Mr. Gray had gone still. Voice careful, he said, “Gansey?”
The very last name on the last of the pages.
She just chewed on her lower lip.
“Does he know?”
She shook her head, just a little.
“Do you know how long?”
She shook her head again.
His eyes were heavy on her, and then he just sighed and nodded, the solidarity of being the one left behind, the one not on the list.
Finally, he said, “A lot of promises get broken, Blue.”
He sipped his beer. She folded the piece of paper to hide JESSIE DITTLEY and then reveal it again. In the dark, she asked, “Do you love my mother?”
He gazed up through the darker lace of the leaves. Then he nodded.
“Me too.”
He somberly flexed his index finger. With a frown, he said, “I didn’t mean to put your family in danger.”
“I know you didn’t. I don’t think anyone thinks that.”
“I have a decision to make,” he said. “Or a plan. I suppose I will make it by Sunday.”
“What’s magical about Sunday?”
“It’s a date that used to be very important to me,” the Gray Man said. “And it seems fitting to make it the day I start to be the person your mother thinks I could be.”
“I hope the person my mother thought you could be is a person who finds mothers,” Blue replied.
He stood up and stretched. “Helm sceal cenum, ond a þæs heanan hyge hord unginnost.”
“Does that mean ‘I’m going to be a hero’?”
He smiled and said, “ ‘A coward’s heart is no prize, but the man of valor deserves his shining helmet.’ ”
“So, what I said,” she replied.
“Basically.”
Gansey was not sleeping.
Because Blue had no cell phone, there was no way for him to break the rules and call her. Instead, he had begun to instead lie in his bed each night, eyes closed, hand resting on his phone, waiting to see if she was going to call him from the Phone/Sewing/Cat Room at her house.
Stop it, he told himself. Stop wanting it —
His phone buzzed.
He put it to his ear.
“You’re still not Congress, I see.”
He was wide-awake.
Glancing toward Ronan’s closed bedroom door, Gansey got his wireframes and his journal and climbed out of bed. He shut himself in the kitchen-bathroom-laundry and sat down in front of the refrigerator.
“Gansey?”
“I’m here,” he said in a low voice. “What do you know about the blue-winged teal?”
A pause. “Is this what you discuss in Congress when the doors are closed?”
“Yes.”
“Is it a duck?”
“Ding! Point to Fox Way. The bank holiday crowd goes wild! Did you know they become flightless for a month during the summer when they molt all of their flight feathers at once?”
Blue asked, “Isn’t that all ducks?”
“Is it?”
“This is the problem with Congress.”
“Don’t be funny with me, Sargent,” Gansey said. “Jane. Did you know that the blue-winged teal has to eat one hundred grams of protein to replace the sixty grams of body and tail feathers shed at this time?”
“I didn’t.”
“That’s about thirty-one thousand invertebrates they have to eat.”
“Are you reading off notes?”
“No.” Gansey closed his journal.
“Well, this was very educational.”
“Always is.”
“Okay, then.”
There was another pause, and Gansey realized she’d hung up. He leaned back against the fridge, eyes closed, guilty, comforted, wild, contained. In twenty-four hours, he’d be waiting for this again.
You know better you know better you know better
“What the hell, man?” Ronan said.
Gansey’s eyes flew open just as Ronan hit the lights. He stood in the doorway, headphones looped around his neck, Chainsaw hulking like a tender thug on his shoulder. Ronan’s eyes found the phone by Gansey’s leg, but he didn’t ask, and Gansey didn’t say anything. Ronan would hear a lie in a second, and the truth wasn’t an option. Jealousy had ruined Ronan for the first several months of Adam’s introduction into their group; this would hurt him more than that.
“I couldn’t sleep,” Gansey said truthfully. Then, after a pause, “You’re not going to try to kill Greenmantle, are you?”
Ronan’s chin lifted. His smile was sharp and humorless. “No. I’ve thought of a better option.”
“Do I want to know what it is? Is it acceptance of the pointlessness of revenge?”
The smile widened and sharpened yet more. “It’s not your problem, Gansey.”
He was so much more dangerous when he wasn’t angry.
And he was right: Gansey didn’t want to know.
Ronan pulled the fridge door open, shoving Gansey several inches across the floor. He retrieved a soda and handed Chainsaw a cold hot dog. Then he eyed Gansey again.
“Hey, I heard this great song,” he said. Gansey tried to tune out the sound of a raven horking down a hot dog. “Want a listen?”
Gansey and Ronan rarely agreed on music, but Gansey shrugged an agreement.
Removing his headphones from his neck, Ronan placed them on Gansey’s ears — they smelled a little dusty and birdy from proximity to Chainsaw.
Sound came through the headphones: “Squash one, squash tw —”
Gansey tore them off as Ronan dissolved into manic laughter, which Chainsaw echoed, flapping her wings, both of them terrible and amused.
“You bastard,” Gansey said savagely. “You bastard. You betrayed my trust.”
“That is the best song invented,” Ronan told him, through breathless laughs. He got himself back together. “Come on, bird, let’s give the man some privacy with his food.” As he departed, he turned off the lights, returning Gansey to the dark. Gansey heard him whistling the remainder of the murder squash song on his way to his room.
Gansey pushed himself to his feet, collecting his phone and his journal, and then he went back to bed. The guilt and the worry had already worn off by the time his head hit the pillow, and all that was left was the happiness.
Gansey had forgotten how much time school occupied. Perhaps it was because he now had more to do outside of school, or perhaps it was because, now, he could not stop thinking about school even when he was not in it.
Greenmantle.
“Dick! Gansey! Gansey boy! Richard Campbell Gansey the Third.”
The Gansey in question strode down the colonnade with Ronan and Adam after school, headed toward the office. Though he was dimly aware of the shouting, his mind was too noisy for the words to register. Part of it was donated to Greenmantle, part to Maura’s disappearance, part to Malory’s exploration of the perpendicular ley line, part to the cave of ravens, part to the knowledge that in seven hours, Blue might call him. And a final, anxious part — an ever-growing part — was occupied with the color of the fall sky, the leaves on the ground, the sense that time was passing without being replaced, that it was running out and spooling to the end.