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He drifted off again, and now Ronan was suddenly and fiercely reminded of praying. Not praying in a church, with a congregation, out loud, or reciting a memorized prayer. But instead the kind of praying he’d done when he was alone. Exhausted. Confused. Those prayers often faded into ellipses as he wondered if there was anyone on the other side of the line.
“Do you remember when I asked you what you’d do if you accidentally dreamt another me?” Adam asked abruptly. “I thought about it a lot after that. What I’d do to that other Adam. Would I let him live my life with me, like Hennessy? Would I kill him before he could kill me? But you know what I got to thinking? That copy exists. I made him. I am him. There’s a real version of me that stayed with you, I guess, that went out to Lindenmere every day and just learned everything he could about the ley line, about the something else. Or maybe who went with Gansey and Blue. Or who went to school in DC
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“I lie to all of them. I lie to Gansey. I lie to Blue. I lie to my professors. It’s like I can’t stop. It’s like I, it’s like … I don’t want this version to have anything the other version had, good or bad. So any time I need a past, I just make something up. New parents, new house, new memories, new reasons for how I lost my hearing, new me. I don’t know what I’m doing anymore. Shit. You were, like, the place I stored all the reality in. Then I had to start lying about you, too, and it just all, it just all …”
“I don’t know if I hate it here or if I hate that I don’t love it. I was supposed to love it. But I want to go—I think about it every day, just getting on the bike and going, and going, but where?” He wasn’t crying, but he quickly rubbed the back of his hand against one eye. “Anyhow, so I can’t blame you that you lied to yourself about dreaming Bryde. ’Cause I made this fake version of me, right, and I was wide awake when I did it. We’re both liars. I don’t know what to do. I miss …” He closed his eyes. “I miss knowing where I was going.”
Tamquam, Ronan thought, furious that Adam was upset, euphoric that he’d come back. It hadn’t been that long before this that he’d been wanting to know what emotions felt like, and now he had all of them at once. Just before the door closed behind him, Adam said to the dark, “Alter idem.”
Love was what Mór called Niall. It always sounded a little like it was the first time she’d said the word.
Marie Lynch, Niall’s mother. She was the sort of species that was only dangerous to a very few, and usually only those related by blood.
He did not struggle. He just looked at his parents with an expression heavy for a toddler, a sort of weary look that seemed to imply that he had known the world was perilous and now look.
They had not seen Niall’s mother since they’d left Ireland. She was not the only reason why they’d left, but she was one of the big three, particularly after Niall’s father had died (vodka rinsing him away over time like the letters on a sign). Did Niall love her? Did Niall hate her? He had hoped to never see her again, which wasn’t as conclusive an answer to those questions as one would think. She was one of those intimate villains, one of those species that was both poisonous and necessary to those susceptible. Too much of her would undoubtedly kill Niall Lynch, but too little might, too.
“It doesn’t bring me any joy at all to see you here, living in sin with that woman, already being against God in your own way, but you know I tolerate it, because you’re my son, and who else will?
“It would be nice for some affection, some gratitude, some family. Some acknowledgment I’m here, even with your old father in the grave, trying to see how you are.” “Acknowledgment,” Mór echoed. “Just say ‘money.’ ”
The federal contacts had been less useful than she’d expected; apparently the Moderators had been handed off to the Drug Enforcement Administration by way of Homeland Security, by way of the CIA. No one wanted to claim them officially, but no one wanted to disband them, either.
I think I have just grown used to choosing the option that keeps me alive. You choose the option you think is morally right. I would rather we try to live like you.”
Hennessy could be so mean and clever when she spoke; with her art, she was just clever.
Her job was keeping herself awake, and she worked hard at it. None of the portraits around her were sweetmetals, but it didn’t seem to matter. The process of trying for sweetmetals was what kept her awake.
“I want to be happy,” Declan said, in a matter-of-fact tone. “I’m tired of feeling guilty. I want to take you to dinner, and then I want to go to Schnee’s opening.” She made a face. “Schnee! What an asshole. I don’t want to go to his opening. I’m not putting on fake eyelashes for that.” “And then,” Declan continued, as if she had not interjected, “I want to make an enormous scene proposing very publicly to you at the afterparty, so it completely overshadows his opening.”
He’d been a joyless and relentless serial dater in high school and in DC, the invisible man with the invisible girlfriend. To marry someone, you had to be visible to at least one person, a choice Declan was unwilling to make.
It was not the life Declan had claimed to want all through his teen years, but that didn’t really matter: Declan had been a liar back then.
He thought of the life he had thought he wanted. He wondered what he wanted now.
It was the sort of frown that did not seem for her but rather about her.
Hennessy had split her life right down the middle to make room for Jordan. If Jordan deserved to have her own life separate from Hennessy, then didn’t that mean Hennessy deserved one separate from Jordan, too?
“Discretion,” Jo Fisher said coolly, “is one of the traits that Boudicca appreciates, and it’s impossible to imagine an associate without it.” “Something else, then. Something worse. Or something better. Interesting,” said Hennessy. “And I’m not an associate yet, Jo Fisher. I hate to be discreet for free.
Boudicca’s most valuable sweetmetal was a huge painting called Jordan in White, of an intense little dark-skinned girl posed in a white slip. “What’s so funny?” asked Jo Fisher. “I don’t need your deal,” Hennessy said. “Because I painted that.”
Her world had already ended. Jordan had left her.
Hennessy had visited caper after caper on Jordan to try to make sure she never, ever left. When pain and anguish were lifted from Jordan’s shoulders, she made a new life. When pain and anguish were lifted from Hennessy’s, there was nothing of her left. She was nothing but the shit other people stepped in.
Jordan was always trying to make herself better, and Hennessy was always trying to keep from being unhappy. Jordan was succeeding at her task and Hennessy was drowning.
Jordan had escaped her, and Hennessy was glad for her.
That was when Matthew punched him. It amazed him, the punch. Not the shape of the blow. Niall had taught all the boys to box when they were much younger, and although Matthew hadn’t used this knowledge since then, it turned out his hands and arms and shoulders still remembered it in some deep, subconscious way. No, what amazed Matthew about the punch was the fact that it appeared at all. The fact that his hand made a fist and the fist took a journey and the journey ended on Declan’s face.
For the past several years, Matthew had always felt like the bridge between two buildings—one burning, one standing tall.
Now Matthew thought that maybe he’d mislabeled the brothers. Maybe it wasn’t Ronan who’d been the burning building.
He hasn’t felt like himself for months, but he is going to be just fine.
Adam understands that suffering is often transient, even when it feels permanent. This too shall pass, etc. Although college seems like a lifetime, it is only four years.
Magic has not always been good for Adam. During high school, he frequently immersed himself in it as a form of avoidance. Deep down, he fears that he is prone to it as his father is prone to abuse, and that it will eventually make him unsuitable for society. By depriving himself of magic, he forces himself to become someone valuable to the unmagic world, i.e., the Crying Club.
Although life is unbearable now, and Adam Parrish seems to have lost everything important to him in the present by pursuing the things important to him in the past, he will be fine.
Adam had come for him. All this way. He had not given up. He had risked everything.
“Are you …” Adam hesitated and then said, very softly, “… the Lace?” Ronan had not expected this answer. Energy exploded from him, conveying his bewilderment and hurt. Adam flinched. He was afraid. He was afraid of Ronan.
Tamquam, said Ronan, and Adam said, Alter idem. Cicero had written the phrase about Atticus, his dearest friend. Qui est tamquam alter idem. Like a second self.
You of all people should know how appealing it is for someone else to have a plan.
“But what could we do for powerful people in high places?” “Become them. The Forest says it could help. Did it tell you that, too?” It had, but Niall hadn’t been paying it any heed. The Forest had sounded a little too eager, which made him nervous. The look in Mór’s eyes made him nervous, too, but he couldn’t ignore her like he ignored the Forest. He didn’t want her to grow bored of him or the Barns. So he nodded and asked her to tell him more. This was what the thing in the Forest had been saying to them lately: more.
Whose dream was this? Were they dreaming of the thing in the Forest, or was it dreaming of them?
At first, Declan had hated Matthew.
Matthew was a mistake: a dream that managed to slip out of Ronan’s head, despite Declan’s best efforts to prevent it. Matthew was also a usurper, a brother dreamt to be a better companion to Ronan than Declan.
There was Aurora on one side, Declan on the other, and Matthew could have chosen either, but he held up his hand for Declan instead. He did not question that Declan would want to keep him secure; he just assumed that he would.
At that moment Declan understood that Matthew was unlike any of the other Lynches. The rest of Declan’s family members were knotted with secrets, memories, lives experienced behind masks. Matthew might have been a dream, but nothing about him was pretend. Matthew was the truth.
Part of Declan had always thought it would end this way. This was the fruit that grew from the seeds his father planted. Declan had tried so hard to make the crop something else, to make the outcome not simply Declan Lynch, a man who used to have a family, but it was always meant to be this. He was a hardier strain than the other Lynches, for better or worse, and so he went on as the rest of the orchard perished around him. He had been preparing to be the last man standing his entire life.
“You were right. I was wrong. I fucked up. I fucked it all up. Here is the situation. Bryde said I wasn’t keeping you from danger, I was keeping you from being dangerous. I don’t think— No. I was. That is true. What he said was true. I have been holding you back your entire life because I was afraid. I have been scared shitless every time you fell asleep since I was a kid, and I have been stopping you whenever I can. Not anymore. I am going to New York and I’m going to get a sweetmetal strong enough to wake you up.”
“Find whoever killed him, Ronan,” Declan told him. “Find whoever killed Matthew and make sure they are never happy ever again.” He and his brother never hugged, but Declan put his hand on Ronan’s warm skull for a second. Declan said, “Be dangerous.”
“It was always going to be this way,” he said blandly. “Jordan, it was always going to be this way. Our story was always a tragedy.” “Pozzi, it wasn’t,” she said. “Not yours,” Declan said. “The Lynch family’s. The Lynch brothers’. It was written before I was born.”
Why am I like this? Ronan prayed when he arrived at church, knees aching on the kneeler. Show me a sign of what I’m supposed to do with myself. God had not yet answered, but Ronan respected the reticence. Fathers were not always there. They had other things to do.
Horribly, Ronan was beginning to understand the sound he’d heard had been Adam’s scream. The rasp in it grew worse every time he recalled it. And he did recall it. Over and over and over, as if punishing himself with the sound could erase his guilt. Matthew, dead. Adam, lost.
