"Get out," said Percy.
The Fates did not get out. They rocked gently in their chairs in the kitchen doorway, the yarn flowing between their fingers, while all around them the party stood frozen like a photograph. The drop of blue punch hung in the air. Matt's hand was halfway to his face. Sally was smiling at someone across the room with a cake knife in her hand, her eyes bright, her cheeks flushed, utterly still.
Percy walked over to his mother. He touched her arm. It was warm, but it didn't move, didn't respond. It was like touching a statue that someone had left out in the sun.
"Let her go," he said.
"She is not harmed, child," said Lachesis. "None of them are. To them, not a single second will pass. When we leave, the punch will spill, and your mother will cut the cake, and your friend will finish telling the other one that a hot dog is a taco."
"It's not a taco," Percy said automatically. Then he caught himself, and turned around, and looked at the three old women with all the fury of two lifetimes. "You promised me. You sat by my fire in Tartarus and you promised me. No gods, no monsters, no prophecies. A long, quiet, ordinary life. That's what you said."
"We did," Atropos agreed. Her shears glinted in the lamplight.
"So what changed?"
The Fates looked at one another. Then Clotho reached into her basket and drew out a length of thread, and held it up so he could see.
It was not a single thread. It was a whole skein, dozens and dozens of strands, all twisted together, bright and multicolored. And as Percy watched, the thread began to fray. It frayed from the inside out, strand after strand snapping and curling back, the colors draining out of it until it was gray, and then black, and then it crumbled into ash in Clotho's hand and drifted down onto the kitchen floor.
"That," said Clotho softly, "is this world. As it will be, four years from now."
Percy stared at the ash on the floor.
"You said there was no catch," he said, but it came out quieter than he wanted.
"There was no catch," said Lachesis. "We did not lie to you. When we offered you this life, we believed this world would hold. It was darker than your old one, yes. More dangerous. Harsher gods, crueler monsters, a Titan lord stirring sooner and stronger in the pit. But it had its own son of Poseidon, its own child of prophecy. We thought it would hold." She shook her head. "We were wrong."
They told him everything. He didn't sit down for any of it. He stood next to his frozen mother with his hand on her arm, as if he could protect her by holding on, and he listened.
The son of Poseidon in this world was a boy named Ezra.
Percy flinched when he heard the name, and the Fates saw it, and Atropos said, "Yes. The same. Or nearly the same. The thread that was spun into your old life, to choke yours, was spun from this one. Someone found this Ezra, in this world, and copied him, and wove the copy into your tapestry."
"Who?"
"We do not know." Atropos's voice was hard as iron. "That is the first thing that frightens us. There are very few beings who can reach into the loom. We do not know which of them did it."
"And the second thing?"
"The second thing," said Clotho, "is that this Ezra is not the one who killed your mother."
Percy went very still.
"This Ezra is fourteen years old," Clotho went on. "He is a student at Yancy Academy, in upstate New York. His mother is a mortal woman who loves him and works too hard and tells him every day that he is destined for great things, because she knows who his father is, and she cannot bear to tell him how dangerous that will be. He is arrogant. He is cruel to boys who are weaker than him, and cruel to his satyr friend who pretends to be a boy on crutches. He believes that being the son of Poseidon makes him better than everyone around him." She paused. "But he has not killed anyone. He has not drowned anyone's mother in her kitchen. He has not done anything at all, yet, except be a proud and foolish child."
"And in four years," Lachesis said, "his pride will destroy the world."
They showed him. Not in thread, this time. Lachesis held up her yardstick, and the air in front of it shimmered, and Percy saw. He saw the Lightning Thief quest go wrong: Ezra refusing to listen to Grover, picking a fight with Ares, losing the bolt. He saw Luke Castellan's plans succeed, one by one, because the boy who was meant to stop them was too busy proving how great he was. He saw the Labyrinth, and Daedalus, and the army of Kronos pouring into Camp Half-Blood through the tunnels, and the camp burning. He saw Manhattan, and the Titan lord in Luke's body walking up the steps of the Empire State Building with nothing standing in his way.
He saw Olympus fall. Not the way it almost had, in his old life. Really fall. The thrones shattered, the gods scattered and fading, and then, worse, the thing that came after: Gaia waking in the Earth, the giants rising, and nothing left to stop them. No gods. No camps. No heroes.
He saw the mortal world crack open like an egg.
"We have tried," said Atropos. "Gods, how we have tried. We have spun this tapestry a thousand ways. We gave the prophecy to Thalia Grace instead. She fell to Kronos at sixteen. We gave it to Nico di Angelo. He went mad in the Labyrinth. We gave it to other children, children of Zeus and Hades who should never have been born, and every time, every single time, the thread frays."
"This world," said Clotho, "was not built to be saved by the people in it. It needs someone from outside. Someone who knows what is coming. Someone who has already done it once."
"No," said Percy.
It took a long time.
He shouted. He'd never shouted at a primordial force of the universe before, and it turned out to be a lot like shouting at the ocean: they just sat there and let it break over them. He told them about Tartarus, about the seven years, about the broom. He told them that he had given everything, everything, and that the one thing he had asked for in return was to be left alone.
"I'm fourteen," he said. "I'm fourteen years old and I just got into high school and my mom made a cake. Do you understand that? My mom made a cake, and she's alive, and she's going to stay alive, and I'm not going to go running off to a camp full of people who are going to turn on me the second it's convenient."
"You do not know that they would," Lachesis said gently.
"I know they did."
"Not here."
"Doesn't matter." Percy's hands were shaking. "It doesn't matter. The world needs saving, fine. The world always needs saving. Find somebody else."
"There is no one else, child."
"Then let it burn!"
The words hung in the frozen air like the drop of punch. He heard them, and hated them, and couldn't take them back.
And the Fates, very quietly, did not argue. They looked past him, at the room. At Sally with her cake knife. At Paul on the fire escape with his spatula raised. At Matt's grandmother with tears on her cheeks, and Nancy's mother in her scrubs, and Rachel on the arm of the couch with her sketchbook open on her knee. Percy followed their gaze. He looked at Rachel's sketch. She'd drawn him, standing by the window with his cup of punch, looking out at the city. She'd drawn him smiling.
"Four years," Atropos said. "Four years, and then the thread frays. Your mother. Your father. Your friends. The baby sister you do not know yet that you will have."
Percy looked at her sharply.
Atropos's ancient mouth softened, just a little. "Estelle," she said. "Your mother will learn of her in the autumn. She will be born the following summer. Unless the world ends first."
Percy sat down, heavily, on the arm of the couch beside Rachel. He put his face in his hands. For a long time, there was no sound in the apartment except the click of the needles.
"If I do this," he said at last, without lifting his head. "If. I have conditions."
"Name them," said Clotho.
He named them.
The first: his family would be safe. Sally, Paul, the baby. Nancy, Matt, Rachel, and their families. Whatever happened to him, whatever he had to fight, none of it would touch them. No monsters at their doors. No half-brothers in their kitchens.
"Done," said Atropos, and snipped the air with her shears, and something in the apartment shifted, like a lock clicking shut. "Their threads are bound in a protection the gods themselves cannot break. Not while you live."
The second: he would not be anyone's weapon. Not the gods', not the Fates', not Olympus's. He would save this world, but he would do it his way. When it was done, he would owe nothing to anyone, and he would be free to do whatever he wanted with the rest of his life. Free to walk away. Free to burn Olympus down if he felt like it.
The three sisters looked at one another for a long moment.
"Done," said Lachesis. "Though we would ask you not to burn it down."
"No promises."
The third condition was the one that made his voice crack.
"The ones who stood up," he said. "At the trial. Grover, Clarisse, Nico, Thalia, Tyson. Rachel." He looked at the girl frozen beside him, her pencil still touching the page. "Hestia. Hades. Artemis. Everybody who stood with me when it cost them something. They exist in this world too, right? Different, but them?"
"They do," said Clotho.
"I want them to remember. Not everything at once, I don't want to fry anybody's brain. But I want them to remember who they were to me. And who I was to them." He swallowed. "I'm not doing this alone. Not again."
The Fates were quiet for so long that he thought they would refuse. Then Clotho reached into her basket and drew out a handful of threads: a green one for Grover, red for Clarisse, black for Nico, electric blue for Thalia, a thick brown one for Tyson, silver for Artemis, a warm gold for Hestia, a deep, dark violet for Hades. And last, a bright, rebellious green with a streak of paint-red running through it, for Rachel.
She tied a tiny knot in each one.
"It will come to them slowly," she said. "In dreams, at first. Then in moments. A smell, a word, a face. When they see you, it will come faster. When they fight beside you, faster still. By the time it matters most, they will know you." She looked up. "That is the best we can do without breaking them."
Percy looked at Rachel. "And her?"
"She has the Sight," Atropos said. "She always did. In her, it will come quickest of all." The old woman almost smiled. "She has, perhaps, already begun to remember."
Something's coming, Rachel had said, a minute before the clock stopped.
Percy let out a long breath. "Okay," he said. "Okay. Then I'm in."
"There is one more thing," said Lachesis. "You are mortal."
"Yeah, I've noticed. I got fished out of a pool by a lifeguard."
"You cannot fight what is coming as a mortal. Not even with all your memories. Not even with all your skill." She reached into her sleeve. "So we have brought you a gift. It is not from us. It is from one older than us. Older than the gods, older than the Titans, older than Gaia and Ouranos and the pit itself."
She held out her hand, palm up. In it sat a small sphere of light. It was no bigger than a marble, and it was every color and no color, and looking at it made Percy's eyes water, because it looked like the inside of the universe before anything had a name.
"Chaos," Percy said.
"The Creator," Clotho agreed. "Chaos does not often interfere. But Chaos does not like it when someone reaches into the loom. It made this for you. The gods know nothing about it, and they will know nothing about it unless you tell them."
Percy took the sphere. It was warm. It dissolved into his palm like a sugar cube in tea, and for a second he felt it run up his arm and into his chest and into his head, and every nerve in his body lit up like a city at night.
Then a voice spoke inside his mind.
[Connection established.]
[Host: Perseus Jackson. Species: Human (Mortal). Age: 14.]
[Initializing Evolution System... Complete.]
[Assistant Module "Great Sage" online.]
It was a flat voice. No emotion in it at all, like a GPS giving directions. A translucent blue panel unfolded in the air in front of Percy's eyes, glowing softly, covered in text.
[Greetings, Host. I am Great Sage. I will provide analysis, guidance, and administrative support for the Evolution System.]
[System functions: Status. Inventory. Quests. Skills. The Tower. Faith Point Exchange. Patron Blessing Summons.]
[Mandatory initialization step pending: Divine Parentage Selection.]
"Divine parentage," Percy said out loud. "What does that mean?"
"You are mortal," said Lachesis. "You will remain mortal. Your mother is Sally Jackson and your father is Paul Blofis, and that will never change. But the System will choose a god to stand as your divine parent, in all the ways that matter to the world above. You will have the powers of that god's children. And the god will know you as their own."
"Like an adoption," Percy said slowly.
"Like an adoption," Clotho agreed. "The System rewrites what it must. The god will remember choosing you. They will not question why. Their heart will turn toward you as toward their own child."
[Divine Parentage Selection will be determined by the Wheel of Lineage. Spin now?]
A wheel unfolded in the air beside the blue panel. It was enormous, gold and bronze, divided into dozens of segments of different sizes, each one marked with a glowing symbol. Percy saw the eagle and lightning of Zeus. The owl of Athena. The sun of Apollo, the moon of Artemis, the skull of Hades, the flame of Hephaestus, the caduceus of Hermes. Minor gods, too: Nike, Hecate, Nemesis, Hypnos. The segments for the Big Three were tiny, slivers barely wide enough to see.
And there, at the top of the wheel, was a trident.
"Take that off," Percy said.
[Clarify.]
"The trident. Poseidon. Take him off the wheel. I don't care who I get. Anybody but him."
There was a brief pause.
[Host request: Exclude "Poseidon" from the Wheel of Lineage. Processing...]
[Request accepted. Exclusion requires a one-time cost of 100 Faith Points. Host currently has 0 Faith Points. Debt recorded.]
[Note: Host has begun with debt. This is statistically unusual.]
"Story of my life," Percy said.
The trident segment flickered and went dark. The wheel rearranged itself, the other segments expanding to fill the gap.
Percy looked at the Fates. All three of them were watching him, needles still, with expressions that were very hard to read.
"Spin," he said.
[Spinning.]
The wheel turned. Slowly at first, then faster, a blur of gold and bronze and glowing symbols, so fast that the light of it threw shadows on the walls of the frozen apartment. Percy watched it go. He found he was holding his breath. Not Ares, he thought. Please, anybody but Ares. Or Aphrodite. Or Dionysus. Oh gods, what if it's Dionysus.
The wheel slowed. The ticking of the pointer across the pegs got louder, sharper. Click. Click. Click. It slid past Athena's owl. Past Hades's skull. Past Hermes. It crept, it trembled, it hung for one agonizing heartbeat on the boundary between two segments.
It stopped.
On a sliver of gold so thin he almost couldn't see it. On an eagle, wings spread, with a lightning bolt clutched in its talons.
[Divine Parentage determined: ZEUS, King of the Gods, Lord of the Sky.]
[Probability of result: 0.8%.]
[Applying lineage... Host has acquired: Child of Zeus (Mortal Variant).]
[Abilities unlocked: Aerokinesis (Novice). Electrokinesis (Novice). Flight (Locked). Divine Authority of the Sky (Locked).]
[Rewriting relevant threads... Complete. Zeus now recognizes Host as his adopted son.]
Percy stared at the eagle.
He thought about the throne room on Olympus. He thought about Zeus standing eleven feet tall with the master bolt pointed at his heart. You will be cast into Tartarus. You will not return.
He started to laugh. He couldn't help it. He laughed until his ribs ached, sitting on the arm of the couch in his frozen apartment, with his frozen mother and his frozen friends all around him, and the three Fates rocking quietly in the doorway.
"Of course," he gasped. "Of course it's him. Of course it is."
"The Wheel," said Clotho, very dryly, "has a sense of humor."
Outside the window, over the East River, thunder rolled across a clear evening sky. Percy felt it in his chest. He felt the air in the room, every current, every draft, every molecule, the way he had once felt the water. It was different. Lighter. Wilder. It crackled faintly along his fingertips.
[Main Quest Issued: "The Child of Prophecy."]
[Objective: Ensure the survival of Ezra Vance, son of Poseidon, until his arrival at Camp Half-Blood.]
[Time limit: 31 days.]
[Reward: Camp Half-Blood Access Key. 1,000 Faith Points. ???]
[Failure: The thread frays.]
Percy read it twice. Then he looked up at the Fates.
"Thirty-one days," he said.
"Thirty-one days," agreed Atropos. "Until the Minotaur."
"Protect Ezra." He said the name like it tasted bad. "You want me to protect Ezra."
"We want you to protect the world," Lachesis said. "For now, those are the same thing." She stood up from her rocking chair, and her sisters stood with her, and the chairs and the yarn and the basket began to fade. "Train, Perseus. The Tower will teach you. You have a month to become strong enough to stand among demigods. Then you will go to camp, and you will do what you must."
"Wait. What's the Tower? What does the question mark reward mean? What—"
But they were gone.
The clock on the wall ticked.
The drop of blue punch hit the carpet. Nancy finished her sentence. "—basically a taco, Matt, I'm right and you know I'm right." Paul shouted from the fire escape that the burgers were done. Sally sliced into the blue cake and everybody cheered. And the music came back on, too loud, some song Rachel had picked, with a drumbeat that thudded through the floor.
Rachel looked up from her sketchbook. Her pencil had slid across the page, a long, dark line right through the middle of her drawing. She frowned at it. Then she looked at Percy, sitting next to her on the arm of the couch, and her green eyes were wide and strange.
"Percy," she whispered. "Why do I remember you with a sword?"
Percy smiled at her. It was a tired smile, and a sad one, but it was real.
"Long story," he said. "Want some cake?"
In the corner of his vision, just at the edge of sight, a small blue notification blinked patiently.
[The Tower: Floor 1 is now open.]