Chapter 22: The Strategos, Surprised at Last

The light came in from the east the way it always had, indifferent to what had happened in the water beneath it, and Edmund watched it come.

Percy had gone inside twenty minutes ago. Edmund had stayed. The sand was cold through the fabric of his trousers and had been cold for some time, and he had stopped noticing it, which he recognized as a symptom of a kind of dissociation he had catalogued in Aldous's early entries — the body's polite withdrawal from circumstances the mind was using all of its available capacity to process. He made a note of it. He was always making notes, even when there was no notebook in his hands, even when the notation was only a small precise marking in the ledger he maintained internally, the one that had been running continuously for thirty years and that he sometimes thought would outlast him in some form he could not specify.

The water was still.