Chapter 16: Annabeth Reads the Final Journal Pages

The dining pavilion was empty at six in the morning, which was the point. Edmund had checked twice.

He'd arranged the journals in a specific order before Annabeth arrived — not chronological, which was how he'd initially organized them, but structural: the late entries first, then the middle period, then the early lucid years as a kind of retrospective key. It was the order in which they needed to be read, not the order in which they had been written, and the distinction mattered in ways he'd spent three days working out.

Annabeth arrived at 6:02, which he appreciated. She had a fresh notebook, uncapped pen, and the particular quality of alertness that Percy had told him, without realizing he was doing it, she reserved for things she considered genuinely dangerous. She'd slept. He could tell because her eyes weren't carrying the specific dryness of someone who'd been awake more than twenty hours, and because she'd changed clothes.