Page 33 of The Raven King(The Raven Cycle 4)
“There he is,” Henry said, same as he had at Raven Day. “It is a terrible thing to see someone else scared, isn’t it?”
“What is in my hand?”
“A secret. I am going to trust you with this secret,” Henry said. Now he sounded a little uncertain himself. “Because I want you to trust me. But to do that, if we are to be friends, you have to know the truth.”
Henry took a deep breath, and then he took his hand off the top of Gansey’s palm to reveal a bee of extraordinary size.
Gansey barely had time to react when Henry touched his fingers again.
“Easy, Mr. Gansey. Look again.”
Now that Gansey had settled, he could see that it wasn’t an ordinary bee at all; it was a beautiful robotic insect. Beautiful was perhaps not the best word, but Gansey couldn’t immediately think of another. The wings, antennae, and legs were clearly fashioned of metal, with fine articulated joints and thin wire wings, but it was as delicately and elegantly colored as a flower petal everywhere else. It was not alive, but it looked vital. He could see it in this darkness because it had a tiny heart that emitted an amber glow.
Gansey knew that Henry’s family was in the business of robotic bees, but he had not thought of this when he considered robotic bees. He felt fairly certain that he had seen images of robotic bees, and while they had been impressive bits of nanorobotics, they were nothing like actual bees, having more in common with tiny helicopters than with living insects. Henry’s bee, though, was fearfully and impossibly constructed. It reminded him so strongly of Ronan’s dream objects that it was hard to shake the idea once it had occurred to him.
Henry dug his phone out of his pocket. Tapping rapidly, he brought up a rainbow-slicked screen that was somehow just as strange to look at. “RoboBee interfaces with ChengPhone via this app. It’s fingerprint specific, so you see I press my finger here and tell it what I want it to find — RoboBee, find great hair! — oh and look, there it goes.”
Gansey startled violently as the bee took flight with the same sound as before, lifting into the air and alighting upon his hair. The weight of it there was even worse than having it in his palm. Stiffly, he said, “Could you remove that? It makes me very uncomfortable.”
Henry pressed his finger to the screen again, and the bee lifted back into the air, buzzing onto his shoulder.
Gansey said, “You didn’t say anything that time.”
“No, I don’t have to say anything. It reads my thoughts through my fingerprint,” Henry said. He didn’t look up from the screen as he said this, but Gansey could see in the light that he was gauging Gansey’s reaction. “So I just tell it what to do and — whoosh! — off it goes, thank you, thank you, little bee.”
Henry held his hand out and the bee whirred into it like a mobile blossom; the light extinguished. He tucked it back into his pocket. It was impossible, of course, and Henry was waiting for Gansey to say it was impossible. This was why it was secret, because it couldn’t exist.
The net looped down around Gansey; he felt it.
“Your parents make robotic bees,” he started carefully.
“My father. My father’s company, yes.” There was a line drawn there, though Gansey didn’t understand it.
“And it makes bees like this.” Gansey did not try to make it sound like he believed it.
“Gansey Boy, I think we have to decide if we trust each other or not,” Henry said. “I think this is the moment in our young friendship.”
Gansey considered his words, “But trusting someone and confiding in them are not the same thing.”
Henry laughed approvingly. “No. But I have already both trusted in you and confided in you. I have kept the secret of what you had in the back of your SUV and the secret of Adam Parrish not getting killed by those roof tiles. That is trust. And I have confided in you: I showed you RoboBee.”
All of this was true. But Gansey knew enough people with secrets to not be dazzled into easily using them as currency. And so much of what Gansey lived with now put other people’s lives on the line, not just his own. That was a lot of trust for a toga party and a hole in the ground. He said, “There’s a psychological principle that car salesmen use. They buy you a drink from a Coke machine with their own money, and then you feel obligated to buy a car from them.”
There was humor in Henry’s voice. “Are you saying your secrets are to my secrets as an automobile is to a carbonated beverage?”
Now there was humor in Gansey’s. “Your father’s company didn’t build that bee, did it?”
“No.”
He might as well get it over with. “What do you want me to say? The word magic?”
“You’ve seen magic like my RoboBee before,” Henry said. “That’s not the same sort of magic as watching Parrish deflect a ton of slate. Where have you seen this kind of magic?”
Gansey couldn’t. “That’s not my secret.”
Henry said, “I’ll spare you the agony; I know it. Declan Lynch. He sold my mother two of them.”
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 backward. 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 artifacts, 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 traveled 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 jeweled 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 marvelous 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.
