He knew, with the specific clarity of a plan about to be executed, that the coming year was the year that everything he had built toward would be tested.
Not just the Bianca mission — though that was the center of it, the thing he had been planning since he was six years old and which lived in his chest as a permanent low-grade urgency. The whole arc: the Titan's Curse events, Atlas's plan, Artemis's capture, the quest, the Junkyard of the Gods. He had been a bystander to the first two canon summers. The third was not a summer he could be a bystander to.
He went through what he knew one more time, in the eastern woods, alone, speaking it aloud to himself the way he sometimes did when the internal voice was not sufficient — when he needed to hear the plan in order to feel whether it was sound.
The di Angelos leave the Lotus Hotel in October. They go to Maine. They come to Westover Hall. Grover finds them there and is recognized as a satyr by the school's monster population. Annabeth, Percy, and Thalia come. The battle. Artemis's hunters arrive. The di Angelos are offered a choice.
Bianca joins the Hunt. This part he could not change — should not change. Bianca's choice to join the Hunt was her choice to make, and his foreknowledge did not give him the right to redirect it. She was going to choose the Hunt and that choice was going to mean something.
But the junkyard. The Talos automaton. That was different. That was not about her choice — it was about her having information she needed to execute the choice she made. She chose to destroy the automaton. She had every right to make that choice. She died because she didn't know where to strike. That was the gap he could close without overriding her agency.
He also thought about Zoe Nightshade. This was harder. He had thought about Zoe for years and had always arrived at the same conclusion: he could not save her. The arc of Zoe's story — the dying — was interwoven with her own choices, her own dignity, her own narrative. She was poisoned by the Nemean Lion. She was the one who chose to hold Atlas. Her death was not a mistake or a gap in information; it was the shape of who she was. Intervention there was not correction. It was erasure.
He would be present at the end of Zoe's story. He would not try to change it. He would be there for it, the way he had been there for Thalia's tree: as someone who knew what it cost and sat with the cost rather than pretending it wasn't paid.
He closed the notebook. He looked at the woods around him — the familiar eastern woods, the light in them late-August golden, the camp sounds distant. He thought: I am ready. I have been getting ready for nine years and I am as ready as I will be. The rest is execution.
He thought: be present. Be honest. Be precise with the information you have. Don't try to do everything. Do the thing you are there to do.
He thought: Bianca di Angelo deserves to live. Everything else is downstream of that.