Thalia came through Long Island in late February with the Hunt, and she found him where she had found him before — on the south hill, looking at the night sky.
She had been on the road for most of the year and a half since the battle. The Hunt moved constantly — that was its nature — and Thalia moved with it with the specific quality of someone who had found, after three years in a tree and one in a body that was a year and a half behind its calendar age, that movement was exactly what she needed.
She sat down next to him on the hill. Her lightning-blue eyes were clear in the February night, clearer than they had been a year ago, the wildness that had come out of the tree having settled into something more like its natural state: fierce and deliberate rather than fierce and searching.
'You seem different,' she said.
'The war is over,' he said. 'Things after the war feel different from things during it.'
'That's true,' she said. 'But it's not what I mean. You seem—' She thought about it. 'Less like someone who's been carrying something. More like someone who's set something down and is figuring out how to walk without the weight.'
He thought: yes. That is exactly it. 'The preparation phase is done,' he said. 'I've been in preparation mode for sixteen years. The Codex shifted when the phase ended. I'm still figuring out what it looks like to be in the living phase instead.'
'Is it good?'
'Yes,' he said. 'Disorienting, but good. I keep looking for the plan and there isn't one. There's just the life.'
She looked at the sky. Zoe's star was above them — she always looked at it when she was here. He had noticed that she oriented herself by it, the way sailors orient by the north star. Not with grief anymore, or not only. With something that lived past grief on the long road that grief becomes when you carry it long enough.
'She would have liked you,' Thalia said.
'You told me that before.'
'I'm saying it again.' She looked at him. 'I'm part of the Hunt, but I'm not Zoe. The Hunt was always going to be temporary for me. I think Artemis knows it. I think she knew it when she offered it to me.' A pause. 'I'm trying to figure out what comes after the Hunt, at some point. What I'm for.'
'You don't have to figure that out yet,' he said.
'I know,' she said. 'But I'm thinking about it.' She looked at Zoe's star for a while. 'You figured out what you were for at six years old.'
'That was unusual,' he said. 'Most people spend longer.'
'What if what I'm for is—' She stopped. 'What if I'm not for something specific? What if I'm just for being Thalia Grace?'
He looked at her. He thought about the specific value of being completely, specifically, irreducibly yourself in a world that constantly wanted you to be something else. He thought about Aurelie in New Orleans, who had kept her magic small and her life local and had been completely herself for fifty years.
'That is a very large thing to be,' he said. 'I would not underestimate it.'
She looked at him. She looked at Zoe's star. Then she looked at the camp below — the spiral arrangement taking shape, the new cabins in their positions, the community that was still forming itself into what it was going to be.
'It's different,' she said. 'The camp.'
'Good different,' he said.
'Yes,' she said. 'Good different.' She was quiet for a moment. 'Thank you for being on this hill. Both of you — you and the pine.'
'That's what hills are for,' he said.
She stayed until midnight. Then the Hunt called her back — he could feel the silver shimmer of Artemis's presence at the camp's edge — and she stood up and went, and he stayed on the hill a while longer with the stars and the warm tree and the camp below.