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She was twelve years old, and she was tired in a way that had nothing to do with how many miles she’d walked or how many monsters she’d outrun.
Bianca di Angelo sat on the cold stone steps of the Big House porch at Camp Half-Blood, watching the sun bleed orange and pink into the Long Island Sound. Somewhere behind her, she could hear the clatter of the dining pavilion—the easy laughter of kids who’d grown up knowing their godly parents’ names, kids who’d been claimed at ten or eleven and spent summers learning archery instead of learning how to keep a little brother from crying himself to sleep in a hotel room.
She pulled her knees up to her chest and rested her chin on them.
Everyone kept looking at her like she was supposed to be grateful. Grateful to be out of the Lotus Casino. Grateful to be alive. Grateful to be a demigod, as if that was some kind of gift. And she was grateful, she supposed, in the abstract way you’re grateful for a lifeboat when the ship is still sinking. But no one asked what it felt like to wake up and realize seventy years had vanished while you were playing a game. No one asked what it felt like to be twelve years old and suddenly know, with absolute, crushing certainty, that your mother was dead—not away, not missing, but long gone, buried in a time you never got to live in.
And no one asked what it felt like to be Nico’s big sister.
She loved him. That was the thing no one understood. She loved him so much it felt like a bruise inside her ribs, a constant ache she couldn’t rub away. For as long as she could remember—and her memory was a strange, slippery thing now, full of gaps where the Lotus had eaten the years—she had been the one to interpret the world for him. She was the one who explained why they had to move schools again. She was the one who lied and said their mother would come back. She was the one who held his hand in the casino and promised they’d find their father, even when she had no idea what a father was supposed to look like.
But somewhere in the blur of Westover Hall, watching Percy Jackson—a boy almost her own age, but somehow older, harder, more sure of himself—fight monsters with a pen that turned into a sword, something inside Bianca had cracked.
She looked at Percy and saw a hero.
She looked at herself and saw a placeholder.
She looked at Nico and saw a boy who needed a protector, and she knew, with a clarity that made her stomach drop, that she wasn’t strong enough to be that person anymore. Or maybe she had never been strong enough. Maybe she had just been pretending for so long that she’d forgotten what it felt like to want something for herself.
The Hunters had appeared like an answer to a question she hadn’t dared to ask out loud.
Zoë Nightshade had looked at Bianca with pity. She'd seen the scared little girl who’d lost her mother and her century. And she’d seen a potential sister. She’d seen someone who could choose. And Artemis herself—Bianca still couldn’t quite believe she’d met a goddess– had spoken to her, been offered something—had looked at Bianca with yellow eyes that seemed to see right through the layers of exhaustion and duty.
You may join us if you wish.
It was the first time anyone had asked her what she wanted. Not what Nico needed. Not what the quest required. Not what the adults expected. Just… what she wanted.
And what she wanted, in that moment, was to stop.
To stop being the one who had to remember the escape routes and the bus schedules. To stop being the one who lied to make things easier. To stop being the mother their mother couldn’t be. She wanted to run through the woods with girls who didn’t need her to be brave for them. Girls who could teach her and be brave for her. She wanted to belong to something that wasn’t built on grief and loss and the hollow ache of a missing father.
She wanted to be Bianca. Just Bianca. Not Nico’s sister. Not the girl from the Lotus Hotel. Just a girl with a silver bow and a future that stretched out, immortal and clean and hers.
But sitting here on the steps, the night before she was supposed to leave on the quest, she couldn’t shake the other feeling. The one that made her throat tight and her eyes sting.
Nico was in the Hermes cabin right now, probably playing that stupid card game with the other unclaimed kids, his dark hair falling into his eyes, his smile too quick and too bright because he didn’t understand yet. He didn’t understand that she was leaving him. He thought she was going on a field trip. He thought she’d come back.
She pressed her forehead to her knees.
I’m sorry, she thought, aiming the words somewhere toward the stars, toward whatever god might be listening, toward the brother she’d spent her whole life shielding. I’m so sorry. But I can’t carry you anymore. I’m not strong enough. I never was.
A tear slipped down her cheek and dropped onto the cold stone, and she let it fall.
Tomorrow she would put on the silver circlet and smile and pretend this was all she’d ever wanted. And maybe, in time, it would be. Maybe immortality would sand away the sharp edges of this guilt. Maybe the Hunt would give her the family she’d never had, the sisters she’d never known.
But tonight, Bianca di Angelo was just a twelve-year-old girl sitting in the dark, saying goodbye to the only person she’d ever truly loved, and hoping—praying—that he would one day understand that she hadn’t abandoned him.
She had just finally stopped abandoning herself.