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Percy had been in college for almost five months, and he still didn’t trust peace.
That probably said something unhealthy about him, Annabeth would’ve said. She’d have lifted one eyebrow over whatever architecture text she was reading and told him that anticipating disaster was not the same as preparedness. Then she’d have kissed his cheek and quietly moved her knife somewhere easier to reach, because Annabeth could judge him and validate him at the same time.
At the moment, though, she was in the Athena cabin archives in New Rome’s senate district, helping one of her professors with a restoration project involving old city plans and Roman waterworks. Percy was alone, walking back from a late study session with exactly one aim in life:
Get to his dorm.
Drink the blue sports drink in his mini-fridge.
Collapse face-first onto his bed.
Maybe text Grover back.
The evening was cool, the campus paths quiet. New Rome University sat under a wash of silver moonlight, all clean stone and laurel shadows, the city beyond it rising in terraces of warm lamps and tiled roofs. It was almost suspiciously beautiful.
Percy passed the fountain in the quad and felt it at once.
The water shivered.
Not from wind. Not from a vibration in the pipes. This was something older, stranger. The surface of the fountain puckered inward as if the moonlight itself had pressed a thumb into it.
Percy stopped.
“Oh, come on,” he muttered.
The water rose in a narrow spiral. Gold flickered through it — not Greek gold, not celestial bronze shimmer, but a deeper metallic light, hot and sharp and alien in a way that made the back of Percy’s neck prickle.
Then the fountain exploded.
Percy threw up both hands. The blast hit an invisible wall of water and split around him, drenching the walkway, rattling the laurel leaves, slamming into the columns of the administration building.
Out of the spray stepped a boy about Percy’s age in a dark jacket, carrying a curved staff and looking extremely annoyed.
He was tall, brown-skinned, sharp-eyed, with the kind of expression that suggested he was already composing a complaint in his head.
“Okay,” Percy said, water streaming off his hair. “That’s new.”
The stranger’s gaze snapped to him. “You’re Percy Jackson.”
“That depends,” Percy said. “Are you here to kill me?”
The guy stared. “No.”
“Then yes, I’m Percy Jackson.”
“Good. I’m Carter Kane.”
Percy blinked. “Oh.”
Because that name he knew.
Not well — cross-pantheon friendships were apparently still filed under complicated, dangerous, and don’t ask too many questions — but he knew enough. A magician. Powerful. Brooklyn House. Related to Sadie Kane, which by all reports meant he probably had a permanent stress headache.
Percy lowered his hands. “Wait. Carter-Kane Carter?”
Carter gave him a flat look. “Is there another one crashing through fountains in California?”
Before Percy could answer, a scream tore across the quad.
Both of them turned.
At the far end of the path, the flagstones split apart with a grinding crack. Something massive hauled itself up from beneath the earth — humanoid, but wrong in all the familiar ways monsters were wrong. It had scaled serpent legs, a torso wrapped in bronze-scale armor, and two dracaena heads rising from a single neck stump like some sick joke a minor god had told after too much nectar.
One hissed in Ancient Greek.
The other hissed in something Percy didn’t understand — harsh consonants, old and dry as tomb dust.
“Oh, that is bad,” Carter said.
The double-headed dracaena roared and charged.
Percy uncapped Riptide.
The pen became a sword in his hand just as the monster hit the fountain’s rim and vaulted straight at them.
Percy ducked under the first spear thrust, slashed upward, and cut the bronze shaft in half. Carter shouted a word Percy didn’t know — a command that hit like a gust front. The air boomed. Hieroglyphs flashed gold around Carter’s staff. The monster staggered sideways as if an invisible fist had smashed into its ribs.
“Nice one!” Percy said.
“Thanks!”
The second head spat a jet of green fire.
Percy swore and yanked the fountain water into a shield. Steam burst across the quad. Carter rolled under the vapor cloud, staff spinning in his hands. For half a second his eyes burned an inhuman gold — Horus, Percy realized dimly, the falcon god looking through him — and Carter drove the staff down into the pavement.
A circle of glowing symbols spread beneath the dracaena.
The monster shrieked. Its legs locked in place.
“Now, Percy!”
Percy lunged.
Riptide bit through the left head first. Bronze dust exploded across the steam. The second head whipped around, jaws snapping inches from Percy’s face, but he twisted with the motion, planted a foot on the creature’s armored thigh, and rammed the sword down through the base of its neck.
The dracaena burst apart.
Silence rushed in.
Steam drifted over broken stone.
Percy straightened, breathing hard. “So,” he said, “you wanna explain why my campus is doing crossover events?”
Carter was staring at the cracked flagstones, where the gold light still flickered below. “Because that thing wasn’t supposed to be here.”
“That is not remotely comforting.”
“It’s not meant to be.”
The ground trembled.
Both of them stepped back as the cracks widened into a jagged ring. The light below intensified until the stones themselves looked translucent. Percy saw, impossibly, not dirt beneath the quad but an immense dark channel full of moving water and drifting symbols — Greek letters tangling with hieroglyphs, as if two magical systems had been forced through the same vein.
Carter went very still.
“Oh, no,” he said softly.
Percy glanced at him. “What kind of ‘oh, no’ is that?”
“The bad kind.”
“Can you narrow it down?”
Carter knelt by the fissure. He touched two fingers to the stone, and gold light ran up his hand like molten wire. He jerked back.
“This is a convergence tear,” he said. “A magical fault line. Greek underworld current, Roman boundary magic, and a Duat passage all intersecting in one place.”
Percy processed that. “In English?”
“In English,” Carter said grimly, “somebody has punched a hole through three separate systems of the universe, and if we don’t close it fast, everything in the surrounding area is going to start coming through wrong.”
As if on cue, something huge moved in the darkness below.
Percy took a step back. “Wrong how?”
The thing burst out of the fissure.
It looked, at first, like a crocodile.
Then Percy saw the lion mane. The bony, almost human forequarters. The dead-white eyes. Its body seemed stitched from different nightmares — part Egyptian devourer, part underworld predator, part raw magical corruption. It landed in the quad with enough force to crack the stones and sent benches flying.
“Okay,” Percy said, pointing with his sword. “That is extremely wrong.”
The creature opened its mouth and screamed.
Not roared. Screamed.
The sound hit Percy like icy water straight down the spine. Images flashed behind his eyes — drowned palaces, black rivers, scales of judgment, legion standards sinking into mud, mouths opening soundlessly underwater. He nearly dropped to one knee.
Carter staggered too, one hand to his temple. “Don’t let it use fear!” he shouted.
“Great tip!”
The creature charged.
Percy met it head-on, because of course he did.
He dodged the first snap of its jaws and slashed across its shoulder. Riptide cut deep, but the wound sealed almost at once in a wash of black-gold light. The thing whipped around with a tail strike that caught Percy in the ribs and hurled him across the quad.
He smashed through a marble bench.
Somewhere in the distance, campus alarms began to ring — imperial gold chimes, the city’s magical defense waking up. Percy coughed, rolled, and barely got his sword up in time as the creature lunged again.
A burst of golden light slammed into its side.
Carter, now half-hovering above the ground with a spectral falcon outline blazing behind him, shouted a stream of words that made the air bend. Chains of light wrapped around the beast’s hind legs. It tore one free instantly, but it bought Percy two seconds.
Two seconds was enough.
Percy slammed his palm to the stones.
Water answered from everywhere.
From the fountain. From the pipes under the quad. From the bay miles off. From the little decorative channels running through the city. Every thread of nearby water surged toward him in a roaring spiral.
The creature pounced. Percy rose with the wave.
He hit it like a living battering ram, drove it backward across the quad, then whipped the water up and over, wrapping the monster in a crushing vortex. It thrashed, claws scoring light through the spray.
“Can you kill it?” Percy shouted.
“Not exactly!”
“Excellent!”
Carter landed beside the vortex, grim and focused. “It’s not a creature in the normal sense. It’s more like a manifestation. Something built out of the tear itself.”
Percy gritted his teeth, forcing the water tighter as the beast strained against it. “So what does kill it?”
“We close the rupture!”
“While I’m hugging the demon-crocodile?”
Carter gave him a brief look. “Yes?”
Percy laughed once, sharp and slightly unhinged. “Man, I missed this.”
Carter actually smiled. “No, you didn’t.”
They moved at once.
Carter sprinted for the fissure, staff blazing. Percy dragged the vortex with him, skidding across the shattered stones as the creature battered against the spinning wall of water. Gold symbols were pouring from the crack now, rising in helixes into the night. The campus around them blurred with emergency magic — Roman guards converging from the streets below, purple cloaks snapping, but they were too far out yet.
Carter reached the fissure and slashed the air with his staff. A doorway of hieroglyphic fire opened above the crack, revealing not the campus sky behind it but a shifting landscape of sand, stars, and deep subterranean water.
He shouted over the noise, “Percy! I need more power!”
Percy stared at him. “That sentence means nothing to me!”
“Water! Force! Whatever you do!”
“Right! Super helpful!”
The creature broke one claw free of the vortex and swiped. Percy ducked, but the claws tore his sleeve and opened a burning line across his shoulder. Pain flared hot and immediate. He snarled, pulled harder, and felt the nearby water answer with savage joy.
Okay. Fine.
No subtlety.
Percy planted both feet and called to the bay.
The answer hit like a god’s heartbeat.
Far off, beyond the hills and streets and sleeping city, the waters of the San Francisco Bay reared in answer to Poseidon’s son. Percy felt them surge through channels and storm drains and old Roman aqueduct lines. He didn’t bring the whole bay, obviously — Annabeth would have killed him if he flooded New Rome — but he took enough.
A column of seawater erupted through the broken quad and blasted straight down into the fissure.
Carter yelled something in Egyptian and drove his staff into the center of the torrent.
The doorway flared brilliant gold.
The creature shrieked as the water-vortex yanked it bodily forward. Percy pushed with everything he had — all the exhaustion, all the old fury, all the stubborn refusal to let monsters ruin one decent semester. The beast slid, clawing at the stones, black-gold light peeling off it in ribbons.
Carter’s voice rang out, doubled by another, deeper and ancient.
For an instant Percy saw Horus fully, wings spread behind Carter like the silhouette of the sun.
The doorway snapped downward.
The fissure sealed.
The creature hit the closing seam and detonated in a blast of darkness, water, and golden fire.
Percy threw his arms over his face.
Then—
Nothing.
Just the hiss of dissipating steam. The patter of falling water. The fading echo of alarms.
Percy lowered his arms.
The quad was wrecked. Benches destroyed. Fountain obliterated. Half the paving stones missing. But the crack was gone.
Carter was on one knee, breathing hard, one hand braced on his staff.
Percy trudged toward him through ankle-deep water. “You alive?”
“Probably.”
“Cool.”
Percy offered him a hand. Carter took it, and Percy hauled him up.
For a few seconds they just stood there, soaked and wrecked and staring at the crater where a fountain used to be.
Then a familiar voice shouted, “Percy!”
Annabeth sprinted across the quad with three Roman guards behind her, dagger out, grey eyes blazing. She took in the destruction, Percy’s torn shirt, the stranger with the staff, and the lingering gold static in the air.
Her expression did a whole strategic recalculation in about half a second.
“You’re hurt,” she said.
“I’m fine,” Percy said automatically.
Annabeth glared. “That wasn’t a question.”
Percy pointed at Carter. “This is Carter Kane.”
Annabeth blinked once. “Oh.”
Then, because she was Annabeth, she nodded like this explained at least forty percent of the situation. “Of course it is.”
One of the Roman guards, a centurion Percy vaguely knew from campus senate, looked around the ruined quad and said weakly, “Do we… need a report?”
“No,” Percy, Carter, and Annabeth all said at once.
The centurion hesitated. “That seems unlikely.”
Annabeth sheathed her dagger. “You’ll get a report. A very edited report.”
Carter actually laughed at that, short and tired.
A few minutes later, after the guards had been redirected toward perimeter checks and magical cleanup, Percy sat on the remains of the bench he’d destroyed. Annabeth bandaged his shoulder with ruthless efficiency while Carter leaned on his staff nearby, finally looking like a college-aged guy instead of an avatar of ancient power.
“So,” Percy said, wincing as Annabeth tied the knot too tight, “Brooklyn House just sends you cross-country whenever reality starts peeling?”
“Pretty much,” Carter said. “We picked up the disturbance about twenty minutes before it opened. I got there as fast as I could.”
Annabeth frowned. “Do you know who caused it?”
Carter’s face darkened. “Not yet. But somebody knew enough to target a place built on layers of old power. Roman foundations. Greek bloodlines. Faults in the earth. They were trying to create a stable overlap.”
Percy groaned. “Why does nobody ever use magic for, I don’t know, free laundry?”
“Because then the world would be too kind,” Annabeth said dryly.
Carter glanced between them, then toward the city lights of New Rome. “You really go to college here.”
Percy followed his gaze. “Yeah.”
“What’s that like?”
Percy thought about lectures, training arenas, blue pancakes in the dining hall, late-night walks with Annabeth, the fact that at any given moment at least one professor had probably fought in a war two thousand years ago.
“Weird,” he said. “Kind of great, actually.”
Carter nodded slowly, as if filing that away.
A shimmer of gold gathered beside the broken fountain — a transport spell, ready to take him back east. He straightened, adjusting his grip on the staff.
“I should go before the magical politics get worse.”
“The magical politics were bad the second you appeared in a Roman campus fountain,” Annabeth said.
“That’s fair.”
Percy stood. “Hey. Thanks.”
Carter met his eyes. “You too.”
For a moment, Percy remembered the first time he’d learned the world was bigger than Olympians and Titans, bigger even than the sea. Strange, maybe, that it comforted him now. The universe was huge and dangerous and full of holes where nightmares could crawl through.
But it was also full of people who would show up when the hole opened.
Even if they had to arrive through a fountain.
Carter stepped into the light. “Try to get some sleep, Percy.”
Percy looked at the demolished quad. “That feels optimistic.”
Then Carter was gone.
The night settled around them again.
Annabeth slipped her hand into Percy’s. “You are, for the record, paying absolutely none of the property damage.”
“Oh, good.”
“You are, however, helping with cleanup.”
Percy sighed. “There it is.”
She leaned up and kissed him anyway, brief and warm and grounding. “Come on, Seaweed Brain.”
As they started back toward the dorms, Percy glanced once over his shoulder at the place where the gold light had vanished.
The water in the broken fountain basin had gone still.
For tonight, at least, the world had chosen its proper shape again.
Percy could live with that.
For tonight.