“Sitwhit,” Gansey called back, his old Southern accent rolling generously through the vowels. “You left your keys in the door!”

Laughing, Whitman zipped up his fly. He loped up beside them, and he and Gansey fell into some effortless conversation. A moment later, two more boys had joined them, then two more again. They bantered lightly back and forth, buoyant and youthful and convivial, advertisements for clean living and good education.

This was a master class that Adam had never got good at, although he’d spent months in dedicated study. He analysed Gansey’s mannerisms, dissected the other boys’ reactions, and catalogued dialogue patterns. He watched how an easy gesture unfolded a bouquet of mannish conversation, elegant as a magic trick. He took careful note of the behind-the-scenes footage: how a miserable Gansey could become a hospitable one in just a moment. But he could never work out the practicum. Warm greetings iced in his mouth. Casual gestures became dismissive. A steady eye contact turned into an unnerving stare.

He’d retaken the class each quarter, but he thought, incredibly, maybe there were some skills even Adam Parrish couldn’t pick up.

“Where’s Parrish?” asked Engle.

“He’s right there,” Gansey replied.

“Don’t know how I missed the wind off the glacier,” Engle said. “What’s up, man?”

It was a rhetorical question, answerable by a lightly painted smile. The boys were here for Gansey. Where’s Parrish? In a place too far away to hike to in a day.

Once upon a time, this dynamic would have unsettled Adam. Threatened him. But now he was certain in his place as one of Gansey’s two favourites, so he merely put his hands in his pockets and walked quietly alongside the rest.

Suddenly, Adam felt Gansey tense beside him. The others were still hooting and laughing, but Gansey’s expression had gone pensive. Adam followed his gaze to the great columns that held up the roof of Gruber Hall. Headmaster Child stood at the top of the stairs between them, a textbook or something similar in hand. He was a leathery bird of a man, a hearty recommendation for sunscreen and broad-brimmed hats.

“All right, gentlemen,” he called. “I could hear you from my office. Are we conducting ourselves like ravens? Class awaits.”

Fist bumps were exchanged; hair was scrubbed; shoulders were knocked. The other boys dispersed; Gansey and Adam remained. Child lifted a hand to Gansey in a sort of wave before ducking into the offices of Gruber Hall.

Again Gansey looked angry, and then he looked nothing at all. He resumed his walk to class.

“What was that?” Adam asked.

Gansey pretended not to have heard as they climbed the stairs Child had just stood on.

“Gansey. What was that about?”

“What?”

“The hand. Child.”

“It’s friendly.”

It was not unlike the world to be friendlier to Gansey than to Adam, but it was unlike Headmaster Child. “Tell me you won’t tell me, but don’t tell me a lie.”

Gansey made a big fuss over tucking in his uniform shirt and pulling down his sweater. He didn’t look at Adam. “I don’t want to fight.”

Adam made an educated guess. “Ronan.”

Gansey’s eyes went to him furtively and back to his sweater.

“No way,” Adam said. “What. No. You didn’t.”

He didn’t know exactly what he was accusing Gansey of. Just – he knew what Gansey wanted for Ronan, and he knew how Gansey got things.

“I don’t want to fight,” Gansey repeated.

He reached for the door; Adam put his hand on it, preventing him.

“Look around you. Do you see Ronan? He doesn’t care. You stuffing it down his throat isn’t going to make him hungry.”

“I don’t want to fight.”

Gansey was saved by a buzzing from his person; his phone was ringing. Technically they were not meant to take calls during the school day, but he retrieved the phone and twisted the face so that Adam could see it. Two things struck Adam: First of all, the call said it was from Gansey’s mother, which it probably was, and secondly, Gansey’s phone said it was 6:21, which it definitely wasn’t.

Adam’s position changed subtly, no longer blocking Gansey from entering Gruber but rather pressing a hand to the door to act as a lookout.

Gansey put the phone to his ear. “Hello? Oh. Mom, I’m in school. No, the weekend was yesterday. No. Of course. No, just go quickly.”

As Gansey spoke to the phone, Cabeswater beckoned to Adam, offering to support his tired form, and for just a minute, he allowed it. For a few effortless breaths, everything was leaves and water, trunks and roots, rocks and moss. The ley line hummed inside him, waxing and waning with his pulse, or vice versa. Adam could tell that the forest needed to tell him something, but he couldn’t quite work out what it was. He needed to scry after school or find the time to actually go to the forest.

The phone was hung up, put away. Gansey said, “She wanted to know if I liked the idea of holding a last-minute campaign thing here on campus this weekend. If Raven Day would conflict, if it would be OK to run it by Child. I said that – well, you heard what I said.”

Actually, Adam had not. He had been listening to Cabeswater. In fact, he was still listening to it so intently that when it suddenly and unexpectedly swayed, he swayed, too. Unnerved, he snatched at the doorknob to ground himself.

The hum of the energy had vanished inside him.

Adam barely had time to wonder what had happened and whether the energy would return when the ley line mumbled to life inside him again. Leaves unfurled in the back of his mind. He released the doorknob.

“What was that?” Gansey asked.

“What?” Adam, a little breathless, nonetheless mimicked Gansey’s earlier tone almost precisely.

“Don’t be an ass. What happened?”

What had happened was someone had just docked an enormous amount of power from the ley line. Enough that it had made even Cabeswater catch its breath. In Adam’s limited experience, there were only a few things that could make that happen.

As the energy slowly clocked back up to speed, he told Gansey, “I’m pretty sure I know what Ronan’s doing.”

That morning, Ronan Lynch had woken early, without any alarm, thinking home, home, home.

He’d left Gansey still sleeping – his phone clutched in a hand and his wireframes folded in slumber a few inches away on the mattress – and crept down the stairs with his raven pressed against his chest to keep her quiet. Outside, overgrown grass lapped dew on Ronan’s boots, and mist curled around the tyres of the charcoal BMW. The sky over Monmouth Manufacturing was the colour of a muddy lake. It was cold, but Ronan’s gasoline heart was firing. He settled into the car, letting it become his skin. The night air was still coiled beneath the seats and lurking in the door pockets; he shivered as he tethered his raven to the seat belt fastener in the passenger seat. Not the fanciest setup, but effective for keeping a corvid from flapping around one’s sports car. Chainsaw bit him, but not as hard as the early morning cold.