Inside, the room was spare and drafty and smelled of woodsmoke and bagels. It had all of the comforts of a quaint prison: wooden benches on the walls, historic mural on the plaster, spidery chandelier overhead, gaunt spread of breakfast foods on a warped old table. Gansey stood in front of the coffeepot. He was getting that odd time-slipping feeling that the campus often gave him: the sense that he had always been standing in this old room in this old building, or someone had, and all times and all people were the same. In that formless place, he found himself intensely grateful for Ronan and Adam waiting outside for him, for Blue and her family, for Noah and for Malory. He was so grateful to have found all of them, finally.
He thought about that pit in the cave of ravens.
For the barest second, he thought he knew — something. The answer.
But he hadn’t asked a question, and then it was gone, anyway, and then he realized that he was hearing something. A shout, a crash, Adam’s name —
He didn’t remember the decision to move, only his feet already running to the door.
Outside, the courtyard looked like a set piece for a play: Two dozen students dotted the green, but none of them were moving. A slow, pale cloud moved among them, slowly settling. Everyone’s attention was turned toward the corner of the green where Henry had been standing.
But it was Adam’s name he’d heard.
He saw that the topmost area of the scaffolding hung crookedly, the workmen staring down from their positions on the roof. Dust. That’s what the cloud was. From whatever had fallen from the scaffolding. The slate tiles.
Adam.
Gansey shoved through the students. He saw Henry first, then Ronan, unharmed, but powdered like Pompeii corpses. He made eye contact with Ronan — Is it all right? — and he didn’t recognize Ronan’s expression.
There was Adam.
He was standing, very still, his hands by his sides. His chin was tilted up in a wary, fragile sort of way, and his eyes narrowed at nothing. Unlike Ronan and Henry, he was dustless. Gansey saw the jerk of his chest as it rose and fell.
Around him lay hundreds of shattered slate tiles. The pieces exploded out for a dozen yards, dug into the grass like missiles.
But the ground around Adam was bare in a perfect circle.
It was this circle, this impossible circle, that the other students stared at. Some of them were taking photos on their phones.
No one was talking to Adam. It wasn’t difficult to understand this: Adam didn’t look like someone you could talk to, just then. There was something more frightening about him than there was about the circle. Like the bare ground, there was nothing inherently unusual about his appearance. But in context, surrounded by these brick buildings, he didn’t … belong.
“Parrish,” Gansey said when he got close. “Adam. What happened?”
Adam’s eyes slid over to him but his head didn’t turn. It was the stillness that made him seem so other.
Behind him, he heard Ronan say, “I like the way you losers thought Instagram before first aid. Fuck off.”
“No, don’t fuck off,” Henry corrected. “Notify a teacher that there’s some men on the roof who are about to be sued.”
“Scaffolding failed,” Adam said in a low voice. An expression was now appearing on his face, but it, too, was unfamiliar: wonder. “Everything fell.”
“You are the luckiest man in this school,” Henry said. “How are you not dead, Parrish?”
“It’s your bullshit signs,” Ronan suggested, looking vastly less concerned than Gansey felt. “They created a bullshit force field.”
Gansey leaned and Adam pulled him in even closer, gripping his shoulder tightly. Right into Gansey’s ear, he whispered, voice tinged in disbelief, “I didn’t — I just asked — I just thought —”
“Thought what?” Gansey asked.
Adam released him. His eyes were on the circle around him. “I thought that. And it happened.”
The circle was absolutely perfect: dust without, dustless within.
“You marvelous creature,” Gansey said, because there was nothing else to say. Because he had just thought that these two worlds could not co-exist and yet here was Adam, both at once. Alive because of it.
This thing they were doing. This thing. Gansey’s heart was a gaping chasm of possibilities, fearful and breathless and awed.
Ronan’s smile was sharp. Now Gansey recognized the expression on Ronan’s face: arrogance. He had not been afraid for Adam. He had known Cabeswater would save him. Been certain of it.
Gansey thought of how strange it was to know these two young men so well and yet to not know them at all. Both so much more difficult and so much better than when he’d first met them. Was that what life did to them all? Chiseled them into harder, truer versions of themselves?
“I told you,” Ronan said. “Magician.”
It was finally here.
After all of the continuances, after months of waiting, it was the day of the court case.
Adam got up as he would normally for school, but instead of putting on his uniform, he put on the good suit he’d bought on Gansey’s advice the year before. He had not permitted Gansey to pay for any of it, back then. The tie he tied on now, though — the tie was a Christmas gift from Gansey, permitted because Adam had already had a tie when Gansey bought it, so it couldn’t be charity.
It seemed like a silly bit of principle now, completely divorced from the point of anything. He wondered if he was going to go through each year of his life thinking about how stupid he’d been the year before.
He thought about waiting until after breakfast to get dressed, to keep from spilling anything on his suit, but that was foolish. He wouldn’t be able to eat anything.
His case was at ten A.M., hours after school began, but Adam had asked permission to take the entire day off. He knew it would be impossible to hide the reason for his absence from Gansey and Ronan if he had to leave midmorning, and equally difficult to disguise where he’d been if he returned right after court.
Part of him wished that he wasn’t doing this without the others — a shocking wish in light of the fact that only a few weeks before, the very idea that Gansey might even know about the court case had troubled Adam.
But now — no. He still didn’t want them to remember this part of him. He only wanted them to see the new Adam. Persephone had told him that no one had to know his past if he didn’t want them to.
He didn’t want them to.
So he waited, while Gansey and Ronan and Blue went off to school and had ordinary days. He sat on the edge of his mattress and worked on the plan to blackmail Greenmantle as first period happened. He stared at his biology text and thought about a dustless circle around his feet for second period. Then he drove to the courthouse.
Cabeswater beckoned him, but he couldn’t retreat. He had to be here for this.
Every step before the courthouse was an event forgotten as soon as it had happened. There was parking, a metal detector, a clerk, a back staircase instead of the elevator, another clerk, a glimpsed low-ceilinged room with pews like a church on either side of an aisle, a church for the mundane, a service for those who claimed not guilty.
Adam tried to soothe himself by telling himself that people worked here every day, this was nothing extraordinary to them, there was nothing special about this building. But the old, mold-and-glue smell of it, the feeling of threadbare carpet beneath his feet, the sickly, uneven light of the fluorescents overhead — all of it felt alien. All of it burdened his senses with how this day was like no other. He was going to be sick. Or faint.