Their voices dropped for a time – it seemed like it might be getting unpleasant – and Gansey began to text furiously. He turned the phone to Blue and Henry.

He is stalling for us to get out. Henry can robobee find a door?

Henry took Gansey’s phone and added to the text:

I will have to keep robobee out of sight tho bc they have always wanted it that is part of why they took me

Blue snatched the phone from him and texted, more slowly, because she had rather less practice than they did:

Who is Mr Gray trying to keep hidden from them? All of us or just you Henry

Henry touched his chest lightly.

Blue typed:

Leave when you can. I’ll catch up

She handed Gansey’s phone back to him, swiftly removed several price tags from the shelves until she had a bouquet of them, and stepped around the end of the aisle. She was startled to discover that it was not one man with Mr Gray, but two. It took her too long to realize that the tilting feeling she got while looking at the strangers was because they looked eerily similar to each other. Brothers. Twins, maybe. Both had a look that she had grown to despise during her time working at Nino’s. Customers who wouldn’t take no for an answer, who weren’t easily negotiated with, who always ended up getting part of their meal taken off the ticket. In addition, they had a slow, bullish way about them that somehow smacked of a lifetime of blunt trauma.

They were a little terrifying.

Mr Gray blinked at Blue in a vague way, no recognition in his face.

The other two men eyed Blue’s hoodie first – not very professional looking – and then her handful of price tags. She ran her thumb over the ends of them in a bored, casual way and said, “Sir? Guys? I’m sorry for the inconvenience, but I’m going to need you to move your vehicles.”

“Excuse me, why?” asked the first. Now that she could hear him better, his accent was more pronounced. French? Maybe.

“We are shopping,” said the other, with vague amusement.

Blue leaned on her Henrietta accent; she’d learned early on that it rendered her innocuous and invisible to outsiders. “I know. I’m sorry. We have a street sweeper coming in to do the lot, and he wants the whole thing cleared out. He’ll be right pissed if there’s still cars here when he starts.”

Mr Gray made a great show of rummaging for his keys in such a way that he twitched up his pant leg to reveal a gun. Laumonier muttered and exchanged looks with each other.

“Sorry again,” Blue said. “You can just ease over to the laundromat lot if you’re not done here.”

“Street sweeper,” said Laumonier, as if only just hearing the phrase.

“Corporate makes us do it to keep the franchise,” Blue replied. “I don’t make the rules.”

“Let’s keep things civil,” Mr Gray said, with a thin smile at the other two. He did not look at Blue. She continued looking bored and beleaguered, running her thumbs over the price tags every time she felt her heart thump. “I’ll catch you two later.”

The three of them moved towards the front door with the uneasy, widening formation of opposing magnets, and by the time they had gone, Blue had skidded hastily down the aisle, through the back-room doors, past the grubby bathrooms, into a warehouse room stacked with boxes and bins, and outside to where Gansey and Henry had just reached the trash bins full of cardboard behind the store.

Her shadow reached them first, cast by the lights fixed to the back of the supermarket, and they both flinched at the movement before realizing who it belonged to.

“You magical thing,” Gansey said, and hugged her head, freeing much of her hair from its clips. They were both shivering in the cold. Everything felt false and stark under this black sky, with Laumonier’s two faces still in her memory. She heard car doors shutting, maybe from the front parking lot, every sound both far and close in the night.

“That was brilliant.” Henry held his hand above his head, palm to the sky. An insect swirled from it, momentarily lit dark by the streetlights, and then lost to the blackness. He watched it go and then fished out his phone.

Blue demanded, “What did they want? Why did Mr Gray think they would be interested in you?”

Henry watched a text feed scroll across the face of his phone. “RoboBee – did Gansey Boy tell you what it was? Good – RoboBee was one of the first things Laumonier and Greenmantle fought about. Lynch was talking about selling it to one of them but sold it to my mother instead because she wanted it for me; she never forgot that; that is why they hate her and she hates them.”

“But Laumonier isn’t here for you, right?” Gansey asked. He, too, was reading Henry’s phone screen. It seemed to be reporting back where Laumonier was.

“No, no,” said Henry. “I would bet they recognized your man Gray’s car from the old days and came to see if there was anything to be had from Kavinsky while they were down here. I do not pretend to know the ways of the French. I do not know if they would still recognize me from that hole in the ground; I’m older now. But still. Your assassin man seemed to think they might. He did me a favour. I will not forget that.”

He turned the phone around so that Blue could watch the live reporting of Laumonier’s actions. The text came in fits and starts, and was strangely conversational, describing Laumonier’s slow progress out of the parking lot in the same way that Henry had described the upcoming artefact sale. Henry’s thoughts, on screen. It was a weird and specific magic.

As they watched it together, Gansey opened up his overcoat and tucked Blue inside it with him. This, too, was a weird and specific magic, the ease of it, the warmth of him around her, his heartbeat thumping against her back. He cupped a hand over her injured eye as if to protect it from something, but it was only an excuse for his fingertips to touch her.

Henry was unaffected by this public display of closeness. He pressed fingers against the screen of his phone; it blinked a few times and reported something to him in Hangul.

“Do you want …” Blue started, and hesitated. “Should you stay with one of us tonight?”

Surprise lit Henry’s smile, but he shook his head. “No, I can’t. I must go back to Litchfield, a captain to his ship. I wouldn’t forgive myself if they came looking for me and found Cheng Two and the others instead. I will set RoboBee watch until we can —” He circled one finger in a gesture that indicated something like a rendezvous.