Chapter Text
The eggs for breakfast were blue.
Not the shell - the scrambled eggs themselves. Percy had achieved that through the extremely scientific method of adding butterfly pea flower extract to the mix before folding them, the way her mom had taught her years ago. Sally Jackson had once started making blue food out of spite and apparently never stopped. Somewhere along the line it had become family tradition, and Percy made it her own even when she lived hours apart from her mom.
The result was eggs that looked mildly cursed and tasted incredible. Arguably the best scrambled eggs in Blüdhaven.
Percy knew this because she'd made them at least four hundred times, and Rachel had never once complained about the colour. Rachel barely even registered thenm anymore, which Percy considered a mark of true friendship.
She layered them over her homemade boring-coloured sourdough toast when Rachel appeared in the kitchen doorway like she'd been summoned by the smell of butter.
Her hair looked like she'd fought a paint storm and lost, which Percy can deeply relate to. She wore an old NYU sweatshirt - technically Percy's sweatshirt now, by right of repeated theft - and squinted at the morning light pouring through the floor-to-ceiling windows like Apollo, her own patron, had insulted her personally. Which, knowing him, it's possible.
The harbour stretched out behind the glass, silver-grey in the early October sun. Below, the waterline glittered.
Don't think about the waterline.
"Something smells illegal," Rachel announced, with the energy of someone who had decided that the day was happening to her whether she liked it or not.
"Eggs on toast, there's also a frittata in the oven, fifteen minutes."
Rachel crossed the kitchen barefoot, stole the spoon from the sauce Percy had simmering on the back burner, tasted it, and made a deeply inappropriate sound for eight in the morning.
"Okay," she said seriously. "I need you to know I would've never asked you to move in if I'd known you cooked like this."
Percy snorted. "Why, because you'd get attached?"
"Because now if you leave me I'll die."
"You'd survive."
"Barely. I'd become one of those people who eats sad hummus standing over the sink."
"You already eat sad hummus standing over the sink."
"Yeah, but now I have standards."
"So you do only want me to live with you because you need someone feeding you."
"I mean. Also, your company."
"After the eggs."
"The eggs come first," Rachel admitted, without shame. "Is there coffee?"
"There's always coffee."
Rachel poured herself a mug and climbed onto one of the counter stools, chin propped in her palm while she watched Percy plate breakfast with the concentration of someone observing a delicate art form.
The kitchen was warm, morning light making patterns on the reclaimed wood countertops, the little blue sea-glass jar of herbs on the windowsill casting a mild shadow across the backsplash. On the far wall, three of Rachel's framed ocean photographs; deep-sea shots so blue they barely looked real.
Percy slid the plate across the counter.
Rachel took one bite, closed her eyes, and looked briefly transcendent.
"I need to tell you something," Rachel said. Her eyes were still closed.
"You're in love with me." Percy deadpans.
"I'm in love with your eggs." Rachel opened one eye. "Unfortunately, that's not the problem."
Percy's shoulders tightened automatically. "Okay."
"I've been having the dream again."
Percy turned back to the sink before her face could do anything obvious. Ran water over the pan. "How many times?"
"Four? Five?" Rachel sipped her coffee. "I stoppedd writing them down because I knew you were going to make that face."
"I'm not making a face."
"You're making the face, Percy."
"This is just my face. I've had it for years."
Rachel ignored that. "It's the ocean again."
Percy dried her hands slowly. "Tell me."
Rachel wrapped both hands around the mug.
"It's beautiful," she said quietly. "That's the worst part. The water's clean. Completely clean. Like - clearer than it should be. You can see straight to the bottom in places that've been dead zones for decades."
Her gaze drifted toward the windows.
"Coral growing where there shouldn't be coral. Fish everywhere. I saw a whale."
"That sounds like a dream," Percy said carefully, leaning against the counter.
Rachel swallowed once. "There were no people."
The kitchen went still.
"Maybe it's just zoomed in on the ocean part-"
"Percy."
"-or a beach somewhere remote, those exist, some beaches are empty-"
"I watched a city sink."
That shut her up.
Rachel stared into her coffee. "Glass towers. Coastline. Everything just-" She made a small motion with her hand. "Gone. The water closed over it and the fish came back and everything was quiet."
Percy looked toward the harbor.
The harbor looked normal. Flat silver-grey water. Buoys. Cargo ship on the horizon. Nothing ancient or prophetic or terrifying about it.
Completely normal harbor.
"You know what I think?" Percy said.
Rachel raised an eyebrow over the rim of her mug.
"I think you've been doomscrolling climate projections at two in the morning again. We've talked about screen time before bed."
"This wasn't anxiety."
"Mm. Dream-whale anxiety. Or you've watched deep sea documentaries with me one too many times."
"Perseus Jackson."
"Rachel Elizabeth Dare."
"I'm serious."
"I know." Percy pushed a hand through her hair. "I just think maybe not every weird dream has to be a divine warning from the universe."
Rachel gave her a look.
"You're the Oracle of Delphi," Percy added. "Usually, your visions come with green creepy smoke and cryptic suffering poetry attached. This one sounds like a David Attenborough documentary directed by depression."
"The depression had a quality of doom."
"That's called regular depression."
"Percy."
Percy exhaled slowly. "Okay. Fine. Maybe it's prophetic. Maybe. But if it is, that doesn't automatically mean I have to do anything about it."
Rachel said nothing.
That was somehow worse.
"I know." Percy straightened. The timer ticked. She looked at Rachel and not out the window. "I know you're serious. I just - I'm a marine restoration consultant. If I'm investigating, it's because that's my job. Not because I'm responding to a divine sign. Those are different things."
Rachel tilted her head. Said nothing. The look she had was the one she'd perfected over years of being Percy's friend - the one that said you can keep talking, this isn't convincing either of us.
"I'm retired," Percy said defensively.
"From what, specifically?"
"The hero thing."
Rachel hummed.
"The quest thing," Percy corrected. "The apocalypse thing. I have a PhD now. I run an NGO. I recycle voluntarily. I'm basically domesticated."
Rachel looked around the penthouse - warm light, stacks of environmental journals, her canvases drying near the windows, Percy's field gear abandoned beside the couch.
Then Rachel looked at her. Really looked, in the way she sometimes did that had nothing to do with the Oracle and everything to do with just knowing Percy.
"You've been trying really hard at this life," she said quietly.
Something in Percy's chest tightened.
"Yeah," Percy muttered. "I'd like to keep it."
"Yeah," she said, quietly. "I know."
The oven timer went off.
She'd been having the life for eleven months.
The jogging habit had started around month three, mostly because her body apparently didn't understand retirement and kept waking her up at five-thirty every morning with the deeply ingrained sensation that something nearby probably needed stabbing.
Running helped.
The harbor helped too.
Except in the ways it absolutely didn't.
Which she was actively not thinking about.
Percy ran the waterfront route past the docks and the industrial piers and the restoration sites she'd spent the last six months helping stabilise. The estuarine grasses along the embankment were thriving. Marine bird populations were improving. Water oxygen levels were up in zones that should've still been struggling.
Everything was recovering too fast.
She knew which spots along the water had dead zone signatures and which ones didn't and she had been watching those signatures shift for three months and she definitely was not thinking about what they implied.
She stopped at the east dock, bent forward with her hands on her knees, breathing hard.
The water moved below her in slow grey foldss.
Rachel had been the reason she came here. That was the simple version.
Eight months ago, Rachel called and said I'm moving to Blüdhaven, the harbour district is an environmental nightmare, come with me.
Percy had said why Blüdhaven and Rachel had said I think you need to be near the sea and Percy had said I'm retired and Rachel had said come with me.
And Percy, because she was apparently incapable of making rational life choices when the people she loved asked things of her, had said okay before she could talk herself out of it.
The breakup with Annabeth had happened three months before that.
It's not dramatic, maybe that's the worst part. It's just two people who had bled for each other through two different apocalypses sitting across a table and crossed Tartarus together, and realising that the way they'd learned to survive wasn't the same and wasn't going to become the same and they were so tired, and they still loved each other, and it wasn't enough. She'd moved out of their shared New Rome apartment in boxes. She'd called her mom and not cried and then called Grover and cried. She'd run along the California coastline for six weeks until Rachel called.
Blüdhaven had made sense. Near the sea. Far from Olympus.
Something about the city's particular supernatural chaos - the weird specific density of costumed vigilantes and rogue villains and general Gotham-adjacent strangeness - made the mist work differently. Partial blind spot for divine attention. Fewer divine interference incidents. Percy could do her actual job without someone's thunderbolt landing in her contamination sample.
Or so she'd thought.
She crouched at the end of the dock and pressed two fingers to the water. The harbour moved against her hand in the way it did when she paid attention to it; present, responsive to the ichor in her body, a little warmer than the ambient temperature. Normal. Except-
There was something underneath the normal. Not a creature, not a sound. More like a quality. Like an old argument that had been running so long it had become atmospheric. Like something vast turning over in its sleep. Like awareness brushing back against her awareness, the old familiar recognition that had lived under her skin since she was twelve yeasr old.
I know, she thought, and wasn't sure who she was talking to.
The water gave absolutely nothing helpful back.
A cormorant landed on the nearest piling and stared at her with open disdain.
"Yeah, okay," Percy told it. "You too."
The cormorant remained spiritually committed to being unhelpful.
She ran home.
By ten-thirty she'd answered four emails about contamination data, argued with two separate city departments about harbor monitoring coordination, and eaten toast over the sink because she'd forgotten breakfast was supposed to involve sitting down.
She had also - not that she was going to tell Rachel - run three different models on the contamination patterns.
The results kept coming back wrong.
Not wrong in the way that data came back wrong when you'd made an error in the methodology.
Wrong in the way that data came back wrong when the thing you were studying was doing something you didn't have a category for yet. The contamination was affecting human-use areas. Industrial zones. Sewage infrastructure. The patches of harbour where fishing crews had been working.
The marine ecosystems were not affected.
The marine ecosystems were, in fact, improving.
Dead zones documented as intractable for decades were showing signs of recovery. Seagrass beds are reestablishing. Invertebrate populations are resurging in areas that had been essentially biologically dead for twenty years. Coral recruitment in the harbour mouth should not have been possible, given the water temperature data from five years ago.
It was incredible data. Genuinely exciting, from a restoration standpoint.
It was also making her feel like she'd swallowed static.
She opened a new document and started writing.
Contamination harms humans/human infrastructure. Marine recovery continues independent of contamination - accelerated. Pattern is selective, not random. Possible explanation: (1) industrial contaminants are selectively toxic in this specific way, which doesn't match the chemical profiles. (2) Something is actively mediating the process, which-
She stopped.
Stared at the last line.
Something is actively mediating the process.
She deleted it.
She closed the document and went to make lunch like a perfectly normal retired person who definitely wasn't spiraling into mythological nonsense again.
Three blocks north and eleven floors down, in the Blüdhaven Police Department's third-floor open-plan office, Detective Dick Grayson was reading an environmental NGO report for the fourth time and doing his level best not to look like someone who had just found the missing piece of something.
He'd been working the harbour disappearances for three months.
It had started with a dockworker - Miguel Reyes, fifty-three, seventeen years on the same pier, no history of anything concerning, gone on a Tuesday morning with his gear still on the dock and his coffee still in his thermos and no evidence of a struggle or a voluntary departure. Then, a second dockworker two weeks later. Then, six weeks after that, an entire three-man fishing crew off a boat found drifting with the engine still running and breakfast half-eaten below deck.
Six people total. All from the same stretch of harbour.
The department's working theory was organised crime in the port district, which wasn't unreasonable except that Dick had been working in Blüdhaven organised crime for two years, and the pattern didn't fit.
Wrong demographics. Wrong locations. Wrong absence of any message; organised crime left messages, intentionally or not.
Dick didn't buy it.
He'd been doing his own mapping as Nightwing, quietly, nights he wasn't running other cases - triangulating the incident sites, looking for a spatial pattern the department's approach kept missing because they were thinking about it as a crime problem rather than a geographic one.
He'd gotten there eventually. All six incidents clustered around specific zones in the harbour. Zones that overlapped almost perfectly with the documented dead zone data from the city's own environmental monitoring.
He'd been trying to get the environmental data in any usable form for six weeks. The city's monitoring system was a bureaucratic disaster, reports were scattered across three different departments in formats that didn't talk to each other, and the harbour patrol, who theoretically coordinate on environmental incidents, was not, in fact, coordinating with anything.
Then, four days ago, a contamination report had landed in the department's shared inbox via a routine city hall forward. The kind of thing that got filed automatically and read by nobody.
Dick had read it.
Twice. Then printed it. Then read it a third time with a highlighter.
The analysis was exceptionally good. The contamination zone mapping was more precise than anything the city's own systems had produced, the methodology clearly documented, the correlation work careful and specific. Whoever had written it had been watching this harbour closely for months. And the finding itself-
Contamination affects human-use areas. Marine ecosystems not affected. Marine ecosystems are recovering.
He'd looked up Pan's Initiative immediately. Small NGO, harbour district focus, independently funded - that last part phrased deliberately in the disclosure documents, the specific language of unaffiliated with any corporate entity that you used when the independence was the point. Two co-founders: R.D., director of outreach and community engagement. P.J., director of research and operations. A third name appeared throughout the field reports and restoration permits - G. Underwood, ecological and conservation consultant.
No full names on the about page. Just initials. Dick had noticed it the way he noticed things that were deliberate.
He'd focused on the research lead, because the report was what he needed, and the report was hers.
The published papers attached to the NGO's citation list had a full name: Percy Jackson, PhD. Ocean and coastal systems, New Rome University. Twenty-three years old.
He'd read that twice.
Four papers. Two of them in journals he'd had to look up. Accelerated doctorate - three years, not five - and based on the publication timeline, she'd been doing this work, or something adjacent to it, since she was barely out of her teens.
He'd sat with that for a moment.
The faculty photo was small and slightly overexposed. Dark hair. Standing in front of water somewhere, squinting slightly at whatever was off-camera. Not especially useful for identification purposes. He'd looked at it longer than strictly necessary, which was - fine. Observational. Completely standard.
The protest listing had come up while he was looking for a contact email. Pan's Initiative, Harbour Plaza, Oct 14th, Tuesday afternoon. Harbour contamination. Systemic failure of city response. He'd had a half-day that week, department admin thing cancelled last minute.
He'd thought: he should go. Make contact with the relevant civilian expert. That was the reason. That was, professionally, obviously, the only reason.
He'd gone in uniform because he hadn't had time to go home first, and it hadn't occurred to him that this might be a problem until he was standing at the edge of a climate protest and three people near the front had deliberately moved away from his badge.
Which. Fair.
He'd found a position where he could hear the speaker - R.D. from Pan's Initiative turned out to be the redhead at the podium, and she was extremely good at this. She has skill of making a crowd feel like a community with a shared problem and a shared stake in solving it; and he'd been actually listening when he'd noticed the woman at the edge of the crowd.
Dark hair. Standing with her coffee, like someone who had positioned herself to see both the audience and the harbour simultaneously. That was a specific kind of situational awareness. He catalogued it automatically and then had to deliberately stop cataloguing because he was supposed to be finding the lead researcher, not-
He'd checked his phone. Confirmed. Put it away.
The faculty page hadnt remotely prepared him for the actual human being attached to it. Dark hair that had clearly lost an argument with the harbour wind and hadn't been fixed since. The photo had been overexposed and slightly blurry and had not, it turned out, conveyed any of the relevant information.
He'd gone over to introduce himself.
Professionally.
She'd looked at his badge first and briskly said, "I'm not a resource for the police department" before he'd even finished speaking.
He'd found it, almost immediately, refreshing.
It had startled an actual laugh out of him.
Someone who had established their position and was prepared to hold it without being aggressive about it. Just that: here is where I stand, what are you going to do with that?
He'd liked that almost immediately, which honestly felt like a personal problem.
He'd wanted to keep talking to her. That was the thing he'd noticed, and then kept noticing. He'd found another angle when the first one reached its natural endpoint. Then another.
He'd watched her face while she talked about the contamination pattern - the exact moment she'd decided how much to give him, the slight recalibration, the way she'd stopped herself - and then he'd moved to perimeter because standing there any longer was going to be obvious.
By the time R.D. - Rachel was her name, apparently - had appeared wearing an expression that said oh this is entertaining, Dick had already become painfully aware he was lingering.
Third loop of the crowd, entirely legitimate perimeter awareness, he'd glanced toward the embankment where Percy was watching the harbour, and Rachel was standing twelve feet away observing him do it with one eyebrow raised at a frankly incriminating angle. He'd looked away. When he'd looked back, she'd smiled. Bright and entirely knowing, the smile of someone who found this very funny and was going to remember it.
He'd done two more loops and mostly stopped glancing.
He'd stayed until the event wrapped, which was professional, and stood at the railing looking at the harbour afterwards, which was also professional, and had not been tracking Percy's location through the crowd, technically, because tracking implied intent, and he was simply spatially aware of his surroundings.
He'd gone home annoyed at himself.
Then he'd spent an hour rereading her contamination report.
Oct 14th. The harbour district at midday had a particular noise to it; the cleanup crews out, a sound system doing its best, the smell of street food cutting through the brine.
Rachel had done this three times since they'd moved: organised something, assembled bodies and banners and council allies and anyone from the environmental coalition she'd been quietly, relentlessly building since the day they'd arrived.
Watching it work still surprised Percy a little. Not Rachel's conviction; that had never surprised her, not since the moment she'd understood what it meant that Rachel had walked into the Labyrinth for them as a mortal without ichor in her and all its advantages. But the way the conviction scaled, the way Rachel in a public space with a microphone became a slightly larger version of herself. Filling in the available room.
The protest was Rachel's event, which meant it was well-organised, well-attended, and slightly overwhelming to stand inside of.
Pan's Initiative had been running events for eight months, and Rachel had the logistics down to a specific science: detailed spreadsheets, a volunteer coordination system, and the particular charisma that made people feel personally motivated to show up with signs and reusable water bottles. Percy was mostly there to look competent, answer technical questions, and occasionally step in front of Rachel if someone started getting aggressive, which happened less often than you'd think.
The NGO banners read Pan's Initiative in clean blue-green on white.
Percy was still not totally over the name. She'd made her case, too on the nose, Rachel, the ancient Greek for faded god of the wild, there's always one classicist in every audience, and Rachel had said do you want to call it Green Solutions and Percy had said absolutely not and then rachel said coward and then Grover got teary-eyed when he heard and then they'd landed on Pan's through a process of mutual exhaustion that counted as democratic.
She scanned the crowd from the edge. Old habit. Noted the exits, the crowd density, the positions of anyone who didn't look like they were there for the cause. She'd been back from Tartarus for years and she still couldn't turn her back to a room. Some things are just wired in.
She was at the edge of the crowd, where she could see both the harbour and the audience simultaneously. Nursing a coffee. Watching the water more than she was watching Rachel, which was probably not the point, so she made herself look at Rachel.
Rachel was good at this. She always had been, even before the Oracle thing, even at sixteen when she'd driven her dad's car into Camp Halfblood because she needed to and made it look inevitable. She had the specific gift of making what was true feel urgent without making it feel hopeless, and the crowd was responding, three hundred people on a Tuesday afternoon who had come because the harbour was sick and they lived next to it.
Percy wanted to believe this would matter. She mostly did believe it. She also knew how many reports she'd submitted to how many city departments over eight months and what had happened to all of them, which was: nothing, filed, pending review, we'll follow up.
She was thinking about the dead zone models. She was thinking about Rachel's dream. Thinking about the quality of the water this morning, that deep slow something underneath the surface that she'd pulled her hand back from and then spent the rest of her run pretending she hadn't noticed. Thinking how she was retired and that's the end of it.
She was absolutely not thinking about the cop thirty feet to her left who had shown up to an environmental protest in uniform and was apparently genuinely listening to Rachel's speech.
Blüdhaven PD. Standing at the edge of the gathering in that particular stance; not quite official, not quite civilian. Mid-twenties. Dark hair. Tall.
Please, Percy thought desperately, please don't come over here, I promised Rachel I wouldn't verbally assault city officials at her events anymore after the last time.
She looked at him anyway.
Good posture, standing with his hands in his jacket pockets in the easy way of someone comfortable being exactly where they were. Not surveilling the crowd with that particular departmental restlessness she'd learned to notice. Just standing there, head tilted slightly, like Rachel was saying something worth following.
Which somehow made him more suspicious.
Don't, Percy thought.
"Did she organise this?"
She turned.
Up close, it was worse.
The face was significantly more symmetrical than she'd estimated from thirty feet, which was, if anything, suspicious - symmetrical faces on cops were a manipulation tactic, everyone knew this. Blue eyes. The easy, good-natured expression of someone who was either genuinely good-natured or deeply practised at approximating it. His jaw was-
She looked directly at the badge and the name clipped to his uniform.
Detective Richard Grayson.
"I'm not a resource for the police department."
One beat of genuine surprise - she caught it, the slight recalibration - then it smoothed. "I wasn't asking on behalf of the department. I'm just-" he gestured at the crowd. "Attending."
"As a police officer."
"Off the clock."
She looked at the uniform.
He looked back at her.
"Sure," she said.
"Is there a reason that's suspicious to you?"
"You're a cop at a climate protest?"
"I live here."
"That's a location, not a reason."
That got a real laugh out of him. Brief and surprised and warm in a way she immediately distrusted on principle.
"That sounds exhausting."
"It's been a very educational decade." She turned back toward Rachel, which was a dismissal, or was supposed to be. "She organised it. It's public information."
"I know." He hadn't moved. "I also know the coastal contamination data that Pan's Initiative submitted last week. Your analysis, I'm guessing. Percy Jackson, right?"
That made her turn back.
He was watching her with an expression that had shifted. Not gotcha. More like interest. Like she'd done something that changed the way the light was landing and he was paying attention to where it went.
She did not find this charming. She found it, if anything, more suspicious.
"What about it?" she said.
"It's detailed. The correlation mapping between the contamination zones and the harbour disappearances was-" he paused, "unexpected."
Her coffee stopped halfway to her mouth. "The harbour what?"
"Disappearances. Several. Last three months." He watched her carefully. "Missing dock workers. A fishing crew."
"I didn't know." She said before she could stop herself.
"I figured."
The contamination patterns were her data. The missing people; closed records, law enforcement, not something that crossed her desk as a restoration consultant. She'd been looking at the chemical signatures, the ecosystem data, the zone mapping. She hadn't been looking for people.
The two datasets together hit the back of her skull like a tuning fork struck once and left to ring.
"The contamination pattern doesn't fit industrial accident," she said, because the data was the data and she was a scientist and she was going to talk about it even with a cop, apparently, at a protest.
"Industrial contamination distributes based on current patterns, water temperature gradients, depth stratification. This contamination is not distributing. It's holding in specific zones. Human-use zones." She watched his face when she said this. "Marine ecosystems in the same areas aren't affected. They're recovering."
Something shifted in his expression. More focused. "Recovering."
"Rapidly. By measures that should take decades." She stopped, because she was aware she was giving him data she hadn't given the city's own environmental office yet, and she had to make a decision about that and she hadn't made it.
"That's all I'm saying until I know what the department plans to do with it."
"I understand." He didn't push. "That's more than the department has."
"That's not a high bar"
"No. It's not." He admitted, looking at her steadily. "Is that a problem you have with departments generally, or specifically this one?"
"I don't have a particular relationship with institutional authority."
"You don't have a stellar one," he corrected mildly. "There's a difference."
Percy turned to face him directly.
He was taller than she'd accounted for standing next to him, which annoyed her deeply. She tilted her chin up slightly, which was physics, not anything else.
"I'm trained in marine environments in ways that most people aren't," she said. "If something is happening in this harbour that's connected to the ecology, I'm one of the most qualified people in this city to assess it."
She narrowed her eyes a little.
"And unlike the department, I actually care what happens to the water after the human crisis is resolved."
Something shifted in his expression. Not offense. More attentive. Considering.
"That's not a small accusation," he said.
"It's not an accusation. It's an observation." Percy folded one arm across her midle. "The harbour contamination has been documented in environmental reporting for six years. The department has been assigned to this district for how long?"
He huffed a quiet laugh through his nose.
"Point," he said. Not conceding the argument. Noting that she'd made it. "You always talk like you're cross-examining people?"
"Only the ones bothering me."
"Good to know."
Percy narrowed her eyes.
He looked infuriatingly amused about that.
"You still haven't answered my question."
"Which question?"
"Why you're at a climate protest. A cop."
"I told you-"
"You told me where you live. That's a location, not a reason."
He laughed again. Actually laughed, short and genuine, surprised out of him. The face did something unfair when he laughed that Percy ignored aggressively.
"I grew up near the water," he said, once he'd collected himself. "I've been reading contamination reports on harbours like this one for years. I know what it looks like when the water is sick, and the people responsible for fixing it are looking somewhere else."
He glanced at the harbour for a moment, then back.
"So yeah. I go to climate protests."
The answer landed harder than she wanted it to.
So naturally, she immediately got defensive.
"That's very naive of you," Percy said.
"I've been told."
"It wasn't a compliment."
"I know." His grin appeared briefly. "But you didn't say it like an insult either."
Percy stared at him.
He had the audacity to look pleased about it.
"I'll think about it," she said finally. About the data. The investigation. Not the face.
"That's better than no."
"It's not yes."
"I know what it's not." He reached into his jacket - an actual business card, the physical kind, which nobody her age used - and held it out. "If you find something you want someone to look at."
She took it. Didn't look at it. "You carry business cards."
"I'm old-fashioned."
"You're, like, twenty-four."
His smile flashed quick and easy.
"Twenty-six," he corrected. "Ancient, basically."
"And if you find something in the disappearances that connects to teh contamination?"
"I'll call you."
"You don't have my number."
His smile came back slowly, warm sunshine, like he'd been waiting for her to notice that.
"I don't have your number. Yet."
She was still formulating a response that didn't count as losing when Rachel materialised at her elbow.
"Percy," Rachel said brightly, in the tone that carried approximately two semesters of subtext.
Percy turned - not a retreat, geometry - and found Rachel looking past her with the bright, interested expression she wore when she was enjoying something that wasn't happening to her.
"Good speech," Percy said quickly.
"Thank you, I'm glad someone was paying attention." Rachel's eyes did a very brief, very deliberate sweep of Detective Richard Grayson. Then back to Percy. Then she smiled, extended a hand past Percy's shoulder. "Rachel. I run Pan's Initiative with Percy."
"Dick Grayson." He shook it. "The speech was excellent."
"She helped write the technical sections." Rachel's smile sharpened at the edges in the specific way it did when Percy was the subject of it. "She's much better with the policy language than I am."
Percy made a warning noise.
Rachel ignored it completely.
"Her report was very good too," Dick said. "That's actually why I wanted-"
"Anyway," Percy cut in quickly, grabbing Rachel's elbow. "He has important cop things to do. Very busy. Good luck with law enforcement, Detective."
Rachel let herself be steered away with alarming willingness.
Which meant she was saving it for later.
They made it forty feet.
Then Rachel snorted.
"Don't start."
"Only you," Rachel said, delighted, "could attend my protest and somehow end up flirting with a detective."
"I wasn't flirting."
"He gave you his card."
"That was professional information-sharing."
"He doesn't have your number yet," Rachel said, perfectly mimicking the cadence Dick Grayson had used, "and he told you that."
"That was-" Percy stopped. "That was just him pointing logistics."
Rachel looked at her.
Percy looked determinedly ahead.
"With that smile."
"I didn't notice a smile."
"Percy."
"I was looking at his badge."
"You were absolutely not just looking at the badge."
"Well, I wasn't looking respectfully."
Rachel burst out laughing.
Percy felt her ears go hot immediately, which was deeply irritating. "I mean - I look at him with disrespect. And not that kind!"
Rachel looked at her with the expression of someone who had been her friend for six years and had survived the Oracle of Delphi and two apocalypses and was therefore completely immune to misdirection. "You know I gave a twelve-minute speech about harbor contamination and systemic municipal failure and you didn't hear a word of it."
"I've heard you give that speech four times."
"That's not the point."
"You're a very compelling public speaker and I support your work entirely."
"He's still there," Rachel said.
Percy absolutely didn't look back. She wasn't going to look back. "He's looking at the harbour."
"He's been looking at you for the last ten minutes."
Percy lasted approximately three seconds before looking back.
Dick Grayson was not looking at the harbour.
Their eyes met across the plaza. Even at that distance, his eyes looked blue of open sky on the days Apollo actually bothered to do his job properly, warm and direct and unflinching. For a moment, neither of them did anything about it. Then he smiled.
Percy turned back around immediately, deeply annoyed at herself for the comparison.
"Professional conversation," she muttered.
"Completely," Rachel agreed solemnly. "Extremely badge-focused."
Rachel's debrief started before Percy got the penthouse door fully shut behind her.
"He stayed for the whole thing," she announced, dropping her bag on the sectional.
Percy kicked off her boots. "You mentioned."
"Past the scheduled end time."
"You mentioned that too."
"He came to an environmental protest," Rachel continued, "as a cop. Voluntarily."
Percy headed for the kitchen before this conversation could become visibly dangerous. "Some people contain multitudes."
Rachel gasped softly. "You're defending him already."
"I'm literally not."
The kettle went on. Percy braced both hands against the counter and stared at it like boiling water required direct supervision.
Behind her, Rachel shifted on the couch. "So which is it? Surveillance or genuine civic concern?"
Percy didn't answer right away. She put the kettle on.
"He knew about the missing dock workers," she said. "The connection to the contamination zones. I've been monitoring that harbour for three months, and I didn't have the missing persons data because it's in closed records."
She looked at the window. The harbour was going amber in the late afternoon light.
"Six people, Rachel. From the same stretch I've been sampling."
Rachel's expression sobered immediately.
"And you didn't know."
"No." Percy leaned back against the counter. "Because why would the environmental consultant get access to missing persons data?" She laughed once under her breath, sharp-edged. "Apparently, I've been modelling a supernatural murder harbour without realising the murder part."
Rachel watched her quietly.
"You believed him."
"I know." She turned around. "He's weird, okay? He agrees when I call out the department's failures. Says he came because he cares about it. He stayed for the whole event, and he looked at the harbour like it bothered him. Like it was personal."
She crossed her arms. "It's naive. The department hasn't acted on contamination reports in six years. What is one detective going to do?"
Rachel was quiet for a moment. Then, carefully, "Hm."
Percy narrowed her eyes. "Don't hm me."
"I'm deciding whether to point out the irony."
"There is no irony."
Rachel tucked one leg underneath herself. "You, famously anti-authority, being emotionally conflicted because one detective appears to genuinely care about systemic environmental collapse."
"I'm not emotionally conflicted."
"You sound emotionally conflicted."
"I sound correct."
Rachel smiled slowly, the kind of smile that usually preceded psychic damage.
"Didn't you once-" Rachel picked up her sketchbook from the coffee table, opened it, made a very casual pencil mark, "-argue systemic reform directly to the king of the gods. On Olympus. To his face. Instead of, say, burning the whole thing down when you had the chance."
Percy opened her mouth.
"And turn down immortality," Rachel continued, same tone, "because you wanted change from the inside rather than-"
"That was completely different."
"Mm."
"It was."
"That was about preventing another Titan War. That was about making sure the next generation of demigods wasn't abandoned the way we were. That was-"
Percy stopped. Rachel was looking at her with the patient expression of someone who had made her point and was willing to wait for it to land.
"You turned down immortality to force systemic accountability. What was it you say - what is one detective, one demigod going to do?"
"Okay, when you phrase it like that, it sounds-"
"Exactly like this."
"It's not exactly like this," Percy snapped. "Zeus wasn't hot."
Rachel blinked.
Percy blinked.
The penthouse went silent.
Then Rachel folded in half laughing.
"Oh my god."
"That's not what I meant."
"You didn't even hesitate."
"I'm not interested in him. He's a cop."
"He's objectively attractive," Rachel offered. "I'm saying that as an artist with a professional eye for composition."
"He's a police detective investigating harbour contamination."
"And apparently symmetrical enough to short-circuit your brain stem."
"I have never short-circuited in my life."
Rachel gave her a long look. "Percy. You once walked directly into a fountain because Annabeth smiled at you during capture the flag."
Percy stared at the ceiling for strength.
"I noticed the badge."
"You noticed other things."
"I noticed the badge and made a deliberate choice to focus on the badge." Percy picked up her mug. "The missing persons data is relevant to the contamination investigation. That's what this is. I should go back to the harbour tonight - triangulate the sample sites against the incident locations now that I have them."
Mrs O'Leary lifted her massive head from Rachel's lap immediately, ears flicking once before she abandoned Rachel entirely and climbed halfway across Percy instead.
The hellhound currently looked mostly like an enormous black mastiff under the Mist. Mostly.
Her eyes still glowed red if Percy looked at them too long.
"You traitor," Rachel informed the dog.
Mrs O'Leary sneezed directly in her direction.
Percy scratched behind the hellhound's ears automatically and stared out toward the harbour through the windows.
Dark water. Orange industrial lights smeared across the surface.
Waiting.
Rachel's voice softened slightly. "You're worried."
Percy exhaled slowly through her nose.
"The contamination patterns were already wrong," she admitted. "Now there are missing people sitting right on top of the same zones." She swallowed once. "And the water felt-"
Rachel waited.
Percy shook her head immediately. "I don't know. Old."
The word settled heavily between them.
Rachel's pencil stilled over her sketchbook.
"The dream felt old too," she said quietly.
Percy looked away from the harbour.
"No," she said immediately. "Absolutely not. We're not doing that."
"Doing what?"
"The thing where we decide this is mythological before exhausting every scientific explanation first."
Rachel raised one eyebrow. "Percy, you've personally punched two prophecies."
"Which is why I'm qualified to say prophecies are stupid."
Mrs O'Leary huffed warm breath against Percy's shoulder.
The penthouse fell quiet for a minute except for the scratch of Rachel's pencil.
Then Rachel glanced up casually. "So are you going to call him?"
Percy nearly inhaled tea.
"No."
"You kept the card."
"That's because throwing it away immediately would've looked weird."
"To who?"
Percy opened her mouth.
Closed it again.
Rachel looked unbearably smug.
"Oh my god," Percy groaned, dragging a hand over her face. "I hate that you're observant."
"I'm literally the Oracle."
"Yeah, and somehow this is still your most evil trait."
Rachel grinned down at the sketchbook. "What's his first name again?"
"You know his first name."
"I want to hear you say it."
Percy considered several forms of violence.
Unfortunately, all of them required standing up, and Mrs O'Leary had settled fully across her legs now with the immovable confidence of a dying star.
"You're unbearable."
"And yet."
Percy stared at the harbour again.
The deep water beyond the piers looked black under the night sky. Calm on the surface.
Not empty.
Something shifted slowly in the back of her mind; the memmory of cold water against her fingertips, ancient awareness moving far below the harbour floor.
Her jaw tightened.
Rachel noticed immediately. "Percy."
"I'm going back out tonight."
Rachel sighed like she'd expected exactly that. "Field work?"
"Field work," Percy stopped before correcting herself. Hoping the universe hears it. "Retired-person field work."
"Of course," Rachel said, in the tone that meant she was allowing this for now and storing the rest for later. "There's leftover frittata if you're back by midnight."
The harbour at night was a different animal.
Industrial pier lights made long orange smears on the water. Further out, the shipping lanes moved slowly and lit against the black. The embankment was mostly empty at ten-thirty; a few runners, a couple with a dog, the distant purposeful shape of a dockworker heading somewhere.
Percy had her sample kit and her data tablet and Dick Grayson's business card still in her jacket pocket, which meant nothing, she just hadn't taken it out yet.
She crouched at the dock's edge and took a water sample from the zone she'd flagged on the mapping. Clean in the physical sense; no smell, no visible contamination, water that looked exactly like water.
But the sample from this location six weeks ago had come back with the specific chemical signature appearing in all the human-use zones, and the marine data from the same area had shown-
Recovery. Seagrass coming back. A cluster of invertebrates in a zone that had been functionally dead for twenty years.
She capped the sample. Took another two meters east. The water here was darker, stiller. She held her hand flat just below the surface and waited.
Human infrastructure degraded while marine life flourished.
Like the harbour itself was choosing sides.
Percy frowned at the water.
"No offense," she told it quietly, "but that's kind of concerning."
The harbour moved against her fingers. Present. Old. She didn't push; just held still, the way you held still when you were waiting for something to decide whether it trusted you.
Something vast shifted, way down. Not close. Not coming closer. Aware. Watching back.
She pulled her hand back slowly.
The cold followed her - not the ambient cold of harbour water, something older, something that had been sitting in the deep long enough to become its own temperature. Her fingers tingled at the tips where the water had been with the sensation of having touched something that had noted her doing it.
"Cool," she muttered. "Love that."
A small silver fish appeared at the dock's edge. Atlantic silverside, common in the harbor. Then two more, then a fourth, nudging up near her fingers where they rested on the planking.
"Hey," Percy said quietly.
Wrong, said the fish. Wrong. Old wrong. Not your wrong.
"Whose wrong?"
The fish moved. Gathered. Dispersed. Reformed. Complicated silverside body-language that translated to something like older than us. older than harbor. from before.
"From before what?"
They scattered. All at once, like something had startled them, except nothing had moved. The water was still. Percy sat on the dock planking and looked at the place where they'd been.
Older than harbor. From before.
She stayed very still for a moment.
"Nope," she said immediately. "Absolutely not."
The harbour remained deeply unconcerned with her boundaries.
"I'm retired," she said, to the empty water, to the harbour, to whatever was deep and old and aware beneath it. "I'm a marine restoration consultant and I'm taking samples for work. That's all this is."
A buoy creaked softly somewhere out in the dark.
Percy pointed accusingly at the harbour. "And don't do cryptic silence at me. I invented cryptic silence."
The harbour continued to be water in a way that felt personally smug.
Behind her, somewhere above dock level, metal shifted softly.
Percy turned instantly.
Nothing.
Just warehouse shadows. Chain-link fencing. Sodium-orange light.
Still.
She slung the bag over her shoulder and started back toward the embankment.
Halfway up the dock she stopped.
The feeling hadn't gone away.
Not danger exactly.
Awareness.
Like she'd walked out of a room while someone was still watching the doorway.
Percy glanced back once toward the harbour.
Dark water stretched endless beneath the pier lights. Ancient. Patient. The surface looked completely calm.
Which honestly felt worse.
Above the dockline, concealed in the shadows of an adjacent warehouse roof, Nightwing stayed perfectly still until Percy disappeared up the embankment stairs.
Then he looked back down at the water.
He'd been watching her for twenty minutes.
Nightwing had come to the east dock because it had appeared twice in his incident mapping and he'd wanted eyes on it independently of the department's approach. He'd been planning his own reconnaissance when he'd come around the warehouse corner and she'd been there, already crouched at the dock's edge with a proper sample kit and a modified sediment net and what appeared to be a water quality meter that suggested she'd done this enough times for the motions to become automatic.
He'd recognised the way she moved before he'd placed her face. That particular attentive quality; the same thing from the protest, the way she looked at things like she was reading them.
He'd stayed back. Not because she needed protecting. The opposite of that. Something about her down there at the edge of the dark water made interrupting feel like the wrong move, the way the wrong move sometimes had a specific texture to it that he'd learned to trust.
She crouched at the waterline. Put her hand in the water. Held still for a long time, longer than you held still for taking a sample.
Then the fish came.
He watched her talk to them.
Not performing it; not narrating her sample collection or making absent noise the way people did when they were alone and wanted to feel less alone. Actually talking to them, quietly, with pauses in between like she was waiting for responses. The fish moved. Gathered. Scattered.
She watched them with an expression he couldn't fully read from his position; something concentrated, something that had gone a register quieter than her face had been at the protest.
They scattered all at once. She sat on the dock planking and looked at the water for a moment. Said something else, quiet, that he couldn't catch.
Then she packed up her kit with the efficient movements of someone who had made a decision about something and stood up.
He filed the whole thing under: follow up on. very carefully. possibly several conversations in.
Below, the deep water shifted. Slow. The particular displacement of something large moving with deliberate unhurry, fifty or sixty feet down, there and then not there. He marked the coordinates. Noted the time.
Percy walked back toward the embankment lights with her bag over one shoulder, and didn't look up, and the harbour settled back into its dark ordinary surface behind her.
Nightwing watched the water for another few minutes. Nothing else moved. He looked once more toward the direction Percy had disappeared.
Marine restoration consultant.
Environmental specialist.
Talks to fish.
Possibly connected to whatever was happening in the harbour.
He rubbed a hand over the back of his neck.
"Great," he muttered.
Because the really irritating part was that none of this had made him less interested in talking to her again.
If anything, the opposite.
He went home thinking about the fish.
Percy got home a little after midnight, smelling like harbour water and bad decisions.
The penthouse was mostly dark except for the lamp Rachel had left on near the sectional, warm gold light spilling across the floorboards. Mrs O'Leary, who currently resolve through the Mist as something between a mastiff and oversized labrador, had migrated fully onto the couch in their absence, enormous paws twitching faintly in sleep.
She was going to rerun the models. Compare the sample zones against the disappearance sites. Think about the contamination patterns and the shape they formed together, which was a scientific problem and therefore the only reason she was thinking about it.
She was not thinking about older than harbour. From before.
She was not thinking about the feeling beneath the water when she'd touched it. That vast slow awareness deep below the surface.
And she was definitely not thinking about the way Dick Grayson had smiled at her.
Rachel, somehow, was still awake.
Of course she was.
She sat cross-legged at the kitchen island in oversized pajama pants and one of Percy's old camp hoodies, sketchbook open beside a half-finished mug of tea.
She looked up immediately when Percy came in.
"Well?"
Percy dropped the sample kit carefully beside the counter. "The harbour's haunted."
Rachel blinked once. "That's usually your opening line after concussions."
"I'm serious."
Rachel straightened slightly.
Percy shoved both hands through her hair and paced once across the kitchen. Restless energy buzzed under her skin like she'd swallowed lightning.
"There were fish," Percy said. "They said something's wrong."
Rachel's expression stayed very calm in the way people got around Percy when she started sounding genuinely unsettled.
"What exactly did they say?"
Percy stopped pacing.
"Old wrong," she said quietly. "Older than the harbor. Older than them."
Rachel's pencil went still.
"And then something moved under the dock."
"What kind of something?"
"I don't know." Percy laughed once without humour. "Big? Ancient? Deeply committed to ruining my retirement?"
That got the faintest smile out of Rachel, though it vanished quickly.
Percy leaned against the counter hard enough to feel the edge dig into her spine.
"The water feels-" She searched for the word and hated all the available options. "Aware."
The penthouse stayed quiet for a moment.
Outside the windows, the harbour lights smeared orange across the dark water.
Rachel closed the sketchbook softly. "Percy."
"No."
"I didn't say anything."
"You were about to."
Rachel raised one eyebrow.
Percy pointed at her immediately. "Do not say prophecy."
"I wasn't going to say prophecy."
"You were thinking it aggressively."
"I was going to say pattern recognition."
"That's just prophecy wearing glasses."
Rachel snorted.
Percy exhaled slowly and scrubbed both hands over her face. Exhaustion was settling into her bones now that she'd stopped moving, heavy and familiar.
This was how it started.
Not with monsters usually.
With feelings. Patterns.
Wrongness sitting just slightly underneath reality until suddenly there was a sword in your hand and somebody screaming.
She hated how recognisable it felt.
Rachel's voice gentled. "You don't have to handle it alone."
Percy stared out at the harbour.
The dark water stretched endless beyond the glass.
Patient.
"I know," she said quietly.
And she did know.
That was almost the problem.
Because if this really was becoming something bigger; something old enough to press against the harbour like that, then eventually other people would get pulled into it too.
Rachel already was.
Percy pushed off the counter abruptly. "I'm showering before I develop tetanus."
Rachel watched her go with narrowed eyes. "You're deflecting."
"I'm literally covered in harbour water."
"Emotionally."
"Rachel."
"Percy."
Mrs O'Leary lifted her massive head sleepily at the rising bickering volume, looked between them once, then made the executive decision that neither human was dying and dropped back onto the cushions.
Percy pointed at the hellhound. "See? She thinks I'm right."
Mrs O'Leary snored loudly.
"Devastating rebuttal," Rachel said.
Percy flipped her off on the way toward the hallway.
"Love you too," Rachel called after her.
Percy paused just long enough to glance back over one shoulder.
Rachel was smiling faintly again now, softer around the edges. Tired. Worried.
Home.
Something in Percy's chest eased despite herself.
"Yeah," she muttered. "Unfortunately."
Rachel's grin widened immediately.
Percy disappeared down the hallway before she could weaponise that.
Dick Grayson didn't usually spend one-thirty in the morning replaying conversations with civilian consultants in his kitchen.
Tonight, unfortunately, exceptions were being made.
He stood barefoot beside the sink, eating cereal directly out of the box while the Batcomputer projected harbour maps across his apartment wall.
Six disappearances.
Contamination zones.
Unexplained marine recovery.
And Percy Jackson talking to fish like that was a perfectly normal part of environmental field work.
Dick rubbed tiredly at one eye.
"You know," he informed the empty apartment, "sometimes I think I should've stayed in gymnastics."
The apartment offered no guidance.
On the wall display, he overlaid the contamination maps again with the coordinates he'd logged tonight from the underwater movement near the east dock.
The overlap tightened.
I'ts not exact. Close enough to matter.
Dick frowned.
The displacement pattern didn't behave like normal marine traffic. Too deep for recreational vessels. Too controlled for random current distortion.
And there'd been no sonar return.
Which he was really trying not to think too hard about.
He tossed the empty cereal box toward the recycling bin.
Missed completely.
Left it there.
His phone buzzed against the counter.
Barbara.
Dick picked it up immediately. "Hey."
"You sound awake."
"I am awake."
"Mhm." Keyboard clicking crackled faintly through the speaker. "Which means you're either concussed or obsessing."
Dick leaned against the counter. "Can't it be both?"
"It can, but statistically it's usually the second one." A pause. "You found something."
He glanced toward the harbour maps. "Maybe."
"That sounds suspiciously like yes."
Dick exhaled slowly. "The contamination case is weirder than I thought."
Barbara hummed thoughtfully. "How weird are we talking?"
He looked at the coordinates blinking softly against the display.
Deep water movement.
No sonar signature.
Civilian scientist having apparent conversations with marine life.
The city harbour feeling wrong in ways he couldn't quantify yet.
"Blüdhaven weird."
Barbara laughed softly under her breath. "That's not a measurable category."
"It should be."
"You calling because you need backup?"
"No." The answer came automatically. Too automatically.
Barbara noticed immediately because, of course, she did. "But?"
Dick hesitated.
Then: "I met someone connected to the case."
There was a beat of absolute silence.
Then Barbara said, very carefully, "Dick Grayson."
He closed his eyes immediately. "Don't."
"You used the voice."
"I did not."
"You absolutely used the voice."
"There is no voice."
Barbara made a sound like she'd finally run out of patience for him personally.
"You meet one environmentally conscious civilian with a jawline, and suddenly Gotham's greatest detective forgets operational security."
Dick laughed despite himself. "That's not what happened."
"Mhm."
"She was relevant to the investigation."
"And attractive."
"Barbara."
"And weird enough to interest you professionally."
Dick considered arguing.
Unfortunately, that would've required lying.
"Maybe."
Barbara cackled openly.
"You're impossible."
"No, you're predictable." More keyboard clicks. "What's her deal?"
Dick looked back toward the wall display automatically.
"Marine restoration consultant. Runs an NGO. Smart." A pause. "Very suspicious of cops."
"Oh, so you like her already."
"I didn't say that."
"You didn't have to."
Dick rubbed a hand over his face.
Because the really frustrating part was that Barbara wasn't entirely wrong.
Percy Jackson had gotten under his skin fast.
Not because she was attractive; though she absolutely was, which felt unfair on top of everything else, but because she'd looked at him like she expected him to disappoint her and still kept talking anyway.
He wasn't sure what to do with that yet.
Barbara's voice softened slightly. "Hey."
"Hm?"
"Be careful with this one."
Dick frowned faintly. "What do you mean?"
"I mean your voice got weird the second you mentioned her, and you're calling me at one-thirty in the morning while staring at conspiracy maps."
"I hate that you know me."
"I earned it."
Unfortunately true.
Dick looked out his apartment window toward the distant harbour lights.
Black water. Silent city.
Waiting.
"Something's happening down there," he said quietly.
Barbara went quiet too for a moment.
Then: "You think metahuman?"
"I don't know what I think yet."
That was the honest answer.
And he hated not knowing.
The harbour case felt slippery in his hands. Every time he thought he'd found the edge of it, something shifted underneath.
Like trying to map movement in dark water.
Barbara exhaled softly through the speaker. "Keep me updated."
"I will."
"And Dick?"
"Yeah?"
"If the fish start talking to you too, maybe call sooner."
Dick blinked.
Slowly.
"Why would you say that specifically?"
There was a long pause.
Then Barbara said carefully, "Dick. Why would you react to that sentence like it's relevant?"
He looked at the wall display.
At the coordinates from tonight.
At the notes he'd written and rewritten three times already.
Observed subject interacting with marine life. Possible response behaviour.
"No reason."
"Dick."
"I'm hanging up now."
Barbara's laughter followed him all the way through disconnecting the call.