He met Bianca di Angelo properly — as opposed to the charged corridor encounter at Westover Hall — on a Wednesday afternoon in January, when she was two weeks back at camp from the Titan's Curse quest and had been assigned to a training session in the archery range that he happened to be using for the same.
She was fourteen and moved with the new precision of someone who had spent three weeks under the Hunt's influence: more deliberate, more present in her body, the specific quality of attention that developed when you spent time with people who had been practicing it for centuries. She was also still herself underneath it — the warmth of her, the specific Underworld-deep steadiness that was different from her brother's.
She saw him and stopped.
He put his staff down — a deliberate gesture, not a threat, not armed. He met her eyes.
'You used the note,' he said.
'I used the note,' she said. She looked at him with those Underworld eyes, and in them was something that was not quite gratitude and not quite wariness — the expression of someone who has received something they did not entirely understand and is working out what to do with that.
'You knew exactly where the node was,' she said. 'Not guessed. Knew.'
'Yes.'
'How?'
He had thought about how to answer this. The full version — the transmigration, the series of books in his previous life, the specific fictional account of her death that he had been planning against for nine years — was not a conversation for a January archery range. But she deserved enough truth to understand the shape of the gift she had received.
'I have knowledge of events before they happen,' he said. 'I know this sounds — I know it sounds impossible. But I've had it since I was born and I've verified it across years. I knew the quest was coming. I knew the junkyard. I knew the automaton and I knew the node and I knew that without that specific piece of information you would not have found it in time.' He paused. 'I knew you were going to die. I spent nine years making sure you didn't.'
Bianca was very still. She looked at him with the full weight of her attention, the Underworld blood in her giving her an unusual capacity for stillness in the face of significant information — the quality of someone who had always lived near the edge of the cold and had learned to be calm there.
'Nine years,' she said.
'Since I was six.'
Another long stillness. Then: 'Why?'
He thought about the honest answer. Not the strategic one — he was done with strategic answers for people who deserved the real ones. 'Because you deserve to live,' he said. 'You didn't do anything wrong. You were going to die because of a gap in information, not because of a choice, not because of who you were. That's the kind of thing that can be fixed. So I fixed it.'
Bianca looked at him for a long moment. He could see her organizing the information — the way he knew she organized things, with the quiet thoroughness of someone who took facts seriously. 'You're not expecting anything,' she said slowly. 'You're not — you gave me this and there is no condition attached to it.'
'No condition,' he said.
She looked at the archery range, then back at him. 'What are you?' she asked. Not rudely — genuinely, the question of someone who has encountered something outside their existing categories.
He almost smiled. 'I'm figuring that out,' he said. 'But mostly: I'm the person who was in a position to help, so I did.'
She stood there for a moment longer. Then she did something he had not expected: she closed the distance between them and embraced him, briefly, with the specific warmth of someone who is not naturally demonstrative and is choosing it anyway because the situation is exactly large enough to require it.
'Thank you,' she said.
'You're welcome,' he said. 'Welcome to being alive.'