Chapter 2: The Professor's Satchel

The infirmary smelled like eucalyptus and something sweeter underneath, an herbal layering that Edmund catalogued automatically as he walked through the door: yarrow, definitely, and something in the artemisia family, and below those a trace of something that had no common name in any pharmacological index he'd ever consulted and which made the air feel, improbably, like the moment before rain. His sinuses registered it as clean. His hindbrain registered it as old.

He sat on the cot Percy indicated and did not argue.

The Apollo kid who came to examine him was maybe sixteen, with the kind of easy handsomeness that suggested divine parentage without requiring it, and he moved through the space with the brisk competence of someone who had set a great many broken bones and wasn't troubled by the process. His name was apparently Marcus, or possibly Markos — he said it quickly and moved immediately to the business of checking Edmund's pupils with a light that was brighter than the penlight it resembled.