Back in Henrietta, night proceeded.
Richard Gansey was failing to sleep. When he closed his eyes: Blue’s hands, his voice, black bleeding from a tree. It was starting, starting. No. It was ending. He was ending. This was the landscape of his personal apocalypse. What was excitement when he was wakeful melted into dread when he was tired.
He opened his eyes.
He opened Ronan’s door just enough to confirm that Ronan was inside, sleeping with his mouth ajar, headphones blaring, Chainsaw a motionless lump in her cage. Then, leaving him, Gansey drove to the school.
He used his old key code to get into Aglionby’s indoor athletic complex, and then he stripped and swam in the dark pool in the darker room, all sounds strange and hollow at night. He did endless laps as he used to do when he had first come to the school, back when he had been on the rowing team, back when he had sometimes come earlier than even rowing practice to swim. He had nearly forgotten what it felt like to be in the water: It was as if his body didn’t exist; he was just a borderless mind. He pushed himself off a barely visible wall and headed towards the even less visible opposite one, no longer quite able to hold on to his concrete concerns. School, Headmaster Child, even Glendower. He was only this current minute. Why had he given this up? He couldn’t remember even that.
In the dark water he was only Gansey, now. He’d never died, he wasn’t going to die again. He was only Gansey, now, now, only now.
He could not see him, but Noah stood on the edge of the pool and watched. He had been a swimmer himself, once.
Adam Parrish was working. He had a late shift at the warehouse that night, unloading mason jars and cheap electronics and puzzles. Sometimes when he worked late like this, when he was tired, his mind ran to his life back in the trailer park. Neither fearful nor nostalgic, just forgetful. He’d somehow fail to recall that things had changed, and he would sigh as he pictured driving back to the trailer when his shift ended. Then there would be the jolt of surprise when his conscious mind clicked in with the reality of his apartment over St. Agnes.
Tonight, he once again misremembered his life and had the lurch of recalling he’d improved things, and as relief trickled through him, he remembered instead the Orphan Girl’s frightened face. By all accounts, Ronan’s dreams were often frightening things, and unlike Ronan, she had no hope of waking up. When he’d brought her back to the real world, she must have thought that she, too, had carved herself a new life. But instead they had merely moved her into another nightmare.
He told himself she wasn’t real.
But guilt gnawed at him.
He thought about how tonight he would return to the home he’d made for himself. The Orphan Girl, though, would remain trapped in dreamspace, wearing his old watch and his old fear.
As he picked up the inventory clipboard, thoughts of Cabeswater nagged at him, reminding him that he still needed to consider the origin of that blackened tree. As he signed out, Aglionby pressed at him, reminding him that he still had a three-page paper on economics in the thirties to turn in. As he climbed into the car, the starter whined, reminding him that he needed to take a look at it before it failed entirely.
He didn’t have time to devote to Ronan’s dream urchin; he had problems of his own.
But he couldn’t stop thinking about her.
His thoughts focused as his fingers skittered across the steering wheel in front of him. It took him a moment to realize what was happening, actually, even though he was looking right at it. His hand galloped across the top of the wheel, feeling the edge, testing the pressure of each pad against the surface.
Adam had not told his hand to move.
He made that hand into a fist and pulled it from the wheel. He held his wrist with his other hand.
Cabeswater?
But Cabeswater seemed no more present inside him than it ordinarily did when it wasn’t trying to get his attention. Adam studied his palm in the grotty glow of the streetlight, disconcerted by the image of his fingers scuttling like an insect’s legs without his mind attached to them. Now that he was looking right at his ordinary hand, the lines dark with cardboard dust and metal flake, it seemed like he may have imagined it. Like Cabeswater may have sent him the image.
Reluctantly, he remembered the wording of the bargain he’d made with the forest: I will be your hands. I will be your eyes.
He rested his hand once more on the centre of the steering wheel. It lay there, looking strange with the pale strip of skin where his watch had been. It didn’t move.
Cabeswater? he thought again.
Sleepy leaves uncurled in his thoughts, a forest at night, cold and slow. His hand stayed where he had put it. His heart still crawled inside him, though, like the image of his fingers moving of their own accord.
He didn’t know if it had been real. Real was becoming a less useful term all the time.