𝟬𝟭𝟴. what are you, if not a monster?

JASON WANTED TO ERASE AERA from his dreams. While his friends were forced to fend for themselves against the Cyclops, he had been transported back into into yet another memory after he got knocked out. This time, he was on a foggy mountaintop. The surrounding hills were topped with frozen white caps. The snow on the ground came up to his ankles. Several feet away, there was a site of black granite block and marble as big as houses. Broken columns. Statues of bronze that looked as though they'd been half melted. He was standing right outside the toppled throne of Kronos.

Jason wasn't alone. There were others with him—five other kids around his age all dressed in the same purple t-shirt, winter jackets, and scabbards attached to their belts for their swords. These were his friends, other demigods, his comrades. Even in his dream, their faces were fuzzy like a swipe of sweat on a camera lens. Their backs were to him, whispering about the prisoner they had tied to the tree.

"She's been like that since Jason snuck up on her..."

"Took four of us to hold her down..."

"If Poppy can't get her to crack, who will?"

"Think she has a boyfriend?"

"Dude—"

"What? Wanted criminals have love lives, too."

"Alright!" the girl at the front of the group barked. "Pipe down, guys!"

She—Poppy—was about 17, with tanned skin and muscular biceps. She was facing the other way, so Jason couldn't get a good look at her face, but her voice was deep and gruff like a pitbull's. She looked like she was half a foot shorter than Jason, but the way she stood at the head of the group proved she was powerful and respected. It was also hard to miss the massive gold garden hoe strapped to her back. One swing from that thing and it was over.

"What's your problem?" Poppy was interrogating their prisoner. "You stand accused of murder, abduction, conspiracy, destruction of property, and thievery. You're also pissing me off. Staying silent will only hurt you, so think carefully and answer me clearly. What are you doing on Mount Othrys?"

Silence.

Jason drew closer.

"—she won't say anything—" the others were murmuring.

"—we should just fall back and go home for now—"

"—man, I'm hungry—"

"—well, I'm not setting foot in the principalis until I have her number—"

"—bro, you don't even have a phone—"

Jason shuffled past them toward the front.

His vision tunneled. Aera's face was the one he could see the clearest. Only he didn't even know her name back then. This was the first time they had ever met.

What gripped Jason's attention first wasn't that she was sitting in the freezing snow or that her beauty would send all the lonely guys in the Fifth Cohort on a lovesick chase, what captured his conscious was the saltwater pearl laced in her black hair. A small white drop resting in the bed of a black flower—a small white drop that would determine his fate. Or more so an indication that its owner would.

Since Jason had joined the legion, there had been a prophecy going around. A prophecy pertaining to the girl with the saltwater pearl in her hair.

"This new generation of demigods does not feel Roman enough," Vitellius, one of the guardians of the Fifth Cohort, had complained to Jason when he was only four years old. "Take pain and suffering as a lesson. Honor ancient tradition. And most importantly, eliminate all graecus, our enemies. Remind them of their roots, won't you, boy?"

Vitellius was one of the oldest Lares at camp. He was an old man with a medicine-ball belly and a toga so long he always tripped over it. When he got mad, his purple aura would flicker. The others usually laughed at his eccentric ideals, but Jason was used to him. He'd been around long before Jason arrived to camp as a feral four year old. If you ignored the long history lectures and random pop quizzes about Julius Caesar, he was almost like a grandfather to him. Jason didn't want to disappoint him.

"I will!" Jason vowed, pushing his gladius into the air in a Roman salute. A notable effort, considering it was taller than he was. "I will be the most Roman Roman there is! Greeks will tremble before me!" His helmet, which was twice the size of his head, slipped over his brow, covering his eyes.

"You shall triumph," Vitellius said seriously, as serious as he could be with a lopsided sword belt and oversized toga. "So long as you beware the graecus girl with a saltwater pearl in her hair."

"Who?" Jason gasped, alarmed.

"This graecus will be your most formidable enemy!" the Lare exclaimed. "Let her succeed and your legacy will be destroyed. 3,000 years of Roman tradition burned to the ground. Our legion gutted from the inside out! Beware, Jason Grace. Beware the girl with the saltwater pearl!"

For years, Jason waited for her to show up. He trained everyday so that one day when he finally met her, he would be able to defeat her. Now, Jason's most formidable enemy was wearing a ruffled lilac dress that wasn't nearly warm enough for the stinging cold. She had on dainty white sandals that would have been impossible to trample through the snow in—let alone win a fight in. She was sitting against the tree her wrists were bound to by rope, staring almost boredly at a clump of moss growing on the icy ground.

She noticed Jason almost immediately. Her eyes were magnets. Jason couldn't seem to look away.

"I was running away," she finally answered Poppy, but she wasn't even looking at Poppy or the rest of the demigods, she was looking right at Jason. Her gaze held no recollection for him, just amusement.

"From?" Poppy demanded.

"Those who wish to punish me."

"Punish you? What crime are you guilty of?"

"The crime of surviving." Her obsidian black eyes gave Jason the impression someone else had not. "I'm someone who should have died a long time ago. Hades has a whole mansion in the Fields of Punishment reserved just for me." She still had the guts to be sarcastic at a time like this. It must not have sunk in how bad her situation was.

"You mean...Pluto?" the tiny girl next to Jason asked quietly. She was so short, her scabbard reached her ankles. She had a different sword than the rest of them, a spatha. Jason remembered Vitellius had given her an earful when she started practicing with it, claiming it was a "ridiculous weapon for a Roman legionnaire".

The other kids seemed to stop talking as soon as she spoke up. Jason couldn't blame them. Pluto was a revered god, but the Romans saw him as a bad omen. Usually when Pluto showed up that meant a grave loss on the battlefield, lots of deaths, that kind of stuff.

Again, the graecus didn't seem fazed at all. "No?" A flash of contempt flickered on her face. She seemed more confused than fearful, as if she wondered why she had to be corrected.

"Still," Poppy said, slitting her eyes at her, "that doesn't explain how we found you over the dead body of one of our own. What's your angle?"

"Three-quarters of the face," their prisoner replied. "45 degrees from the lens, slightly above the natural hairline."

"Not your camera angle!" Poppy snapped. "Your motive, girl. Do you even understand how serious this is?"

"I understand how serious your callouses are. What do you do with your hands? Are you a baker?" She tossed another side glance at Jason. "Is she a baker?"

"We show no mercy for felonies. You are a lone demigod, unloyal to the legion, which increases your chances of being executed. Is that what you want? To be crucified? Burned at the stake? Stoned? Quartered?"

"Oh, I'm down for anything. Just don't put me in one of those bedsheets."

"Your entire family could be exterminated!" Poppy exasperated. Jason knew she was running out of bluffs. The most severe punishment that had been sentenced in the past 200 years was sewer pipe cleaning with Cloacina, goddess of the drain. "Generations worth of legacy ruined...!"

As Poppy went on about corporeal punishment and the execution of her entire bloodline, Jason realized their prisoner wasn't even listening. Her eyes were only on Jason. It was impossible to predict what she was thinking. She was so past the point of return she had no regard for the possibility of torture or death. Frankly, Jason kind of resented her.

Jason had secretly been struggling with impostor syndrome his whole life. He grew up learning to begrudge his identity as the son of Jupiter because it made him feel trapped into a fate he didn't want. He hated that he was forced to step up. He hated that everyone seemed to treat him like a prince-in-waiting. It felt like he never truly belonged at camp. Just as he started to feel more comfortable in the role of praetor, this graecus had to show up to make his life even more...confusing. This was no good.

"What business do you have here?" Jason cut in, right as Poppy started giving really graphic descriptions about what it felt like to have your limbs ripped off from four corners. "Judging by the way you fight, you're not a regular mortal."

Her eyes seemed to sparkle at him. "Judging by the way you look, you're not a regular mortal either."

"Did a god send you here or was it you?"

"Did a god make you this attractive or was it you?"

"Have we met before?"

"I definitely would've remembered if I met a stranger as handsome as you before."

She winked at him. Someone coughed. Behind him, Jason heard one of his comrades utter loudly: "she's hot" and the graecus' confidence seemed to multiply.

"She's lying." Poppy crossed her arms. "She has some sort of...magic in her voice."

"It's true," agreed the daughter of Pluto. "She almost convinced Dakota to hand over his Kool-Aid earlier."

A boy—Dakota—shook his head of black curly hair like a wet dog wringing itself dry. He was clutching what looked like an overflowing flask of Kool-Aid in his hands. "Not cool." The young girl patted his shoulder. Both their faces were still blotches of blur to Jason.

"She must be one of us then!" another boy, Cato, concluded. He seemed extremely happy about that. Looks like almost dying by this graecus' hands somehow equated to love at first sight for him.

"Or a Siren," Poppy grunted, hefting her massive garden hoe in her hands. "You found one lurking around the bay the other day, didn't you, Hazel?"

"A Siren?" The graecus did not seem pleased by this accusation. "Really? I obviously have more class than those prune-y man-eaters. They don't even have pretty mermaid tails."

The others started murmuring in agreement.

Jason wasn't convinced. "Demigods know better than to hike up this mountain. Even the mortals can sense the evil energy radiating from this place and steer clear from the hills. Why were you sifting through the ruins of Saturn's toppled black throne?"

"Saturn?" their prisoner asked. She grimaced as if she was having trouble pronouncing a foreign word. "Who's Saturn?"

Jason remembered something about how the word graecus didn't just mean enemy, it meant Greek, too.

"Kronos," he tried. "Lord of the Ages, King of Titans. We invaded his throne here two months ago. I defeated his brother Krios with my own hands. My comrades and I destroyed Mount Othrys."

His friends in the Fifth Cohort puffed up their chests proudly. It was because of this assault that the Fifth Cohort was respected for the first time since the 1980s. Deep down, Jason worried that their reputation would be tarnished again if he couldn't solve this new monster problem...

"Oh," the graecus said. Her eyes turned far away, as if drifting off in thought. "So that's what happened here..."

Jason studied her warily. Was she pretending not to know?

"Stalling won't get you anywhere," he told her. "Until we get to the bottom of this, you're our prisoner."

"Okay, well, can I at least stand up?" she requested curtly. "If I keep sitting like this, my butt's going to get too big."

So she was going to keep playing dumb.

Jason turned around without another word. He wasn't going to play her little game.

"Poppy," he said. "Make sure the preparations are done for Nathaniel's body. We'll need to call one of the eagles to carry him down to the main road. Hazel, you and Dakota scope out the area. Make sure there aren't any more surprises..."

After assigning each of his comrades a task to regroup, Jason decided to question her on his own. Before Poppy left, she seized his shoulder.

"Be careful with her," she said lowly. "Whatever she is, she's not a normal one."

Jason nodded grimly. "I'll keep that in mind."

Poppy gave him an encouraging clap on the shoulder and sauntered off with the rest of the group.

When he approached, their prisoner shifted her body slightly away from him—a defensive position. She seemed to shed her ditzy girl facade as quickly as she had put it on. She watched his every movement carefully. Jason could imagine her constructing walls around herself, armed with fiery cannons ready to blow.

Her breath came out a white cloud of mist. Jason noticed her skin was already turning a bright, irritated red in all the areas her flimsy dress left exposed. Jason could tell by the thin layer of frost on the rope that she hadn't even tried to pull them off.

Jason sighed.

"I told them not to be so rough," he heard himself mutter.

Jason crouched behind the tree and started to loosen the rope around her wrists. Just enough for her skin to have some breathing room. He had a nasty encounter with this rope once (Poppy liked to play some seriously messed up games sometimes), and it left bruises in his wrists for two weeks.

"What are you going to do with me?" she asked. Her voice sounded less high-pitched and girly than before. Maybe she was letting her guard down now that they were alone. Or luring him into a false sense of security.

"The sun's going down," he responded plainly. "We'll make camp here 'til dawn. Tomorrow, you'll be taken to the Senate and put on trial."

"The Senate?"

"Elected members of the legion that discuss our issues and come to a decision for what's best for New Rome."

"New Rome," she repeated blankly. "That sounds like the name of a washed-up Indie boy band."

A washed-up Indie boyband? Jason tried not to react.

"If you're found guilty," he continued, enduring the blow, "you'll be punished according to our laws. For murder, it's most likely a death sentence. My comrade mentioned this earlier. Quartering, stoning, crucifixion—these are all common sentences." From ancient times, he left out.

"And if I'm innocent?"

Jason came out from behind the tree to look at her. He searched her face for any fear, or regret or any emotion that could convince him that she was one of them and not just another mythical threat sent to terrorize him. No such thing.

"That's not for you to decide." He shook his head. "Not with your odds."

"I didn't kill that boy."

She sounded too adamant to be joking now. Or maybe it was all part of her act.

Jason tilted his head at her. "Poppy said they found you standing over Nathaniel's body when they arrived―"

"It was a coincidence."

"With your knife drawn―"

"You said it yourself. It's a dangerous area."

"I saw what you did to Cato," he admitted. Her eyes seemed to widen the slightest. "I know what you're capable of. You can make a man's heart stop just by touching him. There's magic in your voice when you speak and you don't seem to be scared of the darkness of this place. What are you, if not a monster?"

"A monster?" she replied scathingly. Her face turned redder with every syllable. "You and your friends ambushed me six-on-one and you're calling me a monster? Don't the people of New Rome know what fairness is?"

Jason had been hoping to see some anxiety or remorse, anything that could allow him to be kinder to her, but the first emotion that appeared on her face was anger.

"You're a criminal," he reasoned, "and you'll pay for your crimes against the legion. That's fair."

"What crimes?" she demanded. "That boy was already cold by the time I found him! I was checking his pulse."

Jason cocked his jaw. Why was she making it so difficult for him to help her? "Members of the legion have been disappearing day by day. Monsters have been reviving at alarming speeds. They're popping up at our borders now more than ever. No one knows why. Someone must be responsible for this."

The graecus hesitated. She stared at him for a long drawn out moment. What Jason could understand was that she was piecing something together in her head. A confession, he hoped.

"You're pathetic," she said with a deadly poker face. "You come here as soon as your little 'comrades' leave, pretending to be all nice and noble, when all you're planning to do is blame me for your own incompetence."

Her words felt like a bullet against his skull. Jason stuffed his clenched fists into his pockets. He couldn't show that he was affected by her.

"You must have had a motive before coming here," he pressed on. "What are you after?"

Scoffing, she tore her eyes off him.

"Look." Jason ran a hand through his hair to shake out the bullet. "You can't plead your own innocence if you refuse to tell the truth."

"What makes you think you deserve the truth?" she asked blisteringly. "You ambushed me. You took me hostage and called me a monster and now you expect me to be honest with you?"

Jason could feel his grip on her weakening.

"Someone must have sent you here," he persisted, not wanting to lose his momentum. "You wouldn't have come all the way out here on your own. It was a god who guided you here, wasn't it? Who was it? If you tell me, I can help you negotiate a lesser sentence―"

"Stop lying to yourself!" she suddenly shouted, the most emotional Jason had witnessed. "It doesn't matter if I'm innocent or guilty! There's only one reason you're doing this."

Jason reached for the sword sheathed in his scabbard. How did she know who he was? Had she come to tear down his banners? What on earth was her motive?

"It's because I'm weaker than you!" she said, to his ultimate surprise. The shock was stronger than ice, freezing him in place. She got close to his face, close enough for Jason to count each speck of snow on her cheeks.

"If I was stronger," she said fervently, "you wouldn't have been able to capture me. I'm not just your prisoner, I'm your scapegoat, too. It's way easier to pin everything on me than to own up to your mistakes, isn't it?"

She surged toward him. Jason had been too generous with her. She broke free from the rope as seamlessly as water. Ribbons of frost seemed to stop midair as she covered the hand on the hilt of his sword with her own. Forcing his hand, she drew his sword and leveled the edge of his blade against her own neck, both of their fingers still tangled around the hilt.

"Go ahead!" the graecus tempted, testing his patience by pressing the blade into the soft skin of her throat. "Make me your villain. Show everyone how strong and honorable of a leader you are by killing someone weaker than you."

Her eyes were bloodshot, shooting daggers at his. Jason couldn't feel anything but his entire body, trembling with anger and hate. His body crackled with electricity. The sky above them darkened, black storm clouds gathering. All Jason had ever wanted was peace, but in that moment, he craved blood the way the sun wished to burn.

And so, Jason told Aera in that sewer, "I want to forget her," simply because things were actually going okay between them for once. The faces and names in his dreams were hard to recall once he woke up, but there was no denying how all of these memories were directing him towards the idea that he and Aera weren't supposed to get along. Jason didn't like that. Aera was formidable, but he didn't want her to be his enemy.

Since Quebec, Jason started to notice things about Aera he hadn't before. He discovered she was kinder than she liked to pretend. She had been the first to notice Piper was missing when they crash-landed in the car plant in Detroit. She had been gentle with Piper, helping her down into the sewer and being ready to catch her. She smiled at Leo's jokes. She was too thoughtful to ask for more food even though she was hungry. She stroked Piper's hair for ten minutes to help her sleep.

Aera was also becoming less rough around the edges when it came to talking about the war last summer. That had to mean something. Jason didn't want to let whatever memories he had of her in the past deter the progress he was making with her in the present. At the same time, he feared that whatever disaster he was running from was going to catch him by the tail and swallow them both.

Jason chided himself for feeling this way, for wanting to ignore the past. It was selfish and irresponsible, two traits Jason had a feeling he had worked his whole life trying not to be. He just hoped whatever truth was waiting for him on the other side, Aera wouldn't hate him too much for it.

Aera nodded slowly at his words. From what Jason saw, Aera had no memory of him. She seemed totally oblivious to his recollections. She didn't seem to have the understanding that the girl he remembered was her. Or so he hoped.

That both relieved him and made him nervous. He worried he would say the wrong thing. Jason didn't want to say anything that would upset her. But Aera appeared fine. She just pouted and said, "I have a headache. Can I use your shoulder as a pillow?"

Jason obliged. Despite his trepidation, he wanted to be helpful. He wanted to be there for her. Now that Jason was resting, he didn't really feel the need for more sleep. He was wide awake. He had been conked out long enough on the dragon.

Aera gave him a cute smile and got comfortable on the brick ledge. She leaned over and happily rested her head on his shoulder.

Maybe she was messing with him again. Jason's heart rate couldn't seem slow down.

"Doesn't this remind you of waking up on that ugly school bus?" she asked.

"Please don't push me off the seat again."

Aera laughed a little. Jason hoped she couldn't see how red his face was or how sweaty his palms were getting. He stared across the fire, so he could focus on something other than how Aera was leaning against him, their fingers touching. Piper and Leo were both snoring in three-part harmony on the other side.

Leo was lying on his stomach with his arms dangling like a dead man. Piper's mouth was hanging wide open, ready to catch any spider from the ceiling.

"They must have been exhausted," Jason said quietly, lowering his voice just in case Aera was getting sleepy, too.

"They don't deserve this," Aera said, a note of bitterness lodged in her otherwise saccharine voice. "They should be worried about what to wear to prom and asking their crush to sit with them at lunch, not some crazy earth lady. It's insane how they can still call themselves gods when they're sending off a bunch of kids—their kids—to fight their battles."

"Nothing's going to happen to them," Jason promised. "To any of us."

He meant it. Jason wasn't going to let anything like what happened in Detroit happen again. He was never going to leave his friends to fend for themselves again.

The two didn't speak for awhile. Jason's mind wandered. He contemplated about the quest, his sister Thalia, and Hera's warnings. He thought back to the stories at camp, about Aera using her evil powers to subdue her siblings into blowing up Mount Olympus. Even Boreas, a god so far north, knew how good she was at messing with people's emotions. She was a master at love. It made Jason wonder how she could ever lose...

"Aera," he said cautiously, "can I ask you a question? You don't have to answer if you don't want to."

"Mh-hmm," Aera hummed sleepily, but alert enough. "What?"

Jason almost pulled back. He didn't know how she was going to react. Aera was resting on his shoulder and she seemed content. He decided to take the chance.

"Is it true you killed Luke?" he asked. Jason lost his confidence as soon as the question tumbled out. "Um, I...I heard a bunch of rumors at camp. Some say the gods defeated him after their battle with Typhon. Some say Percy Jackson finished him off, which would explain why you hate him so much. A few people say you had a change of heart at the last moment. I figured if I wanted to know the truth, you'd be the best person to ask."

Aera didn't say anything. Jason worried he'd seriously blew it this time until she said four simple words: "Yeah. I did it."

Jason didn't know how to take that.

"Does that...scare you?" she asked. It didn't sound like it was out of concern, more like curiosity.

"No," Jason decided after a moment's consideration. "You saved the world."

Aera scoffed lightly. "I think you're the only person who sees it that way."

Jason couldn't help but ask, "Did you love him?"

Aera smiled sardonically. "Love is a strong word."

"You're a strong girl."

"My mother is the love goddess," she said. "For a child of Aphrodite, love is the oxygen we breathe. Without it, we'd be nothing. We wouldn't even exist. Like Vogue without Anna Wintour. The sad part is I don't think any of us are capable of real love."

"Why's that?"

"Because it's in our nature. Love is so rooted in who we are, it's something we don't choose to do. It's expected of us. It's inevitable—something that just has to happen. Like..."

"A fate you can't control," Jason finished. "I know how that feels."

Aera lifted her head off his shoulder. "You asked me a question. Now it's my turn."

"Alright."

"What would you do?" Aera asked, staring him in the eye. "If you had to choose between saving the world or saving the person you loved?" She was peering at him so earnestly it compelled him to be honest with her.

"I don't know," Jason admitted with difficulty. "I want to say that I would do the right thing. That I would choose the greater good. Truth is, in the heat of the moment, I don't know if I'd be able to choose."

The thought alone made him nervous. Jason wouldn't want to lose either in that scenario. It seemed impossible to choose between them, even theoretically.

"That's okay," Aera said. "A true hero wouldn't have to choose. They would find a way to save both. Sadly, I don't think anyone like that actually exists. No offense. If they did, then maybe this world wouldn't be so ugly and broken."

"Do you really think that?" Jason asked, feeling himself frown. "That the world is ugly and broken?"

Aera nodded enthusiastically, which wasn't very reassuring. "100 percent. Just look at the gods."

"They can't all be bad."

"Jason," Aera said his name like he was a child who mixed up the color blue with red. "I'm not a know-it-all like Annabeth, but look at all the gazillion times they've screwed up in history. They're some of the highest powers of this universe and they still don't have patience, humility, or a proper foresight into the latest fashion trends of the new generation. If the gods can make the same mistakes you and I do, what does that say about the world and how messed up it is? There's no one watching over us. No one who cares."

Jason shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He didn't know Aera had such a pessimistic view on life. "That's...depressing."

"Of course there is one thing this world did right," Aera continued, putting her head back on Jason's shoulder. "They had someone as gorgeous as me exist the same time as BTS."

Jason suddenly wanted to laugh. "You like them that much?"

"Like them?" Aera said so loudly Leo stopped snoring for a second. She continued in a more restrained voice, "Don't underestimate me, Jason Grace. If there's anyone I would sacrifice the world for without thinking twice, it would be my one true love, Jung Ho-seok!"

"Yeah." Jason shrugged. It just made sense to him that Aera would have a major infatuation for celebrities like BTS. "I'm sure lots of girls would agree with you."

"No, you don't understand!" Aera exclaimed. Jason motioned for her to lower her voice.

"You don't understand," Aera tried again, whispering with the same amount of passion. "BTS is like a magic shop that is always there to give you hope. A butterfly you don't want to fly away. My blood, sweat, and tears. Everything good and beautiful in this world. Except for me, of course. I'm so beautiful..."

Jason didn't get a word Aera was saying, but he nodded along to the discussion anyway. He still had to figure out his past and what that meant for them. The fate of the world was at stake. They had a goddess to rescue. In three day's time, they were going to face whatever horrors were trying to rise from the earth.

But for now, Jason only wanted to sit there in that sewer with Aera and listen to her profess her love for the biggest boyband in the world and brag about her own beauty. Because doing just that made him feel the happiest he'd been in a long time.