This was so unexpected that Gansey was glad they were in total dark again; he was sure the shock had made it to his face. He struggled to piece this information together. Declan – so this bee was Niall’s work. If Henry’s mother was a client, did that mean Declan was selling to people at the school? Surely Declan wasn’t that stupid. “How did your mother know to buy them? Did you tell her about them?”
“You have it backwards. She doesn’t know because I’m here. I’m here because she knows. Don’t you see? I am her excuse. She visits me. Buys something from Declan Lynch. Back she goes. No one the wiser. Ah! I have wanted to say this out loud for two years. They fester, secrets.”
“Your mother sent you to Aglionby just so she could have a cover for when she does business with Declan?” Gansey asked.
“Magical artefacts, bro. Big business. Scary business. Good way to get yourself kneecapped. Or killed like our man Kavinsky.”
Gansey was going to choke on revelations. “She did business with him?”
“No way. He only dealt drugs, but she said they were magic, too. And come on. You were at that Fourth of July party this year. Explain the dragons.”
“I can’t,” Gansey said. “We both know.”
“Yes, we do,” Henry said, satisfied. “Once, he nearly killed Cheng Two for the fun of it. He was the worst.”
Gansey leaned back against the dusty wall.
“Are you collapsing? Are you fine? I thought we were conversing.”
They were conversing, just not in any way that Gansey had anticipated. He had spoken to plenty of uncanny people in his pursuit of Glendower. In many ways, his travels were defined not by cities or countries travelled between, but people and phenomena. The difference was that Gansey had gone looking for them. They had never come looking for him. He had never really met anyone else like himself, and even though Henry was far from Gansey’s twin, he was the closest that Gansey had yet found.
He hadn’t realized the loneliness of this belief until it was tested. He asked, “Are there any other magical people at Aglionby I should know about?”
“Other than the ones who run with you? No one that I know. I’ve been trying to get your number for a year.”
“It’s in the student directory.”
“No, you fool. Idiomatically. Get. Your. Number. See if you were a creeper like K or not. Get. Your. Number. Who here is English as a second language? Hint, not you.”
Gansey laughed, then he laughed some more. He felt he’d gone through every emotion known to man in the last few days.
“I’m not a creeper,” he said. “I’m just a guy looking for a king. You said your mother bought two of those things. Where’s the other?”
Henry shuffled the jewelled insect back out of his pocket. It amber heart warmed light through the pit again. “Back in the lab, of course, as father dear tries to copy it with nonmagical parts. My mother told me to keep this one to remind me of what I am.”
“And what is that?”
The bee illuminated both itself and Henry: its translucent wings, Henry’s wickedly cut eyebrows.
“Something more.”
Gansey looked at him sharply. Somewhere along the way, during this hunt for Glendower, he’d forgotten to notice how much magic there was in the world. How much magic that wasn’t just buried in a tomb. He was feeling it now.
“Here is the thing I need to tell you before we are friends,” Henry said. “My mother sells magic. She told me to watch you to find your secrets. I do not mean to use you now, but that is what I was supposed to do. I did not begin this game looking for a friend.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“Nothing yet,” Henry said. “I want you to think about it. And then I hope you will choose to trust me. Because I’m overfull on secrets and underfed on friends.”
He held the bee between them so that Gansey was looking at him through the glow of its marvellous body. Henry’s eyes were lively and ferocious.
He tossed the bee into the air. “Let’s get out of this hole.”
The world didn’t have words to measure hate. There were tons, yards, years. Volts, knots, watts. Ronan could explain how fast his car was going. He could describe exactly how warm the day was. He could specifically convey his heart rate. But there was no way for him to tell anyone else exactly how much he hated Aglionby Academy.
Any unit of measurement would have to include both the volume and the weight of the hate. And it would also have to include a component of time. The days logged in class, wasted, useless, learning skills for a life he didn’t want. No single word existed, probably, to contain the concept. All, perhaps. He had all the hate for Aglionby Academy.
Thief? Aglionby was the thief. Ronan’s life was the dream, pillaged.
He had told himself that he would let himself quit: that was his eighteenth birthday present to himself.
And yet here he was.
Quit. Just quit. Either he believed he could do it or he didn’t.
He could hear Gansey’s voice: Just stick it out until graduation; that’s only a couple more months. Surely you can make it that long.
So now he tried.
The school day was a pillow over his head. He would suffocate before the final bell. The only oxygen to be found was the pale band of skin on Adam’s wrist where his watch had been and the glimpse of the sky between classes.