What the Tide Takes (Percy Jackson AU)

[Abysseus]

Prologue — The Road Worn Smooth​

Content notes for the story: death and dying, animal death, body horror, divine possession and memory alteration, references to mass death in the Second World War.

The dead go down the slope one at a time.

That was the way of it in the beginning, and for a very long while after. The road from the living lands to Yomi is called Yomotsu Hirasaka, though it is less a slope than a long lean into the dark, the way a tired body leans against a wall. At its top, where it once opened onto the world, sits a boulder that a thousand men could not shift. The boulder is a god. Its name means the one who turns travelers back, and it has done its work faithfully since before there were emperors.

On the far side of the stone, the living go on living. On this side, Izanami waits.

She was not always this. Once, before the stone and the slope, before there was any before worth the name, she stood on the Floating Bridge of Heaven beside her husband and looked down at a sea that had no shore. They held the jeweled spear between them and stirred, and when they lifted it, brine ran from the point and hardened as it fell, and the first island was made. She remembers that: the heavy drop of salt water clinging to the tip, gathering itself, letting go. She remembers thinking it was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. Everything after was only more of it.

She bore islands. She bore the eight great islands and the scattered lesser ones, and the gods of wind and tree and mountain, of rivers and the mouths of rivers, of mist and moor and the sea's own edge. She bore, last of all, a child of fire. He burned his way out of her, and she lay in the ruin he had made of her body, and she died.

She was the first god to die. Nothing had died before her. She walked down into a dark no one had walked before, and the dark became a road because she walked it, and the road became a country because she stayed. Every death since — every sparrow, every soldier, every grandmother in her bed — walks the road Izanami made.

Her husband came for her once. By then she had already eaten at the hearth of the dead, a few polite mouthfuls, the way a guest does, and so she could not simply leave. She went to ask the lords of that place for leave to go, and as she went she begged him: Wait for me. Do not look at me.

He looked.

She does not think about what he saw. She knows what he saw. She was swollen and loud with maggots. Eight thunders had been born in the rot of her and nested there, in her head and her breast and her belly, in her hands and her feet. Izanagi saw it, and he ran. She sent the hags of Yomi after him, and the thunders, and an army of the dead, and at last she came herself, and he rolled the stone across the road. They stood on either side of it and spoke for the last time.

Since you have shamed me, she told him, I will strangle a thousand of your people every day.

And Izanagi, who had loved her, who had come down into the dark for her, answered: Then every day I will raise fifteen hundred birthing huts.

So it has been ever since. A thousand a day, more in hard years. She takes what she is owed, and the world goes on growing anyway, the way grass grows over a grave. And the gods of the High Plain of Heaven — the children her husband made from the filth he washed off himself when he came back from her — keep their watch on the stone and do not say her name.

She does not mind the dark. She minds the stone.

* * *​

Then came the years that mortals would number 1937 to 1945, and the dead came down the slope as they never had before.

Not one at a time. In crowds. In columns. In whole towns. They came down still wearing the shapes of what had killed them — the drowned with the sea in their mouths, the starved as light as kindling, boys in wool uniforms caked with mud — and they came so thickly, for so long, that the road wore smooth beneath them the way a stone step wears hollow under centuries of feet. She had always been owed a thousand a day. In those years she was paid past counting.

It did not please her, exactly. It was not that kind of thing. The children of her own islands came down with all the rest, and she received them as she had received every child of those islands since the first: without hurry, without pity, without cruelty, the way the earth receives rain. Nations were a recent invention. She had been dead longer than there had been emperors to fight for.

But something in her stirred that had not stirred since the stone was set. She grew full. The dead brought their deaths with them, and every death is a door that opens in the world and never quite closes again. In those years there were so many doors standing open at once that the world itself grew thin.

In the eighth month of the last year, two new suns rose over two cities of her islands.

The dead came down still burning.

She knew burning. She had died of it.

She held them. There is no better word. Tens of thousands, in a single morning, came down the slope with the fire still in them, and she, who had been unmade by a child of fire, took them into the dark and the cool and the quiet and put the fire out. And when it was done — when the road was full and the country was full, and she held more of the world's death than she had held since the day of her vow — Izanami reached up through the dark and laid her palm against the stone.

It did not move. She had not expected it to.

But for the first time since Izanagi rolled it into place, her fingertips went through.

* * *​

A lesser god would have spent it.

She knew this the way she knew her own bones, which is to say intimately and without comfort. A lesser god, finding the wall thin for the first time in all those ages, would have thrown everything against it. She would have poured out into a burned and broken world and started a war of her own on top of the mortal one. And she would have been met at the top of the slope by the sun, and the moon, and the storm — by every god of the High Plain, who had waited millennia for exactly that — and driven back down, and the stone set twice as heavy.

Izanami was not a lesser god. She was the mother of them all.

So she drew her hand back from the stone. She folded the power the war had given her into the deepest part of herself, and she did not spend it.

She waited.

The war ended. The doors swung shut. The road went back to its ordinary traffic, a thousand a day and a little more, and the stone grew no thinner. But she had kept what she had taken, and she found she could do with it what she had never been able to do in all the ages before. She could look.

Every death is a door, a little ajar. With the war folded inside her, Izanami could set her eye to the gap.

She looked for a long time. Decades. That is not long, for her.

She did not look at her islands. That was the first thing she decided, and the most important. Izanagi's children watched those shores the way a dog watches the one road out of a farmyard. Every death in Japan, every shrine, every whisper on every mountain had eyes on it. If she made anything there, they would know before it drew breath.

So she looked outward, as she had never needed to, across seas she had not made, at lands whose gods had never heard her name.

She found that the world had other dead, and other roads, and other lords of other darknesses. She found, far to the west, a family of gods who had crossed an ocean themselves and set up house on a mountain that was not truly a mountain, above a city of glass. They were loud and young and quarrelsome. They did not watch her at all. They did not know there was anyone to watch.

And she found that at the very end of the war, three brothers among them had sworn an oath on their own black river to father no more children upon mortal women, because the children they already had had been the war's most terrible generals.

She thought: An oath is a stone, too.

And then: Stones can be gone through, by the patient.

* * *​

She found Sally Jackson by the shape of her grief.

Not new grief. Old grief, worn smooth as the road. The woman had lost her mother and father when she was very small, to a machine that fell out of the sky. Then she lost the uncle who raised her, slowly, to a sickness that ate him from the inside, and she gave up her schooling to sit beside his bed until it was over. Death had come for everyone Sally Jackson had ever belonged to, and she had never once looked away from it. A thing like that leaves a mark, and to someone who knows how to look, the mark can be seen from very far away.

Izanami saw it. And she saw that the god of the western sea had seen something in this woman, too.

He carried a spear with three points. Izanami looked at it for a long moment, and thought of another spear, and of brine dripping from its tip.

It was the dead end of the year at Montauk, a town at the far tip of a long island whose people call it, without irony, The End. The summer people had gone. The beach cabins were shuttered and silvered with salt, and the wind came in off the Atlantic with nothing to stop it. The god had stayed long past summer. The woman knew what he was, though she never once said the word aloud, and she loved him anyway — plainly, without conditions, the way only mortals can manage, because only mortals know how short it will be.

Izanami watched them the way deep water watches a swimmer: from far below, and without much interest. The sea god was hard to look at for long; he blazed at the edges like noon on water. She waited instead for the thing she had come for — the night he would go back into the sea.

It came near winter. A storm rolled in over the dunes and battered the cabin all evening, and when it had blown itself out, a little after midnight, the god rose from the narrow bed and stood a long moment looking down at the woman asleep in it. Then he went out into the cold, and down the beach, and into the surf. The surf closed over his head and did not give him back.

Izanami felt something then: a cold, satisfied recognition. There, she thought. That is how they are. They always leave.

Then she went in.

* * *​

Sally Jackson dreamed she was walking down a hill in the dark.

It wasn't frightening, at first. The ground was smooth under her bare feet, worn soft as old wood, and the air was cool and smelled faintly of rain on stone. She couldn't see a thing. She didn't need to. The hill went down, and she went down with it, and somewhere far below, someone was humming.

She knew she should be afraid. She'd been afraid of the dark as a kid — after the plane, after the phone call, after the social worker with the soft voice. She'd slept with the hall light on until she was twelve. But this dark wasn't like that. It was like the last moment before sleep, when everything you've been carrying slides off your shoulders and you don't even notice it go.

"Hello?" she said. Her voice didn't echo.

The humming stopped.

"Sally Jackson," said a woman's voice, very near. It was low and unhurried, and it seemed to rise out of the ground beneath her as much as from the dark ahead. "You have sat with the dying."

Sally swallowed. "Yes."

"Your mother. Your father." A pause, as if the speaker were checking something. "No. You were very small, and they were far away, and a stranger came to the door to tell you. But they left a door open behind them, and you have lived beside it ever since. And your uncle — him you sat with."

"Every night," Sally whispered. "At the end."

"You held his hand while he went. You did not let go, and you did not look away."

Her eyes stung. She didn't know why she was telling the truth. It didn't seem possible not to. "I wanted him to know someone was there."

"I know." The voice was gentle. It was terribly gentle. "I watched him go. He was not one of mine; he took another road, to another lord. But I saw him at the door, with your hand still warm in his."

"Who are you?" Sally said. "What do you want?"

"Only to be present at a beginning," said the voice. "I have been present at so many endings."

Then Izanami stepped into her, the way the tide steps into a footprint in wet sand, and Sally Jackson dreamed nothing else at all.

* * *​

At ten minutes to four in the morning, in a cabin at the end of the world, Sally Jackson opened her eyes.

They were not her eyes. Not then.

She sat up. She got out of bed and crossed the cold floor without feeling the cold, and opened the door, and went down the wooden steps and over the dune, through beach grass that whipped at her bare legs, to the edge of the water where the god had gone in. The sky was still black. The sea still heaved with the storm's leftover temper. She waded in to her knees. The cold was enormous, and she did not feel it.

The thing wearing Sally Jackson knelt in the surf.

It had been a very long time since Izanami had hands. She looked at these with interest. Small. Chapped. A hard bump on the middle finger where a pen had pressed too often — the woman wrote, or wanted to. A cheap silver ring that had been her mother's. Mortal hands, warm even in that water. Izanami turned them over and felt, with something like wonder, the blood moving in them.

Then she cupped them and lifted the sea.

Brine ran out between the fingers. She held her hands above the black water until only a little was left, pooled in the creases of the palms. Then she tipped them, and watched a single drop gather at the edge of a fingertip, and hang there, and fall.

Like that, she thought. Like the first time.

And inside the woman's body, in a dark far smaller and warmer than Yomi, something that had been two things became one thing — and Izanami was there.

It was such a small light. She had forgotten how small they begin: a spark, a grain of salt, a single cell with a god's tide already moving in it and a mortal woman's stubborn, patient heart. It knew nothing. It did not yet know it was anything. Izanami gathered herself — not much of herself; a drop; she had learned patience — and let it fall, the way the brine had fallen from the spear at the beginning of the world.

She gave it her death. That is the simplest way to say it. She was the first god who died, the origin of every dying thing, and some part of that — the part that knew the way, that had walked the road first and made dying into a country — she gave to the spark. The spark took it in without complaint, the way a seed takes in the dark.

It would not change him. Not yet. He would still be the sea god's son and the woman's son. He would look like them and love like them, and laugh at things that weren't funny, the way she did when she was frightened. But beneath all that, in the deepest and quietest place in him, there would be a third thing: a cool, dark, still pool, like water at the bottom of a cave, where his father's tide did not reach.

That place would be hers.

* * *​

She had brought a gift.

When she was alive, before the fire, she had worn a string of jewels at her throat, as the gods did then: curved beads of green stone, each shaped like a comma, or a fang, or a child curled asleep in the womb. When her fire-child tore his way out of her, the heat of him scorched the beads black. She had carried one of them down the road with her, the way the dead sometimes carry one small thing, and she had kept it for longer than the islands had had a name.

She drew it up the long thread from Yomi and into the woman's hand. Then, with the woman's fingers, she braided a cord from three strands. One was eelgrass, pulled from the surf, for the sea. One was a hair from the woman's own head. One was her own: black, cold, unbelievably long, drawn up out of the dark. She knotted it with small, exact knots those fingers had never learned and somehow knew, and threaded the bead onto it, and closed the woman's hand around it.

Then — carefully, so carefully, the way you smooth a blanket over a sleeper — she smoothed the night out of Sally Jackson's memory and laid another in its place.

In the new memory, Sally woke before dawn, found the bed cold beside her, and knew. She pulled on the sweater he'd left behind and went down to the water to see him go. He was standing knee-deep in the surf, waiting for her; he'd known she would come. He took her hands, pressed something into them, and said: For the child. Keep it on him. It will keep him safe.

What child? she asked. And he only smiled the way he did, sad and a little proud, like the sea before weather, and went under.

It was a good memory. Izanami had built it from true things — the sweater was real, the cold was real, the sand drying on the woman's feet was real — and so it would hold. Memories made from true pieces always hold. It had the sea in it, and the god's face, and a promise. It was the kind of memory a person takes out on hard nights and turns over in her hands, like a stone carried home from a beach.

She would never once think to ask how he had known.

* * *​

Izanami walked the woman back up the sand and up the wooden steps, and laid her down in the bed still warm on one side, and drew the blanket up over her. She left the bracelet in her hand.

Then she went out of Sally Jackson the way the tide goes out — slowly, and then all at once — and was in the dark again, at the bottom of her road, behind her stone.

Not entirely. A thread of her stayed behind, thin as the cord she had braided. It ran up the slope and through the stone and across a sea she had not made, and it ended in a bead of blackened jade in a sleeping woman's fist, and in the spark of a child too small to have a heartbeat.

Izanami sat at her end of the thread, in the cold and the quiet, for a long time. And slowly, the way feeling comes back into a frozen hand, she understood what was happening to her.

She had forgotten that love had a temperature.

It was warm. It began small, where the thread was tied, and it spread. It spread the way the fire had spread on the night her last child was born, the night she died of him. She knew this feeling. She had lain in it once until there was nothing left of her. She thought she ought to be afraid of it.

She found she did not care.

Hello, she told him, though he had no ears yet, and no name, and would not for months. Hello, my son. My tide. I have waited such a long time for you.

On the far side of the world, the sea drew back from the shore at Montauk, and came in again, and drew back. In the cabin above it, a woman slept with her fist closed around a black bead. She smiled in her sleep, and did not know why.

 

[Abysseus]

Chapter One — Snapper Blues​

Percy Jackson was seven the first time he killed something and gave it away.

It was a fish. That part matters. Years later, when the things he gave away had gotten much bigger, he would come back to that fish in his head, the way you go back to the top step of a staircase when you're trying to work out how you ended up so far down. It was a fish about the length of his hand. It was August, it was his birthday week, and he was happy.

They had the cabin for six whole days. His mom had been saving since February; Percy knew because she kept the money in a coffee can on top of the fridge with MONTAUK written on the side in purple marker, and every time she dropped a few bills in, she tapped the lid twice for luck. The cabin was the same one as always. It smelled like mildew and sunscreen and old wood, the sheets were always a little damp, and Percy loved it more than anywhere on earth.

He loved the water more.

That was just a fact about him, like having black hair or not being able to sit still. In the city, everything was too loud and too close and too much at once. Teachers said his name like it was a problem they'd been assigned. Letters squirmed when he looked at them. But the ocean made sense. When he was in it, the noise in his head lined up and went quiet, like a class when the principal walks in.

The bracelet was the other thing.

He had always worn it. He didn't remember a time before it any more than he remembered a time before his own fingers. It was a plain black cord with a single black bead, shaped like a fat comma, or a bean curled up asleep. It never got loose and it never got tight, even though he'd grown about a foot since kindergarten. It was always cool, even in August, even after hours in the sun. When he was nervous, he rolled the bead under his thumb. When he couldn't sleep, he pressed it against his cheek, and it felt like the cold side of a pillow.

"Your father left it for you," his mom had told him, the one time he'd asked. She said it carefully, the way she said everything about his father, like she was carrying a too-full cup across a room. "For protection. Promise me you'll never take it off."

He promised. It wasn't hard. He'd never wanted to.

His father had been lost at sea. That was all Percy really knew, and it was enough to make the bracelet the most important thing he owned — more important than his Game Boy, which was saying something.

* * *​

On the fourth morning, his mom took him down to the harbor and bought him a fishing rod.

It wasn't a real rod, exactly. It was a short, bendy, fluorescent-green thing from the bait shop, with a bobber shaped like a tiny torpedo and a hook so small Percy didn't see how anything could get caught on it. The man behind the counter — sunburned, with a mustache like a push broom — sold them a little carton of silver baitfish and told Percy the snappers were running.

"Snappers?" Percy said.

"Baby bluefish." The man showed his teeth. "Mean little suckers. They'll bite anything. They'll bite you, if you let 'em." Then he winked at Percy's mom, and she gave him the polite smile she gave men who winked at her.

They sat on the edge of the town dock with their legs hanging over. Below them, the harbor was green-black and full of moving light, slapping softly against the pilings. Boats knocked together. Gulls screamed. His mom had brought a paperback with a cracked spine and a thermos of coffee. She showed him how to put the bait on the hook ("Sorry, little guy," she told it), how to drop the line, how to watch the bobber. Then she leaned back against a post and pretended to read while she watched him instead.

Percy watched the bobber.

He was not good at watching things. Every report card he'd ever gotten said so. But this was different. The water under the dock wasn't empty, and he could tell. He couldn't have said how. It was like knowing someone was standing behind you before they spoke — a tickle at the back of his mind, a feeling of something, and then another something, and another, quick and darting, moving through the green dark in a loose bunch like kids let out for recess.

"There's fish down there," he said.

"I hope so," said his mom. "Or that guy's a liar."

"No, I mean —" He frowned. "There's like twenty."

She looked at him over her book. "Oh yeah?"

"Twenty-two." He didn't know why he'd said it. It just felt true.

Then the bobber went under.

It didn't bob. It vanished, like something had grabbed it and yanked, and the whole green rod bent double in his hands. Percy yelled, and his mom yelled, and the paperback went skidding across the boards. "Reel! Reel, honey, turn the —"

He reeled. The fish fought like it had a personal grudge against him. It zigzagged and ran and tugged, and for a few seconds Percy was absolutely sure it was going to pull him off the dock, and he didn't care, because he had never felt anything so alive on the end of anything in his life. Then it broke the surface in a spray of light, silver-green and furious, and his mom grabbed the line and swung it up onto the dock, where it slapped against the boards and flopped and glared at them.

It really did glare. It had a jutting jaw and a mouthful of tiny teeth and the most offended face Percy had ever seen on anything.

"Look at him," his mom said, laughing. "He's so mad."

"I caught a fish," Percy said. "Mom. I caught a fish."

"You caught a fish!" She hugged him from the side, hard. "Okay — hold on, let me get him off the hook, they bite —"

"I want to do it."

She hesitated. Then she showed him how: thumb and finger behind the head, firm but not squeezing, away from the teeth. The fish was cold and slick and strong, and it bucked in his grip. He worked the tiny hook loose. His mom held up the bucket. "We can put him back, or —"

Percy didn't hear the rest.

Because the fish was dying.

He'd known that, in a way. Fish couldn't breathe air; everybody knew that. But he hadn't known it, not the way he did now, with its body going slower in his hands. Its gills flared, red and feathery and useless, opening and closing on nothing. And Percy could feel it — not with his fingers, exactly, but with some other part of him he hadn't known he had. The fish's life was there in his hands like a match burned almost to the end. A tiny, fierce, flickering point, getting smaller.

He could feel exactly how much of it was left. It wasn't much.

Quickly, Ushio, said a voice. Before it goes.

Percy went very still.

The voice wasn't in his ears. It came from lower down — under his ribs, under his breath, as if it rose up through the dock from the dark green water. It was a woman's voice, low and calm, and the strangest thing about it was that it wasn't strange. He knew it. He had always known it. It was the voice from the dream where he walked down the long hill in the dark — the dream he'd had for as long as he could remember, so often that he'd stopped thinking of it as a dream and started thinking of it as a place.

He had never heard it awake before.

It is going to die, the voice said gently. That is already decided. But it can go nowhere, or it can come to me. Give it to me.

How? he thought, before he could wonder whether she could hear him.

She could. Mean it. Say that it is mine.

The fish's gills opened, and closed, and opened.

"It's yours," Percy whispered.

And something happened.

The flicker in his hands went out. It didn't just stop. It went — somewhere, down, through him. A thread of cold ran from his palms up his arms and through the middle of his chest and down and out through the bead on his wrist, which went so cold so suddenly that he gasped. For one second he could almost feel the shape of where it was going: a long road leaning down into the dark, and something at the bottom of it, waiting.

Then, somewhere under his breastbone, a single cold drop fell into a place he hadn't known he had.

He heard it land. Not with his ears. He heard it the way you hear one drip in a quiet house at night — plink — and then the ripples going out and out, across water so still and dark it didn't seem to have a surface until something touched it.

And the voice sighed. It was the sound of someone setting down something heavy she had carried a very long way.

Oh, she said. Oh, thank you. Well done, my son. Well done.

"Percy?"

He blinked. His mom was crouched beside him, the bucket forgotten. "Honey? You okay? You went all —" She let her eyes go blank and her jaw go slack, a pretty good impression of whatever he must have looked like.

Percy looked down. The fish lay still across his palms, its eye flat and silver. It looked smaller than it had a minute ago, the way empty things do.

He waited to feel bad. He'd found a dead pigeon on the sidewalk once and cried for a whole afternoon. But what he felt instead was — he didn't have a word for it. Awake. Like waking up from a nap you didn't know you needed, your whole body clean and light.

"I'm okay," he said. And then, because it was the only question that seemed to matter: "Can we eat it?"

His mom stared at him. Then she laughed, surprised and delighted, and pushed his hair out of his eyes. "He's pretty small, baby."

"Please?"

Yes, said the voice under his ribs, approving. Eat it. That is the proper way. The death was mine; the flesh is yours.

"Please," Percy said again. "I caught it. It's —" He didn't know how to explain. "It's supposed to get eaten. Otherwise it's a waste."

His mother gave him an odd look — a soft, considering look, like he'd said something a lot older than seven. Then she shrugged. "Okay. Catch me a few more and we'll have a fish fry."

He caught four more before lunch. Each time, he held the fish until the flicker went out. Each time, he whispered it's yours, and each time a drop fell somewhere inside him. By the fourth, he didn't need to say it out loud. He just meant it, and that was enough.

That night his mom fried them in butter in the cabin's one dented skillet, with lemon and too much salt, and they ate them with their fingers on the back steps while the sun went down, picking the tiny bones out of their teeth. Afterward there was birthday cake: lopsided, homemade, with frosting the color of a swimming pool, because Percy had asked for blue, and in seven years his mother had never once told him he couldn't have blue.

It was the best day of his life.

He fell asleep before nine, salt-sticky and sunburned, with his thumb on the bead.

* * *​

He was on the hill again.

He was always on the hill in the dream: the long, smooth slope running down into a dark that didn't have any color, not even black. The ground was cool and soft as an old wooden floor under his bare feet. The air smelled like the inside of a stone. He'd been coming here for as long as he could remember, and he'd never been scared of it. He'd never gotten very far down, either. Usually he stood near the top and listened to the humming come up from below until he woke.

Tonight he kept walking.

He didn't decide to. His feet just knew the way. The slope went down and down, so gently he barely felt it, and the humming got closer, and after a long time the ground leveled out and he came to the edge of a pool.

It was small — small enough that he could have thrown a rock across it. The water was perfectly black and perfectly still, and it didn't reflect anything, not even him. When he looked down, he could just make out the bottom: smooth stone, and something faint scattered across it, like five tiny grains of light.

On the far side of the pool hung a blind.

It was the kind made of thin reeds strung side by side, like the ones that hang in front of porches, except it was very old — so old that some of the reeds had rotted away and left gaps, and the ones that were left were gray and soft-looking, like driftwood. It hung from nothing. It went up into the dark farther than he could see. And behind it, somebody was sitting.

He couldn't see her. Only a shape behind the reeds, very still. The humming had stopped.

"Hi," Percy said.

"Hello, Ushio," said the voice. It was clearer here than it had been on the dock. It filled the place the way water fills a cup.

"Why do you call me that?"

"It is your name." She sounded amused. "One of them. Your mother named you for a hero. I named you for what you are."

"What am I?"

"Ushio means the tide." The shape behind the blind shifted, very slightly. "The tide comes in and goes out. It belongs to the sea and to the moon, and to neither. It climbs the beach and comes back down, and it takes things with it when it goes." A pause. "Sit, if you like. You walked a long way."

Percy sat on the edge of the black pool and let his feet hang over it. He didn't put them in. He had a feeling that wasn't allowed yet.

"Is this your house?" he asked.

"This is yours."

He looked around at the dark. "It's kind of empty."

She laughed — a soft, rough sound, like stones rolling over each other at the bottom of a stream. "It is new. It was empty until today. Look."

He looked down at the grains of light on the bottom of the pool, and counted them. Five.

"My fish," he said.

"Your fish. Their deaths, given to me. I keep them for you here." Her voice warmed. "You may take them back when you have need of them. Not today. Today you need nothing. But there will be days."

"Like a piggy bank," Percy said.

There was a short silence. "…Yes. If you like."

He thought about that. It made the kind of sense things make in dreams. Then a bigger question floated up, and he asked it before he could worry about whether he should. "Who are you?"

"I am your mother."

Percy frowned. "No, you're not. My mom's Mom."

He thought she might be angry. Instead she sounded pleased, as if he'd gotten a hard question right. "She is your mother. So am I. A child may have two. You have more than most."

"Like a stepmom?"

"No," she said, and he was sure now that she was smiling. "Not like a stepmother."

"Like a godmother?"

A longer pause. "Closer," she allowed. "Closer than you know."

Percy chewed his lip. "Are you a ghost?"

"In a manner of speaking."

"Can I see you?"

"No."

It came out sharp — so sharp the black water shivered, and the reeds of the blind rattled together like teeth, and Percy flinched back from the edge. For the first time in all his years of dreaming, the dark felt cold.

Then it passed. When she spoke again, her voice was low and soft and, he thought, almost sorry.

"Not yet, Ushio. Not for a long time. Once, someone I loved looked at me when I had asked him not to. It went badly for us both." The shape behind the blind was very still. "Promise me you will not look behind the blind."

He looked at the gray reeds and the gaps between them. He could have looked. It would have been easy. But he thought about how his mom's voice went careful when she talked about his father, like she was carrying a too-full cup, and how this voice was doing the same thing now.

"I promise," he said.

"Thank you." Something eased in the dark. "You are a good boy. Your mother has raised you well."

"Which one?"

That laugh again. "The one who fed you fish and blue cake. Love her, Ushio. Listen to her. She carried you, and she has carried you every day since. She is owed more than you will ever be able to repay."

"Okay," Percy said. He yawned. Being in the dream was starting to feel like being tired. "Did you know my dad?"

"I have seen him."

"What's he like?"

"Bright," she said, after a while. "Too bright to look at for long."

"Mom says he got lost at sea."

"The sea is where he is," she agreed.

Percy turned the bracelet around his wrist, around and around. "He gave me this. For protection."

The silence that followed was the longest yet. In it, Percy heard something he hadn't noticed before: a faint, far-off sound beyond the blind, like rain on a roof, or like a great many small things moving.

"Your mother told you so," the voice said at last.

"Yeah."

"Your mother is an honest woman," said Izanami. "She has never lied to you in her life."

It sounded like an answer. Percy was very tired, and seven, and he decided it was one.

"Will you be here next time?" he asked.

"I am always here," she said. "I have always been here. Go up now, my tide. The sun is almost on the water, and you will want to fish."

He went up.

* * *​

In the morning he told his mom about it.

He told her over cereal, the way he'd tell her about any dream: there was a hill and a pond and a lady behind a curtain who said she was his other mom and called him a weird name that meant the tide. He expected her to laugh. She was good at dreams. She'd wanted to write books once, before, and some nights she told him stories that went on for weeks, about ships and islands and sea serpents with terrible manners.

She didn't laugh. She smiled, but her hand had gone still on her coffee mug.

"Your other mom, huh?" she said. "What's she like?"

Percy shrugged. "Nice. Kind of scary. She sings."

"Yeah? What does she sing?"

He tried to remember. The humming was right there in his head, low and slow and old, but when he reached for it, it slid away like a fish. "I don't know. Not in English."

His mom looked at him for a long moment. Then — and he didn't think she knew she was doing it — her eyes dropped to the bracelet on his wrist. She looked at it the way you look at a word you've written a hundred times that suddenly seems spelled wrong.

Then she blinked, and smiled for real, and reached across the table to steal a spoonful of his cereal. "Well," she said, "you tell her she's not getting you on weekends."

Percy laughed. The moment passed. Out the window, the sea was flat and bright and waiting.

He caught nine fish that day. He gave every one of them away.

Lying in bed that night, with the cabin creaking around him and the surf breathing outside, he put his hand flat on his chest and closed his eyes, and found that if he was very quiet, he could feel it: a small, cool stillness under his ribs, like a pocket of shade on a hot day. Not much. A puddle. Barely enough to wet his toes.

He decided to call it the hollow, because that was what it was — a little empty place, like a knot in a tree where you'd hide something important.

He wondered how many fish it would take to fill it up.

Far below, at the bottom of a long road, behind a stone, someone heard him wonder, and smiled.

 

[Abysseus]

Chapter Two — Salt​

The summer he turned eight, Percy learned that the sea would close a wound. He learned it on the jetty, which he was not supposed to be on.

The jetty at the east end of the beach was a long arm of black boulders reaching out into the waves, and a sign at the start of it said NO CLIMBING in letters even Percy could read. Old men fished off the end of it anyway. They went out at dawn in rubber boots with buckets of green crabs, and they came back with blackfish — fat, dark, blunt-headed fish, homely as bulldogs — that they said lived in the cracks between the rocks and got bigger every year they didn't get caught.

"How old do they get?" Percy asked one of them. The man was cleaning his catch on a board at the foot of the jetty. He had a face like a walnut and a Mets cap so old it had faded pink.

"Big ones? Twenty, thirty years." The man grunted. "Older'n you, that's for sure. Some of 'em older'n your mother."

Percy looked at the blackfish on the board. He tried to imagine thirty years in the dark between the rocks, getting bigger every year, slow and patient and careful — and then one day a green crab coming down on a string.

He wanted one so badly his teeth hurt.

So the next morning, while his mom was still asleep, he took his rod and two green crabs in a coffee can and went out on the jetty.

It went fine for a while. The rocks were wet and slick with weed, and he had to climb more than walk, but he was good at climbing and he was careful, mostly. He got about halfway out. He found a flat-ish rock and wedged himself in and dropped his crab into a dark gap where the water sucked in and out, and he waited, and he felt for them.

They were down there. He could tell. Not like the snappers, which had been a quick, darting crowd. These were different: slow, heavy, solitary, each one tucked into its own hole like a person sitting alone in a dark room. He could feel one right under him. Big. Not moving. Thinking about the crab.

Then a wave came in higher than the rest and slapped the rocks, and Percy's sneaker slid on the weed, and he went down.

Not into the water, which was lucky. But he went down hard against the side of the boulder, and the boulder was crusted with barnacles, and barnacles, it turned out, were basically tiny volcanoes made of razor blades. He slid about two feet before he caught himself. When he looked at his shin, there was a long, ragged scrape from his knee almost to his sock, already beading red, and both his palms were cut up like he'd tried to stop himself on a cheese grater.

It hurt so much he couldn't even yell. He just sat there with his mouth open, making a small whistling sound.

Ushio. Her voice came up sharp and close, colder than he had ever heard it. You are bleeding.

"I know," he managed. His eyes were watering. "I know."

Get into the water.

"It's salt water! It's gonna sting —"

Get into the water, she said again, and see.

So he did. He didn't have much choice; he couldn't climb with his hands like that. He slid down the side of the rock on the seat of his shorts into a sheltered pocket where the waves came in calm and green, and lowered himself in up to his chest, and waited for the salt to hit the cuts like fire.

It didn't.

What happened instead was — cool. Not cold. Cool, and soft, and familiar, like getting into his own bed. The water folded around his legs and his stinging hands, and the stinging just stopped. It didn't fade. It stopped, like someone had flipped a switch. He floated there, breathing hard, holding his hands up in front of his face, and watched the cuts on his palms pull closed. It wasn't fast. It was about as fast as frost melting off a windshield in the sun. But he could see it happening: the red lines going pink, the pink going pale, the pale going away.

When he climbed out, ten minutes later, his shin had a faint shiny line down it, like an old scar. By lunchtime even that was gone.

Did you do that? he asked her, in his head. He was sitting on the sand, staring at his perfectly normal hands.

No. A pause. She sounded — not unhappy, exactly. Thoughtful. Like someone looking at a present that someone else had given her child. That was your father's gift. The sea knows its own.

Because he's lost in it?

Because he is in it, she said. It is part of him. And so are you.

Percy picked at the sand. Something about the way she'd said it made him ask: Does that bother you? That I'm — He didn't know how to put it. Part his?

The silence went on long enough that he started to worry. Then:

You are his, she said. And you are hers. And you are mine. None of that troubles me, Ushio, so long as you are whole. Her voice went low and cool and very, very certain. The sea may heal your body. I will see to everything else.

He didn't know what everything else meant. Sitting there in the sun, he found he didn't really want to ask.

* * *​

He did catch a blackfish that summer.

It took four more mornings, three more crabs, and one very long conversation with his mom about the NO CLIMBING sign. That ended with her walking out on the jetty with him, in her sneakers, holding the back of his shirt the whole way like a leash. She sat on a rock with her coffee while he fished. When the bite came, it wasn't like the snappers at all. It was a single heavy thunk, like someone knocking on a door at the bottom of the sea, and then a weight that pulled straight down into the rocks and didn't want to come out.

He fought it for a long time. His mom had to help. When it finally came up out of the foam, dark and blunt and as long as his arm, she said a word he'd never heard her say before, and then said, "Don't repeat that."

Percy held it on the rocks and felt for its life.

It wasn't a match flame. It was nothing like the snappers. It was more like the coals at the bottom of a grill after a cookout: not bright, not flickering, but deep. Slow. Old. Banked. It had been burning down there between the rocks for longer than he'd been alive, and there was so much more of it than there had been in any fish before that for a second he didn't want to.

You need not, she said quietly. If you would rather put it back, put it back. It is yours to give or not.

He looked at the blackfish. It looked back at him with one dark, unbothered eye.

"No," he said. "We'll eat it. It's supposed to get eaten."

Then give it with care, she said. It has lived a long time.

So he did. He held it, and he meant it — it's yours, it's yours — and the coal went out of it slowly, and went down through him, down through the bead, down the long dark road. And when it landed in the hollow, it didn't land like a drop.

It poured.

He actually gasped. It was like someone had tipped a whole cup of cold water into the place under his ribs. He felt the hollow deepen, the dark surface rising and rising and then settling, still, so much more there than a moment ago that he put a hand on his chest without thinking, as if to check.

"Percy?" his mom said.

"I'm okay." He was grinning. He couldn't help it. "It's a big one."

"It's a monster," his mom said, and kissed the top of his head. "Thirty years, that guy said? Lord. We're going to need a bigger pan."

That night he went down the hill in his dream and sat by the black pool, and the bottom wasn't five grains of light anymore. It was like looking down through clear night water at a scatter of stars — and among them, low and steady, one larger glow, like a lantern set on the stone.

"They're different," he said. "They're not all the same."

"No," Izanami said from behind the blind. "No life weighs the same as another. Some are a breath. Some are a cupful. Some are a river." He heard her shift, a dry sound, like reeds. "You will learn the weight of things, Ushio. It is the first wisdom of my house."

"How do you tell which is which?"

"The way you tell how deep water is by its color," she said. "You look. And you remember."

* * *​

Back in the city, there was no sea.

There was the Hudson and the East River, which didn't count, and the Reservoir in Central Park, which definitely didn't count, and there was the bathtub in their apartment, which was the size of a coffin and had a rust stain shaped like Florida. That was it. Percy started taking a bath every single night, which his mom found so suspicious that she felt his forehead for a fever three times in one week.

He wasn't getting clean. He was practicing.

He didn't know what for, exactly. He just knew that the sea had done something to his cuts, and that he'd felt the blackfish in the rocks the way you feel someone looking at you, and that the snappers had moved through the water like a crowd he could almost touch. And he knew, the same way he knew which way was down, that there was more. That the water was listening. That if he figured out how to talk to it, it would answer.

He'd seen a movie at a sleepover about mutants, where an old man in a cape moved metal with his mind. Percy figured it was probably like that.

It was not like that.

For weeks, nothing happened. He lay in the bath with his ears under the surface, listening to the building's old pipes knock and groan, and he stared at the water and thought move at it so hard his eyes crossed. He held his hand over it and tried to feel what he'd felt on the dock. He tried asking politely. He tried yelling, quietly, so his mom wouldn't hear. Nothing. The bathwater just sat there, going cold, being water.

You are pushing, Izanami told him one night, sounding amused. Water does not like to be pushed. Ask your father. He has spent thousands of years failing to learn it.

Then what do I do?

What did you do on the dock?

Nothing! I just — He frowned at the faucet. Felt them.

Then feel it.

It took two more weeks. And when it finally happened, it wasn't because he'd figured anything out. It was because of Mrs. Kessler.

Mrs. Kessler was his third-grade teacher. She had decided in September that Percy was a problem, and nothing he'd done since had changed her mind. That Thursday she made him read aloud in front of everybody, even though she knew — she knew — what happened when he tried: how the letters slid around and swapped places like they were playing a trick on him. He got through two sentences. Then he read dog as god, and the whole class laughed, and Mrs. Kessler sighed and said, "Thank you, Percy, that's enough," in a voice like he'd tracked mud across her carpet.

He got into the bath that night so angry his whole body buzzed. He didn't try to practice. He just lay there with his fists clenched under the water and his jaw clenched and his eyes stinging, and for once he wasn't trying to make anything happen.

He felt the water.

All of it, all at once. The weight of it on his chest. The warmth leaving it, seeping into the cold porcelain. The way it touched every part of him at the same time, and the way it pushed back. It wasn't like the sea — the sea was huge and alive and full of things — but it was the same stuff, and it knew him. It had known him the whole time. He'd just been too busy shouting at it to listen.

He unclenched his fist under the water. And the water — every bit of it, all at once — shivered.

A ring of tiny ripples went out from his hand to the edges of the tub, bounced back, and met in the middle in a little peak, like a raindrop falling upward.

Percy stopped breathing.

He did it again. This time he barely did anything at all — just thought there at it, the way you'd point at something across a room for a friend — and the ripples went out again. And again. And when he lifted his hand out and held it, dripping, an inch above the surface, a small hump of water rose to meet his palm like a cat pushing its head into somebody's hand.

He laughed out loud. He didn't mean to. It came out of him like a hiccup.

"Percy?" His mom's voice, through the door. "You okay in there?"

"Fine!" he yelled. The hump of water collapsed with a splash. "I'm good! Just — really good bath!"

There was a long pause on the other side of the door. "Okay," his mom said. "Weirdo."

And in the dark under his ribs, he could feel Izanami — not hear her, feel her — glowing with something so fierce and warm and proud that it made his chest ache.

There, she said softly. There you are.

* * *​

After that he practiced every chance he got. Bathwater. Puddles on the way to school. The drinking fountain in the hall, which he could make arc a little higher if he concentrated, until a hall monitor told him to quit messing around. He got better the way you get better at anything — slowly, then sometimes all at once, then not at all for days.

It cost, though. That was the thing nobody in the movies ever mentioned.

He found out how much one afternoon in February, alone in the apartment after school. His mom worked late Tuesdays at the candy shop in Grand Central. He filled a plain glass at the kitchen sink, set it in the middle of the table, and decided that today he was going to lift the water out of it. Not a ripple. Not a hump. Out.

It didn't want to come.

It was like trying to lift something heavy with his mind, which he supposed it was. He sat with his hands flat on the table and stared at the glass until the edges of everything went gray. The surface trembled. It bulged. It rose above the rim in a fat, wobbling dome, like a blister — a quarter inch, half an inch, shining. He held it there. His head started to pound. He held it anyway, teeth gritted so hard his jaw creaked, and the dome got taller, an inch, more —

Something warm ran down over his lip.

The water fell back into the glass with a sound like a sigh. Percy touched his face and his fingers came away red. His nose was bleeding — not a little, a lot, dripping off his chin onto the table — and when he stood up to get a paper towel, the floor tilted sideways and slid out from under him, and he sat down hard on the linoleum instead.

He had never felt like this. Not from running, not from the flu. It was like someone had pulled a plug at the bottom of him and everything was draining out. His hands were shaking. His teeth were chattering. He was so cold. It was February, the radiator was clanking away, and he was so cold he couldn't stop shivering, and he couldn't get up, and his mom wouldn't be home for three hours.

"Help," he whispered. He didn't know who to. Then he did. "Please. Help me."

I am here. Her voice came instantly, calm and close and steady, like a hand on the back of his neck. Breathe, Ushio. You are not dying. You are only empty. You have been bailing out the sea with a teacup.

"I don't —" His teeth clacked. "I don't know what that means."

It means you have two cups, she said, and you have only been using one. You have been pouring from your father's, and it is not deep yet. You are young; you are small. But you have another.

"The —" It clicked. "The hollow."

Reach for it.

He didn't know how. But he'd learned, with the bathwater, that how wasn't really the question. So he stopped trying, and shut his eyes, and felt — down past the shaking, down past the pounding in his head, to the cool, still place under his ribs that had been filling, fish by fish, all summer and fall. It was there. It was waiting. It had been waiting the whole time.

He reached into it the way you'd cup your hands into a stream.

And it came up into him.

It was cold — clean cold, like the first swallow of water on a hot day — and it ran up out of the hollow and out along his arms and legs, into his fingers and toes, into his jaw, behind his eyes. Everywhere it went, the shaking stopped. The pounding in his head rinsed away like dirt under a faucet. The bleeding slowed, and stopped. He felt his heartbeat steady and settle and go slow — a little slower than usual — calm and heavy and sure.

He opened his eyes. The kitchen was the kitchen. The radiator clanked. He was sitting on the floor in a small puddle of his own blood, and he felt fine. Better than fine. He felt rinsed.

And the hollow was lower.

He could feel it, the way you feel with your tongue where a tooth used to be. Not empty — not even close — but lower. About a blackfish's worth, he thought, or a little less. Gone, spent, used up on getting him off the floor.

What you take out, Izanami said, you must put back. Remember that. It is not a bottomless thing. Not yet.

Not yet?

But she didn't answer that.

He got up and cleaned the blood off the floor and the table. Then he sat back down and looked at the glass.

He was tired of it beating him.

If I use the hollow, he asked. For the water. Can I do that?

The pause was short, and it was a kind of pause he was starting to recognize: the pause of someone trying very hard not to sound too pleased.

Try, said Izanami.

So he put his hands flat on the table. He reached for the water in the glass the way he'd learned — not pushing, just feeling — and at the same time he reached down into the hollow and opened it, just a little, just a crack, like a tap.

The two things met inside him.

It was hard to describe, later. It was like two rivers coming together: one warm and salt-bright and huge and restless, his father's, and the other cold and dark and very still, hers. Where they met, they didn't fight. They braided. The warm one gave the cold one motion, and the cold one gave the warm one depth, and the thing they made together went down his arms and into his hands and out across the table to the glass —

And the water stood up.

All of it, at once. It rose out of the glass in a single wobbling, shining column, a rope of silver as tall as his arm, and stood there in the middle of the kitchen with the late winter light shining through it. It turned slowly. It twisted. And Percy sat with his hands flat on the table and his mouth open, and didn't feel tired at all.

Then he laughed, and lost it, and the whole thing came down across the table and into his lap with a slap.

He sat there soaked to the waist, still laughing.

Look at you, Izanami said, and her voice was so full of pride it didn't sound like a goddess at all. It sounded like any mother at any school play, watching her kid remember every line. Oh, look at you. My tide.

When his mom got home, he told her he'd had a nosebleed. She felt his forehead, and turned on the humidifier, and made him tomato soup, and he let her. He didn't tell her about the glass. He didn't know how he would have started.

* * *​

After that, he got serious.

He couldn't have said exactly why. It wasn't anything she said, at first. It was more a feeling, like the feeling before a thunderstorm, when the air goes heavy and the birds go quiet. Like something was coming. When he finally asked her about it, lying in bed one night, she didn't pretend it wasn't.

There are things in the world that hunt children like you, she said. They have not found you yet. I have seen to that, and so has your mother, in her way. But you will not stay small forever, and the bigger you grow, the brighter you will burn, and one day they will smell you, the way sharks smell blood in the water. A pause. When they come, Ushio, I want them to find you strong.

So he got strong.

He started doing push-ups every night before bed — ten, then twenty, then however many he could do before he lost count, which was usually somewhere in the thirties, because counting was not his thing. He did sit-ups with his feet hooked under the radiator. He ran the stairs of their building, all six floors, up and down, until the lady in 4C banged on her door with a broom handle to make him stop. He begged for swimming lessons at the Y until his mom gave in, and she must have skipped lunch for a month to pay for them, and he was so grateful he made her a card with a dolphin on it that looked mostly like a potato.

The swim instructor, a big tattooed guy named Hector, watched Percy swim one length of the pool on the first day. Then he went and stood next to Percy's mom with his arms crossed for a while.

"Who taught him?" Percy heard him ask.

"Nobody," his mom said. "He just — always could."

"Huh," said Hector. After that, he mostly let Percy swim.

And on Saturdays, when the weather was good, his mom took him on the long subway ride out to the piers at Sheepshead Bay, where the fishing boats came in and old men and grandmothers and whole families stood along the railings with their lines in the water. She'd sit on a bench with a library book. Percy would fish.

Except it wasn't just fishing anymore.

He'd drop his line and close his eyes and feel — out across the bay, down into the green-brown murk. At first he could only feel the fish right under him. Then, over weeks, farther: the shapes of the schools moving in and out with the tide, the slow ones nosing along the bottom, the quick ones turning all at once like a flock of birds. He learned to tell porgies from fluke by how they moved. He learned which way they'd go. And then he learned — and this was the part that made his heart pound — that if he reached out, just a little, he could make the water carry his bait to them. A tiny current. A nudge. Nobody else on the pier could see it. The man beside him, who had fished that spot for twenty years, caught nothing all morning and gave Percy a look like he'd personally insulted his mother.

He gave every fish away. He'd hold each one at the railing until he felt its life go out, and mean it, and feel the drop fall. Some days the hollow filled faster than he drew from it; some days it didn't. He started to be able to tell, roughly, without trying: ankle-deep today. Halfway to my knees. Never numbers. Just the feeling of how deep the water was, the way you'd know at the beach without measuring.

And they ate what he caught. All of it. His mom learned to cook porgy about eleven different ways. She said she was going to write a cookbook called What Percy Dragged Home.

"You know you're allowed to throw some back," she said once, watching him clean his catch at the sink.

"I know," Percy said. "But then it's a waste."

His mom gave him that look again — the soft, puzzled one, like he'd said something much older than he was. But she didn't argue. She just handed him the lemon.

* * *​

The summer he was nine, the sea tried to kill him.

That was how Izanami put it, afterward. Percy thought that was unfair to the sea.

It was a gray, windy afternoon at Montauk, the kind where the lifeguards put up a red flag and his mom said knee-deep, Percy, I mean it. He meant to listen. But the waves were huge and green and gorgeous, and he was a better swimmer than anybody on that beach, and he only went out a little, and then a little more, and then a wave pulled back with a long, grinding hiss and the bottom fell away from under his feet, and he was moving.

Fast. Out. Away from the beach, like he was on a conveyor belt.

He knew what it was right away. Hector had drawn it on a whiteboard once: a rip current, a river of water rushing back out to sea through a gap in the sandbar. Don't fight it, Hector had said, tapping the board. Everybody fights it. Everybody gets tired. Swim sideways, parallel to the shore. Get out of the river, then come in.

Percy swam sideways.

The river didn't let him go.

It was strong — so much stronger than anything in a pool, anything at Sheepshead Bay. He could feel it with that other sense, like a rope as thick as a tree trunk, hauling. He swam and swam, and the beach got smaller, and his arms started to burn, and his breath went ragged. He could see his mom on the sand, a tiny figure, running. He swam harder. It didn't matter. The rope kept pulling.

He tried to talk to the water, the way he did at the pier. It was like trying to talk to a freight train.

His arms were getting heavy. His legs were getting heavy. A wave broke over his head and he came up coughing.

Ushio. Her voice came, and it was not calm. It was not calm at all. Ushio, the hollow. Now.

He reached for it.

It came up into him cold and clean and fast, and it was like someone had poured new arms and new lungs into him. The burning went out of his muscles. The weight lifted off his chest. He kicked, and his kick was strong again.

But strength alone wasn't going to do it. He knew that with a horrible, clear certainty. The river was stronger than any kid could swim, no matter how much he had to burn.

So he did the other thing.

He stopped trying to talk to the whole current — the whole freight train of it. Instead he felt along it, the way you'd run your hand along a rope in the dark, and found its edge: the place where the river rubbed against the quieter water beside it, where it frayed. And he reached for that — just that, just the fraying edge — and pushed.

Not much. He couldn't do much. A foot of water, maybe, a little nudge, like he did with his bait at the pier. But a foot of water pushed sideways at the edge of a rip current was enough to open a seam. Percy swam into the seam with the hollow burning cold in every limb, and the river let go of him as if it had never been holding on.

The next wave picked him up and carried him in.

He staggered out of the surf about a hundred yards down the beach, coughing and shaking and alive, and his mom hit him like a linebacker. She was crying. She was yelling. She was hugging him so hard he couldn't breathe, which, under the circumstances, was kind of ironic, and saying never, never, never again into his wet hair, and he held on to her and said I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm okay, and meant all of it.

And under his ribs, the hollow was almost dry.

He could feel the bottom of it: smooth, cold stone, with just a skin of water left. A puddle, like the first night after the snappers. Everything else was gone, spent on getting back to this beach.

That night, in the cabin, with the window open and the sea muttering outside, he lay very still and thought about it. Not the fear; he'd thought about the fear enough. He thought about the other part.

The sea had shown him the way out — the seam, the edge, the place where it frayed. But he couldn't have reached it without the hollow. And the hollow had given him strength, but strength alone would only have let him drown slower. It had been both. The warm and the cold, braided into one thing, and neither half enough alone.

He thought that was important. He didn't know why yet.

Your father's sea tried to take you, Izanami said. Her voice was very quiet, and colder than the bottom of the hollow. I will remember that.

It wasn't trying to, Percy said. It's just a current. It doesn't know anything.

Everything that comes that near to killing you, said Izanami, is trying to, as far as I am concerned.

He didn't know what to say to that. He lay in the dark for a long time, listening to the sea and feeling the empty place under his ribs.

He wanted to fill it back up. He wanted it so badly — more than he'd wanted the blackfish, more than he'd wanted anything — that his fingers twitched on the blanket as if they were already holding a line. He lay there and felt the want, and it scared him a little, and he didn't know why.

In the morning he caught eleven fish before breakfast.

* * *​

That fall, his mom started seeing a man named Gabe Ugliano.

The first time Gabe came over for dinner, he smelled like cigars and old cheese and something under both of those, sour and moldy, like a gym bag left in a hot car all summer. He called Percy "the kid." He didn't look at him. He ate three helpings of pot roast and talked the whole time about poker, and when he left, he kissed Percy's mom on the cheek at the door, and she smiled at him in a way Percy had never seen her smile before — a tight, small, careful smile, like she was holding her breath behind it.

Percy didn't understand it. He lay awake that night trying to.

And he waited for the voice to say something. Anything. About the man, about the smell, about the smile.

She didn't.

It was the first time he could remember her being quiet on purpose. She wasn't gone. He could feel her there, under his ribs, at the far end of the cord on his wrist. She was listening. She was paying very close attention. She just wasn't saying anything at all.

It was so much worse than anything she could have said.

Far below, at the bottom of a long road, behind a stone, Izanami watched the man walk down the stairs and out onto the street. She watched him light a cigar under the streetlight. She watched the smoke go up.

Then, very patiently, she began to count.

 

[Abysseus]

Chapter Three — Gabe​

His mother married Gabe Ugliano on a Tuesday in late October — seven weeks after the first time he came to dinner — at the city clerk's office downtown, in a blue dress she bought for the occasion and returned to the store the next day.

Percy was there. He wore his school pants and a clip-on tie that kept trying to escape, and he sat on a plastic chair in a waiting room that smelled like floor wax and other people's nerves, between a couple in matching Yankees jerseys and a woman holding a baby and a bouquet at the same time. When the clerk called their names, his mom stood up and smoothed the dress and looked back at him once. Then she went into the little room with Gabe and Gabe's friend Eddie, who was the witness, and who had brought a cigar to celebrate and been told twice that he couldn't light it.

It took six minutes. Percy timed it on the clock over the door.

When they came out, Gabe had his arm around his mom's shoulders, heavy, like he was leaning on a fence. "Well, kid," he said. "Guess we're family." He laughed at that, and his mom laughed too, half a second late.

Percy didn't say anything. He rolled the bead under his thumb and waited for the voice under his ribs to say something — about the dress, or the six minutes, or the arm.

It didn't. It hadn't, not once, since the first night Gabe came to dinner.

On the subway home, his mom sat next to Percy instead of Gabe, which Percy noticed and Gabe didn't. She took his hand. Her new ring was cheap and too big, and it kept spinning around her finger.

"Gabe's going to help us," she said quietly, under the noise of the train.

"With what?"

She was quiet for a whole stop. Then she said, "Things," in her careful voice, the too-full-cup voice, and Percy knew that was all he was going to get.

He didn't understand it. He was nine, and he was pretty sure he understood most of the things that mattered, and he did not understand this. His mom was the smartest person he knew. She laughed at jokes on the radio that he didn't get yet. She read books as thick as bricks. And Gabe Ugliano —

Gabe Ugliano smelled.

That was the thing everybody noticed first, and the thing Percy would remember longest. It wasn't just the cigars, or the beer, or the sour onion-and-feet smell of a man who didn't wash much. It was something under all that, thick and greasy and moldy, like a gym bag left in a hot car all summer, and it got into everything. Within a month of Gabe moving in, the apartment smelled like him. The curtains smelled like him. The couch smelled like him. Percy's clothes smelled like him, and a kid in his class started holding his nose and making gagging noises every time Percy sat down.

His mom never said a word about it. She bought air freshener. She opened the windows, even in November. But she never once asked Gabe to shower, and she never once looked surprised by the smell, and that was the part Percy understood least of all.

* * *​

Izanami understood it at once.

She had watched the wedding through the bead on her son's wrist — that small, cold window, which showed her what was near him the way a candle shows a room: the clerk's tired face, the woman's blue dress, the man's heavy arm. And she had watched the man, because she watched everything that came near her son. She had been watching him for weeks.

She saw what he was. That was not difficult. He was a small man, cruel in small ways, the way a draft is cold: not because it means anything, but because that is what it is. Nothing larger than himself had ever looked at him.

She could see his death in him. She could see anyone's, if she looked. It was her country, after all, and every living thing carries a little of it already, the way a seashell carries the sound of the sea. In this man it lay low and sour, in the liver and the heart, coiled and waiting. He had perhaps twenty-five years left, if he stopped drinking. He would not stop drinking.

And she saw — this took her a little longer, and pleased her when she found it — what the woman had seen.

The stench was not only the man's. Something clung to him that was worse than the cigars and the beer: a rank, animal fog that rolled off him and filled every room he sat in. A mortal nose smelled it as unwashed laundry. A monster's nose would smell nothing else. A monster would come up those stairs hunting the bright salt scent of a sea god's son, and find only this, and turn away in disgust.

The woman had hidden her son in a dung heap.

Izanami, who had hidden him on the far side of the world, recognized the move the way one general recognizes another's. She had wondered, when she chose Sally Jackson, whether the woman was merely brave or clever as well. Now she knew. Sally Jackson had found the foulest man in the city and married him on purpose, with her eyes open, and bought a blue dress to do it in, and taken the dress back.

In another age, Izanami thought, she might have liked her very much.

As for the man —

She would allow him. He was useful. The woman needed him, and her son needed the woman. That was arithmetic, and Izanami had always been good at arithmetic. She had kept count of a thousand deaths a day for three thousand years and never once been wrong.

But she watched him. And every time he spoke to her son the way he spoke to him — kid, genius, hey, Einstein, get me a beer — she made a mark.

She did nothing else. Not yet. She only counted.

* * *​

Life with Gabe settled into a shape, the way a bad back settles into a slouch.

Gabe worked at an electronics store in a way that mostly involved complaining about it. On Thursday nights his friends came over to play poker in the living room, and Percy was expected to stay in his room with the door shut, except when he was expected to come out and bring them beers. Gabe called him kid and genius and, in a good mood, Einstein, which was supposed to be funny because of the reading thing. In a bad mood, Gabe didn't call Percy anything. He just looked at him like a stain on the carpet he'd been meaning to get to.

Percy learned to be quiet. He learned which floorboard in the hall creaked and which one didn't. He learned that the best time to use the bathroom was the fourth quarter of a game, that you could do push-ups without making a sound if you did them on your knuckles on the rug, and that if he ran the stairs before Gabe got home, nobody yelled about it.

Mostly, he learned to make himself small. He didn't like it. He was good at it anyway.

The worst part wasn't Gabe. The worst part was the Saturdays.

"Money's tight," his mom said in November, folding his laundry with her back to him. "I'm going to pick up some weekend shifts for a while. Just for a while, baby."

"What about the pier?"

She didn't turn around. "We'll still go. Just not every week."

They went twice that winter.

The hollow didn't go down, not unless he used it. But it stopped going up, and he could feel the difference the way you feel the difference between a full tank and one that's slowly being drained. He started rationing. He only reached for it after the hardest workouts, or when bathwater practice left him shaky. He started thinking about it the way his mom thought about the coffee can on top of the fridge: carefully, every day, adding up.

* * *​

The first Saturday in December, they went to Sheepshead Bay, and it was so cold the spray froze on the pier railings, and Percy caught nine porgies anyway, his fingers numb and red and happy. He gave every one of them away. He felt every drop fall. On the long ride home he sat with the bucket between his sneakers and his mom's head on his shoulder — she'd worked a double the night before — and thought it might be the best day he'd had since the wedding.

Gabe was home. Gabe and Eddie were watching football with the volume all the way up, and the apartment was thick with smoke and the smell, and when Percy and his mom came in with the bucket, Gabe turned around on the couch and wrinkled his nose.

"Oh, come on," he said. "Sally. What is that?"

"Fish," his mom said. "Percy caught them. I'll clean them on the —"

"Not in here you won't. It reeks."

Percy stared at him. Gabe Ugliano — Gabe Ugliano — was complaining about a smell.

"I'll be quick," his mom said. "I'll open a window. We'll have them for dinner, Gabe, they're really good, you'll —"

"I'm not eating that." Gabe turned back to the TV. "Stick 'em in the fridge or something. Jeez."

So she put them in the fridge in a plastic bag and said they'd have them tomorrow, and kissed the top of Percy's head, and went to lie down, because she had to be at work at seven. Percy went to his room. He did his push-ups on his knuckles. He fell asleep listening to the game through the wall.

When he went to get a glass of water at eleven, the fish weren't in the fridge.

He found them in the kitchen trash, under a layer of coffee grounds and cigar butts and the greasy wrapper from Gabe's sandwich, all nine of them, gray and dull-eyed and slimed with ash. Somebody had emptied a half-finished can of beer over the top.

Percy stood there in his socks on the cold linoleum and looked at them for a long time.

It was stupid. He knew it was stupid. They were just fish, and they were already dead; he'd made them dead himself, that morning, with his own hands. It didn't make any difference to the fish where they ended up.

But it made a difference to him. Every time he'd held one at the railing and felt it go and meant it — it's yours — there had been a promise folded inside, even if he'd never said it out loud: and I won't waste you. You'll get eaten. You'll be part of something. The death was hers; the flesh was his. That was the proper way. That was the rule. And now nine of them were lying in the garbage under Gabe's cigar butts, and the rule was broken, and it was his fault for not hiding them better, and his eyes were stinging and he didn't even know why.

"I'm sorry," he whispered. He didn't know who to. The fish. Her. "I'm sorry. I didn't — he just —"

The bead on his wrist went cold.

Not cool. Not the familiar cold-side-of-the-pillow cool he'd known all his life. Cold, so suddenly and completely that it burned, the way ice burns, and Percy yelped and clapped his other hand over it. When he took his hand away, there was frost on the bead — a fine white fur of it, growing across the black stone in feathery lines, in a warm kitchen, with the radiator clanking three feet away.

It is not you, said Izanami, who wasted them.

Her voice was very quiet. It was the quietest he had ever heard it. Standing there in his socks, Percy understood that quiet was not the same thing as calm.

* * *​

He couldn't sleep.

He lay in bed with the bead pressed against his chest, cold as a coin left out overnight, and listened to the apartment. Gabe snoring on the couch, a sound like someone dragging furniture. The radiator ticking. A car alarm somewhere down the block, going off and then stopping.

Around three in the morning, the refrigerator changed its hum.

He didn't know how he knew. It was the kind of sound you stop hearing after your first week in an apartment, a low, steady drone that's always there. But at three in the morning it dropped, just slightly, as if something heavy had been set down inside it. And a smell came under his door. Not Gabe's smell. Something cleaner and older and colder: wet earth, like the bottom of a flowerpot. Like a cellar. Like the inside of a stone.

Percy knew that smell. He had smelled it every night of his life, at the top of a long hill in the dark.

He pulled the blanket over his head and lay very still until it was light.

* * *​

Gabe's beer went first.

Percy heard it at breakfast — or what Gabe called breakfast, which was eleven-thirty on a Sunday. Gabe cracked a can, took a swig, and sprayed it across the kitchen with a noise like a garbage disposal choking. "What the — this is skunked. This whole six-pack is skunked!"

Then it was his salami, which had gone green and soft and sweet-smelling overnight. Then his leftover sub from Saturday, furred with blue mold as if it had been sitting in a basement for a month. Then his milk — not Percy's mom's milk, which was fine, but the separate carton Gabe kept for himself because he said Percy drank it all — which came out of the spout in lumps.

"This fridge is busted," Gabe announced to the apartment. "Sally! Your fridge is busted!"

It wasn't. Everything else in it was fine. His mom's yogurt was fine. Percy's leftover pizza was fine. The eggs were fine. It was only Gabe's things. Every single item in that refrigerator that belonged to Gabe Ugliano had rotted overnight, as precisely as if someone had gone through with a list.

Gabe threw it all out and bought more. By Monday night, that had rotted too.

It went on like that all week. His cigars went soft and spotted with white mold inside their cellophane. His pretzels went stale in a sealed bag. A family-size pack of beef jerky — which, as far as Percy knew, was not supposed to be able to go bad at all — turned gray and slick and began, faintly, to smell like a grave. On Thursday night Gabe stood in the kitchen holding the open bag at arm's length, and for one moment, under the yellow light, Percy saw something on his face that he had never seen there before.

Gabe looked afraid.

Then it was gone, and he was yelling again, and he threw the jerky in the trash and kicked the fridge so hard the magnets fell off.

Percy thought about telling his mom. He even got as far as opening his mouth once, at dinner. But he'd sat in enough offices with enough grown-ups in cardigans, asking him gently whether he ever heard voices, to know exactly how that conversation would go.

And honestly, it would have been funny. Some of it was funny. The beer spit-take had made Percy bite the inside of his cheek so hard he tasted blood, trying not to laugh. He'd have been happy to let it go on forever.

Except that on Friday, Gabe started blaming his mom.

* * *​

Percy heard it through his bedroom wall. He couldn't make out all the words, and he didn't need to. Gabe's voice, getting louder: the fridge, and money, and you're supposed to keep this place clean, and I'm paying for half this dump, and something about Percy, about the fish, about your weird kid. His mom's voice, low and tired, saying Gabe, saying please, saying I don't know what's wrong with it either. A cabinet door slammed. Then a flat, hard smack, like a palm hitting a tabletop, and his mom went quiet.

Percy sat on his bed with his knees pulled up and the bead in his fist.

Stop, he thought. Please stop. I know it's you.

The answer came so quickly that he knew she'd been waiting for him to ask.

He threw your gift to me into his filth, said Izanami. He poured his drink over it. Since the night he first sat at your table, he has called you kid and genius and Einstein four hundred and twelve times, and not once has he called you by your name.

I know, Percy thought. I know, okay? But he's yelling at Mom. He's yelling at her because of the fridge, and she doesn't know it's you, and she's — His throat closed up. She's so tired. You said she was owed. You said.

Silence. On the other side of the wall, Gabe was still talking — lower now, the mean kind of low.

I did say so, Izanami said at last.

So stop. Please.

A long breath, like wind going down a well. Then — and he felt it physically, like a draft he hadn't noticed suddenly cut off — the cold went out of the bead. Not all the way. Just back to the ordinary cool he'd always known.

Because you asked, she said.

Percy let out a breath he hadn't known he was holding. Thank you.

Do not thank me. Her voice had gone very even. I have stopped. I have not forgotten. I do not forget, Ushio — not anything, not ever. You should know that about me.

He swallowed. Then he made himself ask the thing he'd been afraid to ask all week.

Are you going to hurt him?

Not unless he hurts you.

She said it simply, the way his mom said not until you finish your homework. Like a rule. Like something decided a long time ago that would never need deciding again.

Percy sat with that for a while. It should have made him feel safer, and in a way it did. In another way, it was the scariest thing anyone had ever said to him.

The beer, he said finally. And the jerky. That was you. Through — he lifted his wrist — this?

Through that, she agreed. It is a small door. I can put no more than a fingertip through it. A pause, considering. For now.

On the other side of the wall, the voices had stopped. He heard the front door open and slam — Gabe, going out — and then his mom alone in the kitchen, running the water. Just running it. Not washing anything. Just standing there with the faucet on, the way you do when you don't want anyone to hear you.

Percy got up and went out and hugged her from behind. She jumped. Then she turned off the water and held on to him so hard his ribs creaked.

The fridge never rotted anything again.

* * *​

The next Saturday, his mom got her shift covered, and they went to Sheepshead Bay, and Percy caught six porgies and a fluke. On the subway home, he sat with the bucket between his feet and felt sick.

"Mom," he said. "What if Gabe —"

"I know." She was looking out the window at the tunnel walls going by. She had a look on her face he'd only seen a few times before — once when a landlord tried to keep their security deposit, once when a principal used the words special placement — a quiet, flat, stubborn look, like a door locked from the inside. "I've got it covered."

The next time they went to the pier, she brought a backpack. Inside it were a tiny camping stove, a blue can of fuel, a dented frying pan from the thrift store, a stick of butter, a lemon, and a salt shaker shaped like a lighthouse.

Percy stared at it.

"What Gabe doesn't know," his mom said, "won't stink up his kitchen."

And she lit the stove right there on the pier, in the wind, cupping the little blue flame with her hand, and fried his catch in butter while the gulls screamed and the old men at the railing turned to watch with expressions of deep and sincere respect.

They ate the fish standing up, out of the pan, with their fingers, burning their mouths. A grandmother two spots down asked for the recipe. The man who'd fished that spot for twenty years accepted a piece of fluke, chewed it, and nodded slowly, like he was hearing a confession.

It was the best thing Percy had ever tasted. He told her so.

"It's the salt," his mom said, and gave him the last piece.

* * *​

Far below, at the bottom of her road, Izanami watched the woman cup the flame against the wind.

She had wondered once whether Sally Jackson was merely brave or clever as well. It had not occurred to her to wonder whether the woman was also defiant — in that small, stubborn, mortal way, the way grass is defiant coming up through a crack in stone. She found that she approved. She found that she approved very much.

Good, she thought. Feed him, woman. Make him laugh. Keep him yours as well, for as long as you can.

Then she turned her attention, as she did every night now, to the apartment on the Upper East Side, where the man lay snoring on the couch with the television flickering blue across his face.

She had stopped. She had promised her son, and she had stopped.

She had not stopped counting.

 

[Abysseus]

Chapter Four — Sheepshead Bay​

The spring he was ten, Percy found out he was too fast.

Hector entered him in a swim meet. It wasn't a big one — a YMCA invitational in a chlorine-fogged pool in Queens, eight lanes, kids from all five boroughs — but Hector made a big deal of it anyway. Percy's mom took the Saturday off and sat in the bleachers with a homemade sign that said GO PERCY in blue glitter, and Percy stood on the starting block for the fifty-meter freestyle with his heart going like a drum and thought: Don't mess this up.

He didn't mess it up.

The horn went, and he went into the water, and the water took him the way it always did, like a hand catching a ball. The noise of the place went away. There was just the long blue lane and the black line on the bottom and the wall. He didn't think about it. He didn't do anything special. He just swam the way he always swam, the way that felt like breathing.

When he touched the wall and came up gasping, the other kids were still at the halfway mark.

All of them.

It took him a second to understand the silence. Then he looked up at the bleachers and saw his mom. She had lowered her glitter sign and was just looking at him, and her face was white. Next to her, a man in a windbreaker with a stopwatch on a string around his neck had stood up slowly. He was staring at the stopwatch, and then at Percy, and then at the stopwatch again.

The other kids finished. Somebody's dad started clapping, uncertainly, and then everyone was clapping, and Hector was whooping and pounding Percy on the back so hard he nearly fell back in. And the man with the stopwatch was coming down the bleachers toward them with a look on his face Percy didn't like at all — eager and hungry and a little greedy, like a guy who'd just spotted a twenty on the sidewalk and was checking whether anyone else had seen it.

"Who coaches this kid?" the man was saying. "Does he swim club? Has he been timed before? What's his name?"

Percy's mom got there first. She had his towel around his shoulders and her hand flat on his back, steering him toward the locker room before the man reached the bottom step.

"He's ten," she said, in a voice like a door closing. "He has a dentist appointment."

He did not have a dentist appointment.

* * *​

"You can't do that again," his mom said on the subway. She said it quietly, but in a way he'd never heard her say anything. "Percy. Look at me. You can't ever do that again."

"Do what? Win?"

"Win like that." She pressed her lips together. "People notice things like that, baby. And when people notice, sometimes — other things notice too."

"What other things?"

She only shook her head and held his hand, and didn't let go of it the whole way home.

That night he asked Izanami.

Your mother is right, she said. She sounded, if anything, approving. Whoever sees the whole of you will want it. Men with stopwatches. Others, with worse things than stopwatches. Never show anyone the whole of what you are, Ushio. Show them a little. Show them what they expect. Keep the rest behind the blind.

Like you, Percy said.

A pause. Yes, she said. Like me.

So he learned to swim slow.

It turned out to be harder than swimming fast. Fast, he didn't have to think about. Slow, he had to hold back on every single stroke, like walking a big dog on a short leash. The water kept trying to carry him, and he kept having to tell it no, not yet, easy. It was the hardest training he'd ever done. Hector couldn't understand why his star swimmer had suddenly gotten worse, and spent a week convinced Percy was coming down with something.

But Percy kept at it, because it was control, and he was starting to understand that control was the whole thing. The water would do almost anything for him now, if he asked. The trick was to ask for exactly as much as he wanted, and not one drop more.

It helped with everything else, too. The push-ups and the stairs. The bathwater practice, where he could now lift a ball of water out of the tub and hold it in the air for whole minutes at a time, and turn it, and stretch it into a ring, and snap it back. And the hollow. Somewhere that winter, he'd stopped needing to ask her before he used it. Reaching for it had become like reaching for a railing in the dark: he just did it, without thinking, and it was there. After a hard workout he'd take a sip, just enough to rinse the ache out of his muscles. After an hour in the tub, just enough to stop the headache before it started. Never more. He kept track the way his mom kept track of the coffee can.

* * *​

In May, his mom got a Saturday off, and they went to Sheepshead Bay.

It was the first warm day of the year. The bay was flat and bright and busy with boats, and the pier was packed: old men in lawn chairs, a family having a birthday party with a sheet cake, teenagers who weren't really fishing, a dad with two little boys in matching yellow rain jackets even though it wasn't raining. Percy's mom took her bench and her library book and the backpack with the camping stove in it. Percy went to the railing, dropped his line, and closed his eyes.

He could feel the whole bay.

That was new. All winter, without Saturdays, he'd been practicing in the bathtub and the pool at the Y and the puddles on the sidewalk, and he hadn't been out in real water since December. He hadn't known anything had changed. But it had. Last fall, feeling the water had been like holding a flashlight in a dark room. Now it was like someone had turned on the lights in a stadium. He could feel the long curve of the bay out to the inlet, the channel running through it like a vein, the boats sitting on top of it like coins on a tablecloth. He could feel the schools — dozens of them — moving in and out with the tide. The porgies grubbing along the bottom by the bulkhead. A big, slow shape that might have been a striped bass, lying in the deep cut by the channel marker, waiting.

He could feel the tide itself, beginning to turn.

He didn't just nudge his bait this time. He reached out — fifty yards, more — and found a school of porgies, and gave the water a long, slow push behind them, like a hand on someone's back, and herded them down the bay toward the pier. Right under his line.

He caught fourteen fish in forty minutes. For the last ten of them, the man who'd fished that spot for twenty years put down his rod and came over and stood next to Percy with his arms crossed, watching, not saying a word.

"Kid," the man said finally. "I don't know what you're doing. But I want you to know that I hate it."

Percy grinned at him. The man almost grinned back.

* * *​

That was when the little boy fell in.

Percy didn't see it happen. Nobody did, which was the whole problem. One second the dad with the two boys in yellow rain jackets was turned around, digging in a cooler. The next there was only one yellow jacket at the railing, and a splash, and the other boy — the older one, maybe six — was screaming.

The dad looked up. Percy watched understanding hit his face like a slap.

Then the dad was at the railing yelling a name — Danny, Danny — and kicking off his shoes, and people were running, and somebody was yelling call 911, and somebody else was yelling where is he, where'd he go? Because the water under the pier was dark and green and choppy with the turning tide, and there was nothing on the surface. No yellow jacket. Nothing at all.

And Percy could feel him.

Down there in the murk. Small, so small, sinking and tumbling under the pier, where the tide pulled hardest around the pilings. Nobody could have seen anything in that water, but Percy didn't need to see. He felt the boy the way he felt the fish: a shape in the water, a weight, moving the wrong way, getting dragged in under the pier where it was darkest. And he felt something else.

A flicker.

It was like the fish. It was exactly like the fish — the match-flame thing he'd felt in every one he'd ever held — except that it was so much bigger. Brighter. Warm in a way no fish had ever been warm. And it was going out.

Percy didn't decide to go in. He was just in.

He hit the water and it closed over him, green and cold and full of grit, and he didn't swim — there wasn't time to swim. He asked. He reached for the water all around him, the way he'd reached for the porgies, and he said there, and the bay picked him up like a hand and threw him under the pier.

It was dark. Pilings slid past on either side, furred with weed and barnacles, close enough to touch. He couldn't see his own hands. He didn't care. He followed the flicker.

It was close now. Right ahead. Getting smaller, the way the snappers had gotten smaller in his palms on the dock, the way the blackfish had gone out slow on the rocks. And as he reached for it, something happened inside him that had never happened before.

The hollow moved.

He felt it the way you feel the deck of a boat tilt under you. The whole cool, dark pool beneath his ribs leaned — slow and smooth and gentle — toward the flicker in the water. Like a plant leaning toward a window. Like water running downhill. It didn't hurt. It didn't feel bad at all. It felt natural, and that was the most horrible thing about it: a soft, patient pull, as if some part of him had simply noticed that something very heavy was about to fall, and had turned, quietly, to catch it.

That one, the hollow seemed to say, without any words at all. Oh. That one would fill me.

Percy's hand closed on a fistful of yellow rain jacket.

No, he thought. And then louder, with everything he had, at the hollow and the water and the dark: NO.

He pulled the boy against his chest. He kicked off the nearest piling. And he reached for the water again — not asking this time, telling — and the whole bay under the pier heaved upward at once and carried them both up into the light like a fist punching through the surface.

He came up gasping beside the ladder. Hands grabbed him. Hands grabbed the boy. Someone hauled them up and onto the boards, and the dad was there, and the little boy was lying on the pier in his yellow jacket with his lips gone blue, and he wasn't breathing.

A big woman in a nurse's scrub top under her windbreaker shoved through the crowd — move, move, I'm a nurse — and knelt and tipped the boy's head back and started pushing on his chest. Percy knelt on the other side. He didn't know what else to do. He took the boy's hand. It was so small, and so cold.

And he could feel it. The flicker. Still there. Very, very small now — smaller than a snapper's. Guttering, the way a candle gutters when someone opens a door.

The hollow leaned toward it again. Softer this time. Patient.

Don't, Percy thought. He wasn't talking to the hollow. He didn't know who he was talking to. His eyes were burning, and he held on to the little hand and thought it as hard as he had ever thought anything. Don't take him. Please. Please don't take him.

The answer came, low and calm, from very far down.

He is not mine to take, Ushio. There was something in her voice he couldn't name. Nor yours to give. If he goes, he goes down another road, to another lord. I only keep the road.

The nurse pushed. Counted. Breathed into the boy's mouth. Pushed.

The flicker shrank, and shrank — and stopped shrinking.

Percy felt it hold. Felt it waver at the very bottom, at the very edge of out, like a match flame bending sideways in the wind. And then, slowly — slowly, and then all at once — it grew. Swelled. Brightened, like someone blowing on a coal.

The boy coughed. Water came out of him, a lot of it, and he coughed again and started to cry, a thin, furious, wonderful wail. The dad made a sound Percy would remember for the rest of his life, and the whole pier let out its breath at once.

Percy let go of the little hand and sat back on his heels on the wet boards and found he was shaking so hard his teeth chattered.

He had felt it come back.

He had felt a life go almost all the way out and then come back, and he had been holding its hand the whole time. Nobody else on the pier had felt it. Not the nurse, not the dad. Only Percy, kneeling there with his clothes full of bay water and something under his ribs that had leaned, and leaned, and been told no.

* * *​

There was a lot of noise after that. An ambulance came, and the EMTs took Danny and his dad and his big brother, still sobbing in the other yellow jacket. The nurse, whose name was Mrs. Okafor, told Percy he was the bravest kid she'd ever met, and also that if he ever did anything that stupid again she would personally track him down. The man who'd fished that spot for twenty years gave Percy his own dry sweatshirt, which smelled like bait and came down to Percy's knees. He didn't say a word. He just squeezed Percy's shoulder once, hard.

Percy was cold and shaking and so tired his bones hurt, and for the first time since he'd found it, he didn't reach for the hollow. He didn't want to touch it. Not yet.

His mom didn't say anything for a long time. She just sat on the bench with him wrapped in the sweatshirt and her arms wrapped around both of them, and rocked a little, the way she used to when he was small.

Finally, into his wet hair, she said, "How did you find him?"

Percy thought about lying. He didn't want to.

"I could feel him," he said. "In the water. Like the fish."

He felt her go still.

He waited for her to ask more. Part of him wanted her to. Part of him wanted to tell her everything: the hollow and the hill and the lady behind the blind, and the jerky, all of it.

But she only held him tighter. "Okay," she said, very softly. "Okay, baby." She didn't ask anything else, and Percy understood that she was scared too, and that there were things she wasn't telling him either. Maybe that was what being a family was: everybody carrying something heavy and trying not to spill it on each other.

* * *​

They walked to the train along Emmons Avenue, slowly, the bucket of porgies bumping against his mom's leg, the sun going orange over the bay.

At the bus shelter on the corner, a woman was sitting alone.

Percy wouldn't have noticed her, except that the bead on his wrist went cold.

Not frost-cold. Not jerky-cold. It went cold the way your skin goes cold when you're walking down a dark street and realize, without turning around, that someone has been walking behind you for a while. He looked up. The woman wore a long tan raincoat buttoned to the throat, though it was seventy degrees out, and big dark sunglasses, though the sun was going down. She had her face tilted up a little, toward the bay, like someone enjoying the breeze.

She was sniffing.

Slow, deep breaths through her nose. Tasting the air. And as Percy and his mom came level with the shelter, her head turned toward them — turned smoothly, and kept turning, a little farther than a neck should comfortably turn.

Walk, Ushio, said Izanami. Her voice was low and flat and very close. Do not look at her. Walk.

He looked at his sneakers. He walked. Beside him, his mom didn't seem to notice anything — except that her hand found his and held it hard, and her pace picked up, just slightly, just enough.

They didn't look back. The train was waiting at the platform with its doors open, and they got on, and the doors closed, and the train pulled out, and the platform slid away behind them, empty.

Percy sat down. His heart was going like he'd just swum the fifty free again.

She will not follow, said Izanami. She smelled the bay on you, and bait, and under them the man your mother married. She will think she was mistaken.

Gabe? Percy thought. Gabe's smell — hides me?

A pause. Your mother is cleverer than she lets you see.

Percy stared at the dark tunnel walls rushing past the window. He thought about the air freshener. The windows open in November. The way his mom never once asked Gabe to shower, and never once looked surprised by the smell.

For the first time, he wondered whether his mother had married Gabe Ugliano because of how he smelled.

It was a crazy thought. He couldn't stop thinking it.

That night they had porgy for dinner at the kitchen table, all three of them. Percy never found out what his mom said to Gabe. But Gabe ate two pieces, and didn't say a word.

* * *​

That night Percy went down the hill.

He went fast, faster than he had ever gone, almost running, the smooth dark ground cool under his bare feet. When he reached the pool at the bottom, he didn't sit. He stood at its edge with his fists clenched.

The pool was bigger now. It had been getting bigger for a while, and he'd stopped noticing. It was a pond, really — black and still, wide enough that its far edge was lost in shadow — and the bottom was a whole sky of drowned lights: hundreds of tiny ones, the snappers and the porgies, and a few bigger, steadier glows, and the blackfish's lantern, low and patient near the middle. The reed blind hung on the far side, where it always hung. The shape behind it was very still.

"It leaned," Percy said. His voice cracked. "The hollow. In the water. It leaned at him. Like it wanted him."

"Yes," said Izanami.

"Why?"

"Because it is hungry." She said it simply, the way she said everything true. "And so are you. That is part of what you are, Ushio. Not all of it — but part. It is not wickedness. Fire is hungry. The tide is hungry. The dark is hungry. What matters is never the hunger. What matters is what you feed it."

Percy stared at the blind. "You wanted it to take him."

"Did I say so?"

"You didn't say anything. You just —" He didn't know how to finish.

"I said he was not mine." The shape behind the blind shifted with a dry sound, reeds against reeds. "That was true. He was not. And he was not yours. Had you let the water keep him, his death would have gone down another road to another lord, and left you nothing but the memory of it. And had you done the other thing — the thing the hollow was leaning toward —" A pause. "Then every god of every pantheon that keeps watch over this world would have turned, in time, to look at the boy who had done it. And I would have had to watch them come for you."

Percy's skin went cold. "I wouldn't have."

"No," Izanami agreed. "You did not." And then, in a voice he had never heard from her before — low and fierce and full, like a tide coming in over rocks: "You held it. You held the whole of your hunger in your two hands, in the dark and the cold, with a child's death floating in front of you like a lantern, and you said no — and it obeyed you. Do you know how few beings in all the worlds can do that? Do you know how many gods have never learned?"

He didn't know what to say. His eyes were stinging again.

"I have never been prouder of you," said Izanami. "Not on the dock with your first fish. Not in the kitchen with your glass of water. Never, until today."

Percy sat down on the edge of the pond. He hadn't decided to. His legs just stopped holding him up.

"I thought you'd be mad," he said, very small.

"I am a great many things," she said. "Some of them would frighten you. But I will never be angry with you for choosing, Ushio. Only for failing to." A pause. "And you saw something today. Did you not?"

He thought about the flicker. About holding the little cold hand on the pier, and feeling it gutter, and hold, and grow.

"It came back," he said. "It almost went out. And then it came back."

"Yes."

"I felt it come back."

"Yes," said Izanami, and her voice had changed again — gone quiet and thoughtful and very old. "Remember how it felt. Remember it exactly. One day, a long time from now, it will matter more than you can imagine."

Percy did remember. He would remember the exact weight of that small cold hand for the rest of his life — and for a long, long time after that.

 

[Abysseus]

Chapter Five — The Weight of Things​

For his eleventh birthday, his mom took him out on a boat.

Not a big one. Not a fancy one. A party boat — the kind that went out of Montauk Harbor every morning at seven with forty strangers aboard, a captain with a voice like a gravel truck, and two deckhands who could fillet a fluke faster than Percy could tie his shoes. It cost forty-five dollars a person. His mom had been putting it in the coffee can since March. Gabe had said "Boats," in the voice he used for things he thought were stupid, and stayed in the city with the air conditioner and the Mets game, which was the second-best birthday present Percy got that year.

The best was the ocean.

He'd been on the water before, sort of. The Staten Island Ferry, on a school trip. A rowboat in Central Park once, which had ended badly for the rowboat. But he had never been out — past the harbor mouth, past the jetties, past the lighthouse on its bluff at the very tip of the island, out where the land shrank behind them to a thin gray line and the water went from green to blue to a deep, clean, bottomless color he didn't have a name for.

He stood at the bow the whole way out with his hands on the rail and the spray in his face, and felt like his chest was going to crack open.

He could feel everything.

Not just fish. The bay had been fish and current and tide. This was more. The water under the boat went down and down, sixty feet, a hundred, to a bottom of sand and stone and old wrecks, and he could feel all of it, the way you know the shape of a room you've lived in your whole life with your eyes closed. He felt great slow rivers of cold water sliding under the warm. He felt the bottom rise and fall. He felt the hull pressing down into the sea like a thumb in dough, and the sea pressing back. And he felt the life in it — so much life, at every depth, flickering in the dark like a city seen from a plane at night. Schools of bait so big they felt like weather. Fluke lying flat on the sand, eyes up, patient. Something long and quick that might have been a bluefish the size of his leg. Jellyfish, which barely flickered at all, like pilot lights.

"You okay?" his mom said, coming up beside him with two hot chocolates.

"Mom," he said, and didn't know how to finish. "Mom. It's so big."

She looked at him for a long moment. Then she handed him a hot chocolate and put her arm around his shoulders, and they stood together at the bow and watched the sea.

* * *​

He felt the whale before anyone saw it.

They'd been drifting for an hour over a stretch of sand the captain liked. Percy had caught three fluke and lost one and was watching his line, when something moved at the far edge of his sense — a quarter mile off, maybe, and deep. Something so big that at first he took it for a current, or a shift in the bottom, or the shadow of a cloud. Then it moved again, and he felt its life, and he forgot to breathe.

It wasn't a flicker. It wasn't a coal. It was like standing too close to a bonfire. It was so big and so warm and so slow that it felt less like a creature than like a place — a whole country of life moving through the water, singing to itself in a voice too low to hear.

"There," Percy said, and pointed. A few seconds later the sea off the starboard side bulged and broke, and a dark, glistening back rose out of it, impossibly long, and blew a column of mist into the air with a sound like the whole ocean sighing.

The boat went crazy. Forty strangers ran to the rail at once. The captain got on the loudspeaker and said fin whale, folks, fin whale off the starboard side, in a voice that sounded, for the first time all morning, like a little kid's. Cameras clicked. The whale rolled, showing a long ridge of back and a small curved fin, and went under, and came up again farther off.

Percy stood at the rail and couldn't move.

Because the hollow was leaning.

It leaned the way it had under the pier at Sheepshead Bay: the same slow, gentle, terrible tilt, like a deck shifting underfoot. But this was nothing like the pier. Under the pier, it had been a lean. This was a pull. The whole dark pool beneath his ribs swung toward that bonfire in the water like a compass needle swinging north, and for one awful second he could feel how much there was out there — how much weight — and how the hollow would take all of it and still have room, and how deep and full and strong he would be afterward —

He gripped the rail so hard his knuckles hurt.

No.

The pull didn't stop. But it didn't get worse, either. It just hung there, patient, as if it had all the time in the world. And the whale blew once more, far off, and sank, and was gone, and the bonfire faded down into the deep and away, and the hollow settled back, slowly, the way water settles in a glass.

Percy let go of the rail. His hands were shaking.

"Wasn't that amazing?" His mom came back from the crowd at the starboard rail, flushed and laughing. "Did you see it? Percy, did you see —" She stopped. "Baby? What's wrong?"

"Nothing," he said. "It was just — really big."

* * *​

An hour later he caught the dogfish.

He knew it was something different the second it hit. It didn't fight like a fluke, which felt like reeling up a heavy, angry bathmat. It fought smart — running sideways, rolling, wrapping itself in the line — and when he finally cranked it up over the rail, the deckhand nearest him groaned out loud.

"Aw, dogfish," the deckhand said. He was a skinny guy with a sunburned neck and a cigarette tucked behind each ear. "Hold it still, kid, I'll get it off for you. Watch the spines."

It was a shark. A small one, about as long as Percy's arm, but a shark: sleek and slate-gray and scattered with small white spots, with a pale belly, a flat, sly head, and two sharp spines standing up in front of the fins on its back like thorns on a rose. It thrashed on the deck. Its big, flat, greenish eyes looked at nothing at all.

"I want to keep it," Percy said.

The deckhand laughed. "It's a dogfish. It's trash. They're all over the bottom out here, stealing everybody's bait. We just toss 'em."

"I want to keep it," Percy said again, and something in his voice made the deckhand look at him properly for the first time.

"Kid —"

"Let him keep it, Ray." It was the captain, leaning out of the wheelhouse with a coffee mug. "You know what the English do with those? Fish and chips. They call it rock salmon. Fancy." He pointed the mug at Percy. "Bleed it quick and get it on ice, and cook it tonight. They go off fast."

So Ray the deckhand showed him how to hold it, behind the head, away from the spines, and Percy knelt on the wet deck and pinned the shark against the boards, and felt for its life.

He had been wrong about the blackfish. He'd thought the blackfish was old.

The dogfish's life wasn't a match flame, or a coal. It was more like a stone that has sat in the sun all day and is still warm at midnight: dense and quiet and slow and heavy all the way through. It had been alive for a very long time. He didn't know how he knew, but he knew it the way you know the weight of a rock when you pick it up. Longer than the blackfish. Longer than his mom. Longer, maybe, than the captain up in the wheelhouse with his gray beard and his coffee mug. This shark had been nosing along the black sand at the bottom of the Atlantic since before Percy's mother was born, patient and unhurried, and it had kept on swimming all those years until this morning, when it ate a strip of squid on a hook.

Does it count? he thought. If it's trash?

There is no such thing as trash, said Izanami, from very far down. There is only what is wasted and what is not. Give it to me, or put it back. But do not let anyone tell you it is nothing. Nothing that has lived so long is nothing.

He held the shark, and meant it, and gave it to her.

It didn't pour. It flooded. The hollow didn't fill so much as rise, the way the tide rises in a harbor — a long, smooth, unstoppable swell of cold that went up and up and up under his ribs, until he had to sit back on his heels and put both hands flat on the deck to stay upright. It was more than the blackfish. It was more than every porgy he had ever caught at Sheepshead Bay, all of them together. It went on so long that Ray leaned over and said, "Kid? You seasick?" and Percy shook his head without being able to answer.

When it stopped, he sat on the deck with a dead shark in front of him and felt the hollow inside him, deep and still and dark, and realized he couldn't feel the bottom anymore.

He'd never seen the bottom, but he had always been able to feel it: smooth, cold stone. He'd always known exactly how deep the hollow was, the way you know with your feet, wading out from a beach. Now he reached down for it, the way you feel for the sand with your toes, and there was nothing there. Just water. Cool, dark, deep water, going down past where he could reach.

"Oh," he said, out loud.

Yes, said Izanami. She sounded very pleased.

That night they had dogfish for dinner on the back steps of the cabin. His mom dipped it in beer batter from a box and fried it in the dented skillet, and the captain had been right. It was good: sweet and firm and white. They ate it with ketchup and too much salt, followed by a birthday cake with blue frosting, and Percy blew out eleven candles without wishing for anything, because he couldn't think of anything to wish for that he didn't already have.

Except, maybe, for Gabe to get lost at sea.

He thought it — and then unthought it, very fast, the way you snatch your hand back from a stove. He had a feeling, lately, that wishes might work differently for him than for other people. He had a feeling that somebody was always listening.

* * *​

He went down the hill that night and found that the bottom had moved.

The hill was the same — long and smooth and cool underfoot. But where it leveled out, the pond was gone. In its place was water as far as he could see: a black lake, perfectly still, stretching away into the dark on every side. He couldn't see across it. The drowned lights on its bottom went out and out and away, like the lights of a city at night, and near the shore lay something new: a long, dim, steady glow, resting on the bottom like a sunken ship.

The blind was still there. It hung over the water now, a little way out from the shore, as though it were floating, the ends of its rotten gray reeds trailing in the lake. The shape behind it was very still.

And there were other things he could see now that he had never seen before.

Walls. Rough stone, rising on either side into the dark, like the walls of an enormous cave — or of a road cut down through a mountain. And far off to his left, high up, so faint he wasn't sure he was really seeing them: figures. Gray and dim, walking. A long, slow line of them, coming down the slope one at a time, the way people walk at the very end of a very long day. None of them looked at him. None of them looked at anything.

"Who are they?" he whispered.

"The dead," said Izanami. "Some of the thousand. You are seeing the road, Ushio. The hollow has grown deep enough that you can see farther from its shore." A pause. "Do not call to them. They will not answer, and it will only make them sad."

Percy watched them for a long time. A woman in a long dress. An old man in a hat. A child. He looked away.

"I want to ask you something," he said finally.

"Ask."

He sat down at the edge of the black lake. He'd been thinking about it all day — since the whale; since the pier, really; since before that, since the very first time the hollow leaned.

"The dogfish was heavier than the blackfish," he said. "And the blackfish was heavier than the porgies, and the porgies were heavier than the snappers. Because they were older, or bigger, or —" He didn't know the word. "More."

"Yes."

"And the whale was heavier than all of them."

"Far heavier," she agreed. "In my islands, when men killed a whale, they built it a grave and prayed for it, as they prayed for their own dead. They were not fools. They knew what they had taken."

Percy took a breath. "What's heavier than a whale?"

There was a long silence. He thought she wasn't going to answer, and he was almost relieved.

Then she said, "A man."

He'd known. He'd known since the pier at Sheepshead Bay, since the little cold hand in his and the flicker that had been so much warmer and brighter than any fish. But it was different, hearing her say it.

"People," he said.

"Yes."

"Heavier than a whale?"

"Heavier than every whale in the sea," said Izanami, "and every fish in it, and every bird above it. A human life is the heaviest thing that dies easily. There are heavier things still — but they do not die easily, and you need not think about them yet."

Percy looked out across the black lake at the drowned lights, and at the dim gray figures coming down the far slope one at a time.

"I'm not going to do that," he said. "Ever. I'm never going to give you a person."

He didn't know what he expected. Anger. Disappointment. The sharp no that had rattled the blind when he was seven. What he got was silence, and then her voice, low and even and not unkind.

"Not for many years," she said. "Perhaps never, if you choose."

"I choose."

"Then you have chosen." The shape behind the blind didn't move. "A choice is a kind of stone, Ushio. It holds for as long as it holds. I will not try to move yours. I have lain behind a stone for three thousand years. I know better than anyone how much a stone can bear."

That wasn't the answer he'd wanted. He'd wanted good, or of course, or I would never ask you to. He realized, sitting there, that she was never going to say any of those things — because they weren't true, and she didn't lie.

"But hear me," she went on, and her voice grew a little colder and a little more careful. "You will meet things, in time, that wear the shapes of people and are not people. They will look like women and men. Some will look like teachers, or neighbors, or women waiting at bus stops. You will know them by their burning. They do not flicker, as the living do. They smolder, like coals that cannot go out. They have died a thousand times and come back a thousand times, and they will come for you because of what you are." A pause. "Those, my son, you may give me with a clear heart."

Percy thought of the woman in the raincoat on Emmons Avenue. The way her head had turned. The way the bead had gone cold.

"How will I know for sure?" he said.

"You will know," said Izanami. "You will feel it in your hands."

* * *​

Back in the city, Gabe was losing.

Percy could tell by the poker nights. When Gabe won, Thursdays were loud and stupid and full of terrible jokes, and sometimes Gabe even flipped Percy a five for bringing the beers. When Gabe lost, the nights went quiet, and Gabe drank more, and the next morning he'd sit at the kitchen table in his undershirt with a look on his face like a dog that wanted to bite something and hadn't decided what yet.

That fall, Gabe lost a lot.

He "borrowed" Percy's birthday money — the forty dollars his mom had folded into his card, which Percy had been saving for a real fishing rod — and never mentioned it again. He started coming home from the electronics store already smelling of beer. He started calling Percy's mom Sal, in a voice Percy hated, a voice like a hand on the back of someone's neck.

And one night in October, through the wall, Percy heard something that wasn't yelling.

It was quieter than yelling. A scuffle, like a chair being shoved. His mom's voice saying Gabe, you're hurting me — not loud, not even scared. Flat and tired, the way you'd tell someone they were standing on your foot. Then nothing.

In the morning she wore a long-sleeved shirt, even though it was warm out. But when she reached up for the coffee, the sleeve slid down, and Percy saw her wrist. Four dark marks in a row, like the shadows of fingers.

She saw him see it. She tugged the sleeve down, smiled at him, said, "Bumped it on the cabinet, baby," and handed him his cereal.

His mom never lied to him. Izanami had said so.

He took his cereal back to his room and sat on his bed with the bowl going soggy in his lap and the bead in his fist, and he thought, as clearly and carefully as he had ever thought anything:

You said you wouldn't hurt him unless he hurt me.

I did. She'd been waiting. He could tell.

What if he hurts Mom?

The silence that came back was long, and strange, and cold in a way he had never felt from her before. Not angry-cold. Something else. Something like a great distance opening up.

Your mother, said Izanami at last, has asked nothing of me.

Percy stared at the wall. On the other side of it, he could hear the TV, and Gabe laughing at something.

He understood, slowly, what she meant. She wasn't saying no. She was saying that his mom wasn't hers. That his mom's wrist, his mom's long sleeves — those weren't anything she had promised to do anything about. She had made his mom no promises. She'd made them to him.

It was the most frightening thing he had learned about her yet. Scarier than the jerky. Scarier than the hollow leaning. She loved him — he knew she did, he could feel it in his chest every day like a second heartbeat — and she would do terrible things for him. But only for him.

Then I'm asking, Percy thought. I'm asking. For her.

Another long pause.

Then I will watch him, said Izanami. Closely.

That wasn't the same as I'll stop him. Percy noticed. He thought she meant him to.

He sat there until his cereal was mush. Then he went out to the kitchen and washed his bowl and stood next to his mom at the sink without saying anything. She put her arm around him without saying anything either, and they stood there together, listening to Gabe laugh at the TV in the other room.

* * *​

Far below, at the bottom of her road, Izanami watched the man.

She watched him laugh at the television. She watched him crush a can in his fist and toss it at the trash and miss. She watched him get up and stretch and scratch his belly, and flex his right hand — the hand with the thick gold ring, the hand that had closed around the woman's wrist — and she found, without quite deciding to, that she was watching that hand most closely of all.

It was a large hand. Heavy. A hand that had never needed to be careful of anything.

She had promised her son that she would do nothing unless the man hurt him. She kept her promises. She had kept every promise she had ever made, for three thousand years, including the terrible ones.

So she did nothing.

She only watched the hand, and counted, and waited.

 

[Abysseus]

Chapter Six — The Hand​

In January, Percy checked a book out of the library on purpose for the first time in his life.

It was a picture book, mostly — a big, flat, glossy thing from the oversize shelf called Japan: Land of the Rising Sun, the kind of book meant for little kids doing reports, which was exactly why he picked it. The words were big. There weren't too many of them. And it had photographs: mountains with snow on their heads like old men; a huge red gate standing out in the sea; crowded streets full of signs he couldn't read even a little, which was weirdly a relief, because nobody could expect him to.

He carried it home under his coat and read it in bed with a flashlight, one finger under each line, the way the reading specialist had taught him.

He was looking for her.

He didn't find her, exactly. There was a page about gods — Shinto, the book called it, which it said meant the way of the gods — with an old painting of a man and a woman standing on a cloud, stirring the sea with a long spear. Percy stared at that one for a long time. But the caption only said The creation of the islands, and gave no names, and the next page was about sumo wrestling.

The page that stopped him was near the end.

It was a photograph of a river at night, and the river was full of lights. Hundreds of them: little paper lanterns glowing orange and white on the black water, drifting in a long, slow line, all going the same way. People stood along the banks with their hands pressed together. The caption said that during the summer festival of Obon, families set lanterns on the water to guide the spirits of their ancestors home.

Percy turned off the flashlight and lay in the dark and thought about drowned lights at the bottom of a black lake.

Is that for you? he asked her.

It is for them, Izanami said. She sounded far away and very close at once. The dead come home in summer, to visit and to eat with their families, and they are sent back down the river with lights, so that they will not lose the way. It is a kindness. Mortals are capable of great kindness to the dead. It is the living they find difficult.

He thought about that. Then he asked the other thing, the thing he'd really been wondering.

What do kids call their moms? In your islands?

A pause. Okaa-san, most of them. The little ones say kaa-chan.

What about you? What do your kids call you?

The silence went on so long he thought she had gone. When she spoke again, her voice was quiet and flat and very even, the way a lake is even when there is something very large underneath it.

My children do not call me anything.

Percy didn't know what to say. He lay there holding the bead.

Long ago, she said after a while, in the great houses, a son might call his mother haha-ue, which means honored mother. It is an old word. No one uses it now.

Haha-ue, Percy repeated, in his head. It felt strange — formal and soft at the same time, like a bow.

He didn't say it to her. It felt too big, like trying on a coat that belonged to someone else. And it felt, a little, like taking something away from his mom, asleep in the next room, who was the only person he had ever called anything.

You need not call me anything, Ushio, Izanami said, as if she had heard all of that. She probably had. I know what I am to you. That is enough.

He returned the book two weeks late. He paid the fine himself, in quarters.

* * *​

The night Gabe lost the rent money was a Thursday in February.

Percy knew it was bad before he knew what it was. The poker game broke up early, and nobody was laughing. Eddie said Gabe, man, I'm sorry at the door, in a low voice, and Gabe said something back that Percy couldn't hear, and the door closed, and for a long time there was no sound from the living room at all except the TV.

Then his mom came home from the late shift.

He heard her keys. He heard her say hi in her tired voice, and the closet door, and the kitchen drawer — the one where she kept the envelope. Then a long silence. Then: "Gabe. Where is it."

It wasn't a question.

Percy got out of bed.

He didn't decide to. It was like the pier: he was just up, standing in the dark of his room in his socks with his hand on the doorknob, listening. Gabe was talking now, low and fast and mean — I was gonna win it back, I had a straight, Sal, you don't know what you're talking about — and his mom's voice, not loud, saying that was the rent, Gabe, that was the rent — and Gabe's voice going up. And then a sound Percy knew, because he'd heard it through the wall in October. A chair scraping. A scuffle. His mom, sharp: Let go.

Percy opened the door.

They were in the kitchen. Gabe had his mom by the arm, up near the shoulder, his right hand clamped around it, and he was leaning into her face. His mom was leaning away with her chin up and her eyes flat and furious. Neither of them saw Percy until he was standing in the kitchen doorway.

"Let go of her," Percy said.

His voice came out weirdly calm. He was eleven, and small for eleven, even with the push-ups. Gabe was twice his size and three times his weight. None of that seemed important.

Gabe turned his head and looked at him. For a second his face was only surprised. Then something else came into it — something ugly and glad, like a man who's been looking for a door to kick and has finally found one.

"Get back in your room, kid."

"Let go of my mom."

"Percy," his mom said. "Baby, go back to bed. It's okay."

It wasn't okay. Percy could see Gabe's fingers digging into her arm. He took one step into the kitchen, and another, and then he was between them — he didn't know how he'd gotten there — with his back to his mom and his face level with Gabe's undershirt, close enough to smell the beer and the smoke and the thick, moldy stink underneath. He put his hand flat on Gabe's chest and pushed.

He was stronger than he looked. The push-ups. The stairs. Gabe actually rocked back half a step, and let go of his mom's arm, and stared down at Percy in total astonishment.

Then he hit him.

It wasn't even a punch. It was a backhand, the lazy kind, the kind you'd use on a fly. But Gabe's hand was big and heavy and wore a thick gold ring, and it caught Percy across the mouth and knocked him sideways into the doorframe. The back of his head hit the wood. Something in his lip split open, and his mouth was suddenly full of the taste of pennies.

His mom screamed Gabe's name.

Percy slid down the doorframe and sat on the floor. Everything was ringing. He touched his mouth, and his fingers came away red.

Gabe was standing over him, breathing hard, looking at his own hand. For a second he looked almost scared of himself. Then the scared look went away, and the mean one came back.

"Kid had it coming," he said. "Put his hands on me. You saw."

And the bead on Percy's wrist went so cold that it stopped being cold at all.

* * *​

It didn't burn, the way it had the night of the fish. It went past burning, past anything, into a kind of nothing — a numbness, as if his wrist had been plunged into black water at the bottom of the sea.

And the kitchen changed.

The light went first. The bulb over the stove didn't flicker; it dimmed, slow and steady, like someone turning down a dial, until the kitchen was the color of dusk. The air went cold — not winter-cold; cellar-cold, grave-cold — and the window over the sink fogged and then frosted, white ferns of ice creeping inward from the corners of the glass. The faucet, which had been dripping for a month, stopped dripping. The drop hanging from its lip turned white and hard.

And the smell came. Wet earth. Stone. The inside of a hill.

Gabe shivered. He looked around the kitchen — at the frosted window, at the dim bulb — and rubbed his right hand against his undershirt, slowly, as if it had gone to sleep.

Percy couldn't hear her. That was the worst part. Every other time — the fish, the jerky, the pier — he'd heard her voice. Now there was nothing. No words. Only a presence, enormous and silent and very, very close, like something huge standing right behind him in the dark with its breath held.

He knew that silence. It was the silence of the moment before a wave breaks.

Then it was over. The light came back. The faucet dripped. Gabe swore under his breath, grabbed his jacket off the back of a chair, and went out, slamming the door so hard that a picture fell off the wall in the hall.

His mom was on the floor beside Percy, holding his face in both hands, saying his name.

* * *​

She cleaned his lip at the bathroom sink, crying without making any noise. Then she ran him a bath, as hot as the old pipes would give, and he sat in it with his knees up and his lip throbbing and let the water take the hurt out, the way it always did. By the time he got out, the split had closed to a thin pink line. By morning it was gone.

His mom slept on the floor of his room that night, on the couch cushions, with her hand on his arm.

Percy lay awake and held the bead. It was still cold — not burning anymore, just cold, steady and deep, like a stone at the bottom of a well.

Are you there? he asked.

Nothing.

Please say something.

Nothing at all.

* * *​

Gabe came home at six in the morning and went straight to bed. He got up at noon. Percy, who had been kept home from school with a "fever," was at the kitchen table eating cereal when Gabe came in holding his right hand against his chest.

"Slept on it funny," Gabe muttered, to no one. He was flexing his fingers, opening and closing them. "Can't feel the tips."

Percy looked.

The ends of Gabe's fingers had gone gray. Not pale. Gray — the flat, dull gray of a fish's skin after the life has gone out of it. Only the tips, only the pads above the first knuckle, on all five fingers of his right hand. The rest of the hand was its normal blotchy pink.

Percy had seen that gray every summer of his life, on the dock, in his own palms.

He put his spoon down very carefully.

By dinner, the gray had gone black.

Gabe went to the urgent-care place on Third Avenue, where they told him it looked like frostbite, asked whether he'd been out in the cold without gloves, and gave him a cream. He came back furious. By the next morning the black had crept past the first knuckle on his index finger and his thumb, and there was a smell coming off the hand — not his usual smell, something sweeter and worse, like flowers left in a vase for a month. He wrapped it in a dish towel. He didn't go to work.

On the third day he went to the emergency room at Lenox Hill and was there for nine hours, and he came home gray-faced and silent with his hand in a thick white bandage. Later, through the wall, Percy heard him on the phone with Eddie, his voice high and thin, like a scared kid's.

They don't know. They don't know, you understand? They did the X-rays, they did the blood work, the blood's fine, the circulation's fine. There's nothing wrong with it, Eddie. There's nothing wrong with it, it's just — A long pause. The doctor said it's like the tissue's been dead for weeks. Weeks. She said she's never seen anything like it. She wants to take the fingers off.

Percy sat on his bed with his back against the wall and listened to Gabe Ugliano cry.

He had thought — honestly thought — that it would feel good. Part of him had been waiting for this since the night of the fish. Since the jerky. Since kid and genius and Einstein, four hundred and twelve times and counting. Since the four dark marks on his mom's wrist.

It didn't feel good.

It felt like standing at the top of the long hill in the dark and looking down, and seeing for the first time how far it went.

* * *​

That night he went down the hill, and he didn't walk. He ran.

The black lake was there, flat and endless, its drowned lights glowing on the bottom. The blind hung out over the water where it always hung, its rotten reeds trailing, and the shape behind it was very still. But the dark was different tonight. Colder. Thicker. The walls of the road seemed closer and higher than they had on his birthday, and the gray figures on the far slope had stopped walking. They stood motionless in their long slow line, all of them, with their faces turned toward the blind.

Percy stopped at the edge of the water, panting.

"That's you," he said. "Gabe's hand. That's you."

"Yes," said Izanami.

"Stop it."

"No."

He'd known she was going to say it. It still hit him like cold water.

"He struck you," Izanami said. Her voice wasn't loud. It didn't need to be. It filled the dark the way the sea fills a cave at high tide. "He opened your mouth with his ring. He threw you into a wall. I told you that I would do nothing unless he hurt you. You heard me — and he heard me, in his way. Somewhere in that small dim heart, he has always known something was watching him. He hurt you anyway."

"I know, but —"

"So I am keeping my word."

"It's going to — you're going to kill him."

"Yes," said Izanami. "When it reaches his heart. By the new moon."

She said it the way his mom said the bus comes at seven-fifteen. A schedule. A fact.

Percy felt sick. "You can't just — you can't kill people!"

"I can." There was no anger in it. That was the most frightening thing of all. Only a patient, ancient tiredness, like a teacher explaining something for the hundredth time. "I have done it a thousand times a day for three thousand years. I am very good at it, Ushio. This one is not even difficult. He is half-dead already; he has been killing himself slowly with drink and smoke for twenty years. I am only helping him down the road."

"But he won't even be yours. You said. They go to other lords."

"I do not want him," said Izanami, and for the first time something moved in her voice — something huge and cold and contemptuous, like a glacier shifting. "Let the western lord have him. Let the Rich One set him in a field of gray grass forever with all the other small cruel men. I do not want him. I want him gone from you."

Percy pressed his fists against his eyes.

"Mom needs him," he said. "The smell. You said so. If he's gone, then the things come, the things that hunt —"

"Then I will deal with the things."

"And Mom? What about Mom?" His voice cracked. "If they come for me, they'll hurt her. And she'll know. She'll know it was me — that he hit me and then he died. She'll look at me, and she'll know —"

Silence.

For one second he thought he'd gotten through. Then Izanami said, softly, almost gently: "She will grieve for a little while, and then she will be free of him. That is not a cruelty, Ushio. That is a gift. I am giving her a gift."

And Percy understood that he couldn't argue with her. Not really. Not ever. She wasn't wrong the way people were wrong. She just stood somewhere so old and so far down that right and wrong looked different from there, the way the sky looks different from the bottom of the sea. Every reason he could give her, she had already turned over in her hands and set aside three thousand years ago.

He stood at the edge of the black lake with his face wet and his fists shaking, and he did the only thing left.

"Please," he said.

Nothing.

"Please. I'm asking. You said if I asked —"

"I said I would stop," said Izanami. "Once. For the fish. I have made you no promise to stop this."

He couldn't breathe. On the far slope, the gray figures stood watching, silent and patient, waiting to see what she would do. The cold pressed in from every side.

And there was one word left.

He'd been carrying it around for a month like a stone in his pocket, too heavy and too strange to use. He'd told himself he never would. It felt like taking something away from his mom.

But his mom was in the next room, asleep on couch cushions on the floor, with a bruise on her arm the shape of Gabe's hand. She had married a man who smelled like garbage, on purpose, to hide her son. She had done that for him. And if Gabe died — if Gabe died because of him — Percy would have to look at her every day for the rest of his life and know.

He thought she would understand. He hoped she would.

"Please," Percy said. "Haha-ue."

The whole dark went still.

It was like the moment at the top of a wave, the instant before it falls, when the water just hangs, impossibly, glittering, and the world holds its breath. The black lake stopped being still and became stiller. The drowned lights on its bottom flickered all at once, and steadied. On the far slope, the gray figures bowed their heads.

And the bead on Percy's wrist went warm.

He had never felt it warm before. Not once in eleven years. It was always cool, always, even in August, even clenched in his fist on the hottest day of the year. Now it was warm — not hot, just warm, like a stone that has been sitting in the sun. Like a hand that has been holding yours for a long time.

"Say it again," said Izanami.

Her voice had changed. He had heard it proud and cold and sharp and sad and amused, but never like this. It sounded small. It sounded like someone very far away, at the bottom of something very deep, who had just heard her name called from the top for the first time in longer than she could remember, and didn't dare believe it.

"Haha-ue," Percy said. "Please. Stop."

For a long moment, nothing happened.

Then something went out of the dark. He felt it go: a pressure, a held breath, a huge cold hand that had been slowly closing somewhere in the distance and now, finger by finger, opened.

"Yes," said Izanami. "Yes. For you. Because you asked. Because you called me —" She stopped. When she spoke again, her voice was steady, but only just. "Go up now, Ushio. Go up and sleep. It is done."

* * *​

Long after the boy had gone back up the road, Izanami sat behind her blind in the dark and did not move.

No one had called her mother in three thousand years.

She had borne the eight great islands, and they did not speak. She had borne the gods of wind and tree and river and mountain, and they had gone out into the world and forgotten the dark they came from, as children do. And the three brightest gods of the High Plain — the sun, the moon, the storm — were not hers at all. Her husband had made them out of the filth he washed off himself after he fled her, and they had been taught from their first breath that she was the filth.

Once, long ago, one of them had wept for her.

The storm. The youngest of the three. He had been given the sea to rule, and instead he had sat on the shore and wept for years, until the green mountains withered and the rivers ran dry, because he wanted to go to the land of his mother. His mother. She had heard him, faint and far off, all the way down the road: a child she had never borne, crying for her in the dark. And she had waited for him.

In the end he made himself a dark country of his own, at the roots of the world. He never once came down her road.

And now this boy — this small sea-child she had made from a single drop of herself, in a cold surf at the end of the world — had stood at the edge of her lake and called her haha-ue. And he had spent the word, the very first time, on mercy. Not for himself. For a man who had struck him. For his other mother, who had asked her for nothing.

Izanami did not understand mercy. She had never needed to. The dead do not require it.

But she understood that he had asked, and that she had stopped, and that she would always stop if he asked her in that voice. And that frightened her more than anything had frightened her since the night her husband looked.

Love was a fire. She had always known that. She had died of a fire.

She sat in the dark with the warmth of it spreading through her, slow and terrible, and she let it burn.

* * *​

The black stopped at the first knuckle.

Percy saw it the next morning, when Gabe came into the kitchen without his bandage and stood at the counter staring at his hand. The tips of all five fingers on his right hand were black and shriveled and hard, like old leather, like something in a museum case. But they had stopped there. Below the first knuckle, the skin was pink again — a normal, ugly, living pink — and the smell was gone.

The doctors wanted to amputate anyway. Gabe wouldn't let them. Percy heard him on the phone with Eddie again, saying he didn't want to mess with it, didn't want to make it mad, in a voice that said he didn't know what he meant by that and didn't want to think about it. So the fingertips stayed: dead, black, cold to the touch, never healing and never rotting any further. Gabe started wearing a glove on that hand. He couldn't feel his cards through it anymore. On Thursday nights Percy heard the chips clatter and spill when Gabe tried to stack them, and heard Eddie and the others laugh, and heard Gabe not laugh.

He never touched Percy again. He never touched Percy's mom again either — not like that, not with that hand, not with any hand. He stopped calling Percy kid or genius or Einstein. He stopped calling him anything at all. When Percy came into a room, Gabe found a reason to leave it. And sometimes, when he thought Percy wasn't looking, he stared at the bead on Percy's wrist the way a man stares at a dog he isn't sure is chained.

His mom noticed everything. She always did.

She noticed Gabe's hand, and how the black had come the morning after he hit Percy. She noticed Percy's lip, healed overnight without a mark. And one night in March, when Percy got up for a glass of water, he found her standing at the living room window in the dark, looking east — toward the river, toward the sea beyond the river — with her arms wrapped around herself.

She didn't know he was there. Her lips were moving.

Thank you, she was saying, very softly, to the dark water out past the buildings. Thank you. Thank you for watching over him.

Percy went back to his room without his water.

She thinks it was him, he said to Izanami. My dad. She thinks it was the bracelet. His protection.

Yes.

Are you mad?

There was a pause, and then something he hadn't expected: a sound almost like a laugh, low and dry and not entirely amused.

No, said Izanami. Let her think it. It is a kind thing to believe. And then, cooler: Let her keep her sea.

Percy lay in bed with the bead against his chest. It was cool again — the old, ordinary cool. But every so often, when he thought about the dark and the lake and the word, he could have sworn it went warm.

He thought about Gabe's hand. About how close it had come. About by the new moon, said the way you'd say the bus comes at seven-fifteen. About standing at the edge of the black lake and begging, and how nothing had worked — not reasons, not please, not you promised — nothing but that one old word.

She would stop, if he asked. She would always stop, if he asked.

But only if he asked.

He was eleven years old, and he had just learned that he was the only thing standing between the world and his mother's love.

 

[Abysseus]

Chapter Seven — The Platform​

In April, Percy's school told his mom he wouldn't be welcome back in the fall.

It would be his fifth school in five years, which his mom said was not a record anybody wanted to break. This time it was a seventh grader named Kyle Brandt, who liked holding smaller kids upside down over the toilets in the second-floor bathroom, and who had picked the wrong small kid on the wrong Tuesday. Percy hadn't meant to break his nose. He'd only meant to make him let go. But Percy had been doing push-ups on his knuckles every night for three years, and running six flights of stairs, and swimming until his shoulders burned, and it turned out that a punch from a skinny eleven-year-old who'd done all that was a lot more punch than anyone expected, including Percy.

The principal used the word violent. His mom used the word protecting. They went back and forth like that for twenty minutes in the principal's office while Percy sat on a plastic chair outside, looking at his knuckles and listening, and in the end it didn't matter.

Gabe didn't say anything when they got home. Gabe didn't say anything to Percy at all anymore. He just looked at Percy's knuckles, and then at the bead on Percy's wrist, and then at his own gloved hand, and went into the bedroom and shut the door.

That night his mom sat at the kitchen table with a stack of brochures, a calculator, and the coffee can, which was nearly empty.

"There's a school upstate," she said finally, without looking up. "A boarding school. Yancy Academy. It's for kids who —" She stopped, and chose different words. "Kids who haven't fit in other places. They have scholarships."

"Boarding school," Percy said. "Like — I'd live there?"

"During the year. You'd come home for holidays, and for the summer." She looked up then. Her eyes were red, and she smiled anyway. "It's a fresh start, baby. Nobody there knows anything about you."

Nobody there knows anything about you. It sounded good and terrible at the same time.

He thought about something else, too — something he'd figured out the spring before, on a subway train out of Sheepshead Bay, staring at the tunnel walls. If he went upstate, he'd be away from Gabe. Away from the smell.

He looked at his mom, and he could tell she'd thought about it too.

"Okay," he said.

* * *​

The old man collapsed on the 86th Street platform on a Saturday afternoon in May, while Percy and his mom were waiting for the downtown 6.

Percy noticed him before it happened. He didn't know why. He was just a man — old, white-haired, stooped, in a tan windbreaker and a navy-blue ball cap with gold stitching on it — standing near the yellow edge with a plastic bag of groceries. But Percy's eyes kept sliding back to him. Something about him was wrong, the way a picture hanging slightly crooked is wrong.

Then the man put his hand on his chest, said "Oh" in a small, surprised voice, sat down hard on the platform, and tipped over sideways.

The groceries went everywhere. An orange rolled toward the tracks.

People did what people in New York do. Some of them stepped around him. Some of them stared. One woman said oh my God and kept saying it. Percy's mom was already moving — "Percy, stay with him, I'll get the booth" — running for the token booth at the end of the platform, shouting for someone to call 911.

Percy knelt beside the old man.

He didn't know CPR. He didn't know anything. He just knelt there on the dirty concrete. The old man's eyes were open, pale blue and watery and confused, and his hand was moving on the ground as if it were looking for something, so Percy took it.

And he felt it.

The flicker. Like the fish. Like Danny under the pier. Warm and human and so much bigger than any fish — but not like Danny's. Danny's had been a small flame in a big wind, guttering, fighting. This one wasn't fighting. This one was old and tired and very calm, and it was burning down the way a candle burns down at the end of a long dinner, when everyone is still at the table talking and nobody wants to be the first to blow it out.

It was going out. Percy could feel exactly how much was left.

It wasn't much.

"Hey," Percy said. His voice came out rough. "Hey. It's okay. Somebody's coming."

The old man's eyes found his face and rested there a long moment. Then they moved — up, and a little to the left, over Percy's shoulder — and stayed.

"Oh," the old man said again. Softer. Wondering. "It's you."

Percy looked over his shoulder. There was nothing there. Just the platform, and the white tile wall, and a poster for a Broadway show.

"There's nobody there," Percy said.

"Sure there is." The old man's voice was thin and breathy, but there was something almost like a smile in it. "The lady. Behind you. She's got her hand on your shoulder, son."

Percy's skin went cold all over.

"I seen her before," the old man said. His eyes stayed fixed on the empty air above Percy's shoulder. "Okinawa. Forty-five. I was on a tin can — a destroyer. The Laffey." He coughed. "The planes kept coming down. Kamikazes. All day. Sea was on fire. Boys in the water — ours, theirs. And she was walking. On the water. Through the fire. Picking them up."

His hand tightened on Percy's. It was very weak.

"Not ours," he said. "Theirs. Their boys. The Japanese boys. She'd bend down and lift 'em out of the water and hold 'em. Like a mother at the beach, calling her kids in for supper." He was quiet a moment. "I told the chaplain. He said it was shock. Never told anybody else. Sixty years."

"Sir," Percy whispered.

"Always wondered," the old man said, "who was gonna come for us."

Percy couldn't speak.

The old man looked at him then — really looked, right into Percy's face, his pale blue eyes clear for a second. "She was kind to them," he said. "I want you to know that. Whatever she is. She was kind."

And the flicker went out.

* * *​

It didn't go down.

That was the first thing Percy understood, kneeling on the concrete with the old man's hand going slack in his. Every death he had ever felt had gone down — through his palms, up his arms, through the bead, down the long road to the black lake. This one didn't. The flicker went out, and the hollow didn't move. Not a ripple. The bead on his wrist stayed cool and quiet and still.

And then something stood up.

It rose out of the old man like steam off the bay on a cold morning — not a shape exactly, not anything he could see, but something he could feel, the way he could feel the fish in the water: a presence, a weight, a someone, rising up out of the body on the platform and standing for a moment, swaying a little, like a man who has been sitting too long. Percy felt it turn. Felt it look around, confused. Felt it look at him.

Then it started to walk.

Not down. Away. West, Percy thought, though he couldn't have said how he knew it. Away along a road he couldn't see — not the long dark slope with its stone walls and its gray walkers, but a different road, flatter and colder, with a wind blowing up it that smelled of wet ashes. Very faint, very far off at the end of it, he heard water. Not the sea. A river, slow and heavy and black. And beyond the river, so far away it was barely a sound at all, something that might have been a very large dog, barking.

Percy reached for him.

He didn't mean to. It was instinct, like grabbing for a fish slipping out of your hands. He reached with that other sense, the one he used in the water, and his fingers — not his real fingers, the other ones — closed on something cold and thin and slippery, like a strand of eelgrass in the surf. And for one dizzying second he felt that he could hold it. That if he closed his hand, if he just held on, the old man would stop walking, and turn around, and —

Let him go, Ushio.

Her voice. Low and close. Right behind him, where the old man had been looking.

He is not yours. He is not mine. He is expected.

Percy let go.

The cold strand slid out of his grip. The someone walked on, down the flat gray road toward the river, and didn't look back, and got smaller, and was gone.

Percy knelt on the platform, holding a dead man's hand, and cried.

* * *​

The EMTs came. A transit cop came. They moved Percy back, gently, and worked on the old man for a long time, and then they stopped and put a sheet over him right there on the platform, while the 6 train came and went and came and went and people got off and stared and got back on. Somebody picked up his groceries and put them back in the bag. The orange had gone onto the tracks. Nobody went after it.

His name was Walter Kowalczyk. Percy heard the cop read it off his ID. He was eighty-one years old, and he lived alone on East 88th Street.

His mom held Percy on the bench at the end of the platform. She didn't say anything for a long time. Then she said, "You stayed with him."

"I didn't do anything."

"You stayed with him." She pressed her cheek against the top of his head. Her voice was thick. "When my uncle was sick — at the end — I sat with him. Every night. I held his hand. I used to think it didn't do anything either. That I was just sitting there." She was quiet a moment. "But it matters, baby. It's the most important thing anybody can do for anybody. Nobody should have to go alone."

Percy thought about the old man's face. She was kind to them. I want you to know that.

"He wasn't alone," Percy said.

His mom didn't ask what he meant. She only held him tighter.

* * *​

That night he didn't go down the hill. He didn't need to. She came up.

He felt her the moment he closed his eyes. Not the lake, not the blind — just her, close, the way she'd been on the platform. Right behind him. A presence at his shoulder in the dark.

Was it true? he asked. What he said? Okinawa?

It was true.

You were there.

I was there. A long pause. They were my islands' children. They came down out of the sky on fire, and fell into the sea, and the sea burned. I went to them. I could, in those years; there were so many doors standing open. I took them out of the water and held them and put the fire out. Another pause. I did not know that anyone had seen me.

He said you were kind.

She didn't answer that.

Why didn't he come to you? Percy asked. Why'd he go the other way?

Because he was not mine. Because his death was not given to me. Every land has its own dead, Ushio, and every dead has its own road. His went west, to the lord of your father's family. To the river, and the dog.

Percy turned that over. The lord of my father's family.

Yes.

My dad has family? Like — brothers?

A careful pause. He does.

Percy's heart was pounding. He asked the question he'd been circling for years — since the snappers, since the jetty, since the water stood up out of the glass. Is my dad like you? Is he a — god?

The silence went on so long he thought she wouldn't answer.

That, she said at last, is your mother's to tell you. She has carried it a long time, and carried it well, and she has earned the telling. I will not take it from her.

It wasn't a no.

Percy lay in the dark and breathed. He thought about his mom at the window in March, whispering thank you to the sea.

I could have kept him, he said finally. Couldn't I. The old man. When I grabbed — I could feel it. If I'd held on —

Not today.

But someday.

Someday, said Izanami, you will be able to do a great many things. And you will have to decide, every time, whether you should. Her voice softened. You let him go. You did not want to, and you did it anyway. That was right. He had somewhere to be.

* * *​

After the platform, Percy started noticing the flickers.

Not only when he touched someone. Not only in the water. Everywhere. It came on slowly over the next few weeks, the way your eyes adjust to the dark: first a faint sense of warmth when someone stood close to him on the subway, then a kind of shimmer at the edge of his attention in a crowded room. And then, one morning on the crosstown bus, he realized he could feel every single person on it. Forty-some flickers all around him, small and steady and warm, like candles in a church. The bus driver's, thick and strong. A baby's, bright and new and fierce as a struck match. A teenager's, behind headphones, restless and flaring.

And some that were thin.

Not many. But some. A man in a suit, coughing into a handkerchief, whose flicker was steady but somehow shallow, like a flame with too little wax left under it. An old woman with a shopping cart, whose flicker trembled.

Percy got off the bus three stops early and walked the rest of the way with his hands in his pockets, trying not to feel anything.

Is this going to keep happening? he asked.

Yes, said Izanami. And it will grow. It is the first thing every lord of the dead must learn, Ushio, and the hardest. A pause. Everyone is dying. Some are only faster about it.

He didn't sleep much that week.

There was a bodega on the corner of their block, run by a tiny old woman named Mrs. Ruiz, who had sold Percy his first pack of baseball cards when he was five and who still gave him a free lollipop every time he came in, even though he was eleven now and kind of too old for it. The first time he walked in after the bus, he felt her flicker, and it was thin. Thinner than the old woman's on the bus. Thin the way the old man's must have been, he guessed, an hour before he sat down on the platform.

Percy stood in the doorway for a long time.

Then he went in, bought a soda, and asked Mrs. Ruiz if she needed help carrying the boxes in from the back.

He helped her every day after school that June. He stacked cans and broke down boxes and swept the floor, and listened to her talk about her grandkids in Puerto Rico and her late husband, who had played the trumpet. She paid him in lollipops, and he let her. He didn't tell her why. He didn't tell anybody.

In July, at the cabin in Montauk, standing waist-deep in the surf with a fishing rod, he felt it: a hundred miles to the west, a tiny candle going out.

He didn't know how he knew it was her. He just did.

He stood in the water with his eyes closed for a long time. Then he said, out loud, to no one, "Bye, Mrs. Ruiz," and went back to fishing. He caught a striped bass as long as his arm, and gave it away, and felt it go down the long dark road the way his fish always did. Somewhere on a different road, an old woman who had sold him his first pack of baseball cards was walking toward a river.

He hoped somebody would be kind to her.

* * *​

He turned twelve in August. His mom made blue cake. He blew out the candles and wished — carefully, very carefully — for nothing at all.

In September they took a bus upstate.

Gabe didn't come out to see him off. Gabe didn't even come out of the bedroom. But as Percy carried his duffel bag to the front door, he heard Gabe's voice through the bedroom wall, low and hoarse — the first words Gabe had said to him in seven months.

"Don't come back."

He didn't sound angry. He sounded scared.

The bus took four hours. Percy sat by the window and watched the city fall away into suburbs and the suburbs fall away into trees. He could feel it happening as they went: the thick, rank fog of Gabe's smell thinning out of his clothes and his hair with every mile, like a coat coming off. His mom sat beside him and held his hand and pretended to read.

You know what this means, Izanami said, somewhere around Poughkeepsie.

Yeah, Percy said. No more Gabe smell.

No more Gabe smell. She sounded grimly amused. Away from that man's stench, you will shine like a lighthouse, Ushio. Everything that hunts children like you will see you from a long way off. You must be ready.

Percy looked out the window at the trees going by, green and gold and endless. He thought about the hollow — so deep now that he couldn't feel the bottom. He thought about three years of push-ups and six flights of stairs and water standing up out of a glass. He thought about Kyle Brandt's nose.

I'm ready, he said.

Good, said Izanami. And then, more softly: I will be with you. I am always with you. My hand is on your shoulder.

Yancy Academy was a cluster of old brick buildings on a hill above a gray lake, surrounded by woods. It looked like a place where nothing had happened in a hundred years. His mom hugged him in the parking lot for so long that a counselor came over to ask whether everything was all right. Then she got back on the bus and waved through the window until it turned the corner.

Percy stood in the parking lot with his duffel bag, alone, breathing the clean upstate air.

The bead on his wrist went cold.

Not a warning cold. Not yet. Just a faint chill, like the first breath of autumn — like walking into a house where, somewhere out of sight, a fire is burning low.

Somewhere on this campus, something was smoldering.

 

[Abysseus]

Chapter Eight — Yancy​

The something turned out to be his pre-algebra teacher.

Her name was Mrs. Dodds, and Percy knew what she was about four seconds after he walked into her classroom on the first day of school.

It wasn't how she looked. She looked like a lot of teachers: middle-aged and thin, with tight graying hair, a black leather jacket she wore every day no matter how warm it was, and a mouth that seemed to have been designed for saying no. It wasn't even how she looked at him, although she did — the second he came through the door, her head came up from her desk and her eyes went straight to him, flat and hard and dark, and stayed on him all the way to his seat.

It was the way she burned.

He felt it the way he felt everyone now: a flicker, a warmth, a candle in a church. Except that it wasn't a flicker. It didn't flicker at all. It sat at the front of the room, low and red and steady and hot, like coals at the bottom of a fire that has been burning for days. Like something that had gone out a thousand times and been relit a thousand times and no longer remembered how to stop.

They smolder, Izanami had said, the night of the whale. Like coals that cannot go out.

The bead on his wrist went cold.

That's one, Percy thought. His heart was slamming. That's one of them. Isn't it.

Yes.

What do I do?

Nothing, said Izanami.

Nothing? She's right there, she's —

Nothing, she said again, calm and cold and completely certain. She has not moved. She is waiting, which means she is not sure. She has smelled something on you, but not enough. Let her wonder. Let her choose the ground. A pause. She will choose badly. They always do. They are old, but they are not wise.

So Percy sat down and opened his notebook and spent the next forty-five minutes not looking at the thing in the leather jacket at the front of the room. It was the longest class of his life.

It was also, he found out, only the first.

* * *​

His roommate was named Grover Underwood, and Percy liked him immediately, which was a new experience.

Grover was scrawny and nervous and walked on crutches because of something wrong with his legs. He already had a wispy little beard, at twelve, and a laugh like a startled bleat. He ate constantly: cafeteria enchiladas, apples, the occasional pencil eraser when he was nervous, which was often. He had a habit of sniffing the air when he came into a room, and the first time he did it around Percy, he froze with his nose up, and sneezed, and sneezed again.

"Sorry," he said, wiping his eyes. "Allergies. You smell like — the beach? And, uh —" He sniffed again, frowning. "A basement? Do you have a basement?"

"I live in an apartment."

"Huh," said Grover. He looked at Percy very hard for a second. Then he laughed his bleating laugh and offered him half an enchilada.

Percy felt Grover's flicker the same way he felt everyone's. But it wasn't like anyone's. It was warm and bright and small, like a person's — but there was something else in it, something that didn't belong in a person at all. Something green. It was like the smell of cut grass, or lying in a meadow in summer with your eyes closed: wild and sweet and a little bit goatish. Percy had no idea what to make of it.

What is he? he asked Izanami that night.

Something of the woods, she said. She sounded mildly curious. A spirit of wild places, wearing a boy's shape. Not one of the hungry things. A pause. I think he has been sent to watch you.

Watch me? Who sent him?

Your father's family, perhaps. Or their servants. A thoughtful silence. He is afraid of the woman in the leather coat. Have you noticed? Every time she comes near, his little green fire shrinks.

Percy had noticed.

Is he going to hurt me?

That one? There was something in her voice almost like fondness. No. He would sooner hurt himself. Keep him close, Ushio. A frightened friend is still a friend.

* * *​

In October, Percy found the lake.

It lay down the hill behind the gym, gray and cold and ringed with pines, and nobody went there because it was off-limits and full of weeds and probably leeches. Percy went every morning at dawn, before anyone else was up, and swam. The water was so cold it made his teeth ache, and it didn't care. It knew him. It held him up and healed the knuckles he'd scraped on the gym floor and carried the tiredness out of his arms. And when he was done, he would sit on a rock under the pines with a hand line and a can of worms from the bait shop in town, and fish.

Sunfish, mostly. Perch. The occasional bass. He gave every one of them away. Then he'd build a little fire on the rocks and fry them on a flat stone, the way his mom had on the pier, and eat them for breakfast, and get back to the dorm before the wake-up bell.

Grover found him there in November.

He stood at the edge of the pines on his crutches, looking at the little fire and the fish and Percy, and his face did something complicated.

"You do something," Grover said. "When you catch them. When they die. I saw you. You hold them, and you, like —" He made a vague gesture. "Pray?"

Percy's stomach dropped. "Kind of."

"To who?"

Percy didn't answer.

Grover was quiet for a long time. He was a vegetarian; Percy knew that. He had once gotten genuinely upset about a mousetrap. Percy waited for him to say something about the fish.

Instead Grover said, very quietly, "At least you eat them."

"Yeah," Percy said. "It's a rule. No wasting."

"That's a good rule." Grover sniffed the air — woodsmoke, fish, cold lake, and something else, something that wrinkled his nose and made his eyes go worried. "It's a really old rule. Older than you'd think." He hesitated. "Percy? That smell. The basement smell. It's stronger down here."

"I know," Percy said.

Grover looked at him a long moment. Then he limped down to the rock, sat beside him, and held his hands out to the fire.

After that he came most mornings. He never ate the fish. He brought apples and ate them core and all, sometimes the stems too, and sat with Percy while the sun came up over the gray lake, and neither of them asked the other anything he didn't want to answer.

* * *​

The only class Percy liked was Latin.

This was so unexpected that he spent most of September suspicious of it. Latin was a dead language, and Percy had a hard enough time with the living ones. But Mr. Brunner taught it as if it were full of ghosts and monsters and sword fights, which, it turned out, it kind of was. He was a middle-aged man in a motorized wheelchair, with a scruffy beard and a frayed tweed jacket that smelled like coffee, and he told stories about the Greeks and Romans as if he'd been there. He kept a collection of old swords and armor in his classroom and promised that kids who behaved could hold them, which was safe, since nobody ever did.

Percy reached for Mr. Brunner's flicker on the first day, and nearly fell out of his chair.

Because Mr. Brunner didn't have one.

That wasn't possible. Everyone had one. Every person, every fish, every pigeon on every windowsill. Even Mrs. Dodds had something — a smolder, a heat. But when Percy reached for Mr. Brunner with that other sense, there was no candle, nothing guttering, nothing burning down. There was only a deep, quiet, steady warmth, like a hearth that had been lit at the beginning of the world and had never once, not for a single night, gone out.

He's not dying, Percy thought, stunned. He doesn't have any death in him. At all.

No, said Izanami. She sounded thoughtful, and something else — wary, almost respectful. That one is very old, Ushio. Older than the woman in the leather coat. Older, perhaps, than your father. He has never died. Be courteous to him.

So Percy was courteous to him. It wasn't hard. Mr. Brunner was the only teacher at Yancy who seemed to think Percy was smart, which was such a strange feeling that Percy sometimes stayed after class just to see whether it would wear off.

It never did. But once, in October, Mr. Brunner's eyes fell on the bead on Percy's wrist and stayed there.

"That's an unusual piece," he said. "May I?"

Percy held out his wrist. Mr. Brunner leaned forward in his wheelchair and looked at the bead for a long moment without touching it. His eyes were brown and very old and very kind, and a crease had appeared between them, like a man trying to place a song he'd heard once, long ago.

"Where did you get it?"

"My dad left it for me," Percy said. "Before I was born. For protection."

"Did he," said Mr. Brunner softly. He looked at the bead a moment longer. Then he sat back and smiled, and the crease went away, mostly. "Well. Take good care of it."

He does not know what it is, Izanami said, once Percy had left. He knows only that he does not know. That will trouble him. Good. A troubled old horse is a careful one.

Horse? Percy said.

She didn't explain.

* * *​

All year, Mrs. Dodds watched him.

She gave him detention in September for "attitude." She gave him detention in October for "staring," which was rich. In November she kept him after school to grade forty pre-algebra worksheets, and he sat at a desk at the back of her classroom with a red pen for two hours while she sat at the front, not grading, not reading, not doing anything at all except watching him with her flat dark eyes, and burning.

He could feel the heat of her all the way across the room. It made the bead ache with cold.

She's going to do something, he thought. Right now. She's going to do something right now.

She is not, said Izanami. Look at her. She is waiting for you to run. She wants you frightened, so that you will make a mistake. Do not give her one. Grade your papers.

So he graded his papers. He got most of the answers wrong, but he graded them.

It went on like that for months. Mrs. Dodds smoldering. Percy not looking at her. Grover's little green fire shrinking whenever she came into a room. Percy swam in the lake every morning, even after it got so cold there was ice at the edges — even in January, when he had to break the skin of it with a rock to get in. He did his push-ups. He ran the hill behind the dorms in the dark. He practiced with the lake: made it rise, made it turn, made it stand up in a column as tall as the pines and fall back down without a splash. He fished, and gave, and ate. The hollow, which had no bottom anymore, kept getting deeper. He didn't know how he knew. He just did.

Some nights he lay in his bunk listening to Grover snore and thought: Why doesn't she just do it? Why doesn't she just come at me?

Because she has been sent to find something, Izanami said once, and she is not sure you have it. And because she is afraid of the old horse.

Find what?

I do not know, Izanami said, and for once she sounded almost annoyed about it. The western gods have lost something. I can feel them all the way across the sea, buzzing like hornets in a broken nest. They are searching everywhere. She thinks you are a thief.

* * *​

In May, the sixth grade took a field trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Mr. Brunner led it, which was the only reason Percy wanted to go. Mrs. Dodds came along as a chaperone, which was the main reason he didn't. She sat at the front of the bus all the way down to the city, and every time Percy looked up, she was watching him in the big mirror over the driver's head, and every time she did, the bead went colder.

Today, Izanami said, as the bus came down Fifth Avenue. Her voice was low and quiet and very focused, the way his mom's got when she was threading a needle. I think it will be today.

Percy's mouth went dry. How do you know?

Because she has stopped wondering.

Mr. Brunner gave the tour of the Greek and Roman galleries himself, rolling his chair through the long cool halls full of white marble and painted pots, talking about gods and heroes and monsters in a voice that made you forget you were supposed to be bored. He stopped in front of a tall stone slab carved with the figure of a girl holding out a flower, and turned his chair to face the class.

"This is a grave marker," he said. "A stele. It stood over the tomb of a young woman in Attica, some two and a half thousand years ago. Who can tell me what the ancient Greeks believed happened to her after she died?"

Nobody raised a hand. Nancy Bobofit — a freckled redhead who stole things, and who was mean to Grover in a way that made Percy's hands curl into fists — snickered.

Mr. Brunner's eyes settled on Percy. "Mr. Jackson?"

Percy looked at the girl on the stele. She had a calm, sad, patient face. She was holding the flower out as if she were offering it to someone.

"She went down a road," he said slowly. He didn't know where the words came from. They just came, the way the water came when he called it. "A flat road. Cold. There's a wind blowing up it that smells like ashes. And at the end there's a river, a black one, really slow, and she has to cross it. And there's a dog."

The class was quiet.

Mr. Brunner was looking at him very strangely.

"That's —" Mr. Brunner began, and stopped. "That's a very vivid answer, Percy. The Greeks did believe the dead crossed the river Styx, yes, and that a great hound guarded the far side." He paused. "But I don't believe I've ever mentioned a wind. Or ashes. Where did you read that?"

"I didn't," Percy said. "I just — think so."

Mr. Brunner looked at him a moment longer. Then he moved on to the next case. But Percy saw his hands tighten on the arms of his wheelchair.

That was careless, said Izanami. She didn't sound angry. She sounded like someone trying very hard not to sound proud.

* * *​

They ate lunch outside on the museum's front steps, in the sun. Percy sat with Grover on the stone rim of one of the big fountains. The water splashed and glittered behind them, and Percy could feel all of it — the pumps humming underground, the pipes, the whole basin full of cold, clean city water, alive and listening.

He was watching Mrs. Dodds. She stood at the top of the steps by the entrance with her arms crossed, not eating, not talking to anyone. Watching him back.

So he didn't see Nancy Bobofit coming until she had already dumped the rest of her lunch — half a ketchup-smeared sandwich and a cup of coleslaw — into Grover's lap.

"Oops," Nancy said, and her friends laughed.

Grover went bright red. He didn't say anything. He just sat there with coleslaw on his pants and his crutches leaning against the fountain, looking at his hands, and his little green fire went small and miserable. And something in Percy went hot.

The water heard it.

He felt it happen. The whole fountain, all at once, leaned — the same way the hollow had leaned under the pier toward something it wanted — leaned toward Nancy Bobofit, standing there laughing with her freckles and her empty lunch bag. It wanted her. It wanted to reach out of the basin like a big cold hand and grab her by the back of her shirt and drag her in, under, down —

Easy, Percy thought. Not to Izanami. To the water. The way he'd told it a thousand times in the pool at the Y and the lake at dawn. Not that much. Easy.

The water strained against him like a dog on a leash.

He let it have a little.

Just a little. Just one slap — one fat, glittering fistful of fountain water that rose up out of the basin behind Grover, hung there for one bright second, and then came down square on top of Nancy Bobofit's head like a bucket dumped out of a third-floor window.

Nancy screamed. She stood there dripping, ketchup and water running down her face, mouth open. Her friends had stopped laughing.

"That," Percy said, "was for Grover."

"He did that!" Nancy shrieked, pointing at Percy with one shaking, dripping finger. "Percy Jackson threw that on me! I saw him! He —"

"There now."

Mrs. Dodds was there.

Percy hadn't seen her come down the steps. Nobody had. One moment she was at the top by the doors, and the next she was standing right behind Nancy with a hand on her soaked shoulder, smiling. Her smile was the worst thing Percy had ever seen.

"Go and get yourself cleaned up, dear," she said to Nancy, but her eyes were on Percy. "I'll handle this." And to Percy, still smiling: "You. Come with me."

"Wait," Grover said, scrambling up onto his crutches. "Wait, it was me, I splashed her, I —"

"You will stay here," said Mrs. Dodds, without looking at him, and Grover sat back down as if his legs had been cut out from under him.

Percy stood up.

The bead on his wrist was so cold it ached all the way to his elbow. And under his ribs, the hollow — that bottomless dark, six summers of fish and a blackfish's lantern and a dogfish's long, slow river — was perfectly, utterly still, the way the sea goes still before a storm.

She has chosen, said Izanami. Her voice was very quiet and very close. She has chosen a house full of graves. Go with her, Ushio. Do not be afraid. I am with you.

* * *​

Mrs. Dodds walked fast, and Percy kept up. Back up the steps, through the great hall, past the information desk, down a long corridor, and into the Greek and Roman galleries again. An hour ago they had been crowded with tourists. Now they were empty — no guards, no visitors, nobody at all — just the white marble gods on their pedestals, the rows of painted pots behind glass, the long cool silence, and Mrs. Dodds' heels clicking ahead of him on the stone.

She stopped beside a long marble relief of warriors locked in battle, and turned around.

She wasn't smiling anymore.

"You have been a great deal of trouble, Percy Jackson," she said.

Percy didn't answer. He could feel her burning — hotter now, so hot it was like standing at the open door of a furnace, so hot the glass cases around them seemed to shimmer.

"All year I've watched you," Mrs. Dodds said. Her voice was changing, sinking lower and rougher, with something under it like a hiss. "All year, waiting for you to slip. And you never so much as blinked." Her eyes were changing too, the flat dark brown going red from the center outward, the color of iron left in a forge. "That's a thief's patience. A thief's. What have you done with it?"

"With what?"

"Don't play stupid with me, boy."

And then she wasn't Mrs. Dodds anymore.

She grew. Her shoulders hunched; her back split down the middle of the leather jacket, and great wings unfolded out of it — huge and ragged and leathery, scraping the gallery ceiling. Her skin went gray and wrinkled and tight over her bones. Her fingers stretched and stretched and curved into long yellow hooks. Her face fell in on itself until it was nothing but leather and bone and a mouth full of brown needle teeth, and her eyes burned like two holes punched into a furnace.

She smelled like ashes. Like the wind on that flat gray road.

"Give it back," hissed the thing that had been Mrs. Dodds, "and I'll make it quick."

Then there was a sound behind Percy — the whine of a motor, rubber wheels squeaking on marble — and Mr. Brunner's voice, sharp and urgent: "Percy!"

Percy turned. Mr. Brunner was in the gallery doorway in his wheelchair, with something in his hand, and he threw it.

It was a pen. A plain ballpoint pen. It spun through the air end over end, and Percy put up his hand without thinking and caught it.

By the time it hit his palm, it had become something else.

It was a sword: three feet of bronze with a leather-wrapped hilt and a blade that glowed faintly gold, as if it were lit from inside. It was heavy and balanced and fit his hand as if it had been made for it. He had never held a sword in his life, and his arm didn't seem to care.

The Fury screamed and came at him.

She was fast. So fast — a blur of wings and hooks and burning eyes, coming down on him like a hawk on a rabbit — and he didn't think. There wasn't time to think. He did what he did in the water. He felt. He felt her coming, felt the heat of her, felt the whole smoldering, unkillable furnace of her — a thing that had died a thousand times and come back a thousand times and would come back a thousand more —

You will know, Izanami had said. You will feel it in your hands.

He felt it in his hands.

And as the Fury came down on him with her claws out, Percy Jackson planted his feet on the marble floor of a gallery full of graves, swung the bronze sword with everything that four years of push-ups and stairs and cold dawn swims had given him, and meant it.

You're hers.

The blade passed through the Fury as if she were made of smoke.

She didn't scream. There wasn't time. She simply broke — burst apart where the blade had cut her into a cloud of fine yellow-gray dust, like ash blown off a fire. And for an instant the dust hung in the air of the gallery, glittering, the way it always had, ten thousand times before, in the moment before it scattered and drifted and sank away through the floor and the earth and the dark to wherever things like her went to be made again.

It didn't scatter.

It turned — the whole cloud of it at once, like a school of fish turning — and poured in one long, hissing, glittering stream straight down into the black bead on Percy's wrist.

And the hollow —

It didn't pour. It didn't flood.

It broke.

It was like standing on a beach and watching the sea pull back, and back, and back, farther than it has ever gone, until the whole bay is bare sand and stranded boats and flopping fish — and then turning around and seeing, on the horizon, the wave. That was what came into him. Not a cupful. Not a swell. A wall, black and cold and enormous, all the long ages of a thing that had refused to die, all of it at once. It came in through his wrist and his arm and his chest and down, down, into the hollow, and the hollow took it, and took it, and took it, and kept on taking it, and still had room.

Percy went down on his knees.

The sword rang against the marble. Frost was spreading out from where he knelt — he could see it, white ferns of ice racing across the gallery floor in every direction, climbing the pedestals, crawling up the glass cases. Across the hall, the girl on the grave stele was weeping water down her stone face. And far below him — far below the museum and the city and the bedrock and the dark — he heard a sound. A deep, slow, grinding groan, like the noise a mountain might make if it shifted in its sleep.

Like a boulder, very slightly, moving.

And then her voice. Not far down. Not from the bottom of a long road, not through the small cold window of a bead.

Right behind him. Right at his ear. So close that if he turned his head, he would see her.

My son, said Izanami. Oh — my son.

And she laughed.

He had heard her laugh before, soft and rough, like stones rolling at the bottom of a stream. This was not that laugh. This was huge and deep and wild, and it rolled through the empty gallery like the sea through a cave at high tide. The glass cases rattled. The frost on the floor sang. It was the laugh of someone who had been at the bottom of something for a very, very long time and had just felt it, for the first time, give.

Percy didn't turn his head.

He knelt on the frozen floor with his eyes squeezed shut and one hand on the hilt of a bronze sword, breathing, and he didn't look. He had promised. He would never forget that he had promised.

After a while, the laughter stopped. The presence at his shoulder drew back — slowly, the way the tide draws back — and was gone, and was only a voice again, deep and far and warm.

Well done, she said. Oh, well done, my tide. She will not trouble you again. Not in this age of the world.

* * *​

When he finally stood up, the sword was a pen again.

The frost was gone. The stele was dry. The gallery was full of tourists — when had they come back? — and nobody was looking at him, a twelve-year-old boy standing in the middle of the Greek and Roman wing holding a ballpoint pen.

And Percy wasn't cold.

That was the strangest part. He should have been freezing. His teeth should have been chattering, the way they had in the kitchen with the glass of water, the way they had on the pier. Instead he felt —

Full.

He reached for the hollow, the way you put a foot down feeling for the sand, and he couldn't even find the shore. It wasn't a pool anymore, or a pond, or a lake. It was a sea: black and cold and still and endless, going down and down and out and out in every direction. He was standing at the very edge of it. And it was his.

He walked out of the gallery, down the long corridor, and out through the front doors into the sun.

Mr. Brunner was sitting at the bottom of the steps in his wheelchair, under the awning, reading a paperback, exactly where he'd been at lunch. He looked up as Percy came down the steps and smiled pleasantly, as if nothing had happened. As if he had never moved.

"Ah, Percy," he said. "There you are. I believe you have something of mine." He held out his hand.

Percy looked down at the pen. He looked at Mr. Brunner. He reached for Mr. Brunner's flicker and found the deep, steady, ancient warmth of a hearth that had never gone out — and, under it, for the first time, something else. Something tight and careful. Something that felt a lot like fear.

He gave him the pen.

Grover was still sitting on the rim of the fountain where Percy had left him. His pants were clean. There wasn't any coleslaw anywhere. Nancy Bobofit was sitting with her friends on the steps, bone dry, eating a cookie and ignoring both of them.

"Grover," Percy said. His voice came out strange. "Where's Mrs. Dodds?"

Grover looked up at him. For a second — just a second — his little green fire jumped and shivered, like a candle flame when a door slams somewhere in a house.

Then his face went smooth and blank and puzzled.

"Mrs. Dodds?" he repeated, as if he were trying out a word in another language. "Percy, there isn't any Mrs. Dodds. Mrs. Kerr teaches pre-algebra." He was looking at Percy as if he were worried about him. But his flicker was still trembling. "Are you okay? You look kind of —"

"Cold," Percy said. "I know."

He wasn't cold. He had never been less cold in his life. But it was easier than explaining.

They have been made to forget, said Izanami, as he sat down very carefully on the rim of the fountain. The western gods do that. They draw a fog over mortal eyes so that mortals will not see what walks among them. It is clumsy work. Your friend is not fooled; he is only pretending, because he has been told to. A pause. It does not work on you. It never will. You are mine.

Percy sat in the sun and looked at his hands. They were steady.

Is she dead? he asked. Really dead? You said they always come back.

They do, said Izanami, when they go where they belong — down into the pit beneath the western world, where such things are made and remade like bubbles rising in tar. He could hear the smile in her voice, slow and deep and very old. She did not go where she belonged, Ushio. You gave her to me.

* * *​

Far beneath the western world there is a pit with no bottom, where the things that hunt heroes go when they are cut down. They sink into it like stones into tar and lie in the dark for a while, and slowly, slowly, they re-form, and climb back up.

That afternoon, something should have fallen into the pit.

Nothing did.

 

[Abysseus]

Chapter Nine — Two Furies​

Hades kept count of everything that died.

Mortals were easy. They came down to him by the thousands every day, along the long gray road to the river, and he did not need to see them to know they had arrived; he felt them settle into his kingdom like silt settling to the bottom of a jar. A drowned fisherman off Crete. A grandmother in Ohio, asleep. A man in Lyon who had choked on a fishbone in a restaurant and been very surprised about it. He knew them all, by weight and by number, the way a miser knows his coins.

Monsters were different. Monsters did not come to him at all. When some hero cut one down, it fell straight past his kingdom into the pit beneath it, into Tartarus, and lay in the dark there for a while — weeks, or years, or centuries, depending on how hard the world still remembered it — and then it crawled back out. They always crawled back out. That was the oldest rule there was, older than Hades, older than his father: what the pit had made, the pit returned.

And his Furies returned fastest of all. Three days, at most. He had seen Alecto cut down a hundred times in four thousand years, and every time, by the third morning, she had been back on her perch above his throne, sulking, smoothing her wings, complaining about whichever hero had done it.

It was the fourth morning. Her perch was empty.

Hades sat on his black throne in the great hall of his palace and stared at it.

He was in a vile mood. He had been in a vile mood for six months — since the winter solstice, when someone had slipped past his guards and his dog and his Furies and walked out of his palace with the Helm of Darkness. His helm. The one thing in the three worlds that was entirely, unquestionably his. His brothers had scoffed when he told them. Zeus had been too busy raging about his own missing toy to listen. And Persephone was gone for the summer, up in the sunlight with her mother, which meant there was no one left in the whole echoing palace to tell him he was being paranoid.

He was not being paranoid. Someone was moving against him. And the only lead he had was a boy.

A boy who smelled of the sea.

Megaera and Tisiphone came in through the high windows on ragged wings and landed at the foot of the throne, and he knew from their faces before they opened their mouths.

"Well?" he said.

"Nothing, lord." Tisiphone's voice was a dry hiss, like dead leaves dragged over stone. "We went down to the edge of the pit. We called her. We waited."

"And?"

"Nothing," said Megaera. She was the eldest of the three, and the hardest, and Hades had never once seen her afraid. She was afraid now. Her claws clicked restlessly on the black marble. "She is not in the pit, my lord. We would know. When one of us falls, the others feel her in the dark below, re-forming, the way you feel an itch you cannot reach." Her burning eyes flicked toward the empty perch. "We do not feel her. We do not feel her anywhere."

Hades' hands tightened on the arms of his throne.

"Tell me again," he said. "Exactly."

So they told him. The museum in the mortal city. The boy, twelve years old, who had been hidden so long and so cleverly that even Alecto, whose nose could find one guilty mortal in a city of millions, had needed a whole school year to be sure of him. The centaur, and his sword. One stroke.

"Celestial bronze," Hades said. "Celestial bronze does not unmake anything. It sends things down. It sends them to the pit."

"Yes, lord."

"Then where is she?"

Neither of them answered. The cold fires in their sconces along the walls leaned and guttered, though there was no wind.

"Bring me Death," said Hades.

* * *​

Thanatos came the way he always came: through no door at all, simply there between one moment and the next, standing at the foot of the throne with his great black wings folded and his beautiful, solemn face giving away nothing. He looked young, and tired, and kind, which was the cruelest joke the old gods had ever played on mortals.

"My lord."

"My Fury," said Hades. "Alecto. Four days ago, in New York, at the hand of a boy. Did you feel her go?"

Thanatos was quiet a moment. "I did not."

"You feel every death."

"Every death that is ours." Thanatos tilted his head slightly, the way a bird does at a sound it cannot place. "A Fury does not truly die, my lord. She goes down to be remade. But even so, there is a moment when she passes through the door — a ripple. I have felt it every time, for four thousand years." He paused. "This time there was no ripple. She did not pass through any door I keep."

"Then what happened to her?"

"I went to look." Thanatos's voice had become careful. "Afterward. The room in the museum where she fell. There was nothing to see; the mortals had been made to forget, and the frost was gone. But there was a smell."

Hades went very still. "What smell?"

"Wet earth," Thanatos said slowly. "And stone. And something under the stone: something very old, and very patient, and very cold. It was not ours, my lord. Not the river, not the asphodel, not the ashes of the road. Not the Egyptians, either — I know their reek of myrrh and river mud. Not the northern dead; there was no ice in it. It was —" He hesitated, and Hades, who had known Death for four thousand years, had never once seen him hesitate. "It was a kind of death I have never smelled. From very far away. From the east, past the edge of every map we keep."

The great black hall was silent.

"She was not killed, my lord," Thanatos said quietly. "Not in any way we understand. I do not think she was even sent down." He looked up at the empty perch. "I think she was gathered."

* * *​

Hades sat on his throne for a long time after Thanatos had gone.

There were rules among the lords of the dead. Not written ones — nothing so vulgar as written — but older and stronger than any oath sworn on the Styx. Every land had its own dead, and every dead had its own road, and the keepers of those roads did not reach across the borders to take what was not theirs. Hades had never met the gods who kept the other dark kingdoms of the world, and had never wanted to. That was the point. You kept your road, and they kept theirs, and nobody poached.

Someone had poached.

Someone had reached into the middle of his brother's city, taken one of his oldest servants, and left behind nothing but a smell of wet stone and frost on a marble floor in June.

And they had done it through a boy.

Poseidon, Hades thought, and his lip curled. It had to be. His brother had always been reckless, always grasping, always making friends in strange places — horses and sea monsters and fish-tailed nymphs and gods knew what else, down in the black places at the bottom of his oceans. Poseidon had broken the oath and fathered a child, and hidden the child from all of them for twelve years. And now the child carried a weapon none of them understood, and the helm was gone, and Zeus's bolt was gone, and the summer solstice was coming.

It all fit. It fit far too well.

"Find the boy," he said to the two Furies, who had waited all this while at the foot of the throne without daring to move. "Watch him. When he goes out from behind the centaur's walls — and he will; they always do — bring him to me. Or bring me what he stole."

"Yes, lord." Tisiphone's wings rustled. "And if he will not come?"

Hades considered it. He thought about his helm, and his brothers, and his empty halls, and the long gray road. He thought about every desperate fool who had ever come down that road to fetch someone back up it — Orpheus with his lyre, Heracles with his chains, his own nephew Dionysus come to drag his mortal mother into the light. In four thousand years there had only ever been one sure way to bring a hero into the Underworld.

You took something he loved, and you made him come and get it.

"He will come," said Hades. "Everyone has something they would walk into the land of the dead to fetch." He settled back on his throne and steepled his long pale fingers. "And Megaera."

"Lord?"

"Whatever you do," said the Lord of the Dead, "do not let him touch you with that blade."

* * *​

Percy heard about it two weeks later, through a door he wasn't supposed to be listening at.

It was the last week of school. He'd gone to Mr. Brunner's office after dinner to return a book — a thick, battered guide to Greek mythology that Mr. Brunner had lent him in April with a look that said you might find this interesting, and which Percy had found so interesting that he'd read nearly a third of it, one finger under every line, which for him was basically a miracle. The office door was half open. There was light inside, and Grover's voice, high and anxious.

"— not possible, sir. They don't just not come back."

Percy stopped in the hall.

"No," said Mr. Brunner. "They don't." His voice was low and very tired. "Her sisters have been seen twice this week in the mortal world, Grover. Searching. Their master is in a black mood, and he wants to know what became of his servant. So do I."

"I didn't see it! I was outside! When he came out he was just — standing there, holding your pen, and he was so calm. And he smelled —" Grover's voice wobbled. "Sir, he smelled like a grave. Like something that's been buried a really long time. And it wasn't coming from him. Not exactly. It was coming from — under him, kind of."

"From the bead," said Mr. Brunner quietly.

Percy's hand closed around his wrist.

"You noticed it too," Grover said.

"I have been noticing it since September. I have looked at it a dozen times, and I can tell you exactly nothing about it. It is a stone. It is a cord. There is no magic in it that I can find, and I have been finding magic in things for longer than you would believe." A pause. "That frightens me more than anything I could find."

"You think — what? His dad gave it to him? Some kind of weapon?"

"I think," Mr. Brunner said slowly, "that the boy is almost certainly a son of one of the eldest gods. I think someone very clever hid him for twelve years. And I think that something else has its hand on him, Grover. Something none of us invited. I do not know what it is. I do not know whether it means him well."

There was a long silence.

"What do we do?" Grover said finally. Very small.

"We get him to camp," said Mr. Brunner. "Before the solstice, if we can. Before they find him again. You'll ride the bus home with him. Don't let him out of your sight."

"And then?"

Another pause. Percy heard the wheelchair creak, as if Mr. Brunner had shifted his weight.

"And then," Mr. Brunner said, "I will have to ask him what he did. And I will have to hope he tells me the truth."

Percy backed away from the door very slowly, the book clutched against his chest. He made it all the way to the stairwell before he let himself breathe.

He knows, he thought. He knows about you.

He knows that he does not know, said Izanami. Her voice was calm. That is not the same thing. He is a wise old horse, and wise old things are afraid of what they cannot see. Let him be afraid. Fear will make him careful, and a careful guardian is a useful one.

He said something has its hand on me.

Something does. And he felt it then — only for a moment, so faint he might have imagined it: a weight on his shoulder, cool and light, like a hand resting there. Something always has.

Percy stood on the dark stairs for a long time.

Then he went back to Mr. Brunner's door and knocked loudly, and when it opened, he handed the book over with the most normal face he could manage. "Thanks," he said. "It was good. The part about Hades was kind of a downer."

Mr. Brunner took the book and looked at him for a long, long moment.

"Yes," he said. "It often is."

* * *​

Grover rode home with him on the bus.

He said it was a coincidence. He said he was going down to the city anyway, to visit an aunt. He was a terrible liar — he went pink to the tips of his ears every time he tried — and Percy let him do it anyway, because it seemed important to Grover, and because, honestly, Percy didn't mind the company.

The bus broke down an hour south of Yancy, on a two-lane road through farm country. There was a bang and a hiss and a cloud of black smoke from the back, and the driver pulled onto the gravel shoulder, swearing, and everyone filed off to stand in the sun while he banged on things with a wrench.

Across the road was a fruit stand: a wooden table under a faded umbrella, piled with cherries and strawberries and apples so red they looked fake. And behind the table, in three folding lawn chairs, sat three old women.

They were knitting.

That was the first thing Percy noticed, and it didn't seem like much. Old women knitted. But these three were knitting together — a single sock the size of a sleeping bag, in yarn the color of a summer sky, the strand running from one pair of hands to the next to the next. The woman in the middle was spinning the yarn out of a fat bundle of wool in her lap. The woman on the left was measuring it along her arm. And the woman on the right held a pair of shears: long and gold-handled, glittering in the sun.

Percy reached for their flickers the way he reached for everyone's now, without thinking.

And stopped breathing.

They didn't have flickers. They didn't have smolders, either, like Mrs. Dodds, or the deep steady hearth-warmth of Mr. Brunner. They had threads.

That was the only word for it. Out of the yarn in their hands, out of the enormous sock and the bundle of wool in the middle woman's lap, ran threads. Thousands of them. Millions. Too fine for his eyes, but he could feel them with that other sense, the way he felt the flickers — running out from the fruit stand in every direction, across the road and the fields and over the hills, out and out into the whole wide world. And every single one of them ended in a flicker. He could feel it. The bus driver's thread. Grover's, green and wild. The threads of the passengers standing around on the gravel shoulder. Threads running out to the farmhouse a mile away, to the town beyond it, to the city, to everywhere.

The flickers weren't separate things. They were ends. They were the ends of threads. And the other ends were here, in the laps of three old women at a fruit stand.

Percy's knees went weak.

The woman with the shears looked up.

She looked straight at him, across the road. She had a face like a dried apple and eyes like two chips of black glass, and there was no expression in them at all. And without looking down, without even seeming to choose, she lifted the long gold scissors and cut a thread.

Snip.

Percy felt it go. Somewhere — far away, or close, he couldn't tell — a flicker went out. He felt it the way he'd felt Mrs. Ruiz go out from a hundred miles away: a tiny candle, gone. It didn't come to him. The hollow didn't stir. It was somebody else's road.

But she had cut it while she was looking at him.

"Oh no," Grover whispered. He'd gone white to the lips. "Oh no, oh no. Percy, don't look at them. Did she look at you? Percy. Did she look at you?"

"She looked at me," Percy said.

Grover made a sound like a goat being stepped on.

Who are they? Percy asked. His heart was hammering. Haha-ue, who are they?

The answer came slowly, and there was something in it he had never heard before. Not fear, exactly. Wariness. The careful respect you'd keep for a neighbor you had lived beside for a very long time and never once had over for dinner.

Very old ones, said Izanami. Older than your father's family. Older, perhaps, than I am. In the West they measure every life — spin it, and draw it out, and cut it. That is their work. Mine is different. They measure. I only receive. A pause. I have never quarreled with them. I have never needed to. Everything they cut comes down some road or another, in the end.

She cut one while she was looking at me. Was that — was it mine?

It was a thread, said Izanami. Whose, I cannot tell you. That is how they speak: in scissors. Then her voice changed. It went low and cold and fierce, the voice from the kitchen the night Gabe hit him. But hear me, Ushio. Whatever thread is yours, it does not end on the gray road to the river. If they ever cut it, you will not walk west to the Rich One and his dog. You will come down the long slope, and I will be waiting at the bottom of it. A breath. You will come home.

Percy didn't know whether that made him feel better or worse.

The driver got the bus running, and they all filed back on. Percy took a window seat and didn't look at the fruit stand as they pulled away. But he could feel them back there — three old women and their millions of threads, getting smaller and smaller behind him — and he could feel the one thread that ran from their laps all the way down the highway to him, and he wondered how long it was.

Grover didn't say a word until the Lincoln Tunnel. Then he said, staring straight ahead, "Percy? When you get home. Whatever happens. If you need me —" He fumbled a card out of his pocket and pushed it into Percy's hand. It had an address on it, somewhere out on Long Island, written in swirly letters, and the words Half-Blood Hill.

"What's this?"

"Just — in case," Grover said, and went pink to the ears.

Percy put the card in his pocket and looked out the window at the city coming up out of the dark.

 

[Abysseus]

Chapter Ten — The Minotaur​

Gabe was on the couch when Percy got home, with the Mets on and a beer in his good hand and the glove on the other one. He looked up when the door opened. Something crossed his face — fast, like a fish darting under a dock — and then he looked back at the TV and didn't look away from it again.

"Your mom's at work," he told the screen. It was the second thing he'd said to Percy in nine months.

"Okay," Percy said, and took his bag to his room.

His room was exactly how he'd left it, only smaller. He sat on the bed and felt the apartment around him: the thick, rank fog of Gabe that filled every corner of it, that he'd lived inside for four years without understanding. He understood it now. He breathed it in on purpose, the way you'd pull a blanket over your head.

His mom came home at seven, through the door with a bag from the candy store and her work smock still on. She saw him, and she dropped the bag.

She hugged him for a long time. She smelled like chocolate and peppermint and city rain. When she finally pulled back to look at him, her eyes were wet and searching, going over his face as if she were checking for something.

"You got tall," she said.

"It's been, like, three months."

"Still." She touched his cheek. Then she looked at him a moment longer, and something in her face went quiet and decided. "How would you feel about Montauk? Tomorrow. Just us, for the weekend."

Percy looked at her. She was smiling, but it was the careful smile, the full-cup smile, and underneath it was something he'd never seen there before.

She was scared.

"Yeah," he said. "That'd be good."

Gabe gave her the car keys without a word. He held them out with his gloved hand. And when Percy came into the kitchen to say goodbye the next morning, Gabe was already in the bedroom with the door shut.

* * *​

The cabin was the same as always. It smelled like mildew and sunscreen and old wood, the sheets were damp, and Percy loved it so much his chest hurt.

The weather was turning when they got there. The sky over the ocean had gone the color of a bruise, and the wind was coming hard off the water, flattening the beach grass and pushing the surf into long, gray, heavy rollers. Percy swam anyway. He couldn't help it. He waded in up to his chest and stood with his eyes closed and let the sea wash three months of upstate lake out of him, and felt it know him, and felt it say, in the only way it ever said anything: there you are.

When he came out, his mom was sitting on the cabin steps in his dad's old sweater, watching him.

She'd always worn that sweater out here. He'd never asked whose it was. He'd always known.

They made dinner — hot dogs on the grill, and blue cotton candy from the boardwalk stand, which his mom bought as a joke and he ate anyway — and ate it on the back steps with the wind roaring and the first fat drops of rain beginning to fall. When it got too wet to stay out, they went in and lit the oil lamp, because the power had flickered off, and sat on the creaky couch under one blanket while the storm came in off the sea and shook the walls.

"Percy," his mom said. "There's something I need to tell you."

He'd known it was coming. He'd known since she dropped the candy bag. He'd known, if he was honest, for a lot longer than that.

"About Dad," he said.

She looked at him sharply.

"Yeah," she said, after a moment. "About your dad." She took a breath. "Baby, your father wasn't lost at sea. Not exactly. He —" She stopped, and he watched her try three different ways of starting and throw them all out. "He was — he is —"

"A god," Percy said.

The rain drummed on the roof. The oil lamp flickered.

His mom stared at him.

"He's a god," Percy said again. His voice was steady. "The sea one. Isn't he. That's why the water — that's why I can do the things I can do. And the things that hunt kids like me, the ones that smell us. That's why you married Gabe." He swallowed. "Because of how he smells. To hide me. Right?"

His mom's face did something he'd never seen it do. It crumpled, and then it laughed, and then it crumpled again, all in about two seconds. Then she pulled him against her so hard he couldn't breathe, laughing and crying into his hair at the same time.

"How long?" she managed finally. "How long have you known?"

"I didn't know," Percy said, muffled. "I kind of figured. A while." He pulled back to look at her. "Mom. It's okay. You did it for me. I get it."

"Oh, baby." She wiped her eyes on the sweater sleeve. "He loved you, you know. He would have stayed if he could. They're not allowed — the gods have rules. And when you were born, I knew they'd come for you eventually. The monsters. So I made sure they couldn't smell you." She laughed again, wetly. "The worst man I could find. On purpose. And your father's gift, of course."

She reached out and touched the bracelet on his wrist.

"He gave it to me the morning he left," she said softly. "Before I even knew I was pregnant. He was standing in the water, and he put it in my hands, and he said, For the child. Keep it on him. It will keep him safe." She smiled, her eyes far away. "And it has, hasn't it? All these years. After what happened to Gabe's hand, I knew. I knew he was watching over you."

Percy looked at the black bead under her fingertip.

He thought about the lake, and the blind, and a voice that called him Ushio. He thought about frost on a kitchen window, and a dying man on a subway platform saying she's got her hand on your shoulder, son. He thought about his mom at the window in the dark, whispering thank you to the sea.

Let her keep her sea, Izanami had said.

But she'd also said, Your mother has never lied to you in her life.

And Percy had never really lied to her. Not once.

"Mom," he said. "I don't think Dad gave me this."

His mom's hand went still on the bead.

"Of course he did," she said. "I remember. He was standing in the water —"

"I know. But I don't think —" He didn't know how to say it. He'd never said any of it out loud — not since he was seven, over cereal. "Mom, remember when I was little? The lady I used to dream about? Behind the curtain? Who said she was my other mom?"

His mom's face went blank.

"She's real," Percy said. "She's not Dad. She's someone else. Somebody really old. She talks to me, through this." He touched the bead. "She's the one who did Gabe's hand. Not Dad. She's been with me my whole life, Mom, she —"

He stopped.

Because something was happening to his mother's face.

It wasn't fear, or anger, or confusion. It was worse than any of those. It was like watching water close over a stone. Her eyes had been fixed on his, wide and dark and listening — and now they were sliding away. Sliding off his face, off the bead, off whatever he'd just said, the way a raindrop slides down a waxed window. She blinked. She frowned very slightly, like someone who has walked into a room and forgotten why. She put her fingertips to her temple.

"Ow," she said vaguely. "Sorry, baby. Headache." She blinked again and smiled at him, a little puzzled. "What were we saying?"

Percy stared at her.

"Mom," he said. "The bracelet. The lady."

"The bracelet." She looked down at it fondly. "Your father gave me that, you know. The morning he left. He was standing in the water —"

And she told him again — the same words, the same far-away smile, for the child, keep it on him — as if she had never told him before. As if he had never said anything at all.

Percy sat on the couch with the storm shaking the walls and felt something cold open up inside him, deeper than the hollow, deeper than anything.

He didn't say it again.

He let her finish. He let her kiss the top of his head and tell him there was a camp, a safe place for kids like him, where he could learn and be protected — she'd always meant to send him; she'd only wanted one more summer, one more year, a little more time — and he nodded and said okay and didn't hear a word of it.

When she had fallen asleep against his shoulder, her breathing slow and even, Percy sat in the dark with the oil lamp guttering and spoke to the bead.

What did you do to her?

The answer came at once. She'd been waiting.

I gave her a kinder memory than the true one.

What's the true one?

A long silence. The rain hammered on the roof.

Not tonight.

Tell me.

Not tonight, Ushio. Her voice had changed — gone sharp and alert and very close. Something is coming. Wake her. Now.

Out in the storm, someone started pounding on the cabin door.

* * *​

It was Grover.

He was soaked to the skin, his hair plastered flat, his eyes wild — and he wasn't wearing pants. He wasn't wearing pants because he didn't need any, because from the waist down he was covered in thick, shaggy, dripping brown fur, and where his feet should have been he had a pair of small, black, split hooves.

Percy looked at the hooves. He looked at Grover.

Something of the woods, Izanami had said.

"Goat," Percy said.

"Satyr," Grover gasped, "and we don't have time — Mrs. Jackson, it's here, it's right behind me, we have to go now —"

His mom was already up. She didn't ask questions. She didn't look at Grover's legs. She grabbed the car keys off the hook and her raincoat off the chair and said, "Car. Both of you. Go."

The storm was enormous. The rain came sideways in sheets, so hard it stung, and the wind screamed off the ocean, and every few seconds lightning turned the whole world white and then black again. They ran for the car. His mom drove with her hands white on the wheel and her face set like stone, and the wipers couldn't keep up, and the headlights showed nothing but rain.

Percy sat in the back with Grover and felt for the thing behind them.

He found it almost immediately.

It was big. Very big, and very hot, and close. Not a smolder like Mrs. Dodds — a bonfire, a roaring, crackling, furious heat back there in the dark, coming after them down the road, burning like something that had died and come back so many times it had forgotten what being dead was. Every few seconds it was nearer.

"What is it?" he said. His voice came out flat and calm, the way it had in the kitchen with Gabe.

Grover looked at him, then at his mom, and swallowed.

"You know the story," Grover said. "The labyrinth. On Crete. The king who kept something in a maze under his palace, and fed it —"

"The Minotaur," said Percy.

Lightning hit the car.

He never remembered it clearly afterward. There was a light so bright it was a sound, and a sound so loud it was a light, and then the world turned over, and over again, and then he was hanging upside down in his seatbelt with glass in his hair and rain pouring in through the place where the window had been, and the car was on its roof in a ditch.

His mom was saying his name. Grover wasn't saying anything. Grover was slumped against the door with his eyes shut and blood on his forehead, and his flicker — Percy grabbed for it frantically — his flicker was there, green and dim and steady. Unconscious. Not dying. Not dying.

"Percy." His mom had gotten herself unbuckled. She was crawling across the roof of the car, which was the floor now, toward him. "Are you hurt? Baby, look at me —"

"I'm okay." He fumbled his belt loose and fell. "Grover's out. Mom, it's coming —"

"I know." She got her shoulder under Grover's arm. "Help me. The camp's right over that hill. See the pine tree at the top? Once you're past the tree, you're safe. It can't follow you in."

"You're coming."

"Baby —"

"You're coming, Mom —"

They dragged Grover out of the car between them, into the screaming rain. And at the bottom of the road, in a flash of lightning, Percy saw it.

It was eight feet tall. From the neck down it was a man, an enormous man, all slabs of muscle under skin that steamed in the rain, wearing nothing but a filthy rag around its waist. From the neck up it was a bull: a black bull with a ring through its nose and horns as wide as Percy's outstretched arms and eyes that glowed red in the dark like the open doors of furnaces.

It lowered its head and pawed the road, and the ground shook.

And it burned. It burned so hot that Percy could feel it on his skin from fifty yards away, through the rain, like standing too close to a house on fire.

"Run," his mom said. "Percy. Take Grover and run for the tree."

"Not without you."

"I can't go in." Her voice was very calm. "It's a place for kids like you. It won't let me in. Percy —"

The Minotaur charged.

* * *​

What happened next happened very fast.

They ran — up the slope, through the soaked grass, half-carrying Grover between them, the pine tree black against the lightning at the top of the hill. The Minotaur came up behind them like a train. And Percy's mom shoved him and Grover sideways, hard, and turned around to face it.

"Mom —"

The Minotaur's hands closed around her.

Percy screamed. He didn't know he was screaming. He was on his knees in the wet grass with Grover's dead weight across his lap, and the Minotaur had his mother around the waist in both its huge hands, lifting her off the ground, squeezing, and she was looking at him — right at him — and her mouth was making the shape of go.

There was a flash of golden light, and she was gone.

Not dropped. Not crushed. Gone — dissolved into a shimmer of gold that hung in the rain for an instant and winked out, and the Minotaur's hands closed on nothing at all.

Percy stopped screaming.

Because he was feeling for her flicker. He'd been feeling for it the whole time, frantically, the way you grab for someone's hand in the dark. And it hadn't gone out.

It hadn't gone out.

It had gone away. He felt it the way he'd felt the snapper on his line when he was seven — the tug and the run — his mother's flicker, bright and warm and furious and absolutely, completely alive, being pulled. Down, and away. West. Down through the ground and along a flat cold road toward a slow black river and a dog barking, farther with every second, still burning, still her.

Not dying. Not dead.

Taken.

* * *​

The rain stopped.

Not stopped falling — stopped. Every drop on that hillside, millions of them, froze where it hung in the air, glittering in the lightning like a curtain of glass beads. The wind died. The thunder cut off in the middle of a peal. And the cold came.

It came up out of the bead on Percy's wrist like a flood coming up through a drain. It came up out of the ground. It spread out from where he knelt in a wave — he could see it, white racing across the grass, the hanging raindrops going white and hard one after another, the whole hillside turning silver with frost in the space of a heartbeat, in June. The Minotaur bellowed and staggered, its hooves sliding on ice.

And Izanami spoke.

Not in his head. Not through the bead. Out loud, into the frozen air of the hillside, so that even the Minotaur flinched and threw up its head: a voice like a glacier cracking, like the floor of the sea, like a great stone grinding against the mouth of a cave.

"The Rich One," she said. "The western lord. I can smell him. Ash and asphodel and the river. He has put his hand on what is mine."

Percy's teeth were chattering, and not from the cold. "She's alive," he whispered. "Haha-ue, she's alive, I can feel her —"

"She is alive. She is not dead; I would know." The voice went quieter, and somehow that was worse. "He has taken your mother down his road to make you follow. He has put his hand on you, my son, through her. He will learn what that costs. I swear it on the stone."

The Minotaur lowered its head. Its red eyes found Percy, kneeling in the frost with Grover across his knees. It snorted, and steam poured from its nostrils into the frozen air.

It charged.

* * *​

Percy stood up.

He laid Grover down in the frosted grass. He didn't think about it. He wasn't thinking anymore at all; he was past thinking, the way you're past cold when you've been in the water too long. He turned to face the thing that had taken his mother, and he reached down into the hollow — into the black, still, endless sea under his ribs — and he opened it.

Not a crack. Not a tap. He opened it the way you open a floodgate.

At the same time he reached out, the way he'd reached for the porgies in Sheepshead Bay, for the fountain, for the rip current — for the storm.

The storm answered. All of it. Every frozen drop hanging in the air of that hillside, a whole sky's worth of rain. And the two things met inside him, the warm, salt, restless sea of his father and the cold, black, endless sea of his mother, and this time they didn't braid. They crashed. Whatever came out of the crash went out of him and into the storm, and the storm moved.

Every frozen raindrop on the hillside turned at once, like a school of fish turning, like a cloud of dust turning, and pointed at the Minotaur.

It was ten yards away. Head down. Horns out.

Percy let go.

The rain hit the Minotaur from every direction at once. Not as water — as ice. A million needles of it, a storm of frozen glass howling in out of the dark from every side, and the Minotaur's charge broke in the middle of a stride. It bellowed. It staggered, blinded, its hide whitening with frost, its hooves skating on the iced grass — and it went down. It went down hard, sideways, and one great horn struck a rock buried in the hillside with a crack like a gunshot.

The horn snapped off at the base.

Percy picked it up.

It was heavy and curved and longer than his arm, and its broken end was jagged as a spearhead. The Minotaur was struggling to rise, roaring, shaking ice out of its eyes. Percy could feel its heat, its huge furious bonfire: the thing that had been dying and coming back since before there were maps. The thing that had put its hands on his mother.

He walked up to it across the frozen grass.

It got its head up. Its red eyes found him.

You will feel it in your hands, she had said.

He felt it in his hands.

"You're hers," Percy said, out loud, to the Minotaur. And he drove the horn into its chest with both hands and all his weight and every push-up and stair and cold dawn swim he had ever done.

* * *​

The Minotaur didn't scream either.

It came apart around the horn in a burst of hot yellow dust, and the dust hung over the frosted hillside for one instant, glittering — and then turned, and poured in a long, hissing, glittering stream down into the black bead on Percy's wrist.

The hollow didn't break this time. It was already a sea.

The sea rose.

It rose like a spring tide, when the moon and the sun pull together and the water comes over the seawall and into the streets. He felt it come in and in and in, filling the dark places, climbing the black stone walls of the long road. And far, far below — under Long Island and the bedrock and the dark — he heard it again. That sound. That deep, slow, grinding groan, louder this time: a mountain shifting in its sleep.

A stone, moving.

Percy stood on the frozen hilltop holding a bull's horn, breathing. His heart was beating slowly — very slowly, like something settling down for the winter — and there was a taste of ash on his tongue. The frozen rain began to fall again, a few drops at a time, ice turning back into water, the storm coming back to itself. Thunder grumbled far out over the sea, confused. The frost was already beginning to melt.

His mother's flicker was gone. Not out. Just too far away to feel: down a flat gray road, past a river, in a place where no living thing was supposed to be.

He got Grover over his shoulders in a fireman's carry, the way he'd seen on TV. Grover was heavier than he looked. Percy didn't care. He reached into the hollow — he didn't need to ask anymore; it was just there, like breathing — and took a sip, and his legs stopped shaking, and he walked up the last of the hill toward the black pine at the top.

At the tree, he stopped and looked back.

The hillside below him was white. The road was white. The overturned car was white, frost feathered across its broken windows. In June, under the storm, like a winter hill in a picture book.

Beyond the tree, on the other side of the hill, he could see lights. A valley full of them: cabins, a big farmhouse, a lake glinting in the lightning, fields, and the dark line of the woods. Something like a camp.

We will bring her back, said Izanami. Her voice was inside him again, quiet and close and absolutely certain.

Percy looked down at the lights.

We? he said.

We, said Izanami.

He shifted Grover's weight on his shoulders, gripped the Minotaur's horn in his free hand, and walked past the pine tree and down into Half-Blood Hill.

 

[Abysseus]

Chapter Eleven — Half-Blood Hill​

The big farmhouse at the bottom of the hill had a wraparound porch, and on the porch, at a card table under a yellow bug light, two men were playing cards.

Percy saw them as he came down the last of the slope through the strawberry fields, with Grover over his shoulders and the rain soaking him to the skin. One of them was a short, pudgy man in a loud purple Hawaiian shirt, with a red nose and puffy eyes and black hair so curly it was almost purple too. He was drinking a can of diet soda and looked like he had been bored for about three thousand years.

The other one was in a wheelchair.

There was a girl on the porch, too, sitting on the railing in the shadows: about Percy's age, with curly blond hair and an orange camp T-shirt and gray eyes as sharp as a hawk's. They were fixed on the horn in his hand.

Percy stopped at the foot of the porch steps, water streaming off him, and looked up at Mr. Brunner.

Mr. Brunner looked back. His eyes went to Grover, limp across Percy's shoulders. To the bull's horn. To the hill behind him, where — Percy turned to look — the frost still lay white over the slope in the lightning, slowly melting, as if a giant had breathed on it.

Then his eyes came back to Percy, and stayed there.

"Hey, Mr. Brunner," Percy said. His voice was very calm. "Grover needs a doctor. And somebody took my mom."

Nobody said anything for a second.

Then Mr. Brunner did something Percy would remember for the rest of his life.

He put his hands on the arms of his wheelchair, and stood up.

He kept standing up. He kept going up — out of the chair, out of the blanket over his lap, except that it wasn't a blanket and it wasn't a lap. Below his waist, where his legs should have been, the chair came apart like a magician's box, and out of it unfolded the body of a horse. A white stallion's body, enormous, with a long pale tail and hooves the size of dinner plates that came down on the porch boards one after another, until Mr. Brunner stood there in the yellow light nine feet tall: a man to the waist, and a horse from there down.

Percy looked at him for a long moment.

"Horse," he said.

Old horse, said Izanami. He could hear her trying very hard not to laugh.

* * *​

They took Grover away — two older kids with a stretcher and worried faces, who asked no questions — and the blond girl went with them, looking back over her shoulder at Percy the whole way across the lawn. Then Mr. Brunner, who said his real name was Chiron, sat Percy down at the card table with a towel around his shoulders and a cup of something warm in his hands.

It tasted like porgy fried in butter on a pier in Sheepshead Bay, with lemon and too much salt. Percy had no idea how a drink could taste like that. He drank all of it.

"You're not surprised," Chiron said.

"I kind of figured," Percy said. "The Latin teacher who doesn't die. And she called you a horse."

Chiron went very still. "Who did?"

Percy drank the last of it and didn't answer.

Across the table, the man in the Hawaiian shirt snorted without looking up from his cards. "Oh, good," he said. "A mystery. I love those."

"Percy," Chiron said carefully. "I am going to tell you some things now that you may find difficult to believe."

"The gods are real," Percy said. "My dad's one of them. The sea one. There are monsters, and they come after kids like me because they can smell us, and this is a camp where they can't get in." He set the cup down. "My mom told me tonight. Before."

Chiron's face changed. "Percy. About your mother —"

"She's not dead."

The words came out flat and hard, and Chiron stopped.

"I know what it looked like," Percy said. "I know what you're going to say. It's not true. She's not dead. Somebody took her." He looked up at Chiron, and he didn't care what showed in his face. "She went west. Down. Somebody pulled her down a road to a river, and there's a dog. She's alive down there. I can feel her."

The man in the Hawaiian shirt had stopped looking at his cards.

Chiron was silent for a long time. When he spoke again, his voice was very quiet.

"How," he said, "could you possibly know that?"

Percy looked out at the hill. The frost was nearly gone now, only a faint silver sheen on the grass where the light reached.

"I just do," he said.

* * *​

"Percy." Chiron leaned forward, and behind him his long tail swished once, slowly. "In May, at the museum. What happened to Mrs. Dodds?"

"You were there."

"I was outside. I gave you the sword. When I came back, you were standing in the gallery holding it, and she was gone." His old brown eyes were very kind and very steady, and they didn't let go. "Monsters do not simply stay dead, Percy. She should have risen from Tartarus within days. It has been five weeks. Her sisters are turning the mortal world upside down looking for her. Her master is — very upset." He paused. "What did you do?"

Percy thought about it.

He thought about never show anyone the whole of what you are. He thought about the blind, and his promise. He thought about Mr. Brunner's voice through his office door: I will have to hope he tells me the truth.

He didn't want to lie to Chiron. He liked Chiron. Chiron was the only teacher who had ever thought he was smart.

So he didn't lie.

"I hit her with your sword," he said. "Really hard."

Chiron waited.

"That's all I've got," Percy said. "Sorry. I was kind of busy at the time. Maybe she's on vacation."

The man in the Hawaiian shirt laughed out loud — one short, surprised bark — and then looked annoyed with himself for doing it.

"Oh, I like this one," he said. "No, I don't. But I like that." He laid his cards face down on the table and turned in his chair, and for the first time he really looked at Percy.

His eyes were purple. Not violet, not lilac: purple, like the deep heart of a grape, and something swam in the back of them that made Percy's skin prickle. Something wild and hot and a little bit crazy, like the inside of a party just before someone throws a chair.

"Mr. D," said Chiron, warningly.

"I'm only looking, Chiron. Let a god look." Mr. D wrinkled his red nose. "Do you know what you smell like, Paul Jamison?"

"Percy Jackson."

"That's what I said. You smell like a funeral." Mr. D sniffed again, delicately, the way a man sniffs a wine he suspects has turned. "Not a nice one, either. Not lilies and organ music. An old one. Wet stone and turned earth, and something under the earth that's been lying there in the dark a very long time." He tilted his head. "I've been to the Underworld, you know. Went down once to fetch my mother back. I know what my uncle's kingdom smells like — ashes and asphodel and that wretched river." He leaned back in his chair. "And that's not it. That's not it at all. That's some other dark entirely, little sea-brat, and I've never smelled it before in all my long and tedious immortal life."

Nobody said anything. Out on the hill, the last of the frost went out like a breath.

"Well," said Mr. D, and turned back to his cards. "Not my problem. Chiron, it's your deal."

Percy stared at the back of his head.

He brought his mother back, he thought. From down there. He went down, and he got her, and he brought her back.

Yes, said Izanami. It has been done. A pause, low and certain. It will be done again.

* * *​

They put him in the Hermes cabin, because officially nobody knew yet who his father was.

It was crowded and loud and smelled like dirty socks, and it was full of kids who were all, every single one of them, like him: half-bloods, kids whose moms or dads were gods, who had grown up getting kicked out of schools and chased by things nobody else could see. Percy had never been in a room full of people like him. He didn't know what to do with it. Mostly he lay on his sleeping bag in a corner of the floor and stared at the ceiling and felt for his mother's flicker every few minutes, and couldn't find it.

The head counselor was a tall, easygoing nineteen-year-old named Luke, with sandy hair and a quick crooked smile and a long white scar down one side of his face. He found Percy a sleeping bag and a toothbrush and a spot on the floor, told him not to worry about his stuff getting stolen — "much" — and was the first person at camp who made Percy laugh.

Percy liked him immediately.

So it bothered him, a lot, that Luke's flicker was wrong.

It was there: warm and strong and bright, a good flicker, a young man's, with years and years of wax under it. But something was wrapped around it. Something cold and golden and patient, coiled around Luke's flame like a hand closed loosely around a candle. Like a hand that hadn't decided yet whether to shelter the flame or snuff it.

What is that? Percy asked the first night, lying on the floor in the dark. On Luke.

Izanami was quiet a long time.

Something very old, she said finally, and very hungry, and not dead. Not alive, either. Something from the pit, I think, that was cut into pieces once and has not forgotten it. A pause. I do not know its name. But it is holding that boy's heart in its hand, Ushio. Be careful of him. Be kind to him, if you can. But be careful.

He was careful. He was kind. It was easy to be kind to Luke. Luke made it easy.

The next days went by in a blur of things that should have been amazing and mostly weren't, because his mother was somewhere at the bottom of the world and no one would let him go and get her. He learned that the girl from the porch was named Annabeth, and that she was a daughter of Athena, and that she had been at camp since she was seven, and that she wanted, more than anything, to go on a quest. He learned that the lake had naiads in it who giggled and waved when he walked by, and that there was a climbing wall that poured lava, and a forest full of monsters that campers hunted for practice. He learned sword fighting from Luke, and was better at it than he had any right to be — not because he knew anything, but because he could feel the other kid's flicker jump, just slightly, the instant before they moved, and he could be somewhere else by the time their blade arrived.

And he learned that Clarisse La Rue, daughter of Ares, liked to welcome new kids by sticking their heads in a toilet.

She tried it on his second day. She and three of her cabinmates cornered him behind the bathhouse, big and grinning and smelling of war paint and sweat, and Clarisse grabbed him by the collar and said something about fresh meat.

Percy looked at her.

He didn't do anything. He didn't call the water. There was a whole bathhouse full of it ten feet away, humming in its pipes, practically begging, and he didn't call it. He just looked at her, and let her see — for a second, only a little — what was in the back of his eyes. The cold. The black lake. The long road going down.

He felt her flicker jump. Then it shrank, the way Grover's used to shrink whenever Mrs. Dodds walked by.

Clarisse let go of his collar.

She stood there frowning, as if she'd forgotten something important. Her cabinmates looked at her, confused. Under the war paint, her face had gone a little pale.

"Whatever," she said at last. "You're not worth it." And she turned and walked away, fast, and her cabinmates followed, and Percy heard one of them say what's wrong with you? and Clarisse say shut up in a voice that wasn't quite steady.

What did I do? Percy asked, shaken.

You let her look down, said Izanami. Only for a moment. Every living thing knows the road is there, Ushio. Most of them spend their whole lives not looking at it. You showed her where it was. A pause, with a faint, grim amusement in it. She will not trouble you again. Not soon.

Annabeth, who had watched the whole thing from behind a tree, came and found him afterward.

"What did you do to her?" she demanded.

"Nothing."

"You did something. I've seen Clarisse charge a hydra. I've never once seen her back down." Annabeth's gray eyes narrowed. She looked at him the way you'd look at a problem you couldn't solve yet but fully intended to. "And you came over the hill with the Minotaur's horn, and the whole hill was frozen, in June, and you won't say how. And Chiron looks at you like —" She stopped.

"Like what?"

"Like somebody just walked over his grave." She crossed her arms. "Monsters go back to Tartarus. Everybody knows that. It's the one thing everybody knows. So why is every adult at this camp acting like they don't know where yours went?"

Percy looked at her for a long moment.

"I don't know," he said. Which was true, in a way. He didn't know where Tartarus was. He only knew where it wasn't.

"I'm going to figure you out," Annabeth said. "Just so you know."

"Okay," Percy said. And then, because he couldn't help it: "Good luck."

She almost smiled. She caught it just in time.

* * *​

On Friday night there was capture the flag.

The whole camp split into two teams and went into the woods with armor and swords and spears, and the point of the game was to carry the other team's flag back across the creek without getting killed, which, Luke assured him cheerfully, almost never happened. Annabeth was on Percy's team. She put him on border patrol by the creek, alone, and wouldn't say why. He figured out why about four minutes after the conch horn blew, when five kids from the Ares cabin came crashing out of the trees toward him with Clarisse in the lead.

He was bait. She'd made him bait. While Ares came after him, the rest of the team would go around the other way.

Percy almost laughed.

"Keep him away from the water," Clarisse was snarling at her cabinmates. "Keep him out of it —" She had been thinking about it too, he realized. All week. The frozen hill. The look behind the bathhouse. She'd figured out something, and she'd figured it was the water.

She was right. She was just about five years too late.

Percy stepped back into the creek.

The water was cold and fast and only shin-deep, and it was the best thing he had felt in a week. It came up around his legs and knew him. The ache of the week went out of his arms, the fog went out of his head, and the bruises he'd collected in sword practice faded right off his skin. He felt strong. He felt awake.

He didn't reach for the hollow. He didn't need to, and he didn't want to — not here, not with half the camp in the woods around him. Show them what they expect, Izanami had told him. Keep the rest behind the blind.

So he showed them a son of the sea.

When the first Ares kid charged into the creek, Percy didn't even raise his sword. He just asked, and the creek rose up around the kid's legs like a pair of hands and pulled them out from under him, and he went down face-first in a tremendous splash. The second, Percy knocked flat with a wave the size of a hall closet. The third and fourth came at him together, and he slipped between them — he felt their flickers jump just before they swung and was elsewhere when the blades came down — and the creek wrapped around their ankles and dumped them on top of each other. And Clarisse —

Clarisse came last, with an electric spear crackling blue in her hands, her face set and furious and scared. Percy met her in the middle of the creek, and the water came up over both of them in a roaring wall, and when it fell away Clarisse was sitting on her backside in the shallows with her spear snapped in half across her knee and her helmet gone, sputtering.

And on the far side of the woods, someone was yelling that Luke had the flag.

* * *​

The cheering had only just started when Percy felt the fire.

It came from the woods behind him. It was hot — so hot — and smoldering, like Mrs. Dodds, like the Minotaur: a furnace in the dark that had died and come back and died and come back. It was coming fast. And it was coming for him.

He turned around.

The thing that came out of the trees was bigger than a pickup truck. It was a dog, or it had been made to look like one, the way a child's drawing looks like a person: black as a pit, with eyes like two embers and teeth like a wood chipper and a stink of sulfur and ash rolling off it. It didn't bark. It didn't growl. It launched itself out of the shadows and across the creek bank, and Percy had just enough time to think it's from down there, it's from the gray road before it hit him.

He went down under it into the water. Claws raked across his chest, and he felt his skin open, and the creek around him went dark. The thing's breath was in his face, hot and rotten. Somebody was screaming. He couldn't breathe.

He got his sword up somehow — he never knew how — and drove it up into the thing's chest, into the furnace, into the heat.

The hellhound burst into dust.

It came apart all over him in a choking cloud of black ash, hot as cinders, and the ash hung in the air over the creek for a single instant —

And the hollow leaned.

Harder than it ever had. Harder than for the whale. It leaned toward that cloud of ash the way a starving thing leans toward food, and it would have been so easy — so easy — just to mean it, just to think you're hers and watch the ash turn and pour into his wrist and feel the sea rise. He wanted it so badly his teeth ached. He was bleeding and cold, and his mother was at the bottom of the world, and he wanted to feel that sea rise more than he had ever wanted anything.

And through the ash, he saw Chiron.

The centaur had come galloping out of the trees with a bow in his hands and an arrow on the string, too late, and he had stopped short on the creek bank. He wasn't looking at Percy.

He was looking at the ash.

He was watching it the way you'd watch a coin you'd tossed in the air: utterly still, utterly focused, waiting to see which way it came down.

He's watching, Percy thought. He wants to see where it goes.

The ash hung over the creek.

Percy closed his eyes. And he didn't mean anything at all.

He let it go.

It hurt. It actually hurt, like letting go of a rope with your hands already burned. The ash drifted. It sank. It settled into the rocks and mud of the creek bank, and seeped away into the earth, and went down, down, the long ordinary way, to the pit beneath the western world, where it belonged. Where everyone expected it to go.

On the bank, Chiron let out a long, slow breath and lowered his bow. His shoulders came down an inch.

He saw what he expected, Izanami said quietly. Did you see? He wanted to know where it would go. Now he thinks he knows.

I know, Percy said. That's why I let it go.

There was a pause.

And then she laughed — not the huge, wild laugh from the museum, but something small and low and warm: the laugh of someone who has just watched her child do something very clever.

Oh, said Izanami. You are mine, aren't you. Clever, clever boy.

* * *​

"Percy!" Annabeth was splashing toward him through the creek. "Percy, your chest, you're —"

She stopped.

Percy looked down. He was sitting in the creek, in the cold running water, and his chest had been torn open — he'd felt it — and he could see the last of his blood washing away downstream.

But the wounds were closing. He watched them pull shut, faster than frost melting off a windshield, faster than the barnacle cuts on the jetty when he was eight, until there was nothing but clean skin and a few pink lines, and then not even those.

The whole camp had come out of the woods. They stood on both banks of the creek in their armor, staring at him. The Ares kids. The Hermes kids. Luke, with the enemy flag hanging forgotten from his hand. Annabeth, knee-deep in the water, her mouth open.

And Chiron, his bow lowered, looking not at Percy but at something just above his head.

Percy looked up.

A light hung in the air over him. Green and blue, glowing, slowly turning — the color of deep water with the sun coming through it, like the shimmer of sunlight on the bottom of a pool. A three-pronged spear.

A trident.

It hung over his head for a long moment, shining, and the creek water around him shone with it, and every kid on both banks went down on one knee. Even Clarisse. Even Luke.

"Well," said Chiron, very quietly, into the silence. "That settles that." He bowed his head. "Welcome, son of Poseidon."

The trident shimmered, and faded, and was gone.

Percy sat in the creek with the water running cold around him and the bead cold on his wrist and the hollow still and black and endless under his ribs, and he looked up at the empty air where the light had been.

Twelve years, said Izanami.

Her voice was very quiet. There was no laughter in it now. There was something else: something old and cold and enormously patient, like a tide that has been going out for a very long time and is just beginning, far off, to turn.

Twelve years he left you on the shore. He did not come when you were seven and caught your first fish. He did not come when you were eight and bleeding on the rocks, or when you were nine and the sea he rules tried to drown you. He did not come when the man struck you. He did not come on the hill, when they took your mother. A pause. And now that you are strong, and the whole of his family is watching, he hangs his sign over your head in the light and calls you his.

Percy said nothing. He watched the creek run over his hands.

Let him, said Izanami softly. Let him claim you, Ushio. Let them all look at you and see the sea.

And then, so close and so fierce that he felt it like a hand closing on his shoulder:

They will never see me.

* * *​

End of Part One.