"Will."

"I literally closed my eyes three minutes ago."

"I know, but-"

"Sleeping..."

"Will, this is serious!"

"Apó ton skýlo." I lifted my feet off the ground and my chair lurched forward. I didn't recognize the girl, other than she had come from New Rome.

"Nico left."

Sometimes my coworkers can be mind-blowing. "So why are you here telling me instead of stopping him?" I got to my feet and went out into the infirmary's main floor without waiting for her to answer.

"Hey, you don't get it. He was being really weird. He just got up and stood next to his gurney for like, fifteen minutes, in the dark. And I'm just like, this guy is not normal."

I stopped walking and gave her a look. "And you didn't think anything was wrong? Why would he be doing that? How is that normal?"

"Hello? It's not. That's why I came to you."

"What's your name?"

She visibly brightened. "Kim Wilder, daughter of Salus."

"Hi Kim, nice to meet you. You are so fired."

"Wait..."

I went outside and looked off into the darkness. The row of torches distorted everything and I couldn't see past a few feet. I turned and walked across the deck to the satyr's quarters. There was a small wooden bat that we used as a knocker; satyrs are hard to wake at night.

I picked it up and was about to hit the door when- "You can't fire me. You're two years younger than I am!" I shook my head, ignoring her and slammed the bat into the door. "Hey," she practically screeched at me.

"We work in a hospital! How can you just let someone who might be sick, just wander off," I rounded on her.

"He's not sick. He was just being a weirdo and then he left. I only told you because Katie Gardner said I should."

"Okay, so not only are you fired, I don't want you anywhere near my infirmary."

She looked like she was about to start screaming when the door shuddered open. The dryad Indigo stood on the threshold staring at me with round eyes. She gave Kim the same look before slowly turning back to me.

"Um," I started to say, confused by this new development. "Is Grover-"

"He's not home," she blurted out. "He's out with Juniper in the city."

"Okay, what about the other satyrs? How many are home tonight?" I tried looking past her but I couldn't see anything in there either.

"Don't worry about how many satyrs are in here," she laughed ridiculously loud and slammed the door shut again.

I weighed my options. Grover was gone. Most of the satyrs were busy. That left Chiron but I was wasting time wondering about it. I ran into the shadows, worried that I wouldn't find him, or he had already wandered into the woods or something.

Fortunately, Nico had stayed, mostly, to the main path. By the time I spotted him, he started drifting towards the lake. I sprinted in that direction.

I had nearly reached him when he waded waist deep into the water. Then he just laid down in it like he was going to sleep. I stopped, bewildered by what was happening. Nico immediately resurfaced, coughing and gasping. He dragged himself out of the weeds. I went to him, helped him back to his feet.

"What happened," he murmured.

If only you could tell me. I sighed and started stripping his soaked shirt off of him. Over the last several days I had imagined myself doing so but with different context. It didn't matter; Nico was in crisis. I held his gaze while I reached to pick up his wrist. His pulse raced between my fingers.

Confusion, terror, shame, helplessness; they came at me from all sides. Nico instinctively tried to shake free of the connection but I held his gaze as firmly as his wrist. Gradually the emotions shrank back to tolerable proportions.

I took off my own shirt, again wishing the circumstances were different, and passed it to him. "Dry yourself off, okay?" He looked mortified as he took it but I couldn't do anything about that. "You don't remember coming out here," I asked him. Nico frowned and shook his head. "Does it happen a lot?"

"Sometimes."

Meaning it happened enough. I nodded but I really wished I understood more. "I need to get you back to the infirmary." I still had my hand on his wrist so I braced myself for the emotional backlash. But nothing happened. The only thing I felt from him was a kind of acceptance. Somehow I found that worse.

He started back before I did so I followed closely behind.

When we got back to the Big House Kim was hovering behind Chiron, apparently having told him I was running around camp. "Out for a midnight swim, Nico," Chiron asked gently.

I glanced sideways at Kim before telling Chiron, "He had a nightmare and needed some air."

"But I got lost and fell in the lake," Nico added.

Chiron looked from me to Nico and back. He turned around in his wheelchair to face Kim and sent her back to the new Visitor's Cabin. "Now that it's just us three, what really happened?" He looked directly to Nico again.

"I might have been sleepwalking."

"You may have been?"

"I was."

"Why did you go to the lake, I wonder?"

"I don't know. I was having a dream, I think and I just woke up underwater."

"Not good. It seems our security is lacking," Chiron said. Nico turned even paler. He started to say something but Chiron raised his hand to quiet him. "Water under the bridge, my boy. In the future, we will all have to work harder to prevent reoccurrence."

Chiron continued to study Nico for several beats, before seeming to remember I was there too. "The loss of autonomy is often impossible for the mind to grasp. It's a known fact that human beings are responsible for the things they say and do."

A chill crept up my spine, like a spider. "Of course we are." I put my hands on the baluster behind me to hide my own nervousness. "What are you saying," I asked him. Before Chiron could answer me, Nico just started bawling, full-on ugly crying.

Chiron waved his hand at me and just like that, I was dismissed. It was so out of character for him that at first I didn't know what to do. "Chiron..."

He was done talking to me. "I must not fear," he said to Nico. "Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration." Nico was still inconsolable. Chiron continued to speak to him. "That's from a rather popular series of novels but it resonates. Do you enjoy reading, Nico?" Nico shrugged. "If you had the opportunity to do anything you wanted, what would you choose?"

I didn't hear the rest of what was said. Feeling drained, I ended up walking back to the Apollo cabin. Over and over, I went over Chiron's last words to me.

"Late night," Jessie Cosgrove asked me as I went inside. I looked over and she was on her bunk, surrounded with fabric and fittings. Kayla Knowles was there too, giddily waiting for her new bedazzled Camp t-shirt. She floated and twirled back and forth while Jessie added ruffles to the sleeves. It was hideous but Kayla was beside herself.

"Extremely late." I rubbed my eyes. "I have an AP exam at 11." How was I going to focus now?

Kayla rushed over to me and threw her arms around me. "So did you see Nico," she asked me.

"I did."

She bounced up and down on her heels. "Did you do it? Did you ask him to go out with you?"

"I'm not going to ask him out."

Kayla stopped bouncing around. "But you said- Do you think he doesn't like you?"

"I really don't know. It's just not a good idea."

"So...like, it's really bad then," Jessie asked me.

"Yeah. It's really, really bad."

She nodded. "Kayla, do you remember that time that you were playing Towers and that satyr kissed you?"

"I knocked out his front teeth for that."

"Because he didn't ask you and that made you mad. This is kind of the same thing."

"But why would Nico be mad if Will kissed him?"

"I don't think he would be mad. I think that's he's just not feeling very well right now and Will just doesn't want to make it harder than it has to be for him."

"But why-"

"Kayla, enough with the questions. Will had a rough night," Jessie said. Kayla scowled at her and stuck out her tongue. She ran to the other end of the cabin and started jumping on the empty beds. "Do you want to talk about it," Jessie asked me.

"I do. I will. After dinner tonight. I'm going to try to get a hour or two of sleep before I have to get up and study."

"Good luck," she told me.

"Thanks." I went to my bed and lay down, covering my face with my arm.