“Easy, Mr Gansey. Look again.”
Now that Gansey had settled, he could see that it wasn’t an ordinary bee at all; it was a beautiful robotic insect. Beautiful was perhaps not the best word, but Gansey couldn’t immediately think of another. The wings, antennae, and legs were clearly fashioned of metal, with fine articulated joints and thin wire wings, but it was as delicately and elegantly coloured as a flower petal everywhere else. It was not alive, but it looked vital. He could see it in this darkness because it had a tiny heart that emitted an amber glow.
Gansey knew that Henry’s family was in the business of robotic bees, but he had not thought of this when he considered robotic bees. He felt fairly certain that he had seen images of robotic bees, and while they had been impressive bits of nanorobotics, they were nothing like actual bees, having more in common with tiny helicopters than with living insects. Henry’s bee, though, was fearfully and impossibly constructed. It reminded him so strongly of Ronan’s dream objects that it was hard to shake the idea once it had occurred to him.
Henry dug his phone out of his pocket. Tapping rapidly, he brought up a rainbow-slicked screen that was somehow just as strange to look at. “RoboBee interfaces with ChengPhone via this app. It’s fingerprint specific, so you see I press my finger here and tell it what I want it to find – RoboBee, find great hair! – oh and look, there it goes.”
Gansey startled violently as the bee took flight with the same sound as before, lifting into the air and alighting upon his hair. The weight of it there was even worse than having it in his palm. Stiffly, he said, “Could you remove that? It makes me very uncomfortable.”
Henry pressed his finger to the screen again, and the bee lifted back into the air, buzzing on to his shoulder.
Gansey said, “You didn’t say anything that time.”
“No, I don’t have to say anything. It reads my thoughts through my fingerprint,” Henry said. He didn’t look up from the screen as he said this, but Gansey could see in the light that he was gauging Gansey’s reaction. “So I just tell it what to do and – whoosh! – off it goes, thank you, thank you, little bee.”
Henry held his hand out and the bee whirred into it like a mobile blossom; the light extinguished. He tucked it back into his pocket. It was impossible, of course, and Henry was waiting for Gansey to say it was impossible. This was why it was secret, because it couldn’t exist.
The net looped down around Gansey; he felt it.
“Your parents make robotic bees,” he started carefully.
“My father. My father’s company, yes.” There was a line drawn there, though Gansey didn’t understand it.
“And it makes bees like this.” Gansey did not try to make it sound like he believed it.
“Gansey Boy, I think we have to decide if we trust each other or not,” Henry said. “I think this is the moment in our young friendship.”
Gansey considered his words, “But trusting someone and confiding in them are not the same thing.”
Henry laughed approvingly. “No. But I have already both trusted in you and confided in you. I have kept the secret of what you had in the back of your SUV and the secret of Adam Parrish not getting killed by those roof tiles. That is trust. And I have confided in you: I showed you RoboBee.”
All of this was true. But Gansey knew enough people with secrets to not be dazzled into easily using them as currency. And so much of what Gansey lived with now put other people’s lives on the line, not just his own. That was a lot of trust for a toga party and a hole in the ground. He said, “There’s a psychological principle that car salesmen use. They buy you a drink from a Coke machine with their own money, and then you feel obligated to buy a car from them.”
There was humour in Henry’s voice. “Are you saying your secrets are to my secrets as an automobile is to a carbonated beverage?”
Now there was humour in Gansey’s. “Your father’s company didn’t build that bee, did it?”
“No.”
He might as well get it over with. “What do you want me to say? The word magic?”
“You’ve seen magic like my RoboBee before,” Henry said. “That’s not the same sort of magic as watching Parrish deflect a ton of slate. Where have you seen this kind of magic?”
Gansey couldn’t. “That’s not my secret.”
Henry said, “I’ll spare you the agony; I know it. Declan Lynch. He sold my mother two of them.”