Guard duty near Thalia's tree was, in Travis Stoll's professional opinion, the single most boring assignment in the history of Camp Half-Blood.
Nothing ever happened up here.
Ever.
You sat. You watched the tree. The tree sat back. Occasionally a squirrel did something mildly interesting. That was it. That was the whole job.
Travis had brought a deck of cards and a sandwich and the quiet intention of doing absolutely nothing productive for the next two hours.
He was halfway through both when he saw them.
Ten figures coming up the hill.
He squinted.
Silver. They were wearing silver. And they moved like — like people who had never once in their lives been caught off guard by anything, ever, which was a very specific kind of walk that Travis had never personally managed.
Hunters.
Ten Hunters of Artemis walking toward camp.
Travis sat up straighter.
Hunters didn't just show up. Hunters never just showed up. The last time Hunters had come to camp it had been a whole—
One of them was leading. Dark hair. Ancient eyes even from this distance. Moving like she owned the hill.
Behind her, four others were carrying something between them.
Someone.
Travis stood up completely.
Because he knew that hair. Even from here, even at this distance, even with the weird gold streak running through it that definitely hadn't been there before—
He knew that hair.
He grabbed the horn and blew until his lungs gave out.
Then he sprinted toward the cabins, yelling.
THE ARRIVAL
The horn brought everyone.
Cabin doors banged open. Campers spilled out mid-meal, mid-training, mid-whatever-the-Stolls-had-been-doing-that-was-definitely-against-the-rules. Within two minutes a loose crowd had gathered near the Big House, buzzing with confusion.
Then the Hunters crested the hill and the buzzing stopped.
Because:
One — Hunters. Ten of them. Which was already insane.
Two — there was a boy in the middle of the Hunters. Being carried. Which went against basically everything anyone knew about how Hunters operated.
Three — that boy had a gold streak in his hair that caught the afternoon light like it was made of sunlight, and even from twenty feet away something about him looked different. Sharper. Like something had been burned away and left behind only the parts that mattered.
Holy—
The crowd parted for Chiron, who cantered through with the calm urgency of someone who has seen three thousand years of chaos and knows when something is genuinely serious.
Zoe stopped in front of him. The four Hunters behind her carefully set Aditya down.
"Long story," she said. "Short version — he went to Alcatraz. Perses had the dragon. Aditya freed the dragon, fought Perses, blasted him through half the prison. The dragon survived. Aditya..." she glanced down, "...mostly survived. There's a dragon heart situation."
Chiron stared at her.
"A dragon heart situation."
"He's alive," Zoe said. "He's healing. Faster than he should be, actually. But he hasn't woken up and we don't know everything the heart changed yet."
Chiron pinched the bridge of his nose. Took one long breath. Looked at Aditya — at the burns, the bandages, the impossible streak of gold — and let it out slowly.
His tail flicked. Once. Hard.
He was quiet for a long moment. He had known it was a solo quest. He had sanctioned it. He had stood right here and watched Aditya walk out alone, and told himself the boy could handle whatever the prophecy threw at him.
He had not quite anticipated this.
"A dragon heart situation," he said. Very carefully. In the tone of a man choosing his words because the alternative involves saying several things out loud that a mentor really shouldn't.
"Aye," Zoe said.
"Right," Chiron said. "Of course. Naturally."
He straightened up. Snapped back into camp director mode.
"WILL SOLACE!" The shout carried across the whole green. "INFIRMARY! NOW!"
Will appeared at a dead sprint, medical bag swinging. He took one look at the situation, opened his mouth, closed it, and said very calmly:
"What did he do this time."
"Titan," Chiron said.
Will's eye twitched. "Of course. Great. Fantastic. Let's go."
They moved toward the infirmary.
Which meant moving through the crowd.
The Aphrodite cabin had, as a unit, pushed their way to the front. Because of course they had.
Silena Beauregard's hand went over her mouth the moment they got a clear look at Aditya.
"Is that—" she started.
"The gold streak," Drew said, almost reverent. "Is that permanent?"
"And his face is different," another Aphrodite girl said. "Like — sharper? He looks like he belongs on a—"
"A what," said Clarisse flatly, appearing at their shoulder.
"A — I was going to say a statue—"
"Sure you were."
But even Clarisse looked for a moment too long before she caught herself and went back to scowling.
Drew watched Aditya get carried past and said, to no one in particular: "He went on a quest for one week and came back with a glow-up. That is so unfair. That is genuinely, cosmically unfair."
"He nearly died," Silena said.
"Still unfair," Drew said firmly.
THE INFIRMARY
Will did his assessment in four minutes and thirty-two seconds, because he timed it, because he was a professional, and because he needed something to focus on other than the creeping sensation that his entire medical education had just become irrelevant.
Broken ribs. Healing.
Concussion. Healing.
Burns that had no business being on a human body and also no business healing this fast. Healing.
The kneecap — shattered, bone fragments visible on arrival according to Zoe's field notes — fully reconstructed. He checked it three times. Still reconstructed.
He walked a full circle around the bed. Checked the pulse. Checked the temperature — running hot, not dangerously, more like a radiator than a fever. Checked the golden streak, which was doing something he didn't have instruments for. Made three notes on his clipboard. Crossed them out. Wrote them again.
Then he stopped.
Stared at his patient.
"He's healing himself," Will said. "The dragon heart is — it's like he ate an ambrosia factory. His body just has unlimited ambrosia now, apparently, just running constantly in the background. I don't have a chapter on this. There is no chapter on this. I went to Apollo for medical guidance and Apollo gave me a very long poem about sunrise which was, as always, completely unhelpful."
He turned to Chiron.
"I don't need to do anything," he said, with the energy of a man who has trained his whole life for a job that has just informed him his services are no longer required. "He just needs to sleep. The dragon heart is handling it. I am — I am decorative right now. I am a decorative healer standing next to someone who has replaced me with a dragon organ."
A pause.
"I need a moment," Will said.
"How long until he wakes?" Chiron asked.
"Days. Maybe more. However long — whatever's happening in there—" Will gestured at the golden streak, the heat, the general wrongness of the whole situation, "—it's not done yet."
Chiron nodded slowly. He looked at the three Hunters who had filed in behind them — the dark-haired lieutenant, and two others who had stationed themselves at the door and window with the casual readiness of people who expected trouble and were fine with that.
"I want to thank you," Chiron said to Zoe, "for bringing him back. The camp is in your debt. If there's anything we can—"
"We're staying," Naomi said cheerfully, from the doorway.
Chiron blinked. "I'm sorry?"
"Staying! At least five days." Naomi smiled like this was very good news for everyone involved. "The lieutenant has words for the boy when he wakes up, and we need to observe the changes, and Lady Artemis wants a full report, so." She spread her hands. "We're staying."
Chiron opened his mouth. Looked at Zoe, who looked back at him with an expression that said yes, we are, and no, this is not a discussion.
He closed his mouth.
"Of course," he said. "Make yourselves comfortable."
THE STOLL PROBLEM
It started within the hour.
Travis had blown the horn. Travis had done his job correctly and with great personal sacrifice (the sandwich had gone uneaten, the cards unplayed, two whole hours wasted on actual duty). Travis felt, not unreasonably, that this entitled him to some kind of insider access to the situation unfolding in the infirmary.
Connor agreed immediately. Connor always agreed. That was the thing about Connor — he was an excellent co-conspirator because he never asked whether the plan was good, only whether it was interesting.
Together they developed what they called Operation: Visiting Hours.
Attempt One — The Official Clipboard
Travis knocked on the door with a clipboard and his most responsible expression.
"Medical supply audit," he announced. "Official camp business. Very important."
Phoebe opened the door, looked at the clipboard — which had four items on it: bandages, more bandages, ambrosia (ask Will), snacks?? — and closed it again.
The whole interaction took four seconds.
Attempt Two — The Medical Professionals
They borrowed Apollo cabin tunics. Technically without asking. They were significantly shorter than either of them, which became apparent the moment they put them on, but Travis felt the overall impression was still convincing.
Naomi opened the door this time.
She looked at them.
"We're healers," Connor said. " Look at the tunics."
" They are four inches short for you. You look like you're wearing shirts."
"We have a condition," Travis said, with dignity.
"The condition where your tunics are too small?"
"The condition where we're healers."
Naomi closed the door.
Attempt Three — Emotional Appeal
Travis knocked again.
"Look," he said to the closed door, "we're his friends. We just want to make sure he's okay. We're genuinely worried. This is genuine worry, happening right now, on this face—"
"He's fine," Naomi's voice came through the door.
"Can we hear that from him personally?"
"He's unconscious."
"Can we hear it from his unconscious body?"
A pause.
"No."
"What if we just looked through the window—"
"Phoebe is at the window."
Travis looked at the window. Phoebe looked back at him from inside, expression perfectly pleasant, arrow resting across her knees.
He stepped away from the window.
Attempt Four — The White Chocolate Gambit
This one, Connor maintained later, was genuinely clever.
They baked white chocolate cookies. Not stole cookies. Not found cookies. Baked them, in the camp kitchen, with actual effort. Connor had burned his hand twice. Travis had dropped an entire bag of flour. The cookies had taken forty minutes and a significant amount of personal integrity.
They slid the plate under the infirmary door with a note:
FOR ADITYA when he wakes up. We made these ourselves. Connor burned his hand. Please acknowledge the sacrifice. (also can we come in? — T+C)
Silence from inside.
Then the sound of a plate being lifted.
Then quiet.
Then the empty plate came back under the door.
On the back of their note, in neat handwriting: Cookies excellent. Answer still no. — N. (Tell Connor to put ice on that.)
Travis held the empty plate.
"She ate our cookies."
"She ate our cookies," Connor confirmed.
"We burned our hands for those cookies."
"I burned my hand. You dropped the flour."
"I did the emotional labor."
They stood in silence for a moment.
"She said the cookies were excellent," Connor offered.
"She said the cookies were excellent and still wouldn't let us in."
"...is that more or less insulting?"
"I honestly don't know."
Travis looked at the empty plate, then at the closed door, then at the note with Naomi's neat handwriting.
"Okay," he said. "New respect. Genuine new respect. She ate our peace offering and still held the line. That's — that's actually impressive."
"We need a better plan."
"We need a fundamentally different approach."
They came back two hours later with a ladder and the intention of accessing the infirmary through the roof.
Zoe was standing outside when they arrived with the ladder.
She didn't say anything. She just looked at the ladder, then at them, then at the ladder again.
Travis and Connor looked at each other.
They took the ladder back.
The rest of the day settled into an uneasy but functional normal. Training. Meals. The usual camp chaos. But there was a thread of attention pulled toward the infirmary all afternoon — campers finding reasons to walk past, glancing at the window, wondering out loud what a dragon heart actually did to a person.
Inside: not much, visibly.
Aditya slept.
Deeply. Completely. With the absolute commitment of someone whose body had decided consciousness was a low-priority task. Occasionally he shifted. Occasionally his fingers twitched toward something in whatever he was dreaming.
The gold streak caught the light sometimes and seemed, for a moment, to pulse.
The heat radiating off him never faded.
Will checked in every few hours, wrote notes that raised more questions than they answered, and muttered steadily about the concept of hazard pay and whether Apollo would respond to a formal written request.
The Hunters kept their watch.
The Stolls kept planning.
(Their fifth attempt, involving a note claiming to be from Chiron requesting the Hunters' presence at a "mandatory meeting," was foiled when Naomi simply walked to the Big House, confirmed with Chiron there was no such meeting, and returned to her post without a word.)
(Their sixth attempt was never completed because they couldn't agree on the details.)
(The seventh attempt — a distraction involving a fake monster alarm — worked perfectly in terms of getting two of the three Hunters to look toward the tree line, but the third one, Phoebe, had apparently anticipated exactly this and was already standing between them and the door when they turned around.)
Connor looked at Phoebe.
Phoebe looked at Connor.
"How," Connor said.
"I've been doing this for a very long time," Phoebe said pleasantly.
They retreated for the night. There would be more attempts tomorrow. There were always more attempts tomorrow. That was the thing about the Stolls — they weren't deterred by failure, only temporarily inconvenienced by it.
THE VIGIL Night — June 19th
The camp went quiet.
The infirmary didn't.
Naomi at the door. Phoebe at the window. Zoe at the chair beside the bed, same place she'd been since they'd put him down.
His breathing was slow. Deep. Steady in a way that was almost aggressive — like his body was making a point about how committed it was to this recovery. The heat radiated off him in waves. The gold in his hair caught the moonlight through the window and held it.
Zoe watched him.
Fool, she thought. Complete, unbelievable fool.
She hadn't seen the fight. She'd arrived after, seen only the aftermath — the collapsed prison, the bodies, the dragon half-dead, and Aditya broken and bleeding across Aethon's back with Artemis's favor already spent. She hadn't seen how he'd done it. Only what it had cost.
Which was, in some ways, worse.
Because she could fill in the gaps. She'd been a warrior for two thousand years. She knew what a body looked like when it had given everything it had and then kept going anyway. She knew what it cost. And she knew — from Aethon's behavior, from the way the dragon had given out his own heart without hesitation — exactly what kind of choice had been made in that prison before she'd arrived.
He'd used Artemis's favor for the dragon.
Not for himself. Not to escape, not to heal, not to live. For Aethon.
She'd known heroes across two millennia. Most of them had made the great choice once. Beautifully. And spent decades getting invited to dinner parties about it.
This one apparently hadn't even noticed he'd done anything.
She reached out. Adjusted the cloth on his forehead.
His skin was warm. Dragon-warm. Alive in a way that felt almost aggressive given how close the other direction had been.
The gold in his hair up close looked like it was still moving. Still settling. Like the heart hadn't finished whatever it was rewriting.
What did it change that we can't see yet?
His face twitched. His fingers curled toward something in the dark behind his eyes.
"Sleep," she said quietly. "Heal. Figure out what that heart made you."
A pause.
"But wake up soon. Because I have a great deal to say to you about your complete inability to ask for help before you're nearly dead."
Her eyes softened.
Nothing came to her tongue.
She watched on.
At the door, Naomi heard every word.
Said nothing.
Later — 2 AM
The camp was silent.
That's when Luke came.
No torch. Dark clothes. Backbiter at his hip. He moved through the dark like he was part of it — easy, unhurried, the walk of someone who has already made every decision that matters and is simply executing now.
His eyes weren't right. Not dark gold, not anything supernatural — just bloodshot. Red threading through the whites, the edges raw, the look of someone who hadn't slept in days and had been spending that time thinking about one specific thing with complete and total focus.
Naomi had stepped away for sixty seconds — just sixty — and Luke's hand was already reaching for the door handle when Zoe's voice came from the shadows beside the building.
"Don't."
He went still.
Turned slowly.
She was ten feet away. Bow up. Arrow at his chest. Not a tremor.
"Zoe Nightshade." His voice was almost warm. "Just checking on him."
"No visitors."
"He's my friend—"
"Friends don't approach a sickbed at two in the night with sword in hand," she said. "Try again."
Something moved behind his expression. Didn't break through. Those red-edged eyes stayed steady.
"I just want to see him," he said. Each word placed carefully. "That's all."
"No."
"Zoe—"
"Whatever this is waits until he wakes."
The warmth dropped out of his voice entirely. "Does it?"
The silence between them had weight.
His hand drifted toward Backbiter.
"I wouldn't," Zoe said.
"You'd shoot me? Here?"
"You're giving me a reason."
Luke looked at her for a long moment. Then something shifted — not softening, not backing down, more like a decision being confirmed — and he smiled. It was not a good smile. It was the smile of someone who has crossed a line they're comfortable with and is simply waiting for the world to acknowledge it.
"Sharper than I expected," he said. "Genuinely."
His gaze moved past her to the infirmary window. To where Aditya was sleeping on the other side of it, completely unaware.
"I just wanted to see him." His voice hardened at the edges. "See what the dragon heart did. Whether he looks as monstrous on the outside as he was at Alcatraz."
Zoe's grip didn't shift. "What happened at Alcatraz."
"He didn't mention it?" A short, cold sound that wasn't quite a laugh.
Something cracked underneath the control then. Not much. Just a hairline fracture, just enough to hear what was underneath — raw and sleepless and still bleeding.
"Seven demigods," he said. "Only four came back. Leo. James. Lucia." The names came out like they were carved from something that used to be softer. "And the way he—" He stopped. Jaw tight. Swallowed it back down hard. The control returned, colder and harder than before. "He knows what he did."
"You're lying," Zoe said.
"Am I." Not a question.
He stepped back once. Twice. The shadows pulled around him like they were glad to have him.
"Tell him I'll be waiting," he said. "Tell him the names. He'll remember."
He turned.
His outline blurred at the edges — and then he was just gone, darkness where he'd been standing, silence where his footsteps should have been.
Zoe held the draw for thirty seconds. Counted them.
Then she lowered the bow.
Her hands were shaking slightly. She noticed. Filed it.
Luke Castellan.
Golden boy. Everyone's favorite. Those eyes.
Naomi appeared from around the corner. "Zoe. I heard—"
"Luke Castellan," Zoe said quietly. "Tried to get inside."
"Do we tell Chiron?"
Zoe looked at the infirmary door. At where Aditya lay on the other side of it — healing, completely unaware that his enemy had just stood three feet from his bed.
"...Not yet." Working through it. And those names. Leo, James, Lucia." She gripped the bow. "Something is wrong here that I don't understand yet. I'm not moving until I do."
She looked at Naomi.
"Double the watch. Nobody gets through without both of us. And if he comes back—"
"Yes?"
"Wake me immediately. Bring your spear."
Naomi nodded. No jokes this time.
They returned to their positions.
The infirmary was quiet.
Aditya slept on.
Peaceful. Deep. His breathing slow and steady and completely unbothered by the fact that the world outside was considerably more complicated than when he'd closed his eyes.
He was, Connor Stoll would later report to Travis after another very unsuccessful infiltration attempt, snoring.
Not quietly.
"Like an elephant," Connor said. "A very peaceful elephant. On steroids."
"An elephant that has never had a single worry in its life," Travis agreed.
"You know what," Connor said, "good for him. Good for him."
THE RETURN OF THE CHAMPION June 21st — Morning
The celebration horn went off at sunrise.
Three blasts. Three more.
From inside the infirmary, through walls and windows and several days of deep unconscious sleep, some part of Aditya apparently heard it.
Because he stirred.
Not awake — not yet. But his breathing changed. The snoring stopped. His fingers uncurled from whatever dream-battle they'd been engaged in.
The golden streak in his hair caught the early light.
Zoe, who had been watching, leaned forward slightly.
Outside, the camp erupted.
Percy Jackson, Annabeth Chase, and Grover Underwood came over the ridge looking wrecked and alive and triumphant — and camp lost it completely, the way it only can when something that felt impossible has somehow happened anyway.
The master bolt was back. The war between the Olympians was called off. Percy had bested a god in a fight, apparently, which was just very Percy, and the Underworld hadn't kept him, which was the important part.
The celebration horn kept going.
Inside the infirmary, Aditya's eyes moved behind closed lids.
Almost.
Almost.
The celebration horn kept going.
Inside the infirmary, Aditya's eyes moved behind closed lids.
Almost.
Almost.
His breathing changed.
The snoring — the magnificent, unstoppable, elephant-on-steroids snoring that had been the soundtrack of the infirmary for two days — just stopped.
Zoe sat forward.
His fingers uncurled. His chest rose with a breath that was different from the others. Deeper. More deliberate. Like something coming back online after a long time away.
Then his eyes opened.
Just opened. No dramatic moment. No gasping or flailing.
He blinked at the infirmary ceiling.
Blinked again.
"...huh," he said.
Okay so.
Ceiling. White. Infirmary smell — ambrosia and antiseptic and something faintly smoky that I was probably responsible for.
I was alive.
That was good. That was genuinely good.
I turned my head.
And then my brain, which had been doing a perfectly reasonable job of coming back online, just... stopped. Mid-boot. Completely.
Because Zoe Nightshade was sitting three feet from my face.
Right. Okay. First thought: she was — I mean — the sunlight was coming through the window and it was catching her hair and she had this kind of profile that belonged on ancient Greek pottery except that description doesn't do it justice because the pottery never looked like—
Second thought: her eyes. I'd seen them before, obviously, silver-grey and ancient and sharp as anything, but up close in the quiet of the infirmary they were something else entirely. Like looking at starlight through still water. Like—
Third thought, arriving fast and embarrassingly: the way she was sitting, leaning slightly forward, one hand resting on her knee, and she was wearing her silver jacket and her hair was—
Okay. Okay Aditya. Focus. You just woke up. There are more important things to—
Her jaw, though. That was an unfair jaw. Nobody had a right to—
"Ahem."
I turned.
Naomi was standing by the door.
Looking directly at me.
With the expression of someone who had heard every single thought I'd just had and was choosing, generously, not to say any of it out loud.
I felt my face do something extremely warm and extremely obvious.
"I was just — I was taking inventory," I said. "Of the room."
"Of course," Naomi said pleasantly.
Zoe, who had apparently missed none of this, looked at me with the flat steady gaze of someone who was going to let me keep digging my own grave.
"Welcome back," she said. "How do you feel?"
I considered several answers, discarded all of them, and went with:
"Like I got beaten to death by a Titan. "
"Accurate."
I sat up slowly. Looked at my hands. Looked at the room properly this time — the room, Aditya, look at the room — at Phoebe by the window, at the morning light coming through.
"You all stayed," I said.
"The lieutenant had words for you," Naomi said cheerfully. "We weren't missing that."
I looked at Zoe.
Zoe looked back at him steadily. "Later," she said. "First — can you walk?"
I swung my legs off the bed and found out.
THE PORCH
The celebration was in full swing by the time I made it to the infirmary porch.
I didn't go further than that.
Not yet. My legs were working fine — the healing had been thorough, almost insultingly thorough, like the dragon heart had decided broken bones were beneath it — but the noise and the crowd and the everything of it felt like a lot to walk into all at once. The last thing I clearly remembered was a Titan trying to cave my skull in. Two days had apparently passed. The world had kept moving without me.
So I stood at the railing and watched from a distance.
Percy was at the center of it. Of course he was. Standing outside the Big House with Chiron, gesturing wildly, clearly mid-story. Annabeth beside him. Grover eating something that I was fairly certain wasn't food. The whole camp pressed in around them, laughing, shouting questions, someone starting a chant that I couldn't quite make out.
It was everything a returning-hero moment should be.
I watched it and felt something warm and something hollow at the same time. Which was a weird combination. I filed it for later.
Then I found Luke.
I wasn't looking for him. I just — found him. The way you find something you already knew was there.
Luke Castellan was standing at the edge of the crowd. Laughing at something Percy said. Clapping him on the shoulder with the easy warmth of a senior counselor who'd missed his best friend. Looking, to everyone watching, like exactly what they all believed he was.
My jaw tightened.
I knew.
I knew what he'd been doing at the infirmary door two nights ago — Zoe had told me, quiet and careful, while Naomi pretended to be very interested in the window. I knew what those bloodshot eyes meant, what the rage underneath the smile meant, what those names meant.
I knew Luke was Kronos's.
And I knew that if I walked over there right now and said any of that, I'd get looked at like I'd lost my mind. Luke was beloved. Luke was the best swordsman in a generation, the guy who'd been mentoring half these campers since they arrived, Percy's favorite senior counselor. The guy currently laughing with his arm around Percy's shoulders like everything was fine.
Nobody would believe me.
Not without proof.
And I had none.
So all I could do was stand here and watch and feel it sit in my chest like a stone.
I must have been staring harder than I realized.
Because Luke looked up.
Across the crowd. Across the whole celebration. Straight at the infirmary porch.
Straight at me.
For a moment we just looked at each other.
Then he smiled. Easy. Warm. The full golden-boy smile that had probably charmed half the Olympian court.
And waved.
Like we were friends. Like nothing had happened. Like he hadn't stood outside my door two nights ago with his hand on Backbiter.
I didn't wave back.
And for just a moment — half a second, barely long enough to catch — the smile stayed on his face but his eyes changed.
Not bloodshot this time. Not tired.
Just hatred.
Clean and cold and completely certain. The kind that doesn't need to perform itself because it's already made every decision it needs to make.
Then it was gone. The smile was just a smile again. Luke turned back to Percy, said something that made Percy laugh, and the moment closed over like it had never happened.
I stood at the railing.
Watched Percy laughing, alive, oblivious. Luke right beside him.
"You're going to get a headache staring that hard."
Zoe. Beside me. Silent as always, appearing from nowhere like it was a skill she'd spent two thousand years perfecting — which, I realized, it probably was.
She was looking at the crowd, not at me.
"I know," I said.
A pause.
"The names he gave me," she said quietly. "Leo. James. Lucia."
"Yeah."
"Why?"
I thought about those bodies in D-Block.
"Yeah," I said. "I killed them in front of him ."
Zoe was quiet for a moment. The celebration noise washed over us from the other side of camp.
"And you think no one will believe you," she said. Not a question.
"Would you have?" I looked at her. "Two days ago. Before the door. If I'd walked up and said it — would you have believed me over him?"
She didn't answer immediately.
Which was its own answer.
"What do you need?" she said finally.
I looked back at Luke. At the easy laugh. At the arm around Percy's shoulders.
"Time," I said. "And proof."
"Then we wait," Zoe said. Like it was decided. Like she'd already made up her mind and was just informing me of it.
I looked at her.
She was still watching the crowd, not me. Jaw set. Silver bow at her back. Two thousand years of patience in the set of her shoulders.
"We?" I said.
"Don't push it," she said. "Go say hello to your friend. The hero who has returned. He's been asking about you."
She walked back inside.
I stood at the railing a moment longer.
Then I pushed off and walked toward the celebration — toward Percy, toward the noise and the laughter and the good thing happening right in the middle of everything that was wrong — and tried to look like someone who didn't know what I knew.
I managed it.
Mostly.
END CHAPTER 23