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“Excuse me.”
A man with a Yankees baseball cap shoves his way through the crowd of people and stands near the front of the platform. Jason tries to move out of the way accommodatingly, but the New Yorkers around him put up mild resistance, grumbling and giving the man dirty looks for pushing his way to the front when most of them have been waiting here for at least twenty minutes.
It’s the worst kind of day for the train to be delayed. The sun is bright and is drilling into the backs of their necks. The single fan, tucked behind the sign letting them know that the train is supposedly two minutes away, only exists to designate a particularly coveted spot to stand.
Normally Jason would just fly, but with no clouds to cloak him in the middle of a Saturday, he doesn’t want to risk startling someone who can see through the Mist. And unfortunately, going from Prospect Park all the way to the Upper East Side is too far to walk unless he’s okay being two hours late to Percy’s apartment. Plus, even if he’s not a big fan of being underground, he enjoys seeing everyone going about their days, living normal mortal lives.
Besides, Percy told him that subways are safer for demigods than buses or cars because of their specific odor. Jason’s going to take him at his word and assume he wasn’t joking.
Not that they have to be overly concerned about monsters nowadays. From what he’s heard, most of them are in Tartarus or licking their wounds after Gaea’s defeat.
Right as the train is one minute away, he hears a yell from a few feet in front of him. He watches as the excited jostling of the crowd causes a woman with a large red handbag to stumble and fall onto the track.
There are gasps and shouts all around him. He hears someone yell about calling 911. Several people wave their arms frantically at the oncoming train. Some people have a flashlight app on their phones that they turn on as a signal. Jason can see lights emerge from a bend in the tunnel as the heavy whirring noise increases. The train operator must recognize something is wrong because there’s a particularly harsh sound of brakes.
Jason isn’t sure if it will be able to stop in time. The woman is still collapsed on the tracks moaning. She’s curled around her left arm, which looks like it’s broken. The contents of her bag are scattered around her, lipstick and kleenex and loose nickels and pennies.
Before he can overthink and waste precious time, Jason lifts into the air and zips down to the track. He wraps one arm around the woman, grabbing her and flying out right as the train comes to a stop, trampling her bag and its contents
He lands at the edge of the platform, near the front of the train, doing his best to adjust his grip and set her down gently without bumping her left arm. She seems dazed, but as soon as she blinks the fear out of her eyes and slows her breathing, she starts speaking rapid-fire Spanish, crying and hugging him.
Jason can barely even hear her over the noise of the crowd though. The sounds of clapping and cheering. He gives an awkward smile as he sweats nervously. Did the Mist cover up his flying? What did these people see?
Half of the crowd disperses as they get on the train, but there’s still a clump of people surrounding him. The woman he saved is now saying thank you repeatedly in English, tucking her left arm into herself. Jason tries to look closer at her injury, but a tall woman claiming to be a nurse has that covered.
A man in the crowd pushes closer to Jason, close enough to eagerly grab and shake his hand. “That was good work, son, very brave.” Jason nods, smiling nervously. The Mist must have been working overtime. Otherwise the man would be saying something along the lines of “How in the world are you able to fly?”
“I just did what I could,” he says awkwardly, part to the man, part to the whole crowd. He can feel the eyes on him, examining him. He has to get out of the station.
He steps closer to the woman he saved. Someone in the crowd must have offered up a towel, and the nurse has fashioned it into a makeshift sling.
“Are you okay?” he asks her when she looks up at him. She nods, her face red and blotchy.
“Thank you,” she says again, softer and with a grateful smile. Jason smiles back. He looks down at the tracks, where her bag and its contents have been crushed and torn apart by the train. He wonders if he should get them for her too, but that may be asking too much of the Mist.
“I’m glad you’re okay,” he says, trying to inject authority and reassurance into his voice like he did when he was a Centurion, comforting campers hurt in the War Games. Then he nods at the people around her and starts to leave, pushing through the crowd toward the stairs.
“Wait, you should probably stay for the cops!” someone yells, but Jason doesn’t turn around. Percy will understand if he’s late. Maybe a walk to the Upper East Side will clear his head.
When Jason finishes his story a few days later, Nico looks at him in surprise, frozen with a fry in his hand a few inches from his mouth.
“You’re sure no one saw you fly?” Nico asks before devouring the fry in three quick bites.
“Maybe there was someone in the crowd who could see through the Mist, but the majority couldn’t,” Jason says. “Otherwise, I would have gotten different questions.”
“What did they see instead?”
“I’m not sure,” Jason shrugs. “They probably just saw me hop onto the tracks, grab her, and climb back out.”
Nico taps another fry against his chin as he considers. It’s been a month since Jason has seen him. Nico spends most of his time running errands for Hades or staying at Camp Jupiter with Hazel, but he makes a point to visit the East Coast at least once a month and drag Jason out for McDonald’s or some other similarly unhealthy fast food that would make the cooks at Camp Jupiter wag their fingers at him.
“If you barely had enough time to save her when you were flying, there’s no way you could have done that in that time frame,” Nico muses. “Especially if you were holding her and climbing at the same time.”
“I guess it was up to the Mist to make it work,” Jason says, taking another bite of his burger.
When he looks back up, mouth halfway full of food, Nico’s looking at him like he’s a younger camper who made an unexpectedly impressive showing in capture the flag. “You have the craziest luck, you know that?”
“This was really good luck,” Jason says through his partially-chewed burger bite. “If I wasn’t there, she would have died.”
“No, I agree,” Nico says. “Crazy luck can be good or bad. For example, you managed to get hit in the head like seventeen times on the Prophecy of Seven quest. But miraculously, you didn’t get any concussions.”
Jason considers this. “I guess that’s fair. It was really annoying getting knocked out so frequently though.”
“Yeah, it’s a miracle your brain’s not soup at this point. Well—soupier.”
Jason fakes a glare, but Nico just grins. “So,” Nico says, smoothly scooping up some ketchup with a fry. “Have you vowed never to take the subway again?”
“I mean, compared to what we normally deal with, it wasn’t a bad experience for me,” Jason says. “I’m just glad I was there to save that woman’s life. Maybe the lesson is that I should take the subway more so that if anyone falls on the tracks, I’m ready.”
Jason’s memories of the aftermath of the Second Titan War are blurry, partially due to the busyness of recovery and his new praetor duties and partially because all of his pre-amnesia memories still have that tint of unreality, as if he watched them all happen to someone else through the hazy window of an Iris Message.
That’s why it’s hard for him to compare that to what he’s experiencing now, in the aftermath of the Second Giant War. Gaea is defeated, Camp Half Blood is back to being an almost functional haven for demigods instead of a war zone, and the air around them lingers with the question of “What now?”
Some of the campers are better at answering that question than others. Piper went back to California to be with her dad. Leo looked at the wreckage around them and made it his mission to give the camp an upgrade. Most days, it’s near impossible to get him to come out of Bunker 9.
This leaves Jason. No praetorship, no quests to do, no campers directly under his care, just him and the giant statue of Zeus whose imposing glare seems to say, “So you saved the world. Do you expect me to be impressed?”
Jason specifically chose to stay at Camp Half Blood. To be both Greek and Roman. He’s going to stay here with the rest of the year-round campers and keep the camp running.
Sometimes though—and he always feels guilty about this—he gets bored. He keeps up his training, and he’s taken over a lot of the sword-fighting and other battle classes, but his heart isn’t in it. On one side, there’s the fear that Gaea was just a warm up, that there’s another threat to the world waiting in the wings and if he doesn’t put all of his effort into training, he and everyone he loves will die.
But also, what if this is it? Is it time for him to retire? If there are no more prophecies, what is Jason supposed to do with himself?
He has at least one goal. With fewer monsters out and about after the decimation of Gaea’s forces, it’s the perfect time to learn more about the mortal world.
Growing up, he only ever interacted with mortals on quests. Leo and Piper have given him a crash course on the important things (well, what they define as important), but there’s still a lot he doesn’t know.
Occasionally he’ll fly somewhere else for his morning run. It’s a good way to see new places, to observe all the mortals going for a run as well or taking out the trash or just sitting out and enjoying the fall weather. It makes him feel like a normal person.
This morning, he picked a random neighborhood in Long Island. It’s pretty quiet since it’s 7 am, but he can see a few people leaving for work or mowing their lawns. There’s a mom ushering her two kids into a car, telling them to hold on to their lunches. He looks away.
Eventually, it’s time for him to finish up his run and find an isolated enough spot for him to launch into the sky. Before he can do that, however, he hears yelling and crying. Ahead of him, he sees a young boy and presumably his father huddled around a tree. The boy is sobbing with his head in his hands while his dad pats his back.
A bit after the war, Leo came to him with a theory that Jason could use his control over air to enhance his hearing. He coached him through the physics of it, through altering the air flow to direct sound towards him. They’ve run a few tests over the months: Leo forcing him to stand across camp and listen to whatever nerdy monologue or cringey joke he’s picked to recite.
Jason figures the slight invasion of privacy is worth it to figure out if there’s a problem Jason can help with. As he jogs, he directs the boy’s words towards him.
“She’ll die up there!” Jason hears the boy wail. Alarmed, he starts to run faster.
“She won’t die,” the dad is saying. “We’ll figure out some way to get her out! Or she’ll get down by herself. She got up there by herself, didn’t she?” He smiles at his son, who is looking at him with watery eyes. “We just need a ladder. One of the neighbors must have one that’s tall enough.”
Jason slows to a stop in front of them. “Is everything okay?” he calls out.
The dad gives him a sheepish smile and points up. “Yeah, just a cat in a tree.”
Jason looks in the tree and sure enough, he can see a grey blob in the leaves that must be the cat.
“Wow, she got up pretty high,” Jason says.
“What if she falls!” the boy cries.
“She’s not going to fall,” the dad pats his back gently. “She’s got great balance. She’s very agile.”
“She could die!” the boy insists.
Jason looks closer. The cat’s expression is hard to read, but she looks scared.
“Maybe I can help,” Jason says.
The dad looks at him. “Do you live nearby? Do you have a ladder?”
“Uh, no,” Jason admits. But he can fly up and get the cat very quickly. Or use the wind to float her down gently. The problem is that he doesn’t know what the Mist will make them see, so he doesn’t know what to tell them.
He decides to just go for it. He tries to use the winds to lift the cat into the air, but all that does is make her hiss and grab onto the branch with her claws.
Plan B then, Jason thinks. He sticks close to the tree, miming climbing, as he lifts through the air towards the cat. Soon, he’s looking directly into her eyes. She looks suspicious of him, so Jason coos, beckoning her into his arms. Eventually, he gives up and tries to grab her. She hisses, flailing around and refusing to let go of the branch.
“Come on,” Jason whispers. “I’m not going to hurt you. I’m just trying to get you down safely.”
Eventually, she seems to get the message, and her fear gives way to a lack of resistance. Jason cradles her in his arms and starts his descent.
As soon as his feet are on the ground, Jason hands the boy his cat. The kid’s face is still marked by tears, but they’re offset by his huge grin.
“Thank you!” he beams. Then, in a scolding tone to his cat: “Mrs. Fluffy, you really scared me! I’m so glad you’re okay!”
“Thank you, son,” his dad says, shaking Jason’s hand. He has small rectangular glasses, similar to Jason’s own but with black wire frames instead of gold. “That was incredible climbing. And of such a high tree!” So the Mist took the bait. “We can’t thank you enough. He loves that cat more than life itself!”
Jason looks down at the boy, who’s still holding the appropriately named Mrs. Fluffy into his chest, whispering to her. He can see the pieces of his dad in him—in his nose, his ears. Jason wonders if this boy will need glasses one day as well.
“I’m just happy I could help,” Jason smiles.
“You know that we call you Superman as a joke, right?”
Jason rolls his eyes. “What was I supposed to do? Just leave his cat in the tree?”
“They would have gotten the cat down eventually,” Leo shrugs. “Probably.” He looks up from whatever machine he’s working on and points at a table a few feet away. “Hand me that screwdriver, will ya?” Jason does as he’s told. “Anyways, what if either of them could see through the Mist? Or some random person walking around could? A lot of risk for a cat.”
“We fight monsters in public all the time,” Jason says defensively. “Anyway, no one seemed to realize I was flying when I saved that lady from the train, and there had to be at least a hundred people who saw me then.”
Leo switches off the saw, takes off his helmet, and turns to Jason. “Are you gonna keep doing this?”
“I don’t know,” Jason admits. “I wasn’t planning on it. But if I run into people who need help and I can help them, I’ll do it.”
Leo gives him an inquisitive look. “You know, we call you Superman, but you’re echoing Spider-Man’s whole shtick.”
“Huh?”
“You know, ‘With great power comes great responsibility.’”
Jason pauses to consider that, but before he can say anything, Leo continues. “You’re not funny enough to be Spider-Man though, sorry. But hey, he does famously stop crime on the streets of New York.”
“I don’t know about ‘stopping crime,’” Jason says. “I just want to help people.”
“That’s how it starts.” Leo taps Jason’s shoulder with his screwdriver. “But soon you’re going to be fighting a cackling goblin man on a weird hoverboard.”
“I don’t understand anything you’re saying.”
“Hoverboard…” Leo trails off. “I think I could make that.”
At that, Jason leaves. He’s been friends with Leo for long enough that he knows it’s not worth trying to get back his attention from whatever new idea has taken over.
With Leo occupied, Jason has a limited number of people to go to with his questions. He picks the obvious choice.
Given the time difference, he has to wait until it’s dark on Long Island, by which time he knows that Piper will be done with school. She picks up his Iris Message after a few seconds.
“Hey,” he says.
“Hey!” she replies, shoving on a ratty and stained sweatshirt with unevenly cuffed sleeves. They catch up, Jason telling her about the kids he’s training in sword-fighting and Piper complaining about how much she hates math. Eventually, Jason gets to the train and the cat in the tree.
“Leo said that I sound like Spider-Man,” Jason says. “But I don’t know who that is.”
Piper cackles. “You’re not Spider-Man. You’re too much of a boy scout.”
“A boy scout?” Jason starts before deciding it’s not worth it. “Nevermind. I just want you to explain to me who Superman and Spider-Man are.”
Piper looks at him, questioning. “What do you know?”
“They save people, apparently, with their powers. That… aren’t from the gods?”
“Yeah, they’re superheroes,” Piper says. “You’re telling me no one at Camp Jupiter talked about superheroes? No one brought a Batman lunchbox with them from the mortal world?”
“We were a little busy with other things!” Jason says, flustered. Sometimes when Leo and Piper talk, Jason will sit and let everything they say about the mortal world and pop culture wash over him. Occasionally he’ll try to follow along, but he usually ends up more confused than he started.
“Well, lucky for you, my dad was in one of the X-Men movies, so I’ve done my research,” Piper grins. “Basically, superheroes have powers that they use to save the world and fight bad guys.”
“Where do they get the powers if their parents aren’t demigods?”
Piper shrugs. “Could be because of an accident with something radioactive, could be some special serum they were given, could be because they were born that way. Sometimes they don’t have any powers and are just well-trained. And rich.”
Jason thinks back to the legacies at Camp Jupiter whose godly parentage went back generations. They might not have been able to call down lightning, but that didn’t make them any less of a threat during the War Games.
“No one has powers from being a demigod?”
Piper squints in thought. “Actually, I think Wonder Woman is a daughter of Zeus? So you would be half-siblings! Oh, and Thor is actually a god.”
“Thor is a superhero?” Camp Jupiter taught them about other pantheons, including the Norse gods, but they never mentioned this.
“It’s a fictional version of Thor,” Piper says. “He’s in the Avengers.”
“Huh?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“You said that superheroes fight bad guys.” Jason takes them back to where they started. “Like monsters?”
“Uh, sometimes?” Piper says. “Or people with superpowers who want to do bad things. Like rob banks or try to take over the world.”
“Kind of like Gaea,” Jason says. “The taking over the world part, I mean. Though I guess she is the world,” he muses. “But she wanted to kill a lot of people.”
“Yeah,” Piper nods. “Definitely supervillain territory. Supervillains are the bad guys that superheroes fight.”
“Demigods fight monsters,” Jason says. “Superheroes fight supervillains. And save the world.”
“I mean, demigods also save the world,” Piper says. “We definitely did some world-saving this summer.”
“Or world-killing,” Jason ponders. “Since Gaea is the world. But we saved all of the people on the world. So we killed the earth and saved the world.”
“You’re making it too complicated,” Piper groans. “Let’s just say that we’re basically superheroes.”
“And superheroes always try to save people,” Jason says. “So what I did was all in a day’s work.”
Piper looks unsure. “I’m not gonna tell you not to save people,” she says. “But you should probably be careful. The demigod world and the mortal world do not usually mix well.”
Jason almost wants to snap back, to say that if anyone knows that it’s him. To bring up Beryl Grace, standing in front of him, a mortal warped into a mania after being chosen then abandoned by a god. Twice.
But also, Jason has known he was a demigod from the age of two. Growing up in New Rome, he has always been firmly in the demigod world. Piper, on the other hand, spent her childhood ping-ponging from school to school with powers that she didn’t understand. Only finding out later that she’s not fully human, that monsters are real, and that everything she thought was true was a lie.
Piper knows the consequences of using her powers around mortals. She’s watched her dad be dragged into a demigod fight. She’s had to erase his memories to preserve his sanity.
“Yeah, thanks,” Jason says. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
Jason can’t sleep. Normally, he would go for a run or cycle through some drills with his sword or find some other way to burn the energy off. Now though, the stillness of Camp Half-Blood, only disrupted by the hum of bugs or the soft lapping of the water, itches at him. He needs to escape.
As he flies across Long Island towards the city, the lights below him get brighter and brighter, like one of Leo’s machines powering on. Eventually, he’s in Manhattan, only a few blocks from the Empire State Building, from Olympus.
Here, he has his pick of tall buildings. He picks one with a wide enough ridge to sit on. From so high up, New York City looks strangely small. The few people still awake and moving around the sidewalk look like tiny specks of lint. None of them realize that gods walk among them and that their home base is on 34th Street.
When he lifts his vision and looks around at the other buildings, he sees he’s not alone. Sitting on the roof of a slightly shorter building, a boy with mousy brown hair is dangling his feet over the edge, looking down. The arms of his brown knit sweater are pulled over his hands. Too thick for summer, Jason thinks.
The boy hasn’t seen him, eyes fixed on the ground. As Jason stares, he wonders if it would be weird for him to go over and talk to him. They’re probably about the same age. Maybe if he went around, pretended to have gotten on the roof the same way he did…
Jason watches the boy stand. He’s wobbling, swaying dangerously close to the edge. Jason’s muscles tense.
The boy takes a deep breath. And steps off.
Jason doesn’t even think. It’s instinct, honed after years of training sessions and close calls on the Argo II, not to mention Leo’s test rides of Festus. He dives after the kid.
The height of the building is his ally, giving him enough time to catch up to the boy. Jason grabs him from behind as gently as he can and slows their fall until they’re hovering about twenty flights above the sidewalk.
The boy doesn’t even register the disruption to his fall at first, eyes still closed. After a second or so, he blinks them open. First he stares at the ground with a gasp. Then he turns around to look at Jason in awe.
Jason decides to take him up, not to the rooftop he was on but another one nearby, one with a higher wall around it. He tries to let him go gently, but as soon as he loosens his grip, the boy stumbles.
Jason has no idea what the Mist made him see. It’s hard for him to think of a mortal explanation for the fact that this boy jumped off a building and Jason caught him.
“Who are you?” he asks, shaking.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I—” the boy chokes up. “I jumped. I was going to jump.”
The Mist must be working overtime, preventing him from reconciling what happened with what he knows to be possible. That, on top of whatever led him to jump in the first place and the shock of almost dying, has left him a mess.
“I stopped you,” Jason says. It’s the most true thing he can say.
“Why?” There’s a crack in his voice.
Jason considers. In all of his years of saving people, no one has ever asked him why. He tries to figure out a good answer. This kid isn’t a fellow soldier of Rome, a fellow demigod. He’s not one of Jason’s teammates on a perilous and continually life-threatening quest.
In Jason’s world, everything is done in service of the gods. All the life-threatening situations he’d gotten in and out of were because he was a demigod, which meant that he was automatically enlisted in the fight against monsters, against Titans, against Giants.
The gods are a few blocks away, but none of them would have saved this boy.
Jason settles on, “I didn’t want you to die.”
The kid squints at him. “You don’t know me. Why do you care?”
Jason doesn’t know what to say to that. The boy is right: Jason doesn’t know him. But he looks at this crying kid and he thinks of Camp Jupiter, of the kids who had to fight their way to camp, defending themselves against monsters and clawing their way through Lupa’s training only to get stuck in the Fifth Cohort, constantly taunted and jeered at by the other legionaries. Many—most, really—had to fight their way through life even before they knew they were a demigod.
He remembers a twelve-year-old who came to him for comfort a few weeks into his tenure at camp, who told him about his mom’s death, about the foster home he was in and the monsters he had to face there. He cried on Jason’s shoulder.
“You’re right,” Jason says, moving his shoulders back, trying to appear more confident than he is. “I don’t know you. But things will get better.” He takes a deep breath. “They did for me. I made friends I love, and I’m thankful every day that I never died.”
Talking like this feels disingenuous; this kid is assuming what Jason wants him to assume: that Jason lives a normal mortal life and has also struggled with wanting to kill himself.
The truth is more complicated. Growing up, Jason knew that he would die young. It was in his training, in the War Games. It was in the whispers, in the comparisons to other Roman heroes. It was in his name. He had accepted it. And on the Argo II, that certainty only intensified, this time because the prophecy implied that it would either be him or Leo, and it couldn’t be Leo.
But somehow, here he is. He’s alive, all of his friends are alive, and he doesn’t think he’s going to die anytime soon. And that’s a relief that he never knew he was waiting for.
He’s not going to tell this boy all that. But from the way the boy looks at him, he thinks that part of that message got across anyway.
After this, Jason can’t imagine just sitting on a roof and looking out over the city. He decides to fly around instead, weaving through and above the buildings. He tells himself he’s just burning off energy, but he can’t stop himself from scanning the roofs, seeing if there are any other people planning to jump.
Eventually, he runs out of steam. New York is the city that never sleeps, but at 7 am on a weekend, with the sun just having risen, it gets close. He finds a rooftop in Midtown to do what he planned on originally—to sit and look down and think.
After he’s landed, he looks up and sees the Empire State Building across from him and feels a sense of inevitability, as if there was some magnetic pull that he couldn’t quite resist.
He’s been sitting for almost half an hour when he hears a throat clearing behind him.
When he turns around, he sees a woman, about seven feet tall with silky black hair. She’s wearing a grey tunic, and her mouth is stern.
Jason kneels. “Lady Juno.”
“My champion,” she says. Her voice is authoritative, but Jason can sense a hint of warmth. “It is good to see you.”
“It’s good to see you too, my lady.” Jason is still kneeling. It never hurts to be sure.
“Stand up,” Juno says. Jason stands, meeting her eyes. “I see you’ve been exploring the mortal world,” she says with a sweep of her hand. Jason can’t parse her tone, if it’s approving or disapproving.
“Yes,” Jason says. “I’ve been learning a lot.” A corner of Juno’s mouth perks up. This was what she wanted to hear: her champion, always improving, always training.
“You need to be careful.” She shifts into the disapproving zone, a warning in her tone. “The Mist is powerful, but you can’t keep on using your powers openly. It is important that we stay hidden from the mortal world.”
“My lady,” Jason starts. He has to tread carefully. “I apologize, but I felt that it was necessary to use them to save the lives of innocent mortals.”
“Yes, but is the life of a single mortal worth putting Olympus in jeopardy?”
There’s that feeling of injustice in his chest, the same feeling he got when Zeus was blaming all of Gaea’s schemes on Apollo. He remembers the glare in his father’s eyes, knowing that he had washed away years of dutifully serving the gods with a single sentence.
He might be about to make another mistake.
“I’m not just going to stand by and watch someone die when I can prevent it,” he says.
“Death is a fact of life,” Juno says. “Accidents happen. People die. It’s part of being a mortal.”
He looks up at his godly patron. She who has never known death, never stood on the battlefield and felt in her bones that this might be the end for her. That this life could be ripped away, leaving her separated from the people she loves, at the mercy of the judgement of Pluto.
To Juno, a mortal life is nothing. The gods barely even value demigod lives, and those are their children, who fight their battles for them, who go on dangerous quests, often only to satisfy their random fancies. Demigods are useful, but disposable. Mortal lives aren’t even useful.
Jason looks at Juno and thinks of his mother. His mother, who bore Jupiter two children and faced Juno’s wrath for it. Who was forced by Juno to abandon her baby to the wolves. He knows that his mother wasn’t a good person, but did she deserve to be treated as a plaything of the gods?
Maybe she deserved to be saved.
“I’m half mortal,” Jason says, almost a whisper.
“You’re a demigod!” Juno says it firmly, proudly. “A child of Jupiter! Champion of Juno!”
He’s heard echoes of this his entire life. Camp Jupiter, shoving him into this box, raising him on a pedestal.
Juno’s implication is clear. His life means more than a random mortal’s. Because of his relation to the gods. Because he can do their bidding.
When he worked with the rest of the Seven to defeat Gaea, he saved the gods. He covered their asses, really—made up for their mistakes.
He looks down, out on the city—the honking taxis, the bustle of the sidewalk as the mortal day begins. If he hadn’t defeated Gaea, all of those lives would be gone.
Isn’t it strange that he’s spent his life protecting the gods, all of whom are more powerful than him? What about protecting those who need protecting?
“I want to use my powers to help people,” Jason says. Firmly. Juno seems taken aback by the conviction in his voice. She quickly shifts to angry.
“Jason,” she says. “I’m not sure if you realize what you’re doing.”
“I’m making a choice,” he says. “If I can save someone, I’m going to do it.”
Her eyes flash. “Be careful. It might be hard to pursue these reckless heroics if you can’t rely on the Mist to shield you from mortal eyes.”
A threat. Juno does not like to be told no. “You would endanger Olympus?” he says. “To prove a point?”
Her composure is slipping. He sees her nostrils flare, her eyes harden. “All my life you’ve had my protection. Maybe you should see how you fare without it.”
He wants to scoff, wants to say, “Some protection.” But he keeps his face blank, his shoulders back, his hands unclenched. She wants him to beg for forgiveness. To admit that he made a mistake.
She wants him to apologize because there’s a kid alive and walking around instead of broken on the sidewalk. That there’s a woman who just lost her handbag to a subway train instead of losing her life.
Jason turns around. Runs. Leaps off the side of the building and flies away.
He flies high and fast, turning himself into a speck in Juno’s eyeline. Except she’s the queen of the gods and he’ll never truly be out of her sight.
What did he just do?
He slows down as he thinks, the tall apartment buildings turning into parking lots turning into swaths of trees, speckled with yellow and orange and red. He stares off at New York City in the distance. Then looks to the left, to the stretch of Long Island. Towards Camp Half Blood.
For Jason, isolation is an old friend. Being a child of the Big Three—not to mention being raised in Camp since he was a kid—set him apart, making him unapproachable to and resented by many. He can count on one hand the people that tried to get to know him outside of that.
But on a larger scale, being a demigod is its own kind of isolation. Jason stood on that platform, waiting for the subway and knowing that if he told his life story to the crowd around him, no one would believe him.
Jason feels like he’s constantly at a crossroads. He’ll take a decision that should take minutes and stretch it into months of deliberating, of debating within himself. This summer, he had to decide if he wanted to be Greek or Roman.
Now, from the clouds, he looks down at New York and asks himself: god or mortal?
It’s a tightrope every demigod has to balance on. Belonging in both worlds and thus neither.
In many ways, New Rome was the third option, a blend between the two. Camp Half-Blood is neither and both. It’s an icy river: you plunge into the summer, fighting and training, immersed in the world of the gods, and right as you get used to it, you have to step out into the mortal world. Try to live a normal life as if you didn’t spend your summer fighting monsters.
Piper is going to a mortal high school right now. Would he be able to do that?
Jason can’t help his eyes from fixing on the Empire State Building, a beacon even from miles away. Was Juno bluffing? Or would she actually stop the Mist from shielding him?
His pondering is stopped when he notices a haze of smoke in the distance, clouding his view.
He flies closer, staying tucked between the clouds. Watches the trees be steadily replaced by denser and denser collections of buildings.
The smoke is coming from a stout brick building in the Bronx. Fire fills the windows, barely diminished by water from the hose of a firetruck parked in front.
Jason hovers above. How could he get rid of the fire? He imagines blowing it out, like a candle, but that would just spread the fire to the buildings right beside it, not to mention harm the swarm of people standing on the street, watching their home and all their belongings go up in flames.
Jason gets closer. No one from the ground seems to see him, thankfully. He’s not sure if he has the Mist to thank for that or the smoke.
First step is to try to save lives. He looks down at the burning building and wishes Leo was here with him.
Thinking of Leo reminds him of his theory about Jason’s ability to direct sound. When the two of them would practice from opposite sides of camps—and when he listened in on the boy crying over his cat—the main problem was distance. The person was far away, but it was roughly a straight shot.
Jason looks down on the maze of a building and takes a deep breath. He closes his eyes and feels the air, gently strumming his fingers. Then he starts combing through the building, searching for human voices. It’s made doubly hard by the way the fire is swallowing the oxygen around it as it grows even bigger.
He sinks even further from the sky, circling the building and looking in windows as he listens. Each of the rooms seem empty, the last few people climbing down their fire escapes.
Then he hears something near the sixth floor. A slight wheezing.
Jason lands on the nearest fire escape. He uses his knife to break the lock on the window and open it, letting loose a wave of smoke. He tries to dispel it and give himself a bubble of clean air, but the smoke seems inescapable.
Luckily, it only takes him a few steps into the apartment to reach the room the sound is coming from. In bed is an old woman, curled in on herself and coughing. Next to her is a wheelchair.
She doesn’t seem to hear him enter. He tries to extend his clean air bubble to her, lessening her coughing. It helps, but barely. He needs to get her out of here.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers as he moves closer to her, removing her blankets.
It barely takes any effort to lift her. She opens her eyes when they go through the window, out into the slightly fresher air.
“I’m getting you out, ma’am,” he says, trying to be reassuring. She just looks confused, like she’s not fully awake yet.
Jason looks down. Six stories. Maybe he should just take the steps down. He hears Juno’s words in his head: “It might be hard to pursue these reckless heroics if you can’t rely on the Mist to shield you from mortal eyes.”
“You don’t understand!” he hears a wail from below. There’s a young woman with her black hair in a bun, two bags of groceries sitting abandoned on the ground beside her. Her hands are on her knees as she gasps, trying to recover her breath. “My baby’s in there!”
That makes his decision for him. He steps off the fire escape and lowers himself to ground as quickly as he can without startling the old woman in his arms.
He hands her off to an EMT who looks at him in shock for a second before her instincts take over and she helps the old woman onto a stretcher. Then he dashes to the young mom who at this point is sobbing on the ground.
“Which room is your baby in?” he asks. The woman looks up in confusion and suspicion, examining his face. He doesn’t know if it’s the smoke that clings to his clothes or stripes of soot on his face that convince her to point towards the top of the building.
“That window,” she says. “Eleventh floor.”
Jason nods and flies off, not even bothering to see her reaction. There’s no fire escape this time. He shoves open the window.
The smoke is even worse. He gives up on his air bubble, covering his mouth with the arm of his hoodie.
The layout is slightly different from the old woman’s apartment. He has to travel deeper to get to the bedroom door. When he opens it, he sees a bed and dresser and, in the far corner, a crib.
At this point, Jason’s main goal is to get out here as quickly as possible. If he can feel his lungs struggling after spending a minute in this apartment, he fears for the baby.
Jason doesn’t know if he’s ever held a baby before. He hopes he’s doing it right. There’s no time to adjust his grip though. He dashes across the room and flies out the window.
He descends slowly, gently, trying to push the smoke away. The baby, a boy who’s barely as big as Jason’s forearm, is still breathing. Halfway down, he starts to cry.
As he approaches the ground, Jason can feel the stares. He can hear the gasps, the whispers.
“Do you see that guy flying?” a kid who can’t be older than fifteen yells.
So Juno made good on her promise. Jason’s stomach sinks.
He lands in front of the crying woman, gently handing her her baby. She barely looks at him, only having eyes for her son, swaying as she holds him to her chest.
There’s no point hiding now. Jason makes another lap around the building, trying to listen for labored breaths or screams. He can’t hear anything.
He lands back on the ground, in front of the crowd. “Is anyone still in there?” Jason yells.
The response is blank faces and a few shaken heads. Jason looks at the nearby firefighters, still working on dousing the fire with water.
He faces the building, praying that it’s empty of people. Then he lifts his hands.
The lack of sleep and constant flying and use of his powers are getting to him. He feels faint. But he thinks of the faces in the crowd, the people who have almost lost their homes.
Slowly, he pulls the air from the building, starving the fire. He starts from the bottom, watching the flames in the windows get smaller as he moves up, floor by floor.
He grits his teeth, can feel sweat pouring down his face—partially from the heat of the fire and partially from the effort this is taking.
When it’s done, he collapses to his knees. His eyes are closed and his ears are ringing, but he can hear the crowd buzzing. There’s some awed clapping, some cheers.
When he opens his eyes again, the EMT who took care of the old woman from before is kneeling at his side. She offers him water, and he drinks it eagerly.
Jason eventually stands up, slightly wobbly. He faces the crowd.
Suddenly, the questions start: “How can you fly?” and “Who are you?” He even hears a firefighter nearby say, “I don’t know who you are, kid, but do you want a job?”
As the clamor increases, he can feel his anxiety rising with it. Did he just make the biggest mistake of his life?
Then the noise dies down. The crowd parts, letting the mom whose baby he saved push through. She’s still crying, but her panic is gone. Instead, she smiles at him.
“Thank you,” she says softly. “Thank you for saving my baby.” Jason smiles back.
With less noise from the crowd, Jason can hear sirens approaching. He doesn’t know much about the mortal world, but he knows that there are people who will have questions for a flying man and a man who can put out fires with a lift of his hands.
“Fly away, man!” A voice from the back shouts. It sounds like a teenager. Jason nods in its direction.
“Uh—have a good day,” are the best parting words he can manage. He nods his head before lifting off the ground, into the air, escaping into the clouds.