He found Annabeth after the battle, in the school's courtyard where the Hunters were making camp with the efficient practicality of people who had been doing this for a very long time. She was sitting on a stone wall away from the main group with her grey eyes doing the thing they did when she was processing: looking at nothing in particular and seeing everything.
She looked up when he sat down next to her. 'You were here,' she said.
'Eastern perimeter,' he said. 'Chiron authorization.'
'Bianca joined the Hunt.' She said it with the flatness of someone who is not sure yet how to feel about a thing.
'Yes.'
'That leaves Nico.' She looked at him. 'He's going back to camp. He doesn't have anywhere else to go.'
'I know.' He thought about Nico — the ten-year-old with the Hades-bright eyes and the unguarded curiosity. 'He's going to be okay. He's going to be more than okay, eventually. It takes some hard years first.'
Annabeth was quiet for a moment. 'You know that for certain?'
'With confidence,' he said. 'Not certainty. But yes.'
She looked at him sideways. 'You talked to her. To Bianca.'
'This afternoon. Before the battle.'
'And?'
'I gave her information she needs. She has it.' He paused. 'Whether she uses it is her choice.'
Annabeth looked at the Hunters' camp for a while. 'You came all the way to Maine,' she said, 'for a conversation this afternoon.'
'Nine years,' he said. 'To be precise.'
She looked at him. Her grey eyes did the thing they did when they were holding more than they were saying — the specific quality of someone who understands the full weight of a statement and is not going to diminish it with a response that is smaller than what it deserves.
'All right,' she said. 'Tell me the rest of it. What's coming next.'
He told her. He told her the shape of the Titan's Curse quest — the broad outline, the mountain, Artemis's capture, Atlas. He told her as much as she needed to prepare without as much as would redirect her away from finding out the rest herself, because the middle of the Titan's Curse quest was not a script to be recited but a sequence of events that needed to be lived.
She listened. She asked two questions, both precise. She stood up when he finished. 'Thank you,' she said. She said it the way she always gave compliments — as information, not performance. 'For all of this. Not just tonight.'
He drove back to camp with Theron in the early hours of the morning, through the sleeping New England dark. He did not feel triumph. What he felt was quieter than triumph: the specific, grounded satisfaction of someone who has done the thing they came to do.
The note was in Bianca's pocket. She had it. That was enough.