Chapter 24: What the Strategos Serves and Why It Stops

The coffee was instant. Edmund had established this preference on day two, had found the camp's supply of it in a cabinet above the infirmary sink, and had been quietly appropriating it each morning since. Percy had tried it once and decided it tasted like the academic study of sadness. Edmund drank it without apparent suffering, standing at the window of the room Chiron had given him in the farmhouse's east wing, watching the Sound.

It was nine-fourteen in the morning.

The farmhouse was quiet in the specific way old buildings became quiet when the people inside them were processing something they could not yet speak. Chiron was in his study with the archive open for the first time in two hundred and seventy years, which Percy had walked past at eight-thirty and not been able to look at directly, the way you didn't look directly at something sacred that you'd broken accidentally and couldn't fix. Annabeth was at the dining pavilion with her notebook and a real cup of coffee that someone from the Apollo cabin had made properly, working through the morning's structural implications with the focused efficiency of a person who understood that understanding was the only tool she had and therefore intended to use it until it wore through.