, crying a little at the end for reasons he couldn't have explained.
And when he looked at the world, he saw it through the Mist. Mostly.
That was the part that bothered him, sometimes. Because there were moments, rare ones, where the Mist would thin. A man on the subway whose shadow had too many legs. A woman walking a dog that was, for half a second, as big as a car and black as a hole in the world, before it was a poodle again. The news reports. There were a lot more strange news reports in this world than he remembered. Ships vanishing in the Atlantic. Earthquakes in places that didn't have earthquakes. A whole town in Montana that had burned to the ground in a single night and nobody could say why.
This world was darker than his last one. He could feel it, the way you can feel weather coming. Whatever happened out there among the gods and monsters, it was worse here, rawer, more dangerous. And every so often, lying awake in his blue bedroom, he wondered who the son of Poseidon was in this world, and what he was doing, and whether he was going to be enough.
Then he'd remember: not my problem. He had done his time. He had paid more than his share. The Fates had promised him a quiet life, and he was going to live it.
He met Nancy Bobofit in the second grade.
In his other life, Nancy had been a bully, a freckled, red-haired kleptomaniac who threw peanut butter sandwiches at Grover and made Percy's life at Yancy Academy miserable. In this life, she was a freckled, red-haired kleptomaniac who sat next to him in Mrs. Moreno's class at PS 6 and stole his pencils. The first time she did it, he looked at her, and looked at his pencil in her hand, and said, "You know you could just ask."
She glared at him. "Ask for what?"
"For a pencil. I have like six." He held out a second one. "Here. Now you have two."
Nancy stared at the pencil like it was a trick. Then she took it, very slowly, and didn't say thank you, and didn't steal anything from him again. Two weeks later, a fifth grader shoved Percy into a locker, and Nancy Bobofit came out of nowhere and bit the fifth grader on the arm hard enough to draw blood. She got suspended for three days. Sally sent her a care package of blue cookies at home. That was that.
It turned out, once you got to know her, that Nancy stole things because her parents were divorcing in the ugliest way possible, and her dad kept moving apartments without telling her, and her mom worked double shifts, and sometimes it felt like the only things that were really hers were the things she took. Percy didn't tell her it was okay. He just made sure she had a key to the Blofis apartment by the time they were ten, and that there was always a plate for her at dinner on Thursdays. Paul started calling her "the second child." She pretended to hate it.
He met Matt Sloan in the fifth grade, during a fight.
Matt had been the bully at Goode, in the other life. Big, mean, and dumb in the way of kids who'd decided early that being mean was easier than being anything else. In this life, at ten years old, he was big and mean and getting beaten up by three seventh graders behind the school because he'd mouthed off to the wrong one.
Percy didn't think about it. He just walked over, picked up a trash can lid, and hit the biggest seventh grader in the back of the head with it.
It was a terrible idea. He was ten years old and mortal and had the arms of a noodle. The seventh grader turned around and punched him so hard he saw stars. But it was enough of a distraction for Matt to get up, and then it was two against three instead of one, and Percy had been in more fights than every kid in that schoolyard combined, even if he'd been in them in a different body. He knew where to stand. He knew how to move. By the time a teacher came running, two of the seventh graders were on the ground and the third was running away, and Percy and Matt were standing back to back, bleeding from the nose, grinning like idiots.
"You're crazy," Matt said, in the nurse's office, holding an ice pack to his face.
"Yeah," Percy said. "Probably."
"Why'd you do that? You don't even know me."
Percy thought about the Matt Sloan of his last life, who'd thrown a burning ball at him in a gym full of Laistrygonian giants and never once in his life had a friend. "I don't know," he said. "Seemed like you could use some backup."
Matt looked at him for a long time. Then he said, gruffly, "I'm not saying thank you."
"Wasn't asking."
Matt didn't say thank you. He just showed up at Percy's lunch table the next day, and the day after that, and he never left.
He met Rachel Elizabeth Dare at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, when they were both eleven.
It was a Saturday, and Percy was there because Paul was chaperoning a field trip and had invited him along. Percy had slipped away from the group, the way he always did, and gone to stand in front of the Greek and Roman galleries, staring at the statues of gods he had known personally. He was standing in front of a marble Poseidon, thinking several things that were not very polite, when a girl next to him said, "He looks constipated."
Percy turned. She had frizzy red hair and paint on her hands and a sketchbook under her arm, and she was squinting at the statue with a critical eye.
He laughed so hard that a guard came over to shush them.
"Rachel," she said, holding out a paint-stained hand. "I'm not supposed to be here, my dad's having a fundraiser upstairs and it's so boring I think I'm going to die."
"Percy. I'm also not supposed to be here." He shook her hand. It was the strangest feeling, touching the hand of a friend who didn't know him yet. "Want to see something cool? There's a sarcophagus on the other side of the gallery where somebody carved a dirty joke in Ancient Greek."
Her eyes lit up. "There is not."
"There totally is."
There wasn't, actually. He made it up. But they spent four hours wandering the museum together while her father's fundraiser went on without her, and by the end of it, she'd drawn him three times in her sketchbook and declared him "weirdly interesting," and they'd exchanged phone numbers. She didn't have the Sight, as far as he could tell. She was just Rachel. Rich, rebellious, stubborn, kind, and allergic to being told what to do.
Sometimes, when she looked at him for too long, her green eyes went a little distant, as if she were seeing something over his shoulder. He tried not to think about that too much.
By the time they were thirteen, the four of them were a unit.
They did everything together. They spent weekends in Central Park and summers at the Dares' house in Westhampton, where Rachel's parents were too busy to notice four teenagers raiding the fridge. Nancy taught them all how to pick a lock. Matt taught them all how to throw a punch, and was horrified to discover that Percy already knew. Rachel dragged them to art galleries and protests and, once, to an underground poetry reading in a basement in Bushwick where Matt fell asleep and snored through an entire sonnet about the ocean.
Percy taught them how to fight with a sword.
That had started as a joke. They'd been in the park with a couple of sticks, fooling around, and Percy had gotten a little carried away, and Matt had ended up flat on his back in the grass with a stick at his throat, staring up at Percy with his mouth open.
"Dude," Matt said. "Where did you learn that?"
"YouTube," Percy said.
Nobody believed him. But after that, Saturdays in the park became sword-fighting Saturdays, with wooden practice swords Rachel bought online, and Percy found himself teaching them the way Luke had once taught him. Feet planted. Wrist loose. Watch the shoulders, not the blade. Nancy turned out to be fast and vicious and unpredictable. Matt was a wall, impossible to knock down. Rachel was terrible at it, and loved it anyway.
He told himself it was just for fun. Just a hobby. Just a way to keep in shape.
He didn't tell himself that the shadows had been getting thicker. That the news reports had been getting stranger. That there were nights he sat by his window and watched the sky over the East River, and could have sworn that the stars were in the wrong places.
The letter from Goode High School came on a Tuesday in early May, the spring he was fourteen.
It wasn't a sure thing. Goode was a private school, and even with Paul on the faculty, admission was competitive. There were entrance exams and interviews and essays, and the scholarship committee was famously brutal. Percy had worked harder for it than he'd ever worked for anything in either life, partly because he wanted to go, and mostly because Nancy and Matt and Rachel had all applied too, and they had sworn a solemn oath on a slice of pizza that they would all get in or none of them would go.
He opened the envelope at the kitchen table with Sally reading over one shoulder and Paul hovering over the other.
Dear Perseus Jackson, we are delighted to inform you—
Sally screamed so loud that the downstairs neighbor banged on the ceiling with a broom. Paul picked Percy up in a bear hug and spun him around the kitchen, which was ridiculous, because Percy was almost as tall as he was now. Percy's phone was buzzing in his pocket. It was a group text. Nancy: GOT IN. Matt: GOT IN!!!!!. Rachel: got in obviously. dad's furious, he wanted me at a boarding school in switzerland. Then, a second later: best day of my life.
They threw a party that Saturday.
Sally insisted on it. She invited everyone: the neighbors, Paul's colleagues from Goode, Nancy's mom, who came straight from a hospital shift in her scrubs, Matt's grandmother, who'd raised him and who cried through the entire evening, and Rachel's parents, who sent a catered cheese platter and an apology. The apartment was packed. Somebody's kid was playing piano badly in the corner. Paul was running the grill on the fire escape, which was absolutely against building code, and Sally had made a blue cake in four layers, with GOODE LUCK written across the top in white frosting. She was very proud of the pun. Everyone groaned at it.
Percy stood by the window with a paper cup of blue punch and watched it all.
Nancy was arguing with Matt about whether a hot dog was a sandwich. Rachel was sitting on the arm of the couch, sketching the whole room in a few quick lines. Paul was laughing at something his department chair had said. And Sally was moving through the crowd like the sun moves through clouds, touching people's arms, refilling cups, smiling.
Alive. All of them. Alive and ordinary and safe.
He thought: this is it. This is what I fought for, in the other life, without knowing it. Not Olympus. Not the gods. Just this. A room full of people who love each other, and a bad cake with a worse pun.
He thought: I could live like this forever.
Across the room, Rachel looked up from her sketchbook. Her eyes found his, and for a moment they went distant and strange, green as deep water, and she frowned.
"Percy," she said, very quietly, though there were thirty people between them and he shouldn't have been able to hear it. "Something's coming."
Then the clock on the wall stopped ticking.
Percy noticed it the way you notice the silence after a refrigerator turns off. The music had stopped. Nobody was talking. Nancy was frozen with her mouth open, mid-argument. Matt's hand was raised halfway to his face. A cup of punch was tipping off the edge of a table, and it had stopped tipping. A single drop of blue liquid hung in midair above the carpet, perfectly round, glittering in the lamplight.
Sally was in the middle of the room, holding a cake knife, smiling at someone. She was not moving. Nobody was moving.
Except Percy.
And, in the doorway of the kitchen, three old women in rocking chairs that had not been there a second ago.
Click. Click. Click.
Percy Jackson stood very still by the window with his paper cup in his hand, and looked at the Fates, and felt fourteen years of peace crack straight down the middle, quietly, like the first fracture in a sheet of ice.
"No," he said. "No. You promised."
Clotho set down her spindle. Her old eyes, when she raised them, were full of an apology so heavy it was almost grief.
"We did, child," she said. "And we are so very sorry."