And that sigh was the final straw. Because it didn’t whisper of pity. It drowned in it.
“Oh, don’t even,” snapped Adam. “Don’t you dare.”
There was no switch this time. No flip from ordinary to angry. Because he’d already been angry. It was already dark, and now it was black.
“Look at you, Adam.” Gansey held up a hand, demonstrating. Exhibit A, Adam Parrish, impostor. “Just look.”
Adam felt stuffed full of the partygoers, their false civility, the glittering lights, the fakery of everything. He struggled for words. “That’s right. ‘There’s Adam, what a mess. What do you reckon he was trying to say when he woke the ley line by himself? I don’t know, Ronan. Let’s not ask him.’ How about this, Gansey? It wasn’t about you. I was doing what needed to be done.”
“Oh, don’t lie to me. There were so many other ways.”
“You weren’t doing them. Either you want to find this thing or you don’t.” There was something brutally freeing about being able to say it out loud, everything he’d been thinking. He shouted, “And you don’t need him. I do. I’m not going to sit back and let someone else take my shot out of this.”
Gansey’s eyes darted down the hall and back to Adam. That’s right, Gansey, don’t wake the baby. His voice was very low. “Glendower was not yours, Adam. This was mine first.”
“You asked us. Either you meant it or you didn’t. You did this.”
Gansey lightly pressed a finger into Adam’s chest. “This? I don’t think so.”
Adam seized Gansey’s wrist. He wasn’t nice about it. The suit was slippery as blood under his fingers. “I’m not going to be your minion, Gansey. Was that what you wanted? You want me to help you find him, you let me look my way.”
Gansey jerked his arm out of Adam’s grasp. Again his eyes darted down the hall and back. “You should look at yourself in the mirror.”
Adam didn’t.
“We do this, we do it as equals,” Adam said.
Gansey glanced over his shoulder, furtive. His mouth made the shh shape, but not the sound.
“Oh, what?” Adam demanded. “You’re afraid someone will hear? They’ll know everything isn’t perfect in the land of Dick Gansey? A dose of reality could only help those people!”
With a sudden twist, he swept all of the figurines from the Queen Anne table. Foxes in breeches and terriers seized in midflight. They all plunged to the floor with a satisfying and diseased smash. He raised his voice. “World’s ending, folks!”
“Adam —”
“I don’t need your wisdom, Gansey,” he said. “I don’t need you to babysit me. I got into Aglionby without you. I got Blue without you. I woke the ley line without you. I won’t take your pity.”
Now, finally, Gansey was silenced. There was something very remote about his eyes, or the set of his lips, or the lift of his chin.
He didn’t say anything else. He just gave a tiny shake to the sleeve Adam had grabbed, letting the wrinkles fall out. His eyebrows were pulled together as if the action required most of his attention. Then he left Adam standing in the hall.
Next to Adam, the mirror reflected both him and the flickering form of a ghost no one but Adam could see. She was screaming, but there was no sound.
This was the dream: sitting in the passenger seat of Joseph Kavinsky’s Mitsubishi, the odor of a crash clinging to Ronan’s clothing, the white dash lights carving Kavinsky a gaunt and wild face, foully seductive lyrics spitting from the speakers, the vein-covered peaks of Kavinsky’s knuckles on the gearshift between them. The smell in the car was sweet and unfamiliar, toxic and pleasant in the way Ronan had always thought marijuana would be before he came to Aglionby. Even the feel of the racing seats was unfamiliar; they held Ronan’s shoulders and sucked his legs into the very depths of the car like a trap. Every bump in the road transferred directly to Ronan’s bones, sharp and immediate. A touch of the wheel and they darted one way or another. It was like a car built to both feed on and produce anxiety.
Ronan didn’t know if he loved it or hated it.
They didn’t speak. Ronan didn’t know what he would say anyway. It felt like anything could happen. All of his secrets felt dangerously close to the surface.
Kavinsky drove out of Henrietta, past Deering, into nowhere. The road turned from four lanes to two, and pure black trees pressed out the dull black sky overhead. Ronan’s palms sweated. He watched Kavinsky change gears as he snaked along the back roads. Every time he shifted into the fourth gear, he missed the sweet spot. Couldn’t he feel the car hanging when he did?
“My eyes are up here, sweetheart,” Kavinsky said.
With a dismissive noise, Ronan lay his head back in the seat and looked out into the night. He could tell where they were now; they were nearly to the fairground where the substance party had been. Tonight the great floodlights were dark; the only evidence of the fairground was when the headlights swept over the bunting. They were only in the light for a moment, like colorless ghosts of flags, and then there was nothing but brush as Kavinsky pulled onto an overgrown gravel track before the fairground.
A few yards in, Kavinsky stopped. He looked at Ronan. “I know what you are.”
It was like after the crash. After waking from a dream. Ronan was frozen in the sea, staring back at him.
The Mitsubishi charged forward, and the road gave way to a limitless clearing. In the headlights, Ronan saw another white car parked up ahead. As they pulled closer, the lights illuminated a huge spoiler on the trunk, and then revealed a portion of a knife graphic on the side. It was another Mitsubishi. For a moment, Ronan thought that it might be the old one, somehow, its damage miraculously hidden by the poor light. But then the headlights swung to another car parked beside it. This second car was also white with a large spoiler. Another Mitsubishi. A knife graphic peeked around the shadowed side.
Kavinsky pulled forward another few feet. It brought a third car into focus. A white Mitsubishi. They kept creeping forward, field grass rustling against the low bumper. Another Mitsubishi. Another. Another.
“Goldfish,” Kavinsky said.
It wouldn’t be the same.
But these were the same. Dozens upon dozens — now Ronan saw that the Mitsubishis were parked at least two deep — of identical cars. Only they were not quite identical. The longer Ronan looked, the more differences he saw. A bigger wing here. A splattered dragon graphic there. Some had strange headlights that spread across their entire fronts. Some had no lights at all, just blank sheet metal where they should’ve been. Some were slightly taller, some were slightly longer. Some of the cars had only two doors. Some had none.
Kavinsky got to the end of the first uneven row and turned to the next. There had to be more than one hundred of them.
It wasn’t possible.
Ronan’s hands fisted. He said, “I guess I’m not the only one with recurring dreams.”
Because of course these were from Kavinsky’s head. Like the fake licenses, like the leather bands he’d given Ronan, like the incredible substances his friends would travel hours for, like every impossible firework he sent up each year on the Fourth, like every forgery he was known for in Henrietta.
He was a Greywaren.
Kavinsky hauled up the parking brake. They were a white Mitsubishi in a world of white Mitsubishis. Every thought in Ronan’s head was a shard of light, gone before he could hold it.
“I told you, man,” Kavinsky said. “Simple solution.”
Ronan’s voice was low. “Cars. An entire car.”
He hadn’t even imagined it was possible. He had never even thought to try for more than the Camaro’s keys. He’d never thought there was anyone outside of himself and his father.
“No — world,” Kavinsky said. “An entire world.”
After the party had dwindled to nothing, Gansey crept down the back staircase, avoiding his family. He didn’t know where Adam was — he was supposed to stay in Gansey’s old room as guests of his mother occupied all of the other spare bedrooms — and he didn’t go looking for him. Gansey was meant to sleep on the couch, but there would be no sleep for him tonight. So he quietly went outside to the back garden.
With a sigh, he sat on the edge of the concrete fountain. The nuances and wonders of the English garden were many, but most of them were lost after dark. The air was thick with the scent of boxwood, gardenias, and Chinese food. The only flowers he could see were white and drowsy.
His soul felt raw and battered inside him.
What he needed was to sleep, so this day would be over and he could start a new one. What he needed was to be able to turn off his memories, so that he could stop replaying the fight with Adam.
He hates me.
What he wanted was to be home, and home wasn’t here.
He was stretched too thin to consider what was wise or what was not. He called Blue.
“Hello?”
He pressed his eyes closed. Just the sound of her voice, the Henrietta lull to it, made him feel uneven and shattered.
“Hello?” she echoed.
“Did I wake you up?”
“Oh, Gansey! No, you didn’t. I had Nino’s tonight. Is your thing done with?”
Gansey lay down, his cheek against the still sun-hot concrete of the fountain bench, and looked out of the midnight garden at the sodium-vapor paradise that was Washington, D.C. He held his phone to his other ear. His homesickness devoured him. “For now.”
“Sorry for the noise,” Blue said. “It’s a zoo here, like always. And I’m just getting some — uh — yogurt and I’m — there we go. So what do you need?”
He took a deep breath.
What do I need?
He saw Adam’s face again. He replayed his own answers. He didn’t know which of them was wrong.
“Do you think …” he began, “you could tell me what is happening at your house right now?”
“What? Like, what Mom’s doing?”
A large insect buzzed by his ear, coming in like a passenger jet. It kept going, though the flyby was close enough to tickle his skin. “Or Persephone. Or Calla. Or anyone. Just describe it to me.”
“Oh,” she said. Her voice had changed a little. He heard a chair scraping on her side of the phone. “Well, okay.”
And she did. Sometimes she spoke with her mouth full, and sometimes she had to pause to answer someone else, but she took her time with the story and gave each of the women in the house full measure. Gansey blinked, slower. The take-out dinner smell had gone away and all that remained was the heavy, pleasant smell of growing things. That, and Blue’s voice on the other end of the phone.
“Like that?” she asked finally.
“Yes,” said Gansey. “Thanks.”