When Blue knocked on the door of Monmouth Manufacturing after school, Ronan answered the door.

“You guys weren’t waiting outside,” Blue said, feeling a little self-conscious. After all this time, she’d never been inside, and she felt a little like a trespasser merely by standing in the decrepit stairwell. “I thought maybe you weren’t here.”

“Gansey’s partying with his mother,” Ronan said. He smelled like beer. “And Noah’s fucking dead. But Parrish is here.”

“Ronan, let her in,” Adam said. He appeared at Ronan’s shoulder. “Hey, Blue. You’ve never been up before, have you?”

“Yeah. Should I not —”

“No, come —”

There was a bit of a fumble and then Blue was inside and the door was shut behind her and both of the boys were watching her reaction carefully.

Blue gazed around the second floor. It looked like the home of a mad inventor or an obsessed scholar or a very messy explorer; after meeting Gansey, she was beginning to suspect that he was all of these things. She said, “What’s the downstairs look like?”

“Dust,” Adam replied. He used his foot to discreetly move a pair of dirty jeans, boxers still tucked inside them, out of Blue’s direct line of sight. “And concrete. And more dust. And dirt.”

“Also,” said Ronan, moving off toward a pair of doors at the other end of the floor, “dust.”

For a moment, Ronan and Adam craned their necks, looking around the spread-out space as if they, too, were seeing it for the first time. The vast room, painted red with afternoon sun through the dozens of windowpanes, was beautiful and cluttered. It reminded Blue of the feeling she had when she had first seen Gansey’s journal.

For the first time in days, she thought about the vision of his fingers resting on her face.

Blue, kiss me.

For one half of a breath, Blue closed her eyes to reset her thoughts.

“I have to feed Chainsaw,” Ronan said, a sentence that made absolutely no sense to Blue. He disappeared into the tiny office and shut the door behind himself. An inhuman squawking noise emitted from within, which Adam didn’t comment on.

“We’re not doing anything today, obviously,” Adam said. “Do you want to hang out?”

Blue looked around for a couch. It would be easier to hang out with a couch. There was an unmade bed in the middle of the room, a very expensive-looking leather armchair (the sort with glossy brass bolts holding the leather in place) situated in front of one of the floor-to-ceiling windows, and a desk chair with papers scattered across it. No couch.

“Has Noah —?”

Adam shook his head.

Blue sighed. Maybe, she thought, Adam was right about Noah’s body. Maybe moving it off the ley line had stolen his energy.

“Is he here?” she asked.

“It feels like it. I don’t know.”

To the empty air, she said, “You can use my energy, Noah. If that’s what you need.”

Adam’s expression was enigmatic. “That’s brave of you.”

She didn’t think so; if it was something that she needed to be brave about, she was certain her mother wouldn’t have her along to the church watch. “I like to be useful. So, do you live here, too?”

Adam shook his head, his eyes on the spread of Henrietta outside the windows. “Gansey would like me to. He likes all of his things in one place.” His voice was a little bitter, and after a pause, he added, “I shouldn’t say things like that. He doesn’t mean it badly. And we’re — it’s just, this place is Gansey’s. Everything in it is Gansey’s. I need to be an equal, and I can’t be, living here.”

“Where do you live?”

Adam’s mouth was very set. “A place made for leaving.”

“That’s not really an answer.”

“It’s not really a place.”

“And it would be terrible to live here?” She leaned her head back to gaze at the ceiling far above. The entire place smelled dusty, but in the good, old way of a library or a museum.

“Yes,” Adam replied. “When I get out on my own, it will be to someplace I made myself.”

“And that’s why you go to Aglionby.”

He leveled that gaze on her. “And that’s why I go to Aglionby.”

“Even though you’re not rich.”

He hesitated.

“Adam, I don’t care,” Blue said. Parsed on the most basic level, it wasn’t really the most gutsy sentence ever said, but it felt gutsy to Blue when she said it. “I know other people do, but I don’t.”

He made a little face, and then inclined his head in the slightest of nods. “Even though I’m not rich.”

“True confession —” Blue said. “I’m not rich, either.”

Adam laughed out loud at that, and she discovered that she was starting to really like this laugh that burst out of him and seemed to surprise him every time. She was a little scared of the knowledge that she was starting to like it.

He said, “Oh. Hey. Come over here. You’ll like this.”

The floor creaking under him, he led the way past the desk to the windows on the far side. Blue felt a sense of dizzying height here; these massive old factory windows began only a few inches above the old wide floorboards, and the first floor was much taller than the first floor of her house. Crouching, Adam began pawing through a row of cardboard file boxes that were shoved against the windows.

Eventually he dragged one of the boxes a few inches from the window and gestured for Blue to sit beside him. She did. Adam readjusted his posture so that he was more settled; his knee bone pressed against Blue’s. He was not looking at her, but there was something about his posture that betrayed his awareness of her. She swallowed.

“These are things that Gansey’s found,” Adam said. “Things not cool enough for museums, or things they couldn’t prove were old, or things he didn’t want to give away.”

“In this box?” Blue asked.

“In all the boxes. This is the Virginia box.” He tipped it enough that the contents spilled between them, along with a prodigious quantity of dirt.

“Virginia box, huh? What are the other boxes?”

There was something of a little boy in his smile. “Wales and Peru and Australia and Montana and other strange places.”

Blue took a forked stick from the pile. “Is this another dowsing rod?” Though she had never used one, she knew some psychics used them as a tool to focus their intuition and to lead them in the direction of lost items, or dead bodies, or hidden bodies of water. A low-tech version of Gansey’s fancy EMF reader.

“I guess. Might just be a stick.” Adam showed her an old Roman coin. She used it to scrape some ages-old dust off a tiny sculpted stone dog. The dog was missing a back leg; the jagged wound revealed stone lighter than the rest of the grubby surface.

“He looks a little hungry,” Blue commented. The stylized dog sculpture reminded her of the raven carved into the side of the hill — head bent back, body elongated.

Adam picked up a stone with a hole in it and looked at her through it. The shape of it perfectly covered the last remnants of his bruise.

Blue selected a matching stone and looked at him through its matching hole. One side of his face was red with the afternoon light. “Why are these in the box?”

“Water bored these holes,” Adam said. “Seawater. But he found them in the mountains. I think he said they matched some of the stones he found in the UK.”

He was still looking at her through the hole, the stone making a strange eyeglass. She watched his throat move, and then, he reached out and touched her face.

“You sure are pretty,” he said.

“It’s the stone,” she replied immediately. Her skin felt warm; his fingertip touched just the very edge of her mouth. “It’s very flattering.”

Adam gently pulled the stone out of her hand and set it on the floorboards between them. Through his fingers he threaded one of the flyaway hairs by her cheek. “My mother used to say, ‘Don’t throw compliments away, so long as they’re free.’” His face was very earnest. “That one wasn’t meant to cost you anything, Blue.”

Blue plucked at the hem on her dress, but she didn’t look away from him. “I don’t know what to say when you say things like that.”

“You can tell me if you want me to keep saying them.”

She was torn by the desire to encourage him and the fear of where it would lead. “I like when you say things like that.”

Adam asked, “But what?”

“I didn’t say but.”

“You meant to. I heard it.”

She looked at his face, fragile and strange under the bruise. It was easy to read him as shy or uncertain, she thought, but he really wasn’t either. Noah was. But Adam was just quiet. He wasn’t lost for words; he was observing.

But knowing those things about him didn’t help her answer the question: Should she tell him about the danger of a kiss? It had been so much easier to tell Gansey, when it felt like it didn’t really matter. The last thing she wanted to do was to scare Adam off by tossing around phrases like true love right after she’d met him. But if she didn’t say anything, there was a chance that he might steal a kiss and then they’d both be in trouble.

“I like it when you say those things, but — I’m afraid you’ll kiss me,” Blue admitted. Already this seemed like an untenable path to set off on. When he didn’t immediately say anything, she hurried on, “We’ve just met. And I … I’m … I’m very young.”

Halfway through, she lost her nerve to explain the prediction, but she wasn’t sure what part of her felt this was a better confession to blurt out. I’m very young. She winced.

“That seems …” Adam sought words. “Very sensible.”

The precise adjective Neeve had found for Blue that very first week. So she truly was sensible. This was distressing. She felt like she’d done so much work to appear as eccentric as possible, and still, when it came down to it, she was sensible.

Both Adam and Blue looked up at the sound of footsteps crossing the floor toward them. It was Ronan, holding something under his arm. He cautiously lowered himself until he sat cross-legged beside Adam and then sighed heavily, as if he had been part of the conversation to this point and it tired him. Blue was equal parts relieved and disappointed at his presence effectively ending any more talk about kissing.

“Do you want to hold her?” Ronan asked.

That was when Blue discovered that the thing that Ronan was holding was alive. For a brief moment, Blue was actually incapable of doing anything but contemplating the irony that one of the raven boys actually possessed a raven. By then, it was clear that Ronan had decided the answer was no.

“What are you doing?” Blue asked as he withdrew his hand. “I want to.”

She wasn’t exactly sure that she did — the raven was not quite done-looking — but it was a matter of principle. She realized, again, that she was trying to impress Ronan only because he was impossible to impress, but she comforted herself that at least all she was doing in pursuit of his approval was holding a baby bird. Ronan carefully bundled the raven into her cupped palms. The little bird felt like she weighed nothing at all, and her skin and feathers felt humid where they’d been in contact with Ronan’s hands. The raven tipped her huge head back and goggled at Blue and then Adam, beak cracked.

“What’s her name?” Blue asked. Holding her was frightening and lovely; she was such a small, tenuous little life, her pulse tapping rapidly against Blue’s skin.

Adam answered witheringly, “Chainsaw.”

The raven opened her beak wide, goggling even more than before.

“She wants you again,” Blue said, because it was clear that she did. Ronan accepted the bird and stroked the feathers on the back of her head.

“You look like a super villain with your familiar,” Adam said

Ronan’s smile cut his face, but he looked kinder than Blue had ever seen him, like the raven in his hand was his heart, finally laid bare.

They all heard a door open on the other side of the room. Adam and Blue looked at each other. Ronan ducked his head, just a little, as if he was waiting for a blow.

No one said anything as Noah settled down in the gap left between Ronan and Blue. He looked as Blue remembered him, his shoulders hunched forward and his hands restlessly moving from place to place. The ever-present smudge on his face was clearly where his cheek had been smashed in. The longer she stared at him, the more certain she became that she was at once seeing his dead body and his live one. That smudge was her brain’s way of reconciling those facts.

Adam was the first to say something.

“Noah,” he said. He lifted his fist.

After a pause, Noah bumped knuckles with him. Then he rubbed the back of his neck.

“I’m feeling better,” he said, as if he’d been ill instead of dead. The things from the box were still spread out all over the floor between them; he began to sort through them. He picked up something that looked like a carved bit of bone; it must’ve had a larger pattern on it once, but now all that was left was something that looked like the edge of an acanthus leaf and possibly some raised scrolling. Noah held it against his throat like an amulet. His eyes were averted from either of the other two boys, but his knee touched Blue’s.

“I want you to know,” Noah said, pressing the carved bone against his Adam’s apple, hard, as if it would squeeze the words from him, “I was … more … when I was alive.”

Adam chewed his lip, looking for a response. Blue thought she knew what he meant, though. Noah’s resemblance to the crookedly smiling photo on the driver’s license Gansey had discovered was akin to a photocopy’s resemblance to an original painting. She couldn’t imagine the Noah she knew driving that tricked-out Mustang.

“You’re enough now,” Blue said. “I missed you.”

With a wan smile, Noah reached over and petted Blue’s hair, just like he used to. She could barely feel his fingers.

Ronan said, “Hey, man. All those times you wouldn’t give me notes because you said I should go to my classes. You never went to classes.”

“But you did, didn’t you, Noah?” Blue interrupted, thinking of the Aglionby badge they’d found with his body. “You were an Aglionby student.”

“Are,” Noah said.

“Were,” Ronan said. “You don’t go to classes.”

“Neither do you,” Noah replied.

“And he’s about to be a were, too,” Adam broke in.

“Okay!” Blue shouted, her hands in the air. She was starting to feel a deep sensation of cold, as Noah pulled energy from her. The last thing she wanted to do was to get completely drained, like she had at the churchyard. “The police said you’d been missing seven years. Does that seem right?”

Noah blinked at her, vague and alarmed. “I don’t … I can’t …”

Blue held her hand out.

“Take it,” she said. “When I’m at readings with my mom, and she needs to get focused, she holds my hand. Maybe it will help.”

Hesitant, Noah reached out. When he laid his palm against hers, she was shocked by how chilled it was. It was not merely cold, but somehow empty as well, skin without a pulse.

Noah, please don’t die for real.

He let out a heaving sigh. “God,” he said.

And his voice sounded different from before. Now it sounded closer to the Noah she knew, the Noah who had passed as one of them. Blue knew she wasn’t the only one to notice it, because Adam and Ronan exchanged sharp glances.

She watched his chest rise and fall, his breaths becoming more even. She hadn’t really noticed, before, if he’d been breathing at all.

Noah shut his eyes. He still held the carved bone loosely in his other hand, rested palm up on his Top-Siders. “I can remember my grades, the date on them — seven years ago.”

Seven years. The police had been right. They were talking with a boy who had been dead for seven years.

“The same year Gansey was stung by hornets,” Adam said softly. Then he said, “‘You will live because of Glendower. Someone else on the ley line is dying when they should not, and so you will live when you should not.’”

“Coincidence,” Ronan said, because it wasn’t.

Noah’s eyes were still closed. “It was supposed to do something to the ley line. I don’t remember what he said it was supposed to do.”

“Wake it up,” Adam suggested.

Noah nodded, his eyelids still pressed closed. Blue’s entire arm felt chilled and numb. “Yeah, that. I didn’t care. It was always his deal, and I was just going along with him because it was something to do. I didn’t know he was going to …”

“This is the ritual Gansey was talking about,” Adam said to Ronan. “Someone did try it. With a sacrifice as the symbolic way to touch the ley line. You were the sacrifice, weren’t you, Noah? Someone killed you for this.”

“My face,” Noah said softly, and he turned his head away, pressing his ruined cheek into his shoulder. “I can’t remember when I stopped being alive.”

Blue shuddered. The late afternoon light bathing the boys and the floor was spring, but it felt like winter in her bones.

“But it didn’t work,” Ronan said.

“I almost woke up Cabeswater,” Noah whispered. “We were close enough to do that. It wasn’t for nothing. But I’m glad he never found that. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know where it is.”

Blue shivered unconsciously, a product of both Noah’s cold hand in hers and the horror of the story. She wondered if this was what it felt like for her mother and her aunts and her mother’s friends when they were doing a séance or a reading.

Do they hold hands with dead people?

She had thought dead was something more permanent, or at least something more obviously not alive. But Noah seemed unable to be either.

Ronan said, “Okay, it’s time to stop fucking around. Who did it, Noah?”

In Blue’s grip, Noah’s hand trembled.

“Seriously, man. Spill it. I’m not asking you for notes. I’m asking who smashed your head in.”

When Ronan said it, there was something angry and honorable about it, but it was an anger that included Noah, too, that somehow made him culpable.

There was humiliation in his voice when Noah answered, “We were friends.”

Adam said, rather more ferocious than he’d been a moment before, “A friend wouldn’t kill you.”

“You don’t understand,” Noah whispered. Blue was afraid that he would disappear. This, she understood, had been a secret, carried inside him for seven years, and he still didn’t want to confess it. “He was upset. He’d lost everything. If he’d been thinking straight, I don’t think he would’ve … he didn’t mean to … we were friends like — are you afraid of Gansey?”

The boys didn’t answer; they didn’t have to. Whatever Gansey was to them, it was bulletproof. Again, though, Blue saw the shame flit across Adam’s expression. Whatever had transpired between the two of them in his vision, it was still worrying at him.

“Come on, Noah. A name.” This was Ronan, head cocked, keen as his raven. “Who killed you?”

Lifting his head, Noah opened his eyes. He took his hand out of Blue’s and put it in his lap. The air was frigid around all of them. The raven was hunched far down into Ronan’s lap, and he held one hand over the top of her, protectively.

Noah said, “But you already know.”