“There is no solving Noah,” Blue replied, “except by having him … pass on. And he doesn’t want that!”

Gwenllian cackled. “Want and need are different things, my pet.” She nudged the back of Noah’s head with a lifted boot. “Show her what you’ve been hiding, dead thing.”

“You don’t have to do anything she says, Noah.” Blue said it so quickly that she knew at once that she both believed Gwenllian and feared the truth of him.

They all knew that Noah’s existence was a fragile one, subject to the whims of the ley line and the location of his physical remains. And Blue and Gansey in particular had seen firsthand how Noah seemed to be having a harder and harder time coping with the vagaries of being dead. What Blue already knew of Noah was scary. If there was worse, she wasn’t sure she wanted to know.

Noah sighed. “It’s what you deserve. Just … I’m sorry, Blue.”

Nerves started to patter inside her. “There’s nothing to be sorry for.”

“Yeah,” he said in a small voice, “there is. Don’t … just … OK.”

Gwenllian stepped back to give him room to stand. He did, slowly, stiffly, turning his back to Blue. He squared his ordinarily slouching shoulders as if preparing himself for battle. She felt the moment that he stopped pulling energy from her. It was as if she’d dropped a backpack to the ground.

Then he turned to face her.

Every summer, a travelling carnival came to Henrietta. They set up in the big stock sale fields behind the Walmart, and for a few nights it was flattened grass and funnel cakes and lights spasming in the dark. Blue always wanted to like it – she’d gone a few times with people from school (she’d always wanted to like them, too) – but in the end she had just felt like she was still waiting for the real event to happen. Thinking she needed thrills, she’d tried the drop tower. It had lifted them all up – ker-chunk, ker-chunk – and then – nothing. Some sort of malfunction had meant they were not dropped, merely lowered in the same way they’d climbed. Even though they had never plummeted, for a brief moment, Blue’s stomach had dropped as if she had been set free, a feeling made even stranger for the rest of her body not moving an inch.

It was precisely what she felt now.

“Oh,” said Blue.

It was hollow eyes dead and teeth-bared lips and soul threaded through naked bones. It had not been alive for years. It was impossible to not see how decayed the soul was, how removed from humanity, how stretched thin from time away from a pulse.

Noah Czerny had died.

This was all that was left.

That was the truth.

Blue’s body was a riot of shivers. She had kissed this. This thin, cold memory of a human.

Because it was only energy, it read her memories as easily as her words. She felt it haunt her thoughts and then pass out the other side.

It hissed, “I said I was sorry.”

She took a deep breath. “I said there was nothing to be sorry for.”

And she meant it.

Blue didn’t care that he – it – Noah – was strange and decaying and frightening. She knew that he – it – Noah – was strange and decayed and frightened, and she knew that she loved him anyway.

She hugged it. Him. Noah. She didn’t care if he wasn’t quite human any more. She would keep calling whatever this was Noah for as long as it wanted to be called Noah. And she was glad that he could read her thoughts in that moment, because she wanted him to know how thoroughly she believed that.

Her body went icily cold as she let Noah draw energy from her, her arms tight around his neck.

“Don’t tell the others,” he said. When she stepped back, he’d pulled his boyish face over his features again.

“Do you need to go?” Blue asked. She meant go for ever, but she couldn’t say it out loud.

He whispered, “Not yet.”

Blue wiped a tear from her face with the heel of her hand, and he wiped a tear from her other cheek with the heel of his. His chin dimpled in that way that comes before tears, but she put her fingers against it and it resolved.

They were wheeling towards the end of something, and they both knew it.

“Good,” said Gwenllian. “I hate liars and cowards.”

Without pause, she began to climb the tree once more. Blue turned back to Noah, but he was gone. Possibly he had gone before Gwenllian had spoken; just as with his arrival, it was hard to tell the exact moment of his leaving. Blue’s brain had already rewritten all of the seconds around his disappearance.

Blue’s school suspension felt like a faded dream. What was real? This was real.

The kitchen window groaned open, and Jimi shouted out, “Blue! Your boys are out front, looking like they’re fixing to bury a body.”

Again? Blue thought.

When Blue climbed into Gansey’s black Suburban, she discovered that Ronan was already installed in the backseat, his head freshly shaven, boots up on the seat, dressed for a brawl. His presence in the backseat instead of in his usual passenger-seat throne suggested that trouble was afoot. Adam – in a white T-shirt and a pair of clean work coveralls rolled down to the waist – had his seat instead. Gansey sat behind the wheel, wearing both his Aglionby uniform and an electric expression that startled Blue. It was wide-awake and glittering, a match struck just behind his eyes. She’d seen this vivid Gansey before, but usually only when they were alone.

“Hello, Jane,” he said, and his voice was as bright and intense as his eyes. It was hard not to be captured by this Gansey; he was both powerful and worrisome in his tension.

Don’t stare – too late. Adam had caught her at it. She averted her eyes and busied herself tugging up her thigh-highs. “Heya.”

Gansey asked, “Do you have time to run an errand with us? Do you have work? Homework?”

“No homework. I got suspended,” Blue replied.

“Get the fuck out,” Ronan said, but with admiration. “Sargent, you asshole.”

Blue reluctantly allowed him to bump fists with her as Gansey eyed her meaningfully in the rearview mirror.

Adam swivelled the other way in his seat – to the right, instead of to the left, so that he was peering around the far side of the headrest. It made him look as if he were hiding, but Blue knew it was just because it turned his hearing ear instead of his deaf ear towards them. “For what?”