He left camp three days before the primary group, with Theron and Chiron's authorization and a pack that contained his staff, the Moreau gris-gris bag, Hecate's key, four changes of clothes, and a first aid kit that would have done credit to a trauma unit.
He had also packed something else: a small folded note. Not the Percy-note — that was years away still. This one was for Bianca. He had been writing and rewriting it for months and had finally landed on a version that was as simple and direct as he could make it.
It read: You are going to enter a giant bronze automaton to destroy it from inside. You are right to try this — it works. Strike the back of the neck. There is a control node there, the size of a fist. If you hit it, the automaton collapses. If you don't know this, you won't find it in time. I know it. Now you do. — K
He had thought for a long time about whether to write it down rather than tell her in person. The written version had advantages: she could read it in private, in her own time, without the pressure of a stranger watching her process it. It was concrete. It did not require her to remember a conversation; it was the thing itself, readable in the moment she needed it.
He put it in an envelope and sealed it and wrote her name on the front.
The drive north with Theron was quiet in the way long drives are quiet — not uncomfortable silence but the silence of two people who have traveled together enough to not need to fill the space. Theron drove. Kael watched the late-autumn New England landscape and thought about nothing for stretches of miles, which was a practice he had been developing and which was harder than it sounded when you carried two lives of accumulated thought.
'You're not nervous,' Theron said, somewhere in Massachusetts.
'I am,' Kael said. 'I'm managing it.'
'Managing it well.'
'I've had nine years of practice.' He looked out the window. 'I know what I need to do. I know the specific information she needs. I know the timing is narrow. The nervousness is appropriate.' He paused. 'What I can't afford is for the nervousness to become fear, because fear contracts and this situation requires precision.'
Theron was quiet for a moment. 'I've been on field assignments for fifteen years,' he said. 'I have never worked with a demigod who explains their internal state like a physician explaining a diagnosis.'
'My father is a physician,' Kael said. 'It's probably contagious.'
They arrived in Maine in the late afternoon and found a motel twenty miles from Westover Hall. He spent the evening reviewing the Westover Hall floor plan that he had worked from Chiron's records and public architectural data. He knew the school's basic layout, the monster distribution pattern in the area, the approach vectors for both the primary group and for anyone doing reconnaissance.
He slept six hours — deliberately, with the practiced management of someone who knew that fatigue degraded both magical ability and decision-making. The alarm went off at five. He rose in the dark and made coffee from the motel's inadequate machine and stood at the window looking at the Maine morning and thought: today is the day.
He thought: nine years. Today.
He thought: be present. Be precise. Do the thing. Come home.