Chapter 19: The Strategos Makes Its Move

The amphitheater announcement was scheduled for ten o'clock.

Percy found out about it at nine fifty-three, which meant either someone had deliberately not told him, or the scheduling had been managed with a precision that bordered on contempt. The conch sounded the general assembly code — two long, one short, two long — while he was still fifty feet from the archive, the folded paper still in his jacket pocket, and he turned toward the amphitheater on instinct and joined the stream of campers flowing down the hill.

The morning was bright. That was the wrong kind of detail to notice, but Percy noticed it. The sky was the specific cloudless blue that Long Island produces in late summer, the kind that makes everything look theatrical, and the water in the Sound was flat and very still, the way it had been intermittently for two weeks in a way that had nothing to do with weather.