Greywaren, page 6
“They have wings like tapestry cloth. Next time you see one, look up close, as close as you can get. But don’t touch,” Declan said. “I wanted to touch it, but Dad always told me no. If you touch a moth’s wings, he told me, it’ll knock off the fur, and then they can’t fly. But to see the moth is to want to touch it, Matthew. You want to feel that green-white color.”
“Mmmm,” Matthew said, soothed by the story. His eyes were half-lidded as if he, too, were imagining the moth. Ahead, brake lights flashed, but only to demonstrate their irritation, not to indicate a change in traffic status.
Can we make a home for it? Declan had asked Niall. A box? To keep it safe?
It’ll flap around in there, Niall had replied. Moths want to fly. It’s not meant to live long. It’s just meant to get out there and do its mothy thing and get eaten or fly into the sun, that’s what moths do. I don’t think this one’ll even eat, has it even got a mouth?
Tears had gathered in Declan’s eyes, against his will, either because of the futility of the moth’s brief existence or just because of how beautiful it was, and Niall had said quickly, If it’s got glass on the front of the box, sure, it’ll be able to see out and nothing can get in. If that’s what you really want.
“Dad made the moth a little box. With his hands, not his dreams,” Declan said. That had seemed important at the time, that Niall had sworn and sanded and pounded out in the work shed instead of slipping into a dream. Now, for some reason, Declan’s insistence that it be a real box instead of a dreamt one made his eyes burn again, years later. He wished he could take that part back. “So I could carry it with me when I wanted, so I could have it and look at it.”
How the moth had beaten against the walls for those first few days, until it learned it could not escape. And then, when Niall had died, it had of course fallen asleep, and it didn’t know whether it was in a box or free anyway.
“Do you still have it?” Matthew asked.
“I used it to test your pendant. I could show it to you when we get home, if you want,” Declan said, although he didn’t want to make the offer. A third dream tugging on the sweetmetal. How many could he carry? It. How many could it carry?
“Oh no! Declan!” Matthew exclaimed.
He’d twisted to look in the backseat. In the dim light, Ronan was positioned just as before, but one thing had changed: a thin trail of black had begun to trickle from one of his eyes.
Nightwash.
So many days Ronan had come to visit Declan and Matthew at the DC town house, only to be driven from the city—which wasn’t close to a ley line—by an onslaught of nightwash. The rules of nightwash were myriad and ever more severe. Ronan had to manifest dreams, or the nightwash began. He had to return to a ley line often, or the nightwash began. He had to manifest more and more dreams, or the nightwash began. He had to stay on a ley line, or the nightwash began.
Now Ronan was breaking both of these rules. He could not bring a dream back if he could not wake up. And there was no ley line to return to, just Matthew’s ever-weakening sweetmetal.
“No,” repeated Matthew.
In the backseat, a second string of nightwash trickled to match the first. Ronan didn’t stir. The traffic didn’t stir. His self-destruction was the only moving piece.
This, Declan realized, was why Bryde had been stealing that Klimt.
A world-famous sweetmetal, because an ordinary one wouldn’t do the trick. The bottomless abyss needed more, more, more.
No more, Declan thought. No more.
Matthew was trembling. His knuckles were white. His fingers pressed into his temples hard enough that Declan could see his nails digging red moons into his skin. A little sound was escaping him. His eyes were glassy. Once, not long after Ronan had given Declan the ORBMASTER, Ronan’s nightwash had gotten so bad that even his dreams had started to ooze black. Including Matthew. He wasn’t oozing nightwash now, but it was clear he remembered it.
“Matthew, calm down,” Declan said. “We’ll manage it.”
“No,” said Matthew. The sound reverberated inside the car. “No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No.”
Everyone has their max capacity, a man had once told Declan. The man was not Declan’s father but rather one of a variety of men Declan had combined into a parental scarecrow in the final years of his teenhood. These men were teachers, counselors, employers, acquaintances, small appliance technicians, pediatricians, dentists, librarians. They loved giving advice. They took him aside at parties to deliver it. Frowned and doled it out over the coffee machine in the break room. Emailed it to him with subject lines like “thinking more about our convo.” Declan was always meeting people more excited about giving him practical skills than Niall Lynch.
When people hit their max capacity, this man had told Declan, considering the pens in his drawer and selecting the most worthy specimen as his weapon, they get pegged there. Yeah, you don’t want to mistake almost max for actual max. People can get close and still pull themselves back together. Someone who’s truly at max capacity, though—it doesn’t matter if the pressure comes off, even a little bit. The accelerator’s already mashed on their breakdown. They might look fine, but they aren’t. Very next thing that happens, no matter how little: Snap! That’s when you make your move.
Declan couldn’t remember if this guy had been talking about business or politics or dating. He just remembered the phrase. Max capacity.
“No. No. No. No.” Matthew kept saying it the same way over and over again, the timing and inflection identical each time, the volume the only thing changing. “No. No. No. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO! NO! NO!”
Matthew had hit max capacity. No longer sounding at all human. Just sounding like a thing, like a ceaseless, mindless alarm, triggered by disaster.
Declan didn’t think—he just ripped the swan pendant right from Matthew’s neck.
It was as if his hand knew exactly where to grab it to make sure his fingers would snag the cord, and then jerk it so that the clasp snapped.
Matthew didn’t have time to react before Declan threw open the car door and scrambled into the noisy tunnel. He backed one, two, three steps, up to the wall before he paused to see if he was far enough. His heart was pounding. Everything stank of toxic exhaust and dead fish.
“Declan?” Matthew said.
Through the open car door, Declan saw his brother peering at him. He hadn’t moved an inch to counteract the theft; no part of him had suspected Declan might take the pendant from him.
The bewilderment on his face was complete as his eyes dimmed. His head nodded. He had lost the fight against this particular foe so often that he knew better than to struggle. Instead, he leaned against the shoulder of his seat, his gaze still on Declan. With a shuddering sigh, he closed his eyes—and fell asleep.
Declan stood against the humid edge of the tunnel, feeling the rumbling of all the waiting vehicles through his feet. He told himself that if he didn’t preserve the sweetmetal, he’d be the only Lynch brother left. He told himself Matthew wouldn’t have handed it over willingly. He told himself he was doing what had to be done.
But it felt like now he’d betrayed both his brothers.
No more, he thought.
But there was always more.
Aware of the eyes of other drivers on him, he turned to the wall and pretended to throw up. Then he wiped his mouth, went to the trunk, and tucked the sweetmetal in the very furthest corner from the passenger seat. He made a big show of retrieving a bottle of water, as if that had been the reason for opening the trunk in the first place.
Then he returned to the silent car.
His two brothers slept.
His phones had stopped ringing. He wished they hadn’t. He would have loved to snatch one up just then, to solve some other problem that was solvable, to cross something off a list. But he knew better. Problems solved in the heat of the moment were rarely actually solved—that was why he had a job.
So instead he breathed through his mouth a dozen or so times, leaned across Matthew’s quiet form to get an antacid out of the glove box, and took several with his bottle of water. He wiped down the top of his steering column, which had gathered dust. He scrolled through vandalized photos Jordan had texted him of The Kiss with her face subbed in for the woman’s. Only then, after his stomach had stopped hurting, did he navigate through his contacts so that he could start once more to make a plan, to execute it, to handle it.
The car was so, so quiet.
Declan stared out the window at the stagnant traffic. He wasn’t going anywhere. No point fighting it. He placed a call.
As soon as he heard it pick up, he said, “I need your help.”
How did you know this place existed?”
“Lucky guess.”
“You must have a lot of luck.”
“I do a lot of guessing.”
Ronan had been drawn into the waking world again.
It was impossible to tell if he was indoors or out. The only light came from a phone’s flashlight function; it illuminated Ronan’s slack body and not much else. As before, his consciousness floated above his physical form, and he found, now, that he was quite sentimental about his human body. Look at that poor asshole lying on that packed dirt, look how lovingly tattooed his skin was, each mark a small confirmation that even though it felt like he hated his life and his body, deep down, he wanted to keep it, to redecorate the place to his own liking.
Black trails oozed from his body’s eyes, nose, ears.
From this vantage point, Ronan understood the nightwash in a way he hadn’t before. It wasn’t caused by an absence of ley line energy, but rather by an excess of the human world’s energy. The two energies existed in balance, one pushing against the other. That body down there had been built for a world with a different atmosphere, one pressurized with magic. Without it, this world would slowly kill him. It was neither good nor bad. It was simply a side effect of being him here.
The flashlight swung around to illuminate the space, revealing a claustrophobic windowless corridor. One wall was brick with a skeleton of naked framing. The other close wall was cinder block, painted heavily with colors nearly bright enough to pierce the dark. Directly behind Ronan were colorful scales, claws, a twisting tail, but the bigger picture remained hidden.
Ronan recognized that this was the sweetmetal that had brought him here. A mural. The entire wall behind his prone body felt alive with its energy. For the moment, it held the nightwash at bay.
“Why is it bricked up like this?” the first voice asked. Declan. Ronan recognized him now.
“What’s that?”
“What’s what?”
“Sorry, I’m deaf in this ear. What did you say?”
The flashlight swung to point at the second speaker. His features were gaunt and exaggerated, like a drawing of a young man rather than an actual young man. His long, knobby fingers touched one of his ears, an unconscious gesture. He was dressed very stylishly for a dusty cubby hole, in pressed cotton and smooth wool, but his dusty hair was cut jaggedly.
Elation overtook Ronan.
Even before he put a name to the face, he was overwhelmed with a single thought: It is going to be okay.
The second voice belonged to Adam Parrish.
Declan asked, “Why is there this double-wall situation?”
“I reckon …” Adam stopped, then restarted with less of a Virginian accent. “I suppose they did it when they were building that addition upstairs. Needed a bigger footprint to support it. So this was an exterior wall, but now that’s the new exterior wall. The painting—mural—would have originally faced the street.”
Memories were surfacing of a slightly different version of Adam, a younger one, a less polished one. Images, bright as sweetmetals, came to him. Aglionby Academy, an unloved trailer, a bare apartment, an abandoned Virginia warehouse, the slanting, long fields of the Barns. Midnight drives, anxious journeys into pitch-black caves, charged glances over school desks, knuckles pressed against mouths, tight hugs goodbye.
Ronan’s elation was giving way to something more complex. He was beginning to remember that things had ended poorly between them. Part of him wanted to blame Adam—he remembered feeling misunderstood, ill-used—but most of him understood that the unpleasantness had been all Ronan’s doing. Whatever future that spiky, vibrant past had been building to was no longer an option.
“Do you have any idea why he’s sleeping?” Adam asked. He glanced at the body and then away. Ronan saw now that he was as far from it as he could possibly get, his own body turned as if he were already leaving.
Unlike Adam, Declan didn’t flinch from the reality of Ronan’s failing body, although his expression was grim. He leaned forward quickly to wipe the nightwash from Ronan’s face with the bent-over cuff of his jacket. “I was hoping you would know. My father can’t have dreamt him. He would have needed a sweetmetal all this time.”
Adam worried a finger at the sewn edge of his pants pocket; there was not a hole there, but it was a place holes liked to appear. Ronan noticed Adam’s watch then. For the first time, he was able to pull up a memory as easily as he had when he was wearing his physical body. He’d dreamt that watch for Adam when he left for Harvard. It was the closest he could come to a love letter; the language of affection had never felt right to Ronan. Clumsy. Overblown. False. Ronan speaking the language of another country, vocabulary learned from watching films on YouTube. But the watch—the watch told the time for whatever time zone Ronan was in, and it said exactly what Ronan meant to say.
Think of where I am, it said. Think of me.
Currently, the watch’s hands were motionless.
Adam still wasn’t really looking at Ronan. “Where is Chainsaw, by the way?”
“Farooq-Lane didn’t mention a bird,” Declan replied.
“Ronan will be pissed if something happened to her.”
Declan retorted something about how Ronan wasn’t in a position to make further demands on his time, but Ronan tuned it out and instead let himself repopulate his memories around Chainsaw. Wings, talons. Trees. Cabeswater. Lindenmere. Opal. The words and images attached to the dreamt raven came in quickly. Soon, he thought, he’d have them all. He’d be Ronan Lynch again.
He just needed to wake up.
Somehow.
“I’m going to give you the key to this place,” Adam said to Declan. “Just come when no one is in the shop and you’ll be fine.”
“How often do you have work here?”
Adam shook his head. “Oh, no. I can’t do that. I’m not going to … I showed you this place, but I can’t be the, like, I can’t come here and …”
Declan’s tone turned cool and businesslike. “He was going to move here for you.”
The two of them faced each other, a clear divide between them. On one side was the land of adulthood, where Declan lived, his expression weighted with disappointment and judgment. On the other was the nebulous country that contained everything before adulthood, and that was where Adam remained, his eyebrows drawn together uncertainly, once again glancing toward Ronan and away.
“Look,” said Adam, “Ronan chose his side. It wasn’t me.”
This struck Ronan as profoundly unfair. The world had chosen for him. The black smudge all over Declan’s sleeve was proof of it. Left to his own devices, Ronan had chosen Adam, he was sure he’d chosen Adam. Hadn’t he come to Cambridge, even though he hated cities, even though he loved the Barns? Hadn’t he played cards with Adam’s new Harvard friends, even though he hated them? Hadn’t he had a list of apartments he was going to look at, hadn’t he tried?
“Ronan wasn’t himself,” Declan said. “He was under the influence of Bryde.”
Adam’s tone was the dry, rueful one Ronan knew well. “He gets into trouble in school, you ask Gansey to fix it. Gets into trouble here, you blame Bryde. If anything, Bryde’s his victim. He was doing what he was made to do.”
Declan made a face. “Dreams are their own people. They can make their own choices.”
“Too bad Ronan’s not awake to hear you say that,” Adam said. “There was a time it would’ve meant a lot to hear you say it.”
What bitter fights Ronan and Declan had had over their mother Aurora’s sleeping form. How much bad blood underneath that bridge. How many frenzied night drives Ronan had taken, trying to outrun his brother’s factually presented arguments: Aurora was nothing without Niall, which meant that she’d been nothing with him, too. How many days with her had Ronan lost by Declan using everything he had to minimize her as a person instead of digging deep enough into the world of dreams to discover the existence of sweetmetals. What if, what if, what if?
Declan had the good grace to appear pained. He said, “At least I’m showing up now.”
“Yeah, I guess,” Adam admitted. He glanced again at Ronan, visibly warring with himself, and finally, crossed the corridor to him. Crouching, he undid the band of his dreamt watch. Ronan understood at once what was happening.
No.
He laid the useless watch on top of Ronan’s wrist.
No.
He fastened the band, checking to make sure it wasn’t too tight on Ronan’s wrist.
No.
Gently, out of the view of Declan, Adam subtly traced his fingers over Ronan’s scarred wrist, the back of his hand. He swallowed. This was goodbye.
Ronan felt a new emotion: misery.
Adam, no.
Adam suddenly leaned in very close to Ronan’s slumped body. His lips were right on Ronan’s ear. In this close space, even a whisper was audible to Declan, but his words were just for Ronan.
“Post tenebras lux,” he whispered.
Light follows darkness.
Adam added, “Tamquam …”
Alter idem, Ronan thought. But he had no voice. The body lying slumped in this corridor was the one who had a voice, and it couldn’t wake up to say anything.
So Adam drew back uncontested. He gave Declan the key.
For some reason, a clear memory, unattached to anything else, returned to Ronan. A plain wooden mask, with round eye holes and gaping mouth. It was not a horrific mask, but it felt horrific to look at nonetheless.
