He could not decide if he was tired, or tired of waiting.
He wondered where Ronan had gone.
He did not call Blue.
“Look, I found this.”
Gansey jumped at the precise same moment that he recognized Noah’s voice. The dead boy sat cross-legged on the end of Gansey’s mattress in the middle of the room. Gansey was relieved to see that Noah looked more firmly himself than when he’d seen him last. In his hands, he held a lump of dark gray clay that he had formed into a small, negative-image snowman.
“Frosty the clayman,” Noah said, amusing himself. “I took it from Ronan’s room. Look, it melts.”
Gansey regarded it more closely as he settled himself cross-legged, mirror image from Noah. “Did he get it from a dream?”
“Gas station, I think. The clay’s got metal flakes in it or something,” Noah said. “See, it’s standing on that magnet. It slurps down and eats the magnet after a while.”
They watched. They watched a lot. It moved so slowly that it took Gansey a full minute to even believe that eventually, the metallicized putty probably would engulf the magnet.
“Is this supposed to be a toy?” Gansey asked.
“Ages six and up.”
“This is the worst toy I have ever seen.”
Noah grinned. He said, “Piss up a rope.”
They both laughed uproariously at Ronan’s words coming out of Noah’s mouth.
The bottom of the clay figure had managed to hide the magnet without Gansey noticing any movement.
“What’s that slowly phrase?” Noah asked. “Slowly, slowly …”
“… catchy monkey,” Gansey finished. “Noah, don’t go. I’m going to ask you a question, and I don’t want you to go like you always do.”
The dead boy lifted his head to meet Gansey’s eyes. Though he was not transparent or incorrect looking in any way, he was unintentionally unsettling in this light. Something about his unblinking eyes.
That could have been me. That should have been me.
“Did you hear him? When you … when you died?” Gansey regretted asking it already, but he pressed on. “Did you hear a voice as well?”
Noah’s fingers touched his smudgy cheek, though he didn’t seem to notice. He shook his head.
If both Gansey and Noah had been dying on the ley line at the same time, why had Gansey been chosen to live and Noah been chosen to die? By all rights, Noah’s death was the more wrongful one: He had been murdered for no reason. Gansey had been stung by a death that had been dogging his steps for more than a decade.
“I think … Cabeswater wanted to be awake,” Noah said. “It knew I wouldn’t do what needed to be done, and you would.”
“It couldn’t know that.”
Noah shook his head again. “It’s easy to know a lot of things when time goes around instead of straight.”
“But —” said Gansey, but he didn’t know what he had meant to protest. Really it was just the fact of Noah’s slow death, and there didn’t seem to be anyone he could direct that protest toward. He touched one of his ears; he could feel ghosts of those hornets crawling over it. “When we find Glendower, I’m asking him to fix you. As the favor.”
He didn’t like saying it out loud; not because he didn’t mean it, but because they weren’t clear on how the favor worked, or if it worked at all, and he didn’t like to make false promises.
Noah prodded his clayman. It was not much of a man anymore; it was only because Gansey had seen it before that he could still see the suggestion of the figure in the featureless lump. “I know. It’s … it’s nice of you.”
“But …?”
“Don’t be afraid,” Noah said unexpectedly. Reaching out, he pulled Gansey’s hand away from his ear. Gansey hadn’t even realized that he was still touching it softly. Leaning forward, Noah blew his cool, corpse breath over Gansey’s ear. “Nothing there. You’re just tired.”
Gansey shivered a little.
Because it was Noah and no one else, Gansey could admit, “I don’t know what I’ll do if I find him, Noah. I don’t know what I’ll be if I’m not looking for him. I don’t know the first thing about how to be that person again.”
Noah put the clay in Gansey’s hands. “That’s exactly how I feel about the idea of being alive again.”
17
Tell my future,” Blue said that night, throwing herself down in front of Calla, who had blanketed the reading room table with receipts. The entirety of 300 Fox Way was howlingly loud; Orla had yet another group over, as did Orla’s mother, Jimi. Plus, Trinity — Jimi’s sister or cousin or friend — had brought over about one thousand little cousins or something to make soap. The reading room was the quietest place. “Tell me if I’m an orphan in it.”
“Go away,” Calla said, punching buttons on a calculator. She and Maura had generally worked the house finances together, Calla operating the calculator like an adult, and Maura sitting cross-legged in the middle of the table nearby. But now there was no Maura. “I’m busy.”
“I think you don’t actually know,” Blue said. “I think that’s what it is. You and Persephone are pretending to be all wise about it and ‘oh she needs to find her own way in the world’ blah blah, but really, you’re just saying that because you have no idea whatsoever.”
“This is paperwork,” Calla said. “And you are a pest. Go away.”
Blue picked up a handful of receipts and threw them in Calla’s face.
Calla looked at her through the fluttering sheets, unmoving.
They settled on the table.
Blue and Calla stared at each other.
“I’m so sorry,” Blue said, shrinking. “I really am.”
She started to pick up one of the receipts, and Calla grabbed her wrist.
“Don’t,” she said.
Blue’s shoulders slumped more.
Calla said, “Look. This isn’t easy for any of us. You’re right. We could never see into Cabeswater, and it’s harder to see everything else now, when there’s just two of us. Harder to agree when there’s no tiebreaker, especially when it’s about the tiebreaker …” Her face changed. “I’ll tell you this: There are three sleepers.”
“You’ve told me that. Everyone’s told me that.”
“Well, I think your job is to wake up one of them, and I think it’s Maura’s job to not wake up another one.”