“No,” Declan and Ronan agreed at once.
Declan’s phone fussed for attention in the center console. Ronan started to pick it up, but Declan snatched it out of his hands with such speed that he nearly ran off the road. Ronan just had time to see the beginning of the incoming text: The key is—
“Whoa there, outlaw,” said Ronan. “I wasn’t gonna touch your girl.”
Declan shoved the phone into the driver side pocket.
“New personal trainer?” Ronan suggested. “New protein bar supplier? Hot lead on some high-tread carpet for the home and garden?”
Declan didn’t reply. Matthew hummed along happily to his headphones.
Neither of his brothers had said anything about how they felt about Ronan moving, and he couldn’t decide if it was because it didn’t make a difference to them or because they didn’t really think it would work.
He didn’t know which one he’d rather it was.
New York: They pulled over at a service area. Matthew sprinted lightly for the toilets. Declan took another call. Ronan paced. The wind felt crafty and inventive as it worked under his collar, and his pulse felt as fast and streaky as the thin November clouds above.
The little trees bordering the service area were sparse and shapeless, gathered sticks rather than a forest. They were foreign trees. Strangers. Fragile citizens of an urban zip code. Somehow the sight of them drove home the truth of what Ronan was attempting. For so many years, nothing had changed. He’d dropped out of high school, which he didn’t regret, not exactly, and his friends had graduated. Two of them, Gansey and Blue, had invited him on their gap year cross-country road trip, but he hadn’t wanted to go anywhere then. Not when he had just gotten entirely wrapped up in—
“… Adam yet?” Matthew had asked a question, but Ronan had missed it. Matthew had returned with a bag of gummies, and he monched them quietly. “See, I take constructive cristicism. Criticist. Criticism. Gol darn it.”
Adam.
Adam Parrish was the destination of this road trip.
Is there any version of you that could come with me to Cambridge? Adam had asked the day he left.
Maybe. Ronan had visited him once since the semester began, but it had been spontaneous—he’d gotten in his car in the middle of the night, spent the day with Adam, and then left the city without closing his eyes for a second. He hadn’t really wanted to test himself.
Plausible deniability. Ronan Lynch could make it in Cambridge until proven otherwise.
Adam.
Ronan missed him like a lung.
Declan reappeared, looking at his watch with the expression of a man used to it disappointing him. He opened the driver side door.
“Hey, it’s my turn,” Ronan protested. If he wasn’t driving, he knew his thoughts would race for the final two hours of the drive. Adam knew Ronan was coming this weekend, but he didn’t know Ronan had appointments to see rentals. Ronan couldn’t decide how he’d react. “We had a deal.”
“A deal full of Goodwill,” Matthew said. “That’s a joke.”
“You aren’t driving my car among those Massholes.” Declan shut the door as punctuation. Matthew shrugged. Ronan spat.
In the car, Matthew leaned forward to triumphantly claim the AUX cable. A dubstep remix of a pop song oompahed over the speakers.
It was going to be a long two hours to Cambridge.
Ronan put his jacket over his head to drown out the sound and muffle his building nerves. He could feel his pulse thudding in his jaw. He could hear it in his ears. It sounded like everyone else’s heartbeat, he thought. Just like Adam’s heart when his head was resting on his chest. Ronan wasn’t that different. Well, he could seem not that different. He could move to follow the guy he loved, like anyone else. He could live in a city, like anyone else. It could work.
He began to dream.
3
There was a voice in Ronan’s dream.
You know this isn’t how the world is supposed to be.
It was everywhere and nowhere.
At night, we used to see stars. You could see by starlight back then, after the sun went down. Hundreds of headlights chained together in the sky, good enough to eat, good enough to write legends about, good enough to launch men at.
You don’t remember because you were born too late.
The voice was unavoidable and natural, like air, like weather.
Maybe I underestimate you. Your head’s full of dreams. They must remember.
Does any part of you still look at the sky and hurt?
Ronan was lying in the middle of an interstate. Three lanes each direction, no cars, just Ronan. In the way of dreams, he understood that the road began at the Barns and ended at Harvard and that he was somewhere in between. Little strangled trees struggled through the thin grass by the road. The sky was the same color as the worn asphalt.
We used to hear the stars, too. When people stopped talking, there was silence. Now you could shut every mouth on the planet and there’d still be a hum. Air-conditioning groaning from the vent beside you. Semi trucks hissing on a highway miles away. A plane complaining ten thousand feet above you.
Silence is an extinct word.
It bothers you, doesn’t it?
But the dream was perfectly silent, except for the voice. Ronan hadn’t thought about how long it had been since he’d experienced perfect silence until that moment. He wasn’t sure he had experienced perfect silence before that moment. It was peaceful, not dead. Like putting down a weight he hadn’t realized he was carrying, the weight of noise, the weight of everyone else.
Magic. It’s a cheap word now. Put a quarter in the slot and get a magic trick for you and your friends. Most people don’t remember what it is. It is not cutting a person in half and pulling a rabbit out. It is not sliding a card from your sleeve. It’s not are you watching closely?
If you’ve ever looked into a fire and been unable to look away, it’s that. If you’ve ever looked at the mountains and found you’re not breathing, it’s that. If you’ve ever looked at the moon and felt tears in your eyes, it’s that.
It’s the stuff between stars, the space between roots, the thing that makes electricity get up in the morning.
It fucking hates us.
Ronan wasn’t sure what the voice belonged to, or if it belonged to anything. In a dream, physical truths were unimportant. Maybe the voice belonged to this road beneath him. The sky. Someone standing just out of sight.
The opposite of magical is not ordinary. The opposite of magical is mankind. The world is a neon sign; it says HUMANITY but everything’s burnt out except MAN.
Are you understanding what I’m trying to tell you?
Ronan felt rumbling against his skull: distant trucks roaring toward him where he lay in the center lane.
He refused to let the dream be a nightmare.
Be music, he told the dream.
The rumbling of approaching trucks turned into the thudding of Matthew’s dubstep.
The world’s killing you, but They’ll kill you faster. Capital-T They. Them.
You don’t know Them yet, but you will.
Bryde. The voice’s name suddenly dropped into Ronan’s thoughts in the way the knowledge about the interstate had, presented as an understood truth: The sky was blue; the asphalt was warm; the voice belonged to someone whose name was Bryde.