Chapter 108: Doctor and Wife
They were back on the move inside thirty minutes.
Rango set the pace and the group followed it, which was the specific dynamic that had established itself over the course of the island — not because anyone had formally agreed to it, but because Rango was the one whose face communicated that rest was a resource being allocated rather than a right being exercised, and the face was currently communicating that the allocation was thirty minutes and not more.
Jones and Lara would have preferred more. They didn't say so.
Tyson fell into step beside Rango and talked the way younger siblings talked to older ones — the stream-of-consciousness narration of someone who had things to share and had found an audience that seemed to be listening even when they weren't responding.
"Annabeth is the strongest at camp," Tyson said. "In terms of raw divine power. Being a daughter of Athena means her ability level started higher than most of ours from the beginning — it's a bloodline thing."
"What does she have besides the barrier?" Rango said.
"The barrier is the most visible one. There's also the tactical intelligence — that's not a separate power, that's just what you get when your mother is the goddess of wisdom and it's in your blood." Tyson blinked his single eye. "Then there's the Aphrodite kids — they can affect how people feel. Love, desire, the emotional register generally. Very effective. People underestimate it."
"I don't underestimate it," Rango said.
"And Hephaestus's kids have fire. The Poseidon line — Percy's line — can control water. Any water. And if they're injured, contact with water heals them."
Ted, on Toothless's back, had been listening. "Any water?" he said.
"Any water," Tyson confirmed.
Ted considered this. "What about internal water? The water in the body?"
"I — what?"
"Blood is mostly water," Ted said. "If a son of Poseidon can control all water and heals on contact with water, and his own blood is water—"
"That's not—" Tyson started.
"Then theoretically, a wound would close the moment it opened," Ted said. "Because the blood leaving the body is water making contact with the body."
Tyson blinked. Processed this. "I don't think that's how it works."
"But you don't know that it isn't," Ted said.
"I don't know that it isn't," Tyson admitted.
"Then Percy is functionally invincible and nobody has told him yet," Ted said.
Annabeth, walking ahead of them, said without turning around: "I'm going to tell him you said that and he's going to try to test it."
"Don't tell him I said that," Ted said.
"Too late," Annabeth said. "I've already decided."
They reached Camp Half-Blood at the edge of the forest before the sky began to lighten.
The Laurel tree at the camp's boundary had the specific quality of something that had been here long enough to have become part of the place's identity rather than just a feature of it — the silver quality of its leaves in the moonlight, the sense of something intentional in the way it stood.
Annabeth stopped in front of it. Tyson stood beside her. The specific stillness of people saying goodbye to something they belonged to before going back to it.
"She was one of Zeus's daughters," Annabeth said, quietly. "When she died, he couldn't let go. He turned her into the tree. She's been here ever since."
Rango looked at the tree.
"That's not a good trade," he said.
"No," Annabeth agreed. "But it's the one he made."
Rango opened his arms. Tyson came in immediately, the specific warmth of a Cyclops hug, which was considerable. Annabeth came in after, which surprised him slightly given the first several hours of their acquaintance, and then didn't surprise him at all given everything that had happened since.
"New York," he said. "When you get back. Call first, then come to the museum. The night shift."
"The exhibits—" Annabeth started.
"Come after ten," he said. "That's when it gets interesting."
Tyson made the sound that was, in Cyclops terms, a laugh.
Annabeth turned to Mavis. The hug between them was the specific hug of two people who had found more common ground in a cave full of xenomorphs than either of them had expected.
"If you get off the island," Annabeth said. "Come find me."
"I'm going to make Dad let me out," Mavis said, with the specific determination of someone who has made a decision and is reporting it rather than proposing it.
They went through the rift in the space under the Laurel tree — the specific transit method of demigods returning to the ordinary world, the tree providing the mechanism the way Skull Island's storm had provided the mechanism for the other direction — and were gone.
Rango watched the rift close.
He thought about Annabeth's divine power and Tyson's Cyclops strength and what it said about the depth of what existed in the world he was operating in. The Olympians were real. The Percy Jackson novels were documentaries with the names changed. The same pattern as everything else he'd confirmed since getting to New York.
He thought about Los Angeles.
About what he was going to need when he got there.
He turned back to the group and found Toothless, and they left.
Dawn came up over the island as Toothless cleared the Dark Forest's canopy and found altitude.
Victor was behind them on bat wings.
This had been established at departure when Toothless had made his position on Victor riding clear — a roar, a plasma charge warning shot, and the specific body language of a Night Fury who had decided something and was not going to be argued with. Rango had not argued with him. Victor had spread his wings and followed at a distance, which was the arrangement.
Rango watched Victor in his peripheral vision as they flew.
The two-hundred-year-old Vampire Elder who had known Anderson Winchester, who had come on this expedition for reasons that aligned with the group's stated objectives but were clearly not identical to them, who had disappeared during the critical moments of the xenomorph cave and reappeared afterward as though the interval hadn't occurred.
There was a conversation coming. It wasn't this moment.
Jones was beside Rango, watching the geography below.
"When we land," Rango said, "we split. You find your contact and the Nautilus. I find the Curator."
"Agreed," Jones said.
He was quiet for a moment.
"McPhee and I have been friends for thirty years," he said. "He wouldn't have come on this expedition if I hadn't told him what I believed was here. I put him in this situation." He looked at the horizon. "If you find him — tell him I know that. Tell him I'm sorry."
Rango looked at him.
At the specific face of a man who had spent fifty years choosing the expedition over everything that asked him to stay, and who was experiencing the specific cost of that pattern in real time.
"Tell him yourself," Rango said. "When we get him back."
Jones nodded.
They landed on the Little People Country coast as the morning light came fully over the island.
General Edward was at the shore.
He had a full military force with him — the hereditary command's resources deployed at the waterline, the horn call finished, the search apparently concluded. His face carried the specific expression of a man who has decided to reframe a situation he doesn't control as a situation he chose.
He was explaining to a soldier that he was going to hold a beauty pageant.
Rango came down from Toothless's back and took in the scene — the Little People Country soldiers, the General's posture, the ocean, and the notable absence of any sign of the Curator.
The soldiers saw him first.
They reacted the way soldiers reacted when a full-grown man dropped from a dragon's back without warning — weapons up, formation, the coordinated response of people who had been trained for threat response and were executing the training.
Rango tried to explain who he was.
The soldiers did not create conditions conducive to explanation.
He gave it thirty seconds.
Then he looked at Toothless.
Toothless applied a plasma charge to the approach formation's leading edge with the surgical precision that distinguished the Night Fury from less precise options.
The remaining soldiers created conditions conducive to conversation.
Rango looked at General Edward, who had the expression of someone recalibrating his authority assessment very rapidly.
"The Curator," Rango said. "Large man, my companion, was in your custody. Where is he."
Edward's recalibration produced a fawning smile, which was the specific smile of someone who had just watched sixty percent of his military capacity become ash and was making new calculations about the appropriate register for the current interaction.
"Your companion — there was an incident," Edward said. "He formed an attachment to our Princess. They went into the sea last night. The waves—"
"Did you see them drown?" Rango said.
"We didn't see it directly, but there was a creature in the water—"
"What creature."
The soldier who had been there pointed at the ocean.
"Green eyes," the soldier said. "In the water. Like a giant snake but — larger. It was—"
He stopped.
He pointed at the ocean.
Everyone on the shore looked.
A large black shape was rising from the water.
Not a creature.
The specific hull geometry of something manufactured rather than grown — metal, riveted, the design of something that had been built with the understanding that it needed to survive pressure at significant depth. The conning tower came up first, then the main hull, water streaming off every surface in the specific way of something that had been submerged and was choosing to surface.
The green lights at the bow were navigation lights.
The Curator was on the conning tower.
He was waving.
Beside him, barely visible at his scale, was a woman the size of a finger, standing on his shoulder and also waving.
The submarine — the specific vessel that Jules Verne had described in 1870 in a book that Rango now understood had been a documentary — finished surfacing and sat in the coastal water with the unhurried presence of something that had been here before and intended to be here again.
The Nautilus.
Jones, behind Rango, made a sound.
It was not a word. It was the sound of fifty years of work arriving at its confirmation simultaneously with the confirmation that his friend was alive, and the two things arriving at the same moment had produced something that wasn't language.
Rango put his hand briefly on the old man's shoulder.
Jones composed himself.
On the conning tower, the Curator continued to wave with the enthusiasm of a man who had survived a coup, a night ocean swim, and apparently a Nautilus encounter, and who had a great deal to tell everyone.
General Edward, behind them, said something.
Nobody turned around.
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