Ronan shifted restlessly. The successful demonstration of the plane had left him hyper-alive. He felt like burning something to the ground. He pressed his hand directly over the air-conditioning vent to prevent heat exhaustion. “You’re driving like an old woman.”
Gansey waved a hand, the universal symbol for Shut up. Beside the interstate, four black cows lifted their heads to watch the Camaro go by.
If I was driving … Ronan thought about that set of Camaro keys he had dreamt into existence, shoved in a drawer in his room. He let the possibilities unwind slowly in his mind. He checked his phone. Fourteen missed calls. He dropped it back into the door pouch.
“What about a proton magnetometer?” Gansey asked Malory. Then he added crossly, “I know that’s for underwater detection. I would want it for underwater detection.”
It was water that had ended their work today. Gansey had decided that the next step in their search was to establish Cabeswater’s boundaries. They’d only ever entered the forest from its eastern side and never made it to any of the other edges. This time, they’d approached the forest from well north of their previous entry points, devices trained to the ground to alert them to when they found the northern electromagnetic boundary of the forest. After a several-hour walk, the group had instead come to a lake.
Gansey had stopped dead in his tracks. It wasn’t that the lake had been uncrossable: It only covered a few acres and the path around lacked treachery. And it wasn’t that the lake had stunned him with its beauty. In fact, it was quite unlovely as far as lakes went: an unnaturally square pool sunk into a drowned field. Cattle or sheep had worn a mud path along one edge.
The thing that stopped Gansey cold was the obvious fact that the lake was man-made. The possibility that parts of the ley line might be flooded should have occurred to him before. But it hadn’t. And for some reason, although it was not impossible to believe that Glendower was still somehow alive after hundreds of years, it was impossible to believe he was able to pull off this feat beneath tons of water.
Gansey had declared, “We have to find a way to look under it.”
Adam had replied, “Oh, Gansey, come on. The odds —”
“We’re looking under it.”
Ronan’s plane had crashed into the water and floated, unreachable. They’d walked the long way back to the car. Gansey had called Malory.
As if, Ronan thought, a crusty old man three thousand miles away will have any bright ideas.
Gansey hung up the phone.
“Well?” Adam asked.
Gansey met Adam’s eyes in the rearview mirror. Adam sighed.
Ronan thought they could probably just go around the lake. But that would mean plunging into Cabeswater headlong. And although the ancient forest seemed like the most likely location for Glendower, the sizzling volatility of the newly woken ley line had rendered it a little unpredictable. Even Ronan, who had little care for whether or not he shuffled off this mortal coil, had to admit that the prospect of being trampled by beasts or accidentally getting stuck in a forty-year time loop was daunting.
The entire thing was Adam’s fault — he’d been the one to wake the ley line, though Gansey preferred to pretend it had been a group decision. Whatever bargain Adam had struck in order to accomplish it seemed to have rendered him a little unpredictable as well. Ronan, a sinner himself, wasn’t as struck by the transgression as he was by Gansey’s insistence that they continue to pretend Adam was a saint.
Gansey was not a liar. This untruth didn’t look good on him.
Gansey’s phone chirruped. He read the message before letting it drop next to the gearshift with a strangled cry. Abruptly melancholy, he lolled his head dismally against the seat. Adam gestured for Ronan to pick up the phone, but Ronan despised phones above almost every other object in the world.
So it sat there with its eyebrows raised, waiting.
Finally, Blue strained forward far enough to snatch it. She read the message out loud: “‘Could really use you this weekend if not too much trouble. Helen can pick you up. Disregard if you have activities.’”
“Is this about Congress?” Adam asked.
The sound of the word Congress made Gansey sigh heavily and urged Blue to whisper in withering derision, “Congress!” It hadn’t been long since Gansey’s mother had announced she was running for office. In these early days, the campaign had yet to directly influence Gansey, but it was inevitable he’d be called upon. They all knew that clean, handsome Gansey, intrepid teen explorer and straight-A student, was a card that no hopeful politician could avoid playing.
“She can’t make me,” Gansey said.
“She doesn’t have to,” Ronan sniffed. “Mama’s boy.”
“Dream me a solution.”
“Don’t have to. Nature already gave you a spine. You know what I say? Fuck Washington.”
“This is why you never have to go to things like this,” Gansey replied.
In the other lane, a car pulled up beside the Camaro. Ronan, a connoisseur of street battles, noticed it first. A flash of white paint. Then a hand stretched out the driver’s side window, a middle finger extended over the roof. The other car shot forward and then fell back, then shot forward again.
“Oh, Christ,” Gansey said. “Is that Kavinsky?”
Of course it was Joseph Kavinsky, fellow Aglionby Academy student and Henrietta’s most notorious recreational forger. Kavinsky’s infamous Mitsubishi Evo was a thing of boyish beauty, moon-white with a voracious black mouth of a grille and an immense splattered graphic of a knife on either side of the body. The Mitsubishi had just been released from a month-long stint in the police impound. The judge had told him that if he was caught racing again, they’d crush the Mitsubishi and make him watch, like they did to the rich punks’ street racers out in California. Rumor had it Kavinsky had laughed and told the judge he’d never get pulled over again.
He probably wouldn’t. Rumor had it Kavinsky’s father had bought off Henrietta’s sheriff.
To celebrate the Mitsubishi’s release from impound, Kavinsky had just put three coats of anti-laser paint on the headlights and bought himself a new radar detector.
Rumor had it.
“I hate that prick,” Adam said.
Ronan knew he ought to hate him, too.
The window rolled down to reveal Joseph Kavinsky in the driver’s seat, his eyes hidden behind white-rimmed sunglasses that reflected only the sky. The gold links of the chain around his neck glittered a grin. He had a refugee’s face, hollow-eyed and innocent.
He wore a lazy smile, and he mouthed something to Gansey that ended with “— unt.”
There was nothing about Kavinsky that wasn’t despicable.
Ronan’s heart surged. Muscle memory.
“Do it,” he urged. The four-lane interstate, gray and baked, stretched in front of them. The sun ignited the red-orange of the Camaro’s hood, and beneath it, the massively souped-up and tragically under utilized engine rumbled drowsily. Everything about the situation demanded someone’s foot crushing an accelerator.
“I know you are not referring to street racing,” Gansey said tersely.
Noah gave a hoarse laugh.
Gansey didn’t make eye contact with Kavinsky or Kavinsky’s passenger, the ever-present Prokopenko. The latter had always been friendly with Kavinsky, in the sort of way that an electron was friendly with a nucleus, but lately, he seemed to have acquired official crony status.