Henry pressed his finger to the screen again, and the bee lifted back into the air, buzzing on to his shoulder.
Gansey said, “You didn’t say anything that time.”
“No, I don’t have to say anything. It reads my thoughts through my fingerprint,” Henry said. He didn’t look up from the screen as he said this, but Gansey could see in the light that he was gauging Gansey’s reaction. “So I just tell it what to do and – whoosh! – off it goes, thank you, thank you, little bee.”
Henry held his hand out and the bee whirred into it like a mobile blossom; the light extinguished. He tucked it back into his pocket. It was impossible, of course, and Henry was waiting for Gansey to say it was impossible. This was why it was secret, because it couldn’t exist.
The net looped down around Gansey; he felt it.
“Your parents make robotic bees,” he started carefully.
“My father. My father’s company, yes.” There was a line drawn there, though Gansey didn’t understand it.
“And it makes bees like this.” Gansey did not try to make it sound like he believed it.
“Gansey Boy, I think we have to decide if we trust each other or not,” Henry said. “I think this is the moment in our young friendship.”
Gansey considered his words, “But trusting someone and confiding in them are not the same thing.”
Henry laughed approvingly. “No. But I have already both trusted in you and confided in you. I have kept the secret of what you had in the back of your SUV and the secret of Adam Parrish not getting killed by those roof tiles. That is trust. And I have confided in you: I showed you RoboBee.”
All of this was true. But Gansey knew enough people with secrets to not be dazzled into easily using them as currency. And so much of what Gansey lived with now put other people’s lives on the line, not just his own. That was a lot of trust for a toga party and a hole in the ground. He said, “There’s a psychological principle that car salesmen use. They buy you a drink from a Coke machine with their own money, and then you feel obligated to buy a car from them.”
There was humour in Henry’s voice. “Are you saying your secrets are to my secrets as an automobile is to a carbonated beverage?”
Now there was humour in Gansey’s. “Your father’s company didn’t build that bee, did it?”
“No.”
He might as well get it over with. “What do you want me to say? The word magic?”
“You’ve seen magic like my RoboBee before,” Henry said. “That’s not the same sort of magic as watching Parrish deflect a ton of slate. Where have you seen this kind of magic?”
Gansey couldn’t. “That’s not my secret.”
Henry said, “I’ll spare you the agony; I know it. Declan Lynch. He sold my mother two of them.”
This was so unexpected that Gansey was glad they were in total dark again; he was sure the shock had made it to his face. He struggled to piece this information together. Declan – so this bee was Niall’s work. If Henry’s mother was a client, did that mean Declan was selling to people at the school? Surely Declan wasn’t that stupid. “How did your mother know to buy them? Did you tell her about them?”
“You have it backwards. She doesn’t know because I’m here. I’m here because she knows. Don’t you see? I am her excuse. She visits me. Buys something from Declan Lynch. Back she goes. No one the wiser. Ah! I have wanted to say this out loud for two years. They fester, secrets.”
“Your mother sent you to Aglionby just so she could have a cover for when she does business with Declan?” Gansey asked.
“Magical artefacts, bro. Big business. Scary business. Good way to get yourself kneecapped. Or killed like our man Kavinsky.”
Gansey was going to choke on revelations. “She did business with him?”
“No way. He only dealt drugs, but she said they were magic, too. And come on. You were at that Fourth of July party this year. Explain the dragons.”
“I can’t,” Gansey said. “We both know.”
“Yes, we do,” Henry said, satisfied. “Once, he nearly killed Cheng Two for the fun of it. He was the worst.”
Gansey leaned back against the dusty wall.
“Are you collapsing? Are you fine? I thought we were conversing.”
They were conversing, just not in any way that Gansey had anticipated. He had spoken to plenty of uncanny people in his pursuit of Glendower. In many ways, his travels were defined not by cities or countries travelled between, but people and phenomena. The difference was that Gansey had gone looking for them. They had never come looking for him. He had never really met anyone else like himself, and even though Henry was far from Gansey’s twin, he was the closest that Gansey had yet found.
He hadn’t realized the loneliness of this belief until it was tested. He asked, “Are there any other magical people at Aglionby I should know about?”
“Other than the ones who run with you? No one that I know. I’ve been trying to get your number for a year.”
“It’s in the student directory.”
“No, you fool. Idiomatically. Get. Your. Number. See if you were a creeper like K or not. Get. Your. Number. Who here is English as a second language? Hint, not you.”
Gansey laughed, then he laughed some more. He felt he’d gone through every emotion known to man in the last few days.
“I’m not a creeper,” he said. “I’m just a guy looking for a king. You said your mother bought two of those things. Where’s the other?”