The third school year at Hillview was different from the first two in the specific way that a year where you know what is coming next is different from years where you do not.
He did not neglect the present for the future — he had learned this lesson well enough by now to have it in his body rather than just his head. He was present at Hillview, genuinely, in the ordinary ways: he helped Dominic with a history paper (without telling him that his affinity for engineering history was almost certainly Hephaestus legacy), he made sure Maya had company when she was painting through something difficult, he went to the school's winter concert and listened to a choir that was mostly mortal and thought about music and what it was for.
But he also prepared. He spent the winter working on Lantern Step — it was at Rank D now, stable for up to three minutes, surviving light pressure. He needed Rank C before next summer. He spent evenings with his coded notebooks, refining his read on the Westover Hall sequence, working out the approach problem from every angle he could find.
He went home to New Orleans for Christmas and for two weeks in February. Both visits had the quality they always had: the herb garden, the crossroads, his parents' kitchen table, Cece's red beans. He sat with Madame Moreau at the altar one evening and made his regular acknowledgment to Baron Samedi's attention and felt, clearly and warmly, that the attention was present and unchanged.
His mother sat with him in the garden one February morning, both of them with coffee, the camellia in the corner of the garden blooming early because it always bloomed early in that corner.
'You're getting ready for something,' she said.
'Always,' he said.
'Something specific. Something coming.' She looked at the garden. 'I don't ask for the details, Kael. I know you tell me what you can. But I want you to know that I know it's coming and I want you to know that whatever it is, you have done everything a person could do to be ready for it.'
He looked at his mother. Mirela Vasquez-Alexander, who had made conditions at a crossroads sixteen years ago and kept them and raised him with the specific love of someone who chose the whole person rather than the manageable parts.
'I know,' he said. 'Thank you. For — everything. All of it.'
She put her arm around him on the garden bench. 'That's what I'm here for,' she said. 'Also the camellia is doing very well this year.'
'It knows someone is paying attention,' he said.
'Everything does,' she said. 'That's the thing Aurelie understood. Attention is a form of love. The plants know.'
He leaned against her shoulder in the February morning and thought: I am going to carry this into whatever comes next. This specific quality of morning, this specific warmth, the camellia too early and the coffee and the person who has been paying attention to me since before I was born.
I am going to carry it and it is going to be enough.