The three of them stood just off the road, avoiding the stares of slowing drivers. Malory was all turtled over behind his tripod, lecturing either Adam or himself. “The procedure of ley hunting is quite different in the States! In England, a true ley must have at least one aligned element — church, barrow, standing stone — every two miles, or it is considered coincidental. But of course here in the Colonies” — both boys smiled good-naturedly — “everything is much farther apart. Moreover, you never had the Romans to build you things in wonderfully straight lines. Pity. One misses them.”
“I do miss the Romans,” Gansey said, just to see Adam smirk, which he did.
Malory sighted his transit through a gap in the trees, toward the gaping valley down below. “And although your line is now awake and profound — positively profound — with energy, the secondary line we’re looking for today is n— curses!” He had tripped over the Dog.
The Dog looked at Malory. His expression said, Curses!
“Hand me that pencil.” Malory took the pencil from Adam and marked something on the map. “Go sit in the car!”
“Excuse me?” Adam asked, polite and shocked.
“Not you! The Dog!”
The Dog sulkily retreated. Another car slowed down to stare. Malory muttered to himself. Adam absently tapped a finger against his own wrist, a gesture somehow disconcerting and otherworldly. Insects buzzed around them; wings brushed Gansey’s cheek.
A bee, maybe; I could be dead in a minute here, maybe, by the side of this road, before Malory can get his cell phone out of the car, before Adam realizes what’s going on.
He didn’t swat the insect. It buzzed away, but his heart still beat fast.
“Talk me through what you’re doing,” Gansey said. Then he corrected: “Us. Talk us.”
Malory adopted his professor voice. “Your cave is tied to the ley line, and it has no fixed location. Therefore, if we’re looking for a cave to join up with it, there’s no sense searching for ordinary cave entrances. Only an entrance on a ley will do. And as your cave mapping suggests that you were traveling perpendicular to the ley instead of along it, I believe the cave network in its entirety exists on multiple lines. So we seek a crossroads! Tell me, what is this?”
He indicated something on one of the maps that a younger Gansey had heavily notated. Older Gansey lifted Malory’s finger to look beneath it. “Spruce Knob. Highest peak in West Virginia. Forty-five hundred feet or something like that?”
“Highest peak in Virginia?” echoed Malory.
“West,” said Gansey and Adam at the same time.
“West Virginia,” Gansey repeated, studiously avoiding eye contact with another slowing driver. “Sixty miles west of here. Seventy, perhaps?”
Malory dragged his square fingertip a few inches along one of the many short highlighter paths. “And what’s this?”
“Coopers Mountain.”
Malory tapped it. “What’s this note? Giant’s Grave?”
“It’s another name for the mountain.”
The professor raised his hairy eyebrows. “Interesting name for the new world.”
Gansey recalled how excited he had been to learn Coopers Mountain’s old name. It had felt like a stunning bit of detective work to stumble across it in an old court document, and then it had been even more thrilling to discover that the mountain was appropriately odd: situated all by itself in the middle of sloping fields, two miles away from the main ridge.
“Why is it interesting?” Adam asked.
Gansey explained, “Kings were often giants in British mythology. A lot of British locations associated with kings have the word giant in them, or are giant-sized. There’s a mountain in Wales, what is it … Idris? Dr. Malory, help me.”
Malory smacked his lips. “Cadair Idris.”
“Right. It translates to the chair of Idris, who was a king, and a giant, and so the chair in the mountain is giant-sized, too. I got permission to hike on Giant’s Grave — there was some rumor of Native American graves on there, but I couldn’t find them. No cave, either.”
Malory continued tracing the highlighter line. “And this?”
“Mole Hill. Used to be a volcano. It’s out in the middle of a flat field. No cave there, either, but lots of geology students.”
Malory tapped on the last location on the line. “And this is us, yes? Mass-a-nut-ten. My, this line of yours. I’ve waited a lifetime to see something like it. Remarkable! Tell me, there must be others prowling around poking at it as well?”
“Yes,” Adam replied immediately.
Gansey looked at him. The yes had left no place for doubt; a yes not of paranoia, but observation.
In a lower voice, for Gansey, not Malory, Adam said, “Because of Mr. Gray.”
Of course. Mr. Gray had come looking for a magical parcel, and when he’d failed to deliver it to his employer Colin Greenmantle, Greenmantle had flooded the town with people looking for Mr. Gray. It would be foolish to assume they’d all left.
Gansey preferred to be foolish.
“Unsurprising!” Malory concluded. He clapped a hand on Gansey’s shoulder. “Lucky for both of you that this young man has a better ear than most; he’ll hear that king long before anyone else has thought to even listen. Now, let us flee this coarse place before it rubs off. Here! To Spruce Knob. By way of these other two lumps.”
Out of old habit, Gansey gathered up the transit and GPS and laser rod as Malory climbed into the Suburban to wait. Adam went into the woods a bit farther to pee, an action that always made Gansey wish that he was not too inhibited to do the same.
When he returned, Adam said suddenly, “I’m glad we’re not fighting. It was stupid for it to go on so long.”
“Yes,” Gansey replied, trying not to sound relieved, exhausted, pleased. He was afraid to say too much; he’d destroy this moment, which already felt imaginary.
Adam continued, “That thing with Blue. I should’ve known it would be weird trying to date her once she was one of … you know, with us all. Whatever.”
Gansey thought of his fingers on Blue’s and how foolish such a gesture had been. This equilibrium was so hard-won.
He preferred being foolish, but he couldn’t keep on that way.
Both boys looked out through the bare spot in the trees toward the valley. Thunder rumbled somewhere, though there was not a cloud in the sky. It didn’t feel like it came from the sky, anyway. It felt like it came from below them, down in the ley line.
Adam’s expression was ferocious and pleased; Gansey was at once proud to know him and uncertain he did at all.
“I can’t believe we’re doing this,” Gansey said.
Adam replied, “I can.”
This was not Blue’s real life.
As she leaned against the wall outside the guidance counselor’s office, she wondered when she would start to think of school as an important thing again. After an extraordinary summer full of chasing kings and disappearing mothers, it was hard to really, truly picture herself going to class every day. What would any of this matter in two years? Nobody here would remember her, or vice versa. She would only remember that this was the fall her mother vanished. This was the year of Glendower.