He finished Hillview in June. The fourth year was his last — he had accelerated his coursework deliberately, using the significant intellectual capacity that was simply a fact of who he was, and had completed the equivalent of a full secondary education by sixteen. He would not return to Hillview in September.
This was planned. The year before Manhattan required his full attention, and full attention meant not dividing himself between a school schedule and what he needed to be doing.
He spent the fall at camp, year-round for the first time. The year-round population was small — fifteen people, most of them older campers with nowhere better to be or training reasons to stay. He knew all of them. He had been preparing for this year since he was six years old and now that it was here he did not feel the dramatic urgency he might have expected. He felt the particular quality of attentiveness that preceded important work: focused, grounded, everything peripheral cleared away.
The Threshold Network's year-round members — six of them, including Soraya and Emmett and one of the Iris children, a girl named Petra who had graduated high school a year early for similar reasons — continued training through the fall and winter. He ran scenarios now that were explicitly battle-preparation rather than general capability development. He was not pretending anymore that the preparation was abstract. Manhattan was coming and the people in this room were going to be in it and they deserved to know that and to be as ready as possible.
He told them directly in September, in the eastern woods, with the autumn light in the trees. He told them: a significant battle is coming, probably next summer, here in the New York area. I cannot give you precise timing. I can tell you it is coming and that what we have been building is for it. You did not have to be in this network; you chose to be, and your choices are your own, and if any of you decide that combat preparation is not what you signed up for, I will understand.
Nobody left.
He had not expected anyone to leave, but he had needed to give them the choice because offering the choice was what made the staying genuine rather than assumed.
He also spent the fall finishing the Percy note. He had been working on it for four years, revising it through four drafts, and in October he wrote the final version. It was one page. It said what it had always been intended to say: about the unclaimed children, about what it meant to belong nowhere, about Percy's specific knowledge of that cost and his specific position to address it. It ended: You know what this costs. Ask for it to end. The gods will resist and they will ultimately yield and the children who come after you will never spend a year without a cabin because you asked. That is worth asking for.
He folded the note and sealed it and wrote on the front: To Percy. Open after the battle.
He put it in his jacket pocket, the same pocket where he had kept the Bianca note four years ago. He thought: two notes. One delivered. One to come. This is what the foreknowledge is for — not to be the hero, not to change the story wholesale, but to put the right information in the right hands at the right moment.
He thought: almost there.