Chapter 13: The Fourteen Identities of the Strategos

The photograph came out of the satchel at seven in the morning.

Percy almost missed it. He'd come to the anteroom with three cups of coffee and the translated cyclops testimony written up in Annabeth's hand — she'd taken it down the previous night while Percy held the creature, translating Edmund's translation in real time, her handwriting going careful and very small as the word that meant *what comes before the gods* entered the paper and stayed there. The cyclops was in the camp's containment pen now, eating with the dazed mechanical focus of something that had outrun a nightmare and not yet caught up with the fact that it had stopped running. Nobody had slept particularly well.

Edmund was already at the anteroom table when Percy arrived, not with the journals but with a cardboard folder, the cheap kind from an office supply store, its edges gone soft with handling. The photograph was face-up in front of him. First time Percy had seen it that way.