She was walking off the stage; Adam was covering one of his eyes with a hand; there was the dutiful double clap that Aglionby students were asked to perform in lieu of unruly applause.
“Let’s go, ravens!” Child said.
This was Adam and Gansey’s cue to open the doors. Students poured out. Humidity and light poured in. Headmaster Child joined them in the doorway.
He shook Gansey’s hand, then Adam’s. “Thanks for your service, gentlemen. Mr Gansey, I didn’t think your mother could put together this fund-raiser and a guest list by this weekend, but we’re pretty much there. She has my vote for running the country.”
He and Gansey exchanged the sort of coMr adely smile that comes from having signed legal paperwork together. It would have been a fine moment if it had ended there, but Child lingered, making polite chitchat with Gansey and Adam – his best and his brightest, respectively. For seven excruciating minutes, they mined the weather, Thanksgiving break plans, and shared experiences in Colonial Williamsburg, and then, finally, exhausted, they parted ways as the juniors appeared with their raven warriors.
“Jesus Christ,” Gansey said, panting a bit from the effort.
“I thought he would never leave,” Adam said. He touched the bottom of his left eyelid, squinting it shut, before looking past Gansey. “If – ah. I’ll be right back. I think I have something in my eye.”
He left Gansey; Gansey set himself free on Raven Day. He found himself at the foot of the stairs where students were receiving ravens. The flock was composed of paper and aluminium foil and wood and papier-mâché and brass. Some birds floated with helium balloon bellies. Some glided. Some teetered on multiple supports, with separate rods to control flapping wings.
Noah had done this. Noah had dreamt this.
“I’m flipping you a bird,” said a junior, handing him a dull black raven made of newspaper tacked to a wooden frame.
Gansey stepped off into the crowd. Noah’s crowd. In a better world, Noah would have been giving that tenth-anniversary introduction.
At eye level, the landscape was all sticks and arms and white T-shirts, the mechanics and gears. But if one squinted into the too-bright sky, the sticks and the students vanished and the expanse was filled with ravens. They swooped and attacked, plunged and lifted, flapped and spun.
It was very hot.
Gansey felt time slip. Just a little. It was just that this sight was so oddly like something from his other life, his real life; these birds were cousins to Ronan’s dream things. It seemed unfair that Noah should have died and Gansey had not. Noah had been living when he was murdered. Gansey had been marking time.
“What are the rules of this battle again?” he asked over his shoulder.
“No rules in war except stay alive.”
Gansey turned; wings flapped past his face. He was hemmed in by shoulders and backs. He could not tell who had spoken, or even, now, without a face to look at, if someone had.
Time tugged at his soul.
The Aglionby orchestra began to play. The very first measure was a harmonious thicket of sound, but one of the brass instruments got the first note on the next phrase very wrong. At the same moment, an insect buzzed past Gansey’s face, close enough that he could feel it. Suddenly, everything went slanting sideways. The sun overhead burned white. Ravens flapped around Gansey as he turned, looking for Adam or Child or anything that wasn’t just a white shirt, a hand, a bird flapping. His eyes snagged on his own wrist. His watch said 6:21.
It had been hot when he died.
He was in a forest of wooden sticks, of birds. The brass instruments muttered; the flutes screamed. Wings buzzed and hummed and shivered around him. He could feel the hornets in his ears.
They aren’t there
But that big insect whirred by him again, circling.
It had been years since Malory had been forced to stop halfway through a hike to wait as Gansey fell to his knees, hands over his ears, shivering, dying.
He had worked hard to walk away from that.
They aren’t there. You are at Raven Day. You are going to eat sandwiches after this. You are going to jump-start the Camaro in the parking lot after school. You are going to drive to 300 Fox Way. You will tell Blue about your day you will
The insects pricked into his nostrils, moved his hair gently, collectively seethed. Sweat ran straight down his spine. The music shimmered. The students had become spirits, brushing past him and around him. His knees would buckle; he would let them.
He could not re-create his death here. Not now, not when it would be fresh on everyone’s minds at the fund-raiser – Gansey Three lost it at Raven Day, did you hear; Mrs Gansey can we have a word about your son? – he would not make it about him.
But time was slipping; he was slipping. His heart ran with black, black blood.
“GanseyMan.”
Gansey couldn’t quite focus on the words. Henry Cheng stood before him, all hair and smile, his eyes intense. He took Gansey’s raven from him and instead pressed something cool into Gansey’s hand. Cool, and getting colder.
“Once, you got me coffee,” Henry said. “When I was losing my mind. Consider the favour returned.”
Gansey was holding a plastic cup of ice water. It should not have done anything, but something worked: the shocking temperature difference, the ordinary sound of the ice cubes knocking against one another, the eye contact. Students still milled around them, but they were once again students. The music was once again merely a school orchestra playing a new piece on an incredibly hot day.
“There he is,” Henry said. “Toga party tonight, Richard, at Litchfield House. You should bring your boys and your child bride.”
Then he was gone, ravens flapping where he had been.
Adam had thought there was something in his eye. It had begun while he stood in the over-hot theatre. Not so much an irritation as a fatigue, like he’d been staring at a screen for too long. He could have lived with it until the end of the school day if it had stayed like that, but his vision was getting a little blurry now. Not a troubling amount on its own, but combined with being able to feel his eye, it seemed like he should take a look at it.
Instead of returning to one of the academic buildings, he slid down the stairs to the theatre’s side door. There were bathrooms in the area under the stage, and it was those he headed to, passing many-legged animals made of stacked old chairs, strange silhouettes of stage-set trees, and depthless oceans of black curtain hung over everything. The hallway was dark and close, the walls horrors of chipped green paint, and with one hand cupped over his eye, Adam found it distorted and unnerving. He recalled again the picture of his skittering hand.
He needed to do some work with Cabeswater, he thought, and figure out what was going on with that tree.
The bathroom light was switched off. It was not an obstacle at all – the light switch was just inside the door – but still, Adam didn’t quite want to put his hand into the blackness to find it. He stood there, his heart a little too fast, and he looked behind himself.
The hall was close and dark and unmoving under sickly fluorescent light. The shadows were inseparable from the stage curtains. Big swaths of black connected everything.
Turn on the light, Adam thought.
With his free hand, the one not covering his eye, he reached into the bathroom.