Ten minutes until the next block.

Annabeth tosses her bag on her desk and releases a breath. Out, then in, and hold. A long stretch toward the ceiling. Cracks along her spine, along the slow roll of her neck. Breathe out.

Five classes a day and she's still going strong. For a brief moment she looks longingly toward her bunk—she could take a few minutes and slip out of her uncomfortable jumpsuit, have a quick power nap, ease the headache curled up against her temples. Just a few minutes.

Her tablet beeps.

Well, there goes that idea, she thinks, pulling the thing from her bag, keying it open. She's got a few new messages from Director Chiron, one from Travis Stoll about tutoring, one from Clarisse regarding who knows what, and at the top, the most recent and marked urgent, from an unknown sender. Interesting. Even more interesting when she opens it and finds the screen flooded with undulating strings of numbers and letters and symbols, messy and unpatterned.

Her fingers still. Unknown sender, layers of encryption. Something like excitement tickles through her arms. It could be one of her advisor's tests or another stupid prank—that message from Stoll is starting to look suspicious, since when does he care about tutoring—but it could be something else. Something real.

Ten minutes until the next block.

She hangs her bag on her chair and sits down, hooks her tablet up to the larger unit on her desk. The holo screen lights up immediately, stretches up and out wide in front of her, her tablet turning into a keyboard. In front of her, expanded on screen, the lines of encryption blur and dance before her eyes, shake themselves sharp into distinct shapes as she loses herself in unraveling the knots of code.

And then it's there, garbled and full of static, but a sound: —wh—d… very—sk but… no time—to 49… ant th—out.

Long-range. Second-hand, maybe. She tries it again, but it's not any clearer, the same bursts of silence and noise. She moves that to the side with a wave of her hand and focuses instead on the sender, scoffing at the attempt at anonymity. It doesn't take long to trace the source.

Marin System, ship 143-1B registered Princess Andromeda.

Annabeth pauses on an inhale, stops moving, fingers hovering frozen over her keyboard.

It can't be. It can't be.

Again and again she runs the trace. There must've been a mistake. An error in her coordinates, a missed number in her algorithm, something. Her heart pounds, beats loud against the inside of her head, and she can't breathe, can't see straight—how can this be possible—nobody would be cruel enough to play this as a joke—

But the words are there. The lost ship Princess Andromeda. Confirmed destroyed, last seen in pieces as it drifted apart in the Marin System.

A ghost voice broadcast from a ghost ship.

She has to—what? What can she do from here, stuck at CAMP, pacing the length of her room?

If she reports the message, as is expected of her, the CAMP Board will take it under investigation; after waiting for mission approval and an assigned team, which she may or may not be in charge of or even included in, and which may not even leave base for days, they'll have lost their lead. No, what she needs to do is understand this message and follow its meaning. Something about a delivery, perhaps, someone running out of time, the number 49? A destination? The spaceport? Or: travel to the Marin System, investigate the wreckage, find any kind of active unit still sending a signal. Perhaps it was a retroactive message, set up to send if the ship was destroyed? But why would someone send a copy of the message to her own private tablet if there wasn't something more going on?

Questions with no answers. Either way, she's got to get out of here. And there's no way to do that quickly if she plays by the rules.

"Okay," she says, listening to the level sound of her own voice—something, anything to calm the desperate pounding of her heart, the tick-tock what if what if what if running fast and hard through her veins.

Because if the destruction of the Andromeda had been a lie?

Quickly she saves the message, backs it up to different servers, sends a copy to her external drive and pulls it from her desk unit. Her questions will have to wait. She pulls open her bag and tucks away the drive, her tablet, a credit chip with her stipend savings, an extra jumpsuit. She feels around the bottom of her footlocker until her fingers brush across the small pistol Director Chiron gave her when she graduated her training two years ago.

That, too, finds a home in her bag. Before she can think too much about the why and the how and all the ways she might actually have to use it, out there beyond the walls of CAMP, she stands and moves to the door.

The hall is clear.

She checks her watch. Her hand-to-hand combat block started fifteen minutes ago. Lost time in the code. It might make things more complicated, without people around to hide behind, but she can make this work. She pulls her tablet from her bag and sends a quick message to Malcolm.

/:0.51 : Emergency. Meet me in the deck three hangar in five minutes.

/:0.52 : Where are you? Hu has called roll twice looking for you, thinks you're sick. You never skip.

/:0.52 : What's going on?

/:0.52 : Dammit, Annabeth. This better be worth it.

The hangar is a smaller one on the station, out of the way of main thoroughfares, filled mostly with shuttles needing repair and broken down equipment. Annabeth crouches next to a generator, tapping away on her tablet, trying to send a natural-looking glitch through the security systems in the hangar. She can make a small window before someone in security comes to investigate or finds their way around the glitch—hopefully it'll be enough time to convince Malcolm to do what she needs him to do.

He arrives, like she knew he would, five minutes even and hardly out of breath. His footsteps echo in the hangar; It's dim, but light enough that Annabeth can see his glare as he approaches.

She waves him over. "Hey. We've got two minutes. I know this sounds crazy, but I need you to listen."

A pause, to see if he will interrupt. He only crouches beside her, arms crossed, watchful, while she explains the transmission, the garbled voice, her plan to go to Spaceport 49 and see if there's anything to find, then make her way to the wreckage site of the Princess Andromeda.

She doesn't waste time telling him why, doesn't need to tell him about the gravity of this. Sometimes we choose our own family, he'd said right after she'd heard about the ship crash, right as she sunk to the floor, little bits of memory piecing themselves together and starting to make the most terrible kind of sense. Family, she'd said, the word breaking on a sob, echoing hundreds of times in the promise she'd been made.

And Malcolm's hand, heavy on her shoulder, a tether.

And sometimes we choose wrong.

"Come on," Malcolm says now, pulling her out of her crouch, up and forward. He takes her bag from her shoulder and tosses it into the back of a four-person shuttle, then helps her in.

An automatic smile, surprised and grateful, pulls at her lips. She settles behind the controls and engages the engine. It comes alive with a quiet purr.

Outside, she can hear Malcolm fighting with the garage control panel, muttering curses. Just a few minutes longer. By now the security camera malfunction has been reported, possibly fixed remotely.

"Use my codes," she calls toward the open door, wishing he could move faster. "Less trouble for you that way. , password 01a—"

"Please, Annabeth. Like I don't already know all of Athena's passwords. Besides," he continues, leaning his head into the empty backseat of the shuttle. "I'm already going to be in trouble for this. Director's probably going to haul me into his office as soon as you take off."

"Come with me?"

Malcolm shakes his head. There's amusement in his eyes, a tight pull around his lips that always betrays his worry. "Somebody's got to stay here and cover your ass, Chase. Go find your answers."

.o.O.o.

She clears launch, makes it far enough away from CAMP to be sure they haven't sent fighters out after her yet. There's no way she'll be able to outrun them. For now, the radar is blank, systems green, and in the silence of the small, one-room shuttle, she sends a quiet thanks to Malcolm.

For a few silent hours, she allows the autopilot to guide her shuttle forward, busies herself with her tablet. Numbers and letters, symbols, a pattern that lulls her into a half-doze, coordinates that bring back memories she'd rather now forget. The shuttle has enough fuel for short distances or quick ship-to-ship flights, and the reserve tank will only last so long. She'll have to head for the nearest port soon. Those closest to CAMP have docks set up for Federation ships; at Spaceport 5, she drops the shuttle off with workers who are familiar with CAMP operatives. Luckily they don't arrest her, haven't been alerted to any suspicious behavior (seriously, she is going to owe Malcolm something big). In the busy terminal, she finds a transport ship that is carrying cargo to the Thule System and hitches a ride.

It takes a full day travelling at FTL speeds. The captain and his crew both are drunkards—who else would be travelling so far out to haul cargo—and Annabeth's had to knee a fair few of them in the gut to ask them to behave.

Seeing Spaceport 49 out of the viewport is almost a relief.

When she steps off the ramp and exits the tunnel that brings her to the first sector, Annabeth isn't sure what she feels. It's small. Crowded, close, too many people stuffed together in a tin can of a hub. Entirely too many variables on every side. Where is she even supposed to begin here? It's difficult to be on high-alert for everything in a place where anybody is likely a criminal. Spaceport 49's on the ass-end of the galaxy for a reason.

But she tries to blend. She finds a clothes shop and tosses her CAMP jumpsuit, chooses wrinkled black pants to tuck into her boots; an old yellowed shirt, holed and oil-stained, that she picked up on the transport on the way over; and a patched brown jacket she bought from a vendor who looked entirely too hungry. She tucks her dog tags under her shirt, hides the Athena tattoo on her wrist under her jacket, and tries to disguise everything else about herself that screams Federation.

It works, mostly. People bump into her as they do any other person on the port. One merchant mistakes her for some kind of mercenary looking for work, and Annabeth tries to hunch her shoulders more as she walks, forces herself to stop looking around so obviously.

The thing is? She doesn't know quite what she's looking for.

Coming here was illegal and stupid. But what if this was the lead she'd been waiting for?

.o.O.o.

The information dig is a bust. All anybody knows about the Princess Andromeda is that it went down in the Marin System years ago and that salvagers have already picked it clean.

"Vultures," one man says, hunched over his cold can of soup, his wild beard full of dry bread crumbs. "Can't leave nothin' alone. Heard it over the Net when the thing went down, saw this gang down on Sector E pick up and take off. Sure they picked it clean down to the bone. Vultures, all of them."

Annabeth hands him another roll of bread from her bag. "You don't think the Federation got there first?"

The man scoffs. "The Federation! Girl, they were the ones to blow it up, mark my words, cleaning up their own damn problems one way or another. Up to nothing good."

Others, too. A woman she runs into near a small data library: "Don't talk about such things! They've got ears everywhere, don't you know, ears in the walls and the ceilings and ears in your ears, be sure about it." A nymph, holding a sprig of her home tree in a pot against her chest: "Dangerous. Dangerous, meddling with space, with the Mist. Meant for land and air and sea, we were, not big metal monsters to walk around inside."

That night, she finds a cheap room for rent in Sector F, takes a shower, wipes the grime from her skin, washes her clothes best she can in the sink, avoids the reflection of her drawn face in the mirror. When was the last time she slept or ate? Sitting cross-legged on the bed, her tablet on her lap, she snacks on a fish taco she picked up from some vendor in the marketplace (where did the fish come from, anyway? Gods, she probably doesn't want to know, will probably spend most of tomorrow in the bathroom).

While she eats, she writes up a report for the day. Habitual, this time, instead of required. The woman, the cranky old man, the nymph. Nothing useful. Nothing that points to a why or a how, nothing that indicates anything from the Andromeda survived.

Nothing that mentions Luke.

Once she finishes the taco and listens to the recording for what feels like the hundredth time—she has memorized the length of the syllables and the empty static in the pauses between that tell her absolutely nothing, that give her too much time to think about promises of family and a scar-stretched smile—she lies back and sends an encoded message to Malcolm.

/:0.51 : Made It. No news yet. Keep you updated.

/:0.51 : Malcolm? They throw you in the brig?

/:0.51 : Malcolm?

.o.O.o.

She dreams of her and Luke and Thalia, the smallest incoming cohort from the CAMP school on Earth, precocious and starry-eyed and so, so young.

We'll go out together, Thalia had said, our first mission, and Luke agreed, and Annabeth made them shake on it, their hands all three piled together between them.

And she dreams of Thalia's grinning face as she waves around the acceptance letter to the Hunter program; of the bumpy edges of Luke's scar underneath her fingers, the hard press of his knuckles against her in combat class; of the maps and charts and letters, actual paper ones, he tried to keep hidden from her in his desk; of his new friends and the renewed frustration in his eyes.

And she dreams of her new friends, Malcolm and sometimes Clarisse, Grover and—

And she pulls herself from sleep.

No. No good reason to dream of the past.

Today, she tells herself, pulling her almost-dry clothes on. Today there will be something. Something that ties this damn recording to the Andromeda.

The crowds are much the same as they were, much the same as they must always be. Annabeth watches an eye-patch wearing goon bully an old woman into handing over all of her credits, gun pointed into the woman's side; a group of kids, shoeless and thin and dirty, crawl into an open duct vent; an ancient satyr being escorted roughly from a store, the shopkeep kicking his cane out from his grip. She watches, and tries to remain passive, and hates everything that makes this place what it is. Criminals and the scum of the galaxy. And too few security guards, none of them paying attention.

Why doesn't the Federation have more people out here?

Passive, she reminds herself. It is her job, right now, to stay focused, keep an eye out for anything unusual or threatening. There's supposed to be some kind of delivery, something big, she hopes, something she doesn't completely miss.

But there's a girl—around her own age, maybe, mid-twenties, it's hard to tell with a hat casting shadows on her dirt-grimed face—hovering around a satyr's herb cart. When the satyr turns away, sneezing, the girl brushes her fingers across the different plants and spices, lifts them with nimble fingers and slips them down the loose sleeves of her jacket. Her left hand is wrapped tight around the messenger bag on her shoulder.

Annabeth moves before she can think better of it, reaches out to snatch the girl's wrist. The girl yanks back, tries to pull away, only to have Annabeth step closer and into her space.

Pale, underneath the dirt and the splash of freckles across her face—pale, and gaunt, and bruise-purple skin hanging underneath her eyes.

"Hey," Annabeth says, letting her grip ease just so. She leans in closer. "What's your name?"

The girl mumbles.

"What?"

"Nancy," she says, slowly looking up again.

From behind them, the satyr keeps sneezing, over and over, trying to apologize to passersby in between bouts. Nancy meets Annabeth's stare through the shadow of her hat, an uneven grin stretching across her chapped lips, and Annabeth fingers twitch against the girl's wrist.

Around Nancy's pupils there is a hazy and shifting ring of purple.

Extreme Mist exposure.

"Nancy." Annabeth hates the quiver in her voice, hates the way she feels a quick jerk of fear through her heart; she does not need to be afraid of this girl, only the crazed and rapid dilation of her pupils, the clenching rainbow of colors in her eyes. Annabeth has some Mist in her—CAMP uses it intermittently and in the smallest doses to strengthen their operatives, heighten their senses, sharpen their skills—but this? This is dangerous. "Nancy, listen to me."

"No, you listen, Annabeth Chase. It's too late. You are always too late."

And Nancy takes advantage of Annabeth's surprise to finally pull away, sprinting nimbly through the crowd, disappearing around a corner. The satyr's sneezes dwindle. And before Annabeth can react, before she can follow Nancy, or wonder if this is the delivery, a Mist-riddled girl, a deep voice from somewhere down the sector shouts something about a bomb.

And then there is madness.

Screaming, and pushing, and people running into her from every direction. Annabeth pushes her way toward the source, into the crowd, against it—she sees the terror on people's faces as they pass by. She is shoving against a wall of human muscle and fear and she is not going to make it, the warning came a few stores down—

She is not going to make it

The explosion shakes Annabeth to her bones. She hits the ground hard, elbows first, head slamming back into the metal walkway, landing on something sharp in her bag. Pain sings through her skull and rattles her teeth in her gums and she clings, desperately, to her consciousness. An alarm blares. People scream. A pitched whine wraps around her brain and pulls her thoughts apart.

Stay awake, she thinks. Stay awake. Stay awake.

A burn on her wrist, scrapes on her left calf, a large cut on her stomach. She blinks back bursts of light to see smoke and ash and fire, squeezes her eyes shut against the pain.

Stay awake.

Focus.

She gives herself five seconds to drag in a breath and snap herself alert. Training. She's been trained for this, has a list of protocols, things she has to do-locate blast site, locate possible suspect, clear area of civilians, wait for backup.

Except she doesn't have backup, and people are panicking, and she has to move. Now.

Too slowly, she pulls herself to her feet, secures her bag around her shoulder. Not breathing in the vacuum of space: good. Blast kept contained. But the smoke isn't helping. People run in every direction, trample over bodies lying prone and bleeding on the walk. Her eyes spin as she looks around, dizzy with garbled, dancing shapes and the stark red reality of the dead.

Someone bumps into her shoulder, turns to help her balance before bending toward a man lying a few feet away. Annabeth's ears feel like they're stuffed with cotton, filtering voices and amplifying the uneven beat of her heart. Possible concussion? Stay awake. Focus. She yanks her shirt up to cover her nose and stumbles forward. Stay awake. Keep moving. The blast site is nothing but debris. There's a hole in the walkway, reaching down towards the next level and up into the one above, but Annabeth can't see clearly enough to know if any part of the detonation device survived the blast.

Check for suspect. Running out of time. Likely escaped in chaos.

And by some chance, through her dizziness, through the crowd and the starbursts in her eyes, she focuses enough to notice the familiar silhouette of a girl several hundred feet away.

Of course.

She has her training, years of protocol, and all she can think to do is run.

.o.O.o.

Shoulders high and pushing through the panicked crowd, ignoring the yelling security guards, as everyone else seems to be doing. Annabeth tries to keep an eye on the vivid flare that is Nancy's carrot-orange hair. Everything's a blur, and she loses her footing more than once, but if she can just stay upright, if she can just catch up—

The girl disappears around a corner. Panic is near choking. This is her only lead, the only thing she's got right now. Annabeth chases after, desperation pushing against her feet, earning her a little more speed. Nancy's heading toward the docking bay, will probably take a ship and disappear. There's not time. Annabeth has to find a ship.

She has to take a ship.

Gods, but she hates this place.

Okay, she tells herself, shoving her way into the garage. There's more room to move around here, but not by much, especially when security starts guiding people in as a safe zone. It makes sense. The doors can shut and seal, locking in air, and it has its own oxygen processing unit. All in case of emergencies such as these.

There's an unmanned comm panel right next to the door. Scrolling through the list of offices, Annabeth finds the docking control operator and orders that all ships be placed under a landlock under the orders of the Federation. Hopefully they will work fast enough to stop any ship now from breaking the lock; hopefully she'll be able to find Nancy before it's necessary.

And maybe it's the Mist—maybe being so close to Nancy, coming in contact with her—did some kind of influence-transfer, but Annabeth zeroes in on the girl as she runs up the closing ramp of a freighter. A Cyclops guides her in with a huge, meaty hand, chuckles as the girl ducks away.

Focus.

She needs a ship.

She needs something small. Fast. Ideally a recent model—she'll need the ship's computers to track any recent deployments from the port.

Annabeth runs past a few, weaving her way through the crowd—a junked-up trash barge, no, a big cargo ship with five-year-old thrusters, no, shuttle carrier, no, a small, modified corvette model… she slows as she nears the doors to docking bay D2, suspicion and disbelief pushing past her exhaustion. She knows this ship—its low curving lines, the shape of the wings, the swell of the roof over the bridge. She knows it even as it's been repainted a bland gray, even as the name has been covered up with a new one: Riptide.

Anaklusmos.

And if this is here, then inside…

If she's going to do this, there cannot be any hesitation. The ship itself is fast enough. It's got FTL capabilities, strong shields, powerful guns.

What she is worried about is its captain.

She swallows the smoke-sore knot in her throat, pushes past her pride, and jogs into the docking bay. Her steps are heavy as she staggers up the ramp—distantly she wonders how much blood she's lost, and if she's punctured something serious in her stomach—and a smaller kid with wild black is hurriedly stacking crates into the ship's cargo bay. He looks up when Annabeth approaches. "Hey! What are you doing? You can't just—"

She pulls her gun from her bag, points it at his chest. "I'm a Federation operative and I need to speak to your captain."

His face pales. Slowly he raises his hands. "Look, why don't we—"

No time. With her free hand, she reaches back and punches the kid right across the jaw, sends him falling back against the crates. With him distracted with his moaning, Annabeth tucks her pistol into her belt and finds the stairs, takes them two at a time, stumbles onto the metal grating of the high crosswalk. Annabeth is in the hallway, nearing the common room—so familiar, she remembers everything about this place, the order of the rooms and the smell and the way the air tastes in her mouth—when she hears a voice on the shipwide intercom.

"Boss! There's some crazy woman on board, says she's a Fed, totally loca, man, she punched me in the face! She's coming up to you, I think. She had a gun—"

She is halfway down the hall to the cockpit when he steps out.

Percy.

Annabeth's heart falters. He is dressed like her, like the people of the port—dirty brown pants tucked into dirty black boots, a faded cotton button-down rolled up to his elbows, a pistol holstered at his hip. He watches her, silent, eyes narrowed. She doesn't remember him being so tall.

And the first time she heard his name, so many years ago—the boy's name is Percy Jackson and they say he's beaten the MINOTAUR, only the most challenging CAMP aptitude test created.

Annabeth doesn't believe it. Nobody's beaten the MINOTAUR for decades.

Director Chiron gestures for her to have a seat, and she perches on the edge of the chair, back straight, hands clenched in her lap. There's a tight ball of anger in her chest that she's held for far too long now, a knot that flares with heat when the Director fusses with the tablet on his desk and clears his throat into the silent room. It's not pride that tells her she's the smartest student at CAMP. Her test scores have set records. But if Director Chiron is here to tell her that this Percy Jackson has taken her place—

Just say it, she thinks, smoothing her face into a mask of calm. Just say it, already.

"We've received a new student. I'm sure you've heard." Director Chiron moves the tablets around on his desk. The screens, glowing a soft, clear blue, are almost calming. "And while he's passed our aptitude tests, he is entirely behind on academics. I need you to be his tutor. Get him up to speed."

Tutor. Annabeth blinks. Her fists unfurl. "Sir?"

"The Board has decided to place him in Poseidon, and as you know, he will be alone there. They're allowing for his immersion in classes with other divisions to get him accustomed to life at CAMP."

"They're fast-tracking him," Annabeth says.

Director Chiron doesn't respond. He doesn't shake his head, doesn't say anything, doesn't fiddle with his tablets.

Definitely fast-tracking, then.

And if the Board is trying to push a brand new kid like Percy Jackson through CAMP as quickly as possible, making allowances for his admittance that they wouldn't have otherwise, there must be something going on. She studies Director Chiron—the lines around his dark eyes, the gray dusting of his hair, the rumpled lines of his uniform.

He's tired. He's tired, and he's asking for help.

Annabeth sighs. "When do I start?"

Director Chiron allows himself a small smile and leans forward to hand Annabeth the topmost tablet. "Today. 0300. He's getting settled in his bunk. Grover Underwood gave him the tour earlier, but he won't be expecting you. Don't be too hard on him his first day."

She stands, gives a quick salute. At the door, because she can't stop herself, and because if they're pretending these aren't orders disguised as some kind of favor she's doing him, she has just enough room to be insolent. "If you wanted someone to coddle him, Director, you wouldn't have assigned him to me."

And here he is, settled into his ship, its walls protective around him. They stand, just a few feet of empty space between them, a few lightyears of misunderstandings and secrets and lies, and she doesn't know what to do with the hard refusal in his eyes, the empty hollow in his voice as he says, "Annabeth."

So she takes a breath and goes with the truth. "I need your ship."