On his last night in New Orleans before returning to camp, he sat in the herb garden and did something he had not done in a very long time: he thought about Jason Park.
Not with the analytical care he usually brought to that memory — the cataloging of useful knowledge, the separation of past-life information from present-life experience. He thought about him the way you think about someone you knew and lost. With the full weight of who that person had been.
Jason Park had been born in Atlanta in 1987, the son of Korean immigrants who had come to the American South for graduate school and stayed because the South had gotten into their bones in the way of places that mark you. He had grown up between cultures in the specific way of second-generation children: fully American and fully Korean and not entirely either in the eyes of people who required one or the other. He had learned to move in the threshold space between identities before he had any framework for what that meant.
He had loved mythology. He had loved it with the specific, almost embarrassing intensity of someone who found in ancient stories a quality of reality that the present world seemed to be gesturing at without quite reaching. He had studied it in college. He had argued about it with anyone who would argue. He had read every translation of every thing he could find and had opinions about all of them.
He had died at twenty-five. A car accident on a highway in Georgia, in October, on his way to visit his parents. It had been ordinary and sudden and without warning and he had not known it was coming.
Kael sat in the herb garden and thought: Jason Park never knew his mythology was real. He never knew that the gods he studied were actual beings with actual presence in the actual world. He never got to stand at a real crossroads and feel the shimmer. He never met a satyr or a centaur or a goddess. He studied the map for seven years and never saw the territory.
He thought: and then he died and his soul went into the void and was given a second chance, and the second chance came with the memory of the map. And the second chance let him see the territory. And the territory was everything the map had promised.
He thought: Jason Park gave me the mythology knowledge that made everything possible. He gave me the strategic instinct that came from years of thinking about ancient conflict and divine politics. He gave me the love of the thing — the genuine, embarrassing intensity of it — that had made me take it seriously enough to plan for sixteen years.
He thought: everything I have done in this life was built on what he knew and loved. His death was real and its cost was real and it was also the beginning of something he could not have imagined.
He thought: thank you, Jason. You would have loved all of this. I hope, wherever souls go after the void, you can see it somehow. I hope you know the map was true.
He sat in the herb garden until the dew came. Then he went inside and made tea and sat with his parents in the kitchen for a while and did not say anything profound, which was exactly right.