“Well, it would’ve been a fuckton easier if I’d known more,” Ronan snapped back. “Instead Adam and I had to run Greenmantle out on our own, while you played cloak and daggers.”

His brother eyed him appraisingly. “That was you? How – oh.”

Ronan enjoyed a full minute of his brother’s appreciation.

“Parrish always was a creepily clever little fuck,” Declan observed, sounding a little like their father despite himself. “Look, here’s the thing. This buyer called me this morning and told me someone’s offering to sell something big here, like I said. People are gonna come from all over to look at it, whatever it is. It’s not going to take much effort to find you and Matthew and the Barns and that forest here.”

“Who is this person selling something?”

“I don’t know. I don’t care. It hardly even matters. Don’t you see? Even after that deal is over, they’re gonna show up because Henrietta’s a giant supernatural beacon. And because who knows what of Dad’s business I haven’t cleaned up yet. And if they find out you can dream – God help you, because it’ll be over. I’m just –” Declan stopped speaking and closed his eyes; when he did, Ronan could see the brother he’d grown up with instead of the brother he’d grown away from. “I’m tired, Ronan.”

The car was very quiet.

“Please –” Declan began. “Just come with me, OK? You can quit Aglionby and Matthew can transfer to a school in D.C., and I’ll pour gasoline on everything Dad built and we can just leave the Barns behind. Let’s just go.”

It was not at all what Ronan had expected him to say, and he found he had no response. Quit Aglionby; leave Henrietta; quit Adam; leave Gansey.

Once, when Ronan was quite young, young enough that he had attended Sunday school, he had woken holding an actual flaming sword. His pyjamas, which adhered to rigorous safety codes that had to that point seemed academic in interest, had melted and saved him, but his blankets and the better part of his curtains had been entirely destroyed in a small inferno. Declan had been the one who had dragged Ronan from his room and woken their parents; he had never said anything about it, and Ronan had never thanked him.

When it came to it, it wasn’t like there was an option. The Lynches would always save one another’s lives, if they had to.

“Take Matthew,” Ronan said.

“What?”

“Take Matthew to D.C. and keep him safe,” Ronan repeated.

“Yeah? And what about you?”

They looked at each other, warped mirror images of each other.

“This is my home,” Ronan said.

The stormy weather perfectly mirrored Blue Sargent’s soul. Her first day back at school after suspension had been interminable. A small part of it was that the time away from school had been extraordinary: the absolute opposite of the mundane experience at Mountain View High. But the much bigger part of it was the memory of the most unmagical element of her suspension: Henry Cheng’s toga party. The enchantment of that experience was made more impressive by the fact that it had actually contained no magic. And her instant kinship with the students there only underlined how she had absolutely failed to experience anything like it in her years at Mountain View. What was it that had made her feel so instantly comfortable with the Vancouver crowd? And why did that kinship have to be with people who belonged to a different world? Actually, she knew the answer to that. The Vancouver crowd had their eyes on the stars, not trained on the ground. They didn’t know everything, but they wanted to. In a different world, she could have been friends with people like Henry for her entire teen years. But in this world, she stayed in Henrietta and watched people like that move away. She was not going to Venezuela.

Blue was filled with frustration that her life was so clearly demarcated.

Things that were not enough, but that she could have.

Things that were something more, that she couldn’t.

So she stood like a prickly old lady, hunched over in a long mutilated hoodie that she’d made into a dress, waiting for the buses to pull out and free up her bike. She wished she had a phone or a Bible so she could pretend to be super busy with it like the handful of shy teens standing in the bus line ahead of her. Four classmates stood perilously close, holding a conversation about whether or not the bank robbery sequence in that movie everyone had seen was indeed awesome, and Blue was afraid they would ask her opinion on it. She knew, in a broad way, that there was nothing wrong with their topic, but she also knew in a more specific way that there was no way she could talk about the movie without sounding like a condescending brat. She felt one thousand years old. She also felt like maybe she was a condescending brat. She wanted her bike. She wanted her friends, who were also one-thousand-year-old condescending brats. She wanted to live in a world where she was surrounded by one-thousand-year-old condescending brats.

She wanted to go to Venezuela.

“Hey, hey, lady! Want to come for the ride of your life?”

Blue didn’t immediately realize that the words were being directed at her. Truth only dawned after she realized that all of the faces around her were pointed at her. She pivoted slowly to discover that there was a very silver and expensive car parked in the fire lane.

Blue had managed to go months hanging out with Aglionby boys without looking like she hung out with Aglionby boys, but here was the most raven-boy-looking raven boy of them all parked in the fire lane next to her. The driver wore a watch that even Gansey would have considered gauche. The driver had hair tall enough to touch the ceiling of the car. The driver was wearing big black-framed sunglasses despite a notable lack of sun. The driver was Henry Cheng.

“Whooooooooooo,” said Burton, one of the bank robbery boys, swivelling slowly. “Not Your Bitch has a date? Is that who roughed you up?”

Cody, the second of the bank robbers, stepped towards the kerb to gape at the Fisker. He asked Henry, “Is that a Ferrari?”

“No, it’s a Bugatti, man,” Henry said through the open passenger window. “Ha-ha, I’m kidding you, man. It’s totally a Ferrari. Sargent! Don’t keep me waiting!”

Half the bus line was looking at her. Until that moment, Blue had never really stacked up all of her public statements against gratuitous commercialism, offensive boyfriends, and Aglionby students in one place. Now that everyone was looking at Henry and then at her, though, she was eyeing the stack and finding it enormous. She was also seeing how every student was slowly labelling the stack BLUE SARGENT IS A HYPOCRITE.