The big day Ezra had promised started with a sword missing from the armory.
Percy woke to someone pounding on the door of the tiny side room he'd been given in the Big House. Chiron had offered it the night before, very gently, after Percy had come up from the beach and found his bunk in Cabin Three stripped bare and his things dumped in a cardboard box outside the door. "Just for tonight," Chiron had said. "Until tempers cool." He had not looked Percy in the eye when he said it.
Now it was barely dawn, and the pounding was the Hephaestus cabin counselor, Jake Mason, with three of his siblings behind him. Jake had a burn scar down one arm from the Battle of Manhattan. Percy had carried him out of a collapsing building on Fifth Avenue to get him that scar treated.
"Where is it?" Jake demanded.
Percy squinted at him. "Where's what?"
"Don't play dumb. The Beckendorf blade."
Percy came fully awake. Charles Beckendorf had forged one sword before he died on the Princess Andromeda, a half-finished thing he'd been working on for Silena, with her name worked into the guard in tiny bronze letters. The Hephaestus cabin kept it on a stand in the forge, wrapped in velvet. Nobody touched it. Nobody would ever touch it.
"Jake," Percy said slowly, "I would never."
"It was in the forge at curfew. It was gone at five. You were the only one out of bounds last night."
"I was on the beach. Everybody saw me on the beach."
"Everybody saw you come back up from the beach," said one of the Hephaestus girls, Nyssa. "Past the forge."
It was the only way back up from the beach. Percy opened his mouth to say so, and that was when Ezra appeared in the hallway behind them, a little out of breath, as if he'd come running.
"Guys," Ezra said. "Guys, I found it."
He was holding the sword. It was wrapped in a camp T-shirt, and the T-shirt was soaking wet. Seawater dripped onto the floorboards.
"It was in the surf," Ezra said. "Down past the canoe lake, right where the water gets deep. Like someone tried to throw it out to sea and it washed back in." He looked at Percy with an expression of wounded disbelief so perfectly pitched that Percy almost admired it. "Why would you do that, man? Why would you do that to them?"
Percy looked at the sword. It was Beckendorf's, no doubt about it; he could see Silena's name glinting on the guard. The salt water had already started to dull the bronze.
"I didn't," he said.
Nobody listened.
It went on like that.
The Demeter cabin's prize strawberry patch, the one that funded half of camp's operating budget through the sale of jam to New York delis, was found flooded and rotting by noon, drowned in brackish water that had come up through the ground in a way that only a child of Poseidon could manage. The pegasus stables were found unlatched, three of the horses gone out over the Sound. Blackjack was not among them; Percy had been calling for Blackjack since he'd arrived, and the pegasus had not come, and Percy was starting to suspect that whatever was in everyone else's heads had gotten into Blackjack's, too.
By the afternoon, campers were crossing to the other side of the paths when he walked by. By dinner, someone had painted the word TRAITOR on the steps of the Big House in dripping red letters. Percy scrubbed it off himself with a bucket and a brush while the sun went down, and nobody offered to help, and when he went to put the bucket away somebody had already written it again on the back of the porch.
He went to Chiron. He went three times.
The first time, Chiron listened. He sat in his wheelchair disguise in the Big House parlor with his hands folded in his lap and his old brown eyes full of sorrow, and he heard Percy out, and when Percy was done he said, "I believe that you believe this, my boy."
"That's not the same as believing me."
"No," Chiron agreed. "It is not." He rubbed his forehead. "Percy. I have trained heroes for three thousand years. I have watched the very best of them turn bitter. I have watched them come to believe that the world owed them for their sacrifices, and I have watched what they did when the world declined to pay." He looked older than Percy had ever seen him. "I do not want to see it happen to you."
"It's not happening to me. It's happening around me. Chiron, there's something wrong with Ezra. When he touches people—"
Chiron winced. It was a small wince, quickly hidden, but Percy saw his hand twitch toward his temple. The same place Grover had touched. The same place Annabeth's frown had sat.
"That will be all for today," Chiron said.
The second time, Percy didn't get past the porch. Mr. D was sitting in a deck chair with his feet up and a can of Diet Coke sweating in his hand, and he looked at Percy over the tops of his sunglasses and said, "Peter Johnson. Go away."
"Mr. D, please, I just need five minutes—"
"I said go away." The god of wine took a long, deliberate sip. "I have been instructed, by persons higher up than myself, to let this situation resolve itself. I intend to do so. If I were you, I would spend less time knocking on doors and more time thinking very hard about what you might have done to irritate an Olympian."
"Which Olympian?"
Dionysus smiled without humor. "Run along."
The third time, Chiron came to him. It was the next morning, the third day since he'd come over the hill, and Chiron was in his full centaur form, which he rarely used for conversations. He stood in the doorway of the side room with his bow over his shoulder, and Percy knew before he said a word.
"The cabin counselors have voted," Chiron said heavily.
Percy sat on the edge of the narrow bed. "Let me guess."
"Eleven in favor of your expulsion. Two abstentions." Chiron paused. "Clarisse La Rue did not attend the meeting. Nor did a representative from Cabin Thirteen, as Nico is in the Underworld."
"And Grover? He's on the Council of Cloven Elders, he gets a—"
"Grover was asked to excuse himself, due to his personal relationship with you."
Percy laughed. It came out ugly. "Right. Of course he was."
"Percy." Chiron took a step into the room, his hooves loud on the old floorboards. "I am going to say something to you, and I need you to listen carefully, because I am not certain I will be able to say it twice." His face was strained, like a man pushing against a great weight. "Leave camp. Today. Go home to your mother. Do not come back until I send for you. Do you understand?"
Percy looked up at him. Chiron's eyes were bright with something that might have been tears or might have been effort, and the muscles in his jaw were clenched so tight that Percy could see them jump.
"You know," Percy said. "Some part of you knows."
"I know that you are in danger here," Chiron said through his teeth. "Beyond that, I find I am not able to—" He stopped. His eyes went unfocused. When they cleared again, the strain had gone out of his face, and he was only an old centaur looking at a disgraced former student with weary disappointment. "You are hereby banished from Camp Half-Blood," he said, in a different voice entirely. "The borders will no longer admit you. Collect your things."
He left at noon.
He didn't make a speech. He thought about it, standing on the porch of the Big House with his duffel bag and the cardboard box of things Ezra had thrown out of Cabin Three. He thought about standing on the hill and telling them everything he'd done for them, every friend he'd buried, every time he'd chosen them over himself. He thought about the burn on Jake Mason's arm and the strawberries he'd helped the Demeter kids plant after the war and the Hermes cabin kids he'd taught to sword fight when they were nine years old and so scared of everything that they cried at night.
In the end, he just walked.
A crowd gathered to watch him go. Most of them stood in silence, which was somehow worse than jeering. A few jeered anyway. Somebody threw a strawberry, and it hit him in the back of the head, and someone else laughed.
Annabeth was standing at the edge of the crowd. Ezra stood behind her with his hands on her shoulders, his chin resting on top of her head the way Percy used to rest his. She was watching Percy go with her arms crossed and her face blank, and when he passed within ten feet of her, she said, too quietly for Ezra to hear, "Percy."
He stopped.
She was frowning again. That crease between her brows. Her lips moved like she was trying to find the words to a question she didn't know how to ask. "Did we," she said. "Were we ever—"
Ezra's fingers tightened on her shoulders. The shimmer went out of them, faint as heat haze. Annabeth's mouth closed.
Percy looked at her for a long moment, and then he kept walking.
Grover was waiting at the top of the hill, by Thalia's pine. He'd been crying, his eyes red and swollen, and he threw his arms around Percy so hard that they both nearly went over.
"This is wrong," Grover said into his shoulder. "This is so wrong, Percy, I'm going to fix it, I'm going to talk to the Council, I'm going to Iris-message Thalia, and Nico, and—"
"Hey." Percy pulled back and held him by the shoulders. "Hey. Look at me. You stay here, okay? You stay here and you keep your head clear. Whatever he's doing, it's working on everyone who's around him. Don't let it work on you."
Grover nodded hard. "Where will you go?"
"Home. Mom's. Paul's going to make burgers and Mom's going to make the blue cookies and I'm going to sleep for about a week, and then I'm going to figure out how to kick that kid's teeth in without going to jail for it." He tried to smile. "Same as always."
Grover laughed wetly. "Same as always."
Percy stepped past the pine tree, across the border of camp. He felt the magical barrier close behind him like a door swinging shut, a pressure in his ears and a faint electric sting across his skin, and then he was on the other side, on a rural road on Long Island with the Delphi Strawberry Service van rusting in a ditch, and it was just a summer day.
He pulled out his phone and called his mom.
It rang. And rang. And rang.
It was a long trip back to Manhattan. He caught a bus, then a train, then the subway, and he called her eleven times along the way. He called Paul's cell eight times. He called the landline, which nobody ever used, and listened to Sally's voice on the answering machine, bright and warm, You've reached Sally and Paul and Estelle, leave us a message, and if this is Percy, honey, call your mother more, and the beep, and the silence.
She's at work, he told himself. She's writing. She turns her phone off when she writes. Paul's teaching summer school. They're fine.
But he kept remembering Ezra on the beach. Tomorrow's going to be a big day for you. He kept remembering that the banishment had been in the works for days, that Ezra must have known exactly when Percy would be thrown out and exactly where he would go. He kept remembering that Ezra had said his mother had a friend who'd kept newspaper clippings about Percy Jackson.
Clippings had addresses in them.
The building on the Upper East Side looked the same as it always did. The doorman wasn't at his post. That was unusual, but not unheard of; Eddie took a long lunch sometimes. Percy took the stairs because the elevator was too slow, three at a time, then four, his duffel bag banging against his hip, and by the time he hit the fifth-floor landing, he could smell it.
Salt water. The sharp, rotten-sweet stink of seawater left too long in an enclosed space. And under it, something he had smelled too many times on too many battlefields to mistake.
The apartment door was standing a few inches open.
Percy uncapped Riptide. The blade sprang out to its full length in his hand, bronze glowing faintly in the dim hallway, and he pushed the door the rest of the way open with his foot.
The apartment was flooded. Not a little. The water had come up to the windowsills and drained away again, and it had left everything wrecked behind it: the sofa sodden and slumped, the bookshelves collapsed, Sally's manuscripts pulped into gray mush across the floor, the framed photos on the walls hanging crooked behind cracked glass. Seaweed was draped over the kitchen counter. A starfish was drying out on the carpet, its arms curled in on itself.
Paul was in the hallway outside the bedroom. He was lying on his back with his eyes open, and there was a bruise on his throat the shape of a hand, and his reading glasses were still on his face, cracked down the middle. One of his hands was stretched out toward the bedroom door, as if he had been trying to stand between it and something.
Sally was in the kitchen.
Percy didn't remember the next part very well. He remembered kneeling in the water that was still pooled on the linoleum. He remembered that she was cold, and that her hair was wet, and that her eyes were closed, and that someone, the person who had done this, had folded her hands over her chest, neatly, like an undertaker would. That was the detail that his mind kept snagging on, later. The neatness of it. The arrogance. Ezra had wanted it to be found exactly like this. He had wanted Percy to know.
He said, "Mom."
She didn't answer.
He said it again, louder, and then he was shouting it, and the windows rattled in their frames, and somewhere down in the street a fire hydrant burst open and sent water fountaining up into the air three stories high.
On the refrigerator, held up by a magnet shaped like a blue cookie, there was a note. It was written on a page torn from a camp notebook, in looping, confident handwriting.
Dad only needs one son. I told you. Don't take it personally. —E.
P.S. The baby's not here. Don't bother looking. She was at her grandmother's. Guess I'm not a monster after all.
Estelle. Estelle was at Paul's mother's house in Brooklyn, for the weekend. Sally had mentioned it on the phone last week. Percy clung to that fact like a piece of driftwood in a hurricane. Estelle was alive. Estelle was alive, and safe, and five years old, and she would never remember this.
He sat on the kitchen floor in the seawater with his mother's head in his lap, and he did not cry. He had thought he would. He had always imagined that if this ever happened, if the thing he had been most afraid of since he was twelve years old ever actually came to pass, he would break apart like a wave against rocks.
Instead, he went very, very calm.
It was the kind of calm he had felt at the bottom of the Pacific when the pressure should have crushed him. The calm of the deep ocean, where the light doesn't reach and the cold is total and nothing moves but the things that hunt. He felt it settle into his bones. He felt the water in the kitchen go still around him, every ripple flattening, the drip from the faucet hanging motionless in the air.
He laid his mother down gently on the floor. He took the blanket off the back of the ruined couch, the old blue one she'd knitted the winter he turned ten, and covered her with it. He did the same for Paul with Paul's corduroy jacket. He closed Paul's eyes.
Then he called the police, because that was what you were supposed to do, and because Estelle would need someone to have done it right. He gave them the address in a level voice. He told them there were two bodies. When they asked his name, he gave it. When they told him to stay on the line, he hung up.
He stood in the doorway for a moment, looking back. There was a photograph on the wall by the door, the glass cracked but the picture whole. It was from his high school graduation. Sally was hugging him from one side and Paul from the other, and Percy was in his blue cap and gown with his diploma held up over his head, grinning like an idiot. Annabeth had taken it.
He took the photo off the wall, slid it out of its broken frame, and put it in his pocket next to Riptide.
Outside, the sirens were getting closer. The fire hydrant was still gushing, sending a river down the gutter of East 104th Street. Above the city, out over the East River, clouds were starting to gather, dark and low, though the forecast had called for sun all week.
Percy Jackson walked out of the building and turned east, toward Long Island.
He was not going home. He didn't have a home anymore.
He was going back to camp.