Chapter 2

"like a thief in the light, you can't hide, you can't hide from your shadow / it's the only thing you own"
human, gabrielle aplin

Annabeth gets paired with a boy called Leo in Science.

She's not too sure how she feels about Leo yet. The first lesson they had in which they were lab partners Leo managed to get the entire Science floor evacuated because he accidentally set fire to a table (which Annabeth is still confused about – they weren't even doing an experiment, it was literally just textbooks and worksheets and suddenly they all went up in flames) and when she sat with Hazel in the canteen on her first day Frank Zhang joined them, giving them a long-winded story about how stupid Valdez had let the crickets out again and now he couldn't even go to the toilet because the sinks were infested with them punctuated every five seconds with a gosh darn it Leo.

Like. He seems wonderful. But if Annabeth wants to try and stay under the radar she's going to have to avoid spontaneously catching fire.

"All right, class," says Mr call-me-Hephy Hephaestus, a man with a lopsided beard and a button-up covered in what looks (and smells) like machine grease. "Today we're going to look at nuclear weapons. Can anyone give me any uses or purposes of nuclear weapons?"

Leo's hand shoots up.

Hephaestus sighs. Leo's hand is the only one up, but he looks like he'd rather pluck his nose hairs then call on him. "Valdez."

"Tanks, submarines and bombs," Leo chirps cheekily. He knows how much Hephaestus despises him. "To name a few."

Oh yeah, and another thing? Leo is incredible at Science. When Annabeth Studied him, she got a sense that he didn't really care about his grades – which is the case with most subjects, if the stories Hazel told her about how one time he got the entire school shut down for a week because of a stink-bomb he set off during an English exam are anything to go by – but not with Science.

Or woodshop. Annabeth's seen some stuff he whips up. His work rivals Beckendorf's.

"Yes," Mr Hephaestus says, displeased. "Today we're going to focus on how nuclear weapons benefitted the creation of the nuclear bomb."

Someone behind Annabeth stifles a yawn. She feels the same way.

One of the only benefits of being Lois Watermann – aside from, you know, getting her own space and acting like a normal teenager – is that to remain unremarkable she can't work to her full potential. Annabeth is smart. Annabeth is incredibly smart. There is a reason she got selected to be part of FBI – apart from being born into it and all, but that's a different story. She needs to 'dumb herself down' to fit in – which normally she would be absolutely furious about, but in lessons like this she's actually rather pleased. She sits near the back and she's read every WikiHow she possibly can on high school. She reckons if she plays it right she could fall asleep through the whole lesson.

Or at least, that's the plan. But then suddenly it's not, because when Hephaestus clicks onto the next slide Annabeth sits up straight in her chair.

It's a screenshot of a news report – but not any news report, oh no, it's the news report. The news report that talked about the bakery.

Her bakery.

Annabeth almost vomits.

Across the room, she sees Brandon sit up.

"This is an example of a nuclear bomb attack," Mr Hephaestus explains. "In 2015, in a bakery in Georgia, a nuclear bomb went off. It killed only one person but it caused a great deal of casualties. If used incorrectly or taken advantage of, nuclear weapons can cause a great deal of trauma and destruction."

"Why was there a bomb in a bakery, sir?" Brandon asks.

"That's not what we're focusing on – however, the police are still not quite sure. They assume it was a terrorist attack."

Annabeth stares at her book, feeling her stomach swirl. She is actually going to vomit. Leo gives her a concerned look. You okay? he mouths.

Annabeth can't focus on that. Instead, she stares at the lines and the margins and the slope of her handwriting in her exercise book, looking at their neatness and actively trying not to think about how it felt when the table leg impaled her stomach.

Yoga breaths, she tells herself. Yoga breaths.

It's not working, and somewhere in the fogginess of hr mind she swears at herself. What is happening? She's talked about the bomb before. She read all the articles. She even watched the security camera footage that had been uploaded to YouTube without batting an eyelid. Why is this happening now? At school?

So much for keeping a low profile. She's barely been here two days and now she's having a panic attack in front of thirty students.

Leo starts to look a little scared. Tentatively, he raises his hand.

"Um, sir?"

Hephaestus sighs crossly. "What, Valdez? Can't you see I'm trying to teach a lesson?"

"My lab partner's having a panic attack."

That catches his attention. Hephaestus looks right at her – so does everyone else – and Annabeth wants nothing more than to crawl in a hole and die.

"Take her to A&E," he squeaks out. He's clearly very out of his limit here.

Leo helps Annabeth out her chair and together they wobble out the classroom. It's a little awkward, because Annabeth is at least a head taller than him, but she appreciates his efforts anyway. Uncomfortably, they manage to move themselves around the corner – but before Leo can start leading her down the stairs to A&E Annabeth pulls him into a bathroom.

"Um?"

"No nurses," Annabeth wheezes. "I just need– need'ta breathe."

Leo fidgets. "Are you– are you sure? 'Cause, like. I'm flattered that you would think otherwise but I'm not actually– a good person to come to with things like this? Like. I don't know how to help. Or anything."

"It's okay." Annabeth lets out a gasp and clutches the edge of the toilet. Somehow, in her blurry state of mind she had managed to sink to the floor and was now leaning over the toilet bowl. She doesn't think she's going to throw up.

Or maybe she will. It might help. Who knows.

"I just– need a few moments."

Leo nods and uncomfortably joins her on the ground. "Okay."

Annabeth sucks in a few clumsy breaths of air. Slowly, her head is beginning to clear and she feels like she can breathe again. "Tell me something funny," she rasps out.

"Won't that make it worse?"

"No, I need to concentrate on something. Go on."

"Uh, okay." Leo scrunches up his eyebrows, trying to think of something. "I've been expelled five times?"

Annabeth stares at him. "Are you serious?"

Leo nods cheerfully. He's beginning to ease up a bit – although Annabeth suspects it's mainly because he's telling a story he's very proud of. "Yup."

"How?"

"Well, the first time, I let the frogs out. It was just a joke but one of the water fountains had had some issues with blockage and whatever and was filled with water that couldn't go down the train, so a bunch of the frogs camped out there and laid lots of little tadpoles."

Annabeth laughs. "No way."

"Way." Leo even does a white girl hair flick that Annabeth sniggers at. He sobers up quickly and keeps going. "But the tadpoles went everywhere, innit? Somehow they ended up in the drinking water and all the water fountains had to be closed for about six months because frogs kept hopping out of them. It cost so much to get them all out, man. So they expelled me."

"What about the second time?"

Leo launches into another story, a long-winded tale involving fire, hockey sticks and locking a teacher inside a gym closet overnight, and Annabeth is so immediately enraptured that they both don't hear the bathroom door open.

"Um, hello?"

Annabeth whips around. Leo stares up, scandalized.

It's Percy.

He's wearing a pair of faded jeans and a shark T-shirt that has most certainly seen better days. Annabeth wasn't able to see him properly through the window of the door but now that he's standing right in front of her all she can see is tousled black hair and eyes. Annabeth has never really been a sap when it comes to eyes but his eyes are probably the most beautiful eyes she's ever seen.

"'Sup, Perce," Leo says weakly. He raises a hand. "How you doing?"

Percy looks very, very confused. "Did I interrupt anything?"

Annabeth frowns. "No?"

"Lois wasn't feeling too great," Leo says quickly. "Mr H let us out of Science."

Annabeth sends a silent thank-you to him.

"What did you think we were doing?" she asks.

Leo chokes.

Percy flushes red. "Um. Nothing. Don't worry."

Annabeth doesn't believe him in the slightest. As an occasional pathological liar herself, she can sniff out lies like a bloodhound.

"So, Perce." Leo tries to casually lean against the toilet bowel. "What brings you here?"

Percy fidgets. "I, um. Needed the toilet."

Annabeth's eyes widen. Right. That would explain the urinals. "Ah."

"Of course," Leo says. "The toilet. I see."

They wait in uncomfortable silence for a few seconds.

Percy is the one to make the first move. "So, can I, uh...?"

"Yes! Yes, absolutely." Leo comes back to it with a start, and pats the toilet seat. He hauls himself up and then looks at Annabeth expectantly. "Do you, uh, need any more time, or are you ready to head back?"

"I'm ready to head back," Annabeth says, and tries to pull herself back up. Except what she doesn't know is that when it comes to hygiene and leaving wet toilet paper on the ground boys are almost the same, if not worse, than girls, because she plants her foot right on one and almost goes flying.

Leo, the utter piece of crap, cracks up. "Are you okay?"

Annabeth lets go of the toilet seat and glares at him. "Thanks for helping."

"No problem," Leo tells her. Annabeth pulls a hideous face and dusts herself off, and then out of the corner of her eye catches sight of Leo imitating her almost-fall and Percy sniggering at it. "I can see you, you know."

Percy sounds like he's trying to suppress laughter. "It was very graceful."

"I'd like to see you do better."

They couldn't. She's a spy. She's got the reflexes of a wolf.

"Of course," Leo says. "The next time I'm picking myself off the ground of a toilet I'll make sure to slip on a piece of loo roll."

Annabeth scowls at him.

It's lunchtime and it takes Annabeth exactly 21.47 seconds to regret her decision.

"Hey Lois," Hazel says cheerfully – but then she catches sight of Leo and Percy and gives Annabeth an odd look. "Um, hey, Leo, Percy? How– how are you guys?"

"We're absolutely spiffing, thank you for asking," Leo tells her, swinging in the chair next to Annabeth. He leaves a gap of one seat that Percy, who, Annabeth has quickly learnt, isn't as outgoing and outrageous as Leo when around new people, awkwardly sinks into. His leg brushes Annabeth's and she internally smacks herself when she feels the area zing with electricity.

For heaven's sake, you don't even know the boy. He could be a serial killer.

Then she internally laughs because please, if he were a serial killer, she would know.

Leo gives Hazel an over-flirtatious wink. "And who might you be?"

Hazel looks mildly annoyed. "We've been in the same English class for two years."

"Oh." Momentarily, Leo looks a little thrown off. Then he blinks and it's gone, and he obnoxiously leans his upper body across both Percy and Annabeth to rest his chin in his hands nearer to Hazel's face. "Well, it's about time that we get to know each other a bit better, don't we?"

Annabeth sees Hazel flush. She knows that she's attracted to Frank Zhang like nobody's business but after a few days with her she learnt that her morals when it came to dating are rather old-fashioned. The most explicit thing she'll be doing until she's twenty-five is holding hands. The fact that Leo is leaning remarkably close to her probably is deemed as 18+ Material in her books.

"Hey, Hazel." And suddenly Frank appears out of nowhere, and even though Annabeth and Hazel are pressed up tightly against each other he pushes himself in between them. Annabeth, Percy and Leo all get pushed to the side, and Leo's hand slips from under his chin and he conks his nose on the table edge.

Hazel goes even redder. "Hey, Frank," she squeaks.

Leo beams. "Frank, my man!"

Frank scowls at him. "Valdez."

Percy looks like he wants to sink into the ground.

Hazel turns to Annabeth and lowers her voice. "Silena told me what happened to you in Science today," she says quietly. "Are you okay?"

Grr.

"Yeah, I'm fine. Just– had me a little shaken, that's all."

"Good."

Frank is still giving Leo shifty looks. Percy slouches down in his chair and does his best to look invisible.

The stifling tension gets all a little too much for Annabeth. She pushes her chair back and presses a hand to her head. When Hazel gives her a questioning look, she feigns a headache and says, "migraine, sorry" and darts off towards the bathrooms.

She knows she's meant to be a spy and all, but she definitely had not expected the tension between Frank and Leo to be there.

She doesn't go to the bathroom immediately. She waits outside them, leaning against one of the cereal bar vending machines. School is really not all she sussed it out to be. It's like Mean Girls on steroids. She hadn't realised how different it was from High School Musical – not that she expected everyone to be singing and dancing all the time, but, you know, the occasional jazz hands wouldn't hurt – and even though Hazel had told her that they didn't really do 'cliques', or at least not to the extent of some of the YA novels Annabeth has read, there's a pretty obvious divide in the canteen.

The cheerleaders and the footballers sit at one table. The kids with the black skinny jeans and awful haircuts sit at another. The music nerds, the ones still stuck in 2011 when the Fringe™ was a thing, sit near the corner.

It's funny. Annabeth had never expected it to be this complicated.

Suddenly, someone lets out a shriek. Annabeth looks out from behind the vending machine down the corridor and into the canteen and sees what looks like two boys wrestling each other. They've both got dark hair and are wearing obnoxiously coloured shirts, but for some reason Annabeth can only focus on Brandon.

He's not doing the fighting, but he gets in the way. Somehow, he gets punched in the face, and topples backwards into a table. A couple of girls scream.

He's only the centre of attention for about two more seconds, however, until the two boys doing the fighting slam into a window and someone yells, "it's going to break!" and then everyone forgets Brandon.

But not Annabeth.

Brandon blindly stumbles out of the canteen and starts making his way towards the toilets. His hand is pressed to his cheek and blood is dripping down his arm. Annabeth knows this is her chance – and as fast as she can she darts out from behind the vending machine and into the boys' toilets. She can't hide in the cubicles – he won't do anything if he knows someone else is in here with him, even if he does think it's just a boy having a crap. Her eyes fall upon a small door next to the mirror, labelled JANITOR/STORE CUPBOARD – she remembers seeing a similar one in the toilets in Science.

Brandon is injured but he's moving fast. From the canteen to the toilets, the corridor is at least ten metres. At the speed he's going at she'll only have about five more seconds until he walks in.

There's no time to pick the lock. She has a hairpin under the base of her ponytail – always does – but the lock is big and clumsy. It would break. Without thinking, she reaches into her pocket and pulls out her acid lipstick.

Four seconds.

She uncaps it and presses the head of it against lock. Immediately, it starts steaming and melting away, and internally Annabeth swears.

Three seconds.

Hopefully Brandon will be too fixated on his injuries to notice the smell of burnt iron – and the next time the janitor comes to clean the toilets he'll be too tired to notice how misshapen the lock has suddenly become.

Two seconds.

The lock falls off. Annabeth hooks her fingers inside the hole where it used to be, ignoring the way the still-hot plastic around it burns her hand. She pulls it open and tumbles inside. A mop pushes against her back and she accidentally falls inside a bucket.

One second.

She closes it just as Brandon walks in.

The first thing she can think is: wow, that's a lot of blood. His whole hand has been soaked, and it's still trickling down his arm. For someone who just got punched in the face, he looks a lot more injured than he should be.

Annabeth's hackles rise.

He looks around, and, after seeing that no one else is around, lets out an aggressive-sounding curse word. He takes his hand away from his cheek. The entire left side of his face is covered in blood – too much for Annabeth to properly see the mark left behind. Maybe it really was a cut. She supposes the boy that punched him could have been wearing a lot of rings.

But then suddenly her eyes catch on something just underneath his eye, and she almost throws up.

It's a flap of skin.

Annabeth is just about to lean over and vomit when she realises that that's all it is. A flap of skin. No blood. No bruise. No nothing. Just a flap of skin. He doesn't seem to realise it's there. It doesn't seem to be causing him any pain.

Annabeth stares at it. A literal fold of skin is just hanging beneath his eye and he doesn't realise? How does that even happen? In what universe is getting injured to the point where a flap of your skin gets ripped off and is hanging off your face not painful?

Annabeth is just about to lean closer to her little peephole in the door when the bathroom door opens and a couple of boys pile in.

"Brandon, dude!" one of them hollers too loudly. "You okay?"

"That's a lot of blood, bro!"

"Was it one those freaks who were fighting? We can beat 'em up if you want!"

Annabeth sighs. Her chance is gone.

Brandon and the boys start to head back out. However, just before he walks out completely, Brandon turns around to throw one of the tissues he was using to mop himself up in the bin – and Annabeth catches sight of his cheek. Which is now completely smooth.

The flap of skin is gone.

Annabeth tells herself she just imagined it. But something in her gut stirs uncomfortably.

So. Here's the thing.

Annabeth knows Chiron said 'no sleuthing', right. She can picture it very vividly in her mind. But he didn't say anything about tagging, now, did he.

Tagging isn't anything particularly spy-like. It's simply following someone, more often than not without them knowing, and that's what Annabeth is doing. She's not doing anything wrong.

Except maybe she is, because she's been following Brandon for an hour now and she's pretty sure she's seen him do some stuff that she wasn't really meant to see. So far, it's been nothing discriminating (unfortunately) but on more occasions than she'd like to admit she caught him with his finger up his nose and pulling faces at homeless peoples.

Unfortunately, that's literally all he's done. As soon as she could after the bathroom incident, Annabeth had gone up to him and asked if he was okay. She had given him a cookie to "make him feel better", which she is still surprised he accepted, but in it she had planted a tiny tracking device. It is designed to be digested, so now it is sitting comfortably in his stomach waiting to be excreted out.

Then Annabeth had ducked into a Seven-Eleven and bought a can of cheap auburn hairspray and some green Halloween contacts. They were a little too luminous for them to be considered natural, but as long as Annabeth didn't directly approach him she reckoned she should be fine.

And now here she is. Tagging him. Waiting for him to do something interesting.

It takes another three hours until he does it. By this time, the sky has gone considerably darker and Annabeth is pretty sure she's about to fall asleep because he is so boring. But then he parks his car outside a house and walks for half an hour before finding another, very different, may she add, car, climbing in it and driving it away.

Annabeth's interest is piqued.

She checks the tracker. He's heading towards the bridge.

Annabeth takes a shortcut. He'll arrive immediately at it by the way he's going but Annabeth cuts across the green and makes it to the edge of the bridge. She arrives a few minutes after he does, but she doesn't approach him straight away. She ducks behind one of the houses – hidden away in the shadows with her dark clothes and darkening sky, it's almost impossible to spot her – and notices Brandon standing at the bridge. But he's not alone.

With him is a man a few inches taller than him. They're talking about something, but Annabeth is too far away to hear properly. She inches backwards. She'll have to do this the hard way.

The hard way is disgusting, to put it frankly. The bridge was built over a river, and Annabeth's plan is to swim through the river, climb one of the supports and wait there, so she can hear their conversation from under the bridge without them noticing her. It seems like a smart idea, until Annabeth actually gets to the riverbank.

For one, the river is absolutely freezing. It's February, so it's still pretty cold, and in the shadow of the bridge it's pitch black. Annabeth is a strong swimmer – of course she is – but she can't see a thing. She's wearing a lot of clothes, too, and she doesn't want to take them off because at least they'll do something against the cold. She doesn't know how deep it is, and in case she gets weighed down she wants to know if she'll be able to pull herself up.

Well. Too late now.

She dives in. It's so, so cold – and also much, much deeper than she suspected. She sinks like a stone and accidentally splits her knee open on something sharp. She gasps. The current has already pulled her too far away from shore to even consider going back so instead she pulls herself to one of the supports and hoists herself up.

Her knee is disgusting. It tore right through her jeans and left a nasty cut that is probably going to get infected from being submerged in that awful water. Annabeth scales the support as fast she can – which is no easy feat, because even though Annabeth was one of the top rope-climbers back at headquarters the pole is slimy and slippery – and then grabs one of the beams on the direct underside of the bridge. She's shivering and wet and cold and she has no way down. She's far, far too weak right now to try and swim back, not against the current. And of course she can't climb over the bridge. Brandon and the man are there, and they'd ask questions if a girl (or drowned rat, 99% of scientists can't tell) suddenly climbed over.

She closes her eyes.

A/N: (so i may have lied this chapter was a little boring it does get better i swear)

Also: BRANDON IS NOT AN OC. I REPEAT. BRANDON IS NOT AN OC. Which sounds ridiculous, because there is no one called 'Brandon' in any of the books but I can assure you he is not an OC. You will see later. I pinky-promise. While a lot of this story is sitting in unorganized shambles in my laptop Brandon is the one part that isn't.

Anyway: i hope you enjoyed that! I had to write it four times and im still not thrilled with the way it turned out, but oh well. I call chapters like these 'crapters', which is a crap chapter. I hope you liked it, though. And im so sorry, the percabeth IS coming, I promise you. If not next chapter, then definitely the one after it. I've got a vague understanding of where this story is going, so hopefully it's all fine and dandy and that you guys like it :)

And thank you all so much for your lovely comments! For the guest asking how many parts I planned to have I'm not actually sure, really. It's not going to be short, I'll tell you that. But really, thank you to everyone. They were all so nice to read! It gives me inspiration to write, actually, which sounds hella cheesy but is true. You guys are awesome :DDD

Please tell me what you think, and I'll see you soon! Bye xxx