Annabeth Chase found him in the camp library on a Wednesday afternoon, which he had expected. He had been spending his free time in the library because it was the most useful place to spend free time at Camp Half-Blood and also because he genuinely liked libraries and always had, in both lives.
She sat down across from him without asking whether the seat was taken. This was either confidence or social obliviousness and in her case it was confidence; she had assessed that the seat was effectively open and acted on the assessment. He respected this.
She said, without preamble: 'Your claiming was unusual. I've been researching dual claimings in camp history. There are six documented cases. None of them had both a major Olympian and a Titan-era goddess. None of them happened simultaneously. Yours is in a different category from all the others.'
He looked at her. Nine years old, grey eyes behind her camp-issued baseball cap, a scroll of notes on the table beside her that she had clearly prepared before this conversation. He felt, strongly, the thing he had been trying to practice: this is a person, not a character. She is nine and brilliant and she is talking to you as an intellectual equal and that deserves to be received as exactly what it is.
'What's your interpretation?' he said.
'Three possibilities,' she said immediately. She had clearly been waiting for someone to ask. 'One: the dual claiming is a unique divine arrangement that Apollo and Hecate made deliberately, which implies cooperation between those two specifically. Two: it reflects a bloodline anomaly — both lines strong enough simultaneously that both gods claimed automatically without prior arrangement. Three: there's something about you specifically that attracted both claims, something that isn't just bloodline.'
'Which do you think?' he asked.
She looked at him steadily. 'Option three,' she said. 'The bloodline explanation doesn't fully account for the simultaneity. If it were automatic bloodline response, they wouldn't have been synchronized. That takes intention.' She paused. 'But I don't know what the 'something specific about you' is. I'm working on it.'
He thought: she is nine years old and she has already identified the correct answer and she is transparently telling him that she is investigating him and somehow this is not hostile; it is simply her being exactly who she is.
He said: 'I appreciate the directness. I'll tell you what I can when I can.'
She considered this for a moment — the precisely calibrated offer, which was honest but not full disclosure. 'That's fair,' she said. 'I'd prefer more but fair is what it is.' She looked at what he had been reading: a scroll on Greek divine history, the pre-Olympian era. 'You read Ancient Greek.'
'Yes.'
'How well?'
'Well enough for this.' He paused. 'Well enough for most things.'
She looked at him with the grey eyes reassessing. He had been reading a dense scroll without difficulty, which he had been allowing himself to do because the library was relatively private and the ability to read Greek fluently was not in itself inexplicable for someone with his background.
'We should work together,' she said. Not as a question. As a conclusion arrived at. 'You know things. I know different things. That's useful.'
He thought: yes. That is exactly right. And this is exactly who she is. She assesses utility without apology and she is right to, and the utility is mutual and genuine.
'Yes,' he said. 'I think so too.'
She pulled out a second scroll and put it on the table between them. 'Tell me what you know about Hecate's pre-Olympian relationships,' she said. 'I have a theory about the Titan War origins and I need more source material.'
He told her. He told her more than he had intended to, because her questions were good and following good questions honestly was something he had not been able to do freely for eleven years and it was, he discovered, a profound relief.
They worked for three hours. She was right that they knew different things. The combination was, as she had assessed, useful.
He thought, walking back to the Apollo cabin in the early evening: she is going to be one of the most important people in this camp, in this world, in the next decade. She already is. She has been nine years old for all of about thirty seconds of my experience and I already know she is extraordinary.
He thought: I am going to be careful with this friendship. Not managed-careful. Present-careful. She deserves the real version of me, not the strategic version.
He thought: this is what it feels like to meet someone who thinks at the same speed you do. In either life, he had not encountered this often enough to have become accustomed to it.
He hoped she felt it too. He suspected she did. She had, after all, been the one who came to find him.