They stopped the night before crossing into New York at a motel outside Paramus, New Jersey. They had made it through Virginia and Maryland without incident and his mother had, at various points during the drive, shifted from frightened to watchfully curious to something that Kael categorized as competent awareness — the adaptation of a scientist who had been confronted with new data and was updating her model rather than resisting it.
His father had said very little through most of Virginia, and then said quite a lot in Maryland, and had arrived in New Jersey with the specific equanimity of a physician who had accepted a new diagnosis and was now focused entirely on the treatment protocol.
'Tell me about Camp Half-Blood's medical situation,' Marcus had said, somewhere in Maryland. 'Chiron is a healer. You've mentioned he has some medical training. What about the demigods? Are they trained in first aid?'
'Inconsistently,' Kael said. 'The Apollo cabin handles most medical care. There's an informal training system but it's not standardized.'
'There should be a standardized system.' Marcus said this with the quiet firmness of a physician who has seen preventable harm and considers prevention a moral obligation. 'I can help with that.'
He looked at his father. 'You want to come to camp.'
'Not to stay,' Marcus said. 'But I'd like to meet Chiron. I'd like to see the facilities. And I'd like to know that the people around you have at least basic emergency training.'
Kael thought about this. He had not planned for his father to be directly involved in the camp world — his parents' role in his plan had been as the people he returned to, the safe shore between quests. But he also thought: Marcus Alexander, physician, son of an Apollo-legacy healer, wanting to standardize medical training for demigods. That was not a bad thing. That was possibly a very good thing.
'I'll introduce you,' he said. 'Chiron will find you interesting.'
'I hope he finds me useful,' his father said. This was so close to what Kael had said to Theron years ago that he felt something that was half humor and half recognition move through him.
'Yeah,' he said. 'I know. Useful is the point.'
✦ ✦ ✦
He could not sleep in the motel. He lay on the double bed and his parents were in the other room and Theron was on the floor because Theron refused to sleep on hotel beds on account of the springs being wrong for a satyr's particular physiology.
He lay awake and thought about what was coming.
Not the Titan War — that was years away still. Not the canon events, which were several years in the future. He thought about tomorrow: Camp Half-Blood. The place he had been reading about for eleven years, thinking about for eleven years, preparing for eleven years.
He thought about how it would feel to walk through that barrier for the first time.
He thought about Thalia's Pine. About what it contained. About the girl who had turned herself into a tree to save her friends and was going to wake up in two years with the world entirely changed.
He thought about Luke. Not the character — the person. A seventeen-year-old boy who was angry in ways that had perfectly legitimate causes, who was going to make a catastrophic choice unless something changed, who had already made some of the choices that led to that catastrophe before Kael had even arrived.
He could not save everyone. He knew this. He had always known this. But he intended to try specific things for specific people, and Luke was one of them, and the time was coming when the trying would begin in earnest.
He thought about Bianca di Angelo, who was — he checked his mental timeline — fourteen now, probably, somewhere in the world, not yet in a lotus hotel, not yet at Westover Hall, still years from the Junkyard of the Gods. Years of preparation left.
He turned over on the motel bed and looked at the ceiling and thought: I am ready. Not fully, never fully, there was always more to learn and more to earn. But ready enough. Ready to start being in the world rather than preparing to be in it.
He thought: tomorrow I cross into New York. The day after, I reach camp.
He thought: the crossroads are open and every road leads somewhere and I have been standing at this one for eleven years and it is time to walk it.
He slept. He dreamed of his mother's garden, green and shimmering, and of a crossroads lit by a lamp that cast golden light, and of a woman with three faces who looked at him from across the intersection and nodded once, briefly, as if to say: yes. Good. Now go.