The ocean was in a bad mood, and Percy Jackson knew better than to take that personally.
He'd been up since five-thirty, which was not a choice he'd made so much as a choice his body had made on his behalf when the nightmares got loud enough. The dreams had been the usual catalog lately: Tartarus with its geography of wrongness, the weight of water in places where water shouldn't be, his mother's face in various states of needing rescue. Sleep therapists, Percy had heard, could do something about this. He'd looked one up once. The reviews were mostly five stars and phrases like transformative and really helped me process my work stress, and he'd closed the browser.
He'd been running beach drills for the past forty minutes — ten younger campers in various states of consciousness, ranging from Chloe from the Ares cabin, who moved like she'd been awake for hours, to a Hermes kid named Felix who kept running into his own group members and apologizing in his sleep. The drill was a simple attack-from-the-water scenario that Percy had put together after noticing that most of the camp's training defaulted to land-based engagements. Monsters came from the water. Percy knew this professionally. He'd made it his project this summer to make sure everyone else knew it too.
"Felix," Percy said. "Stop apologizing to the training dummy. It doesn't have feelings."
"You don't know that," Felix said, without opening his eyes.
"Circle formation. Two steps back from the waterline. When I call the wave, you disperse outward. On my mark, not before."
The Long Island Sound stretched out ahead of them in the gray pre-dawn light, the kind of dark that wasn't quite night and wasn't anything else yet. Percy tracked the water's surface out of habit, the same way other people tracked a crowd for exits. The Sound had been restless the past two weeks, and not in the way it got when weather came in. It was more interior than that. A low-grade agitation that Percy felt in his back teeth.
He couldn't prove this. He'd filed a report with Chiron, who'd written it down with his careful handwriting and his expression of warm institutional concern and said he would look into it. That had been eleven days ago. The report lived, Percy suspected, in a stack of reports that Chiron had developed a subtle and affectionate taxonomy for organizing in order of how much he planned to worry about them.
"Mark," Percy said.
The wave he pulled was small — controlled, textbook, the kind of thing he could do in his sleep, which sometimes, memorably, he had. It rolled in at an angle he'd calculated to catch the left flank of the formation, and the campers scattered the way he'd drilled them, and it was fine, it was good, they were learning.
He was watching their feet and not the horizon when the Sound gave back the man.
Not dramatically. The ocean was not theatrical about it. Percy saw the shape in his peripheral vision — a dark mass in the shallow break, maybe fifteen meters out — and his brain processed it as debris for approximately one second before the mass moved in a way that debris didn't. Arms. Hands. The specific inefficient motion of someone who had been fighting the water for a long time and had mostly stopped.
"Stay formation," Percy said, and was already moving.
He hit the water at a full sprint and the cold didn't bother him in the way it didn't bother him, which was to say it touched him and found nothing to work with and passed on. He reached the man in twelve seconds. Maybe ten. The water helped.
The man was face-up, which was lucky, though luck felt like the wrong category for whatever had produced him from the Long Island Sound at five forty-seven in the morning. He was somewhere in his mid-fifties, broad-shouldered in the framework of someone who'd once been considerably healthier, with a gray-streaked beard waterlogged flat against his jaw. He was wearing what had recently been a decent button-down shirt and a pair of trousers that belonged on a different continent, and he was clutching a leather satchel against his chest with both arms in the crossed, white-knuckled grip of someone protecting something more important than themselves.
Percy got an arm under his shoulders and started moving.
"Hey," Percy said. "Can you hear me? You're okay. I've got you."
The man's eyes opened. They were a dark gray-brown, the color of water in November, and they didn't focus on Percy right away — they swept the horizon first, in a rapid, systematic way that had nothing to do with drowning panic. It was the look of someone checking that they hadn't been followed.
Then they found Percy's face, and the man exhaled in a long, shuddering way.
"East-northeast," he said. His voice had the ragged quality of someone who'd been talking for a long time before anyone was close enough to hear. "Thirty-nine degrees, fifty-seven minutes. Eighteen seconds north. Seventy-four—"
"Yeah, okay," Percy said, pulling. "Coordinates. Got it. Keep talking if it helps."
"Seventy-four degrees, twelve—" The man coughed, rolling to the side, still holding the satchel. "Twelve minutes. You're — this is—" Another cough. "Long Island."
"Gold star," Percy said. "You've been doing great. Let's get you to shore."
The campers had held formation, which was actually a decent sign. Chloe was already on her radio, calling up to the main house, and Felix had somehow produced a thermal blanket from a pocket Percy was pretty sure hadn't existed thirty seconds ago. The man let himself be walked out of the surf — walking, actually walking, which Percy noted with mild surprise, because he'd expected to be carrying him — and he stood on the sand for a moment with his eyes closed and his feet wide apart like a person recalibrating their relationship with solid ground.
"What's your name?" Percy asked.
A pause. The man opened his eyes and looked at him with an expression Percy couldn't categorize right away. Not gratitude, though it was somewhere in the vicinity. Something that had had gratitude burned out of it, maybe, by long exposure to the reason it was necessary.
"Voss," the man said. "Edmund. I'm — my name is Edmund Voss." He glanced down at the satchel, checking something only he could assess. Whatever he found there made his shoulders drop slightly, the way Percy had seen soldiers drop after a head count came back right. "Professor. Technically. Ex-professor."
"Professor of what?"
"Classical mythology. Comparative — it's not relevant." He looked up, and for the first time seemed to register the camp behind Percy — the cabins in their assigned rows, the pine trees, the breakfast smoke beginning to show from the main house. His expression changed. Something ran through it that Percy would have called calculation except it was happening too fast and too many things were moving in it at once. Recognition, maybe. Or the process of a man who had expected something impossible for long enough that running into it didn't stagger him as much as it should have.
"This is Camp Half-Blood," Edmund said. It wasn't a question.
Percy went still. Just for a second — the trained kind of still, the kind that looked like nothing was happening because he was busy deciding how to respond.
"What makes you say that?" Percy said.
Edmund looked at him with something that might have been, in a different context, patience. "I've been studying topographical records of the eastern seaboard for sixteen years with the specific intent of locating a site consistent with historical accounts of the Sanctuary of the Half-Born." He wiped water from his face with the back of his hand. "The pine tree with the fleece. The big house with the porch. The layout of the cabins corresponds to a pattern described in a fragmentary Linear B text from circa 1400 BCE that I've spent eleven years arguing isn't metaphor." He stopped. "I'm quite sure this is Camp Half-Blood."
"...Okay," Percy said.
"I'm not your enemy," Edmund said, and there was something stripped about the way he said it, like a man who had spent time preparing more sophisticated opening lines and decided in the water that he didn't have the energy. "I'm also not — I'm aware this is unusual. I know how I look. I know what you're calculating right now and I'm telling you that whatever the conclusion is, I'm not a threat. I'm a fifty-four-year-old academic who has been awake for approximately forty-one hours and I would very much like to sit down."
Percy studied him for another moment.
What he was looking at was a man who had nearly drowned and apparently didn't particularly care. Which was strange. Most people who nearly drowned were doing one of several things: crying, shaking, calling their families, or staring at nothing with the chemical residue of adrenaline wearing off in visible increments. Edmund Voss was doing none of these things. He was looking at the camp with the focused, cataloguing attention of someone who had a list and was checking it, and the fear that Percy could see in him — and there was fear, a lot of it, settled deep in the set of his jaw and the way his knuckles were still white around the satchel's strap — was not connected to the ocean. The ocean had not put that fear there. The ocean had found it already installed.
Percy had catalogued a lot of fear. It came with the territory. He'd seen the fear of someone facing a monster for the first time, all spike and electricity, unprocessed and physical. He'd seen the fear of someone in the middle of a battle where the numbers weren't working. He'd seen the specific sick fear of people who'd realized the myth was real and the real was trying to kill them. He knew what each of those looked like, had a whole internal taxonomy, had learned to read them the way other people read weather.
This wasn't on the list.
Edmund's fear was quiet. That was the wrong word — it wasn't quiet so much as it had already become the landscape rather than something moving through it. It had been there long enough to stop having the quality of news. It sat in him the way a building sits on its foundation: not noticed, load-bearing.
The thought arrived in Percy's head before he could stop it, clear and unhelpful: this man is not afraid of something that might happen. He is afraid of something that is happening.
"Yeah," Percy said. "Okay. Let's get you inside."
Felix had materialized a second thermal blanket, which Percy was not going to ask about. Chloe reported that Chiron was on his way down and that the infirmary was being prepped, and Edmund submitted to the blanket with the quiet compliance of someone conserving energy for something else. As they walked up the beach path through the morning light, Percy kept pace beside him and the campers moved in a loose perimeter that was more instinct than instruction.
Edmund was looking at everything. Not with the gaping stare of someone encountering magic for the first time — he'd clocked the fleece-pine without breaking stride, registered the distant shape of one of the Pegasi in the far paddock with what looked like relief rather than surprise, was noting the cabin arrangements with the systematic attention of a man who'd been looking at a map and was now comparing it to the territory. He was finding things he'd expected and his jaw was tightening each time he found them, which should have been the opposite of how confirmation worked.
Most people who'd been looking for evidence of something impossible for a long time, Percy figured, would feel something like triumph when they found it.
Edmund Voss found what he'd been looking for and looked more afraid.
"How long have you been in the water?" Percy asked.
"I'm not entirely sure." Edmund glanced down at his watch, which had stopped. "I came off a dock in New Haven. Approximately. I don't — there was a rupture of some kind. A spatial — the Light was wrong. I went through it rather than—" He stopped himself. "I'll explain when I'm not—" He gestured vaguely at his soaked clothing.
"Sure," Percy said.
They reached the top of the path. The camp was waking up around them in its usual organized chaos, breakfast fires and the distant sound of the Hermes cabin already arguing about something, morning light coming in low and gold through the trees. It looked the way it always looked: young and operational and provisionally safe, a place that was very good at the specific set of problems it had been built to address.
Edmund stood at the top of the path and looked at it.
"The Strategos will know I'm here," he said, almost to himself. "Within — not long. He tracks disappearances." He said the word Strategos the way Percy had heard people say names in the middle of nightmares. Not loudly. Like something that might hear itself being named.
Percy had no idea what a Strategos was. He made a mental note of it the way he made mental notes of unknown vocabulary in ancient texts: file, revisit, do not ignore.
"You're safe here," Percy said. The camp's wards were real. He believed in them. He'd bled on them personally on more than one occasion.
Edmund didn't say he wasn't safe. He also didn't say he was. He looked at the camp for one more moment with that expression Percy couldn't name, the one that lived in the same territory as recognition but had something too heavy in it to be purely that, and then he nodded once.
"Thank you," he said. "For the water. Getting me out."
"Don't worry about it," Percy said. "We do a lot of pulling people out of that Sound."
"Has anyone—" Edmund paused. "Has anyone come out of it recently. Not drowning. Just — appearing."
Percy looked at him.
"No," Percy said. "Just you."
Edmund absorbed this. "All right," he said, and there was something in the two words that Percy heard as neither relief nor despair but as the sound of a man updating a calculation. "That's — all right."
He walked toward the Big House and Percy walked beside him, and the morning light caught the Long Island Sound behind them and turned it briefly, ordinarily golden, and the water was calm now in the way water was calm when it had already done the thing it was going to do.
Percy's back teeth ached.
He put it on the list of things to think about later and caught up with Edmund Voss, who was walking toward the infirmary with the careful, deliberate stride of a man who had things to do before whatever came next, and was not planning on using more time than necessary.