“How many years? How old were you?”
“Ten.” Henry’s sweater rustled; Gansey sensed him repositioning. His voice went a little different. “How old were you, Whoop Whoop Gansey Boy, when you were stung by those bees?”
Gansey knew the factual answer, but he wasn’t sure if that was the answer Henry wanted. He still didn’t know why this conversation was happening. “I was ten as well.”
“And how have those years treated you?”
He hesitated. “Some better than others. You saw, I suppose.”
“Do you trust me?” Henry asked.
It was a loaded question here in the dark and the more dark. Here in the test of mettle. Did he? Gansey’s trust had always been based in instinct. His subconscious rapidly assembling all markers into a picture that he understood without knowing why he understood it. Why was he in this hole? He already knew the answer to this question.
“Yes.”
“Give me your hand,” Henry said. With one of his hands, he found Gansey’s palm in the darkness. And with the other, he placed an insect in it.
Gansey did not breathe.
At first, he didn’t think it really was an insect. In the dark, in this closeness, he was imagining it. But then he felt it shift its weight on his palm. Familiar. Slender legs supporting a more vast body.
“Richardman,” Henry said.
Gansey did not breathe.
He could not snatch his hand away: That was a losing game he’d played before. Then, terribly, it buzzed, once, without lifting off. It was a noise that Gansey had long since stopped interpreting as a sound. It was a weapon. It was a crisis where he who flinched first died first.
“Dick.”
Gansey did not breathe.
The odds of being stung by an insect were astonishingly low, actually. Think about it, Gansey had often told a worried friend of the family as they stood outside, insects bright in the dusk. When’s the last time you were stung? He could not process why Henry had done this. He didn’t know what he was supposed to be thinking. Was he supposed to be remembering all that had happened to him? All of the good and the bad? Because if so, the recorder was stuck, playing only this moment.
“Gansey,” Henry said. “Breathe.”
Little lights moved at the corner of Gansey’s vision. He was breathing, just not enough. He couldn’t risk moving.
Henry touched the back of Gansey’s hand, and then he cupped his other hand over the top of Gansey’s. The insect was trapped against Gansey and Henry, inside a globe of fingers.
“Here is what I have learned,” Henry said. “If you cannot be unafraid —”
There was a place where terror stopped and became nothingness. But today, in this hole, with an insect on his skin, with a promise that he was to die soon, the nothingness never came.
Henry finished, “— be afraid and happy. Think of your child bride, Gansey, and the times we had last night. Think about what you are afraid of. That weight that tells you it is a bee? Does it have to be something that kills you? No. It is just a little thing. It could be anything. It could be something beautiful instead.”
Gansey could not hold his breath any longer; he had to pass out or take a proper breath. He released a ragged stream of worthless air and sucked in another. The dark became just the dark again; the dancing lights were gone. His heart was still making a racket in his chest, but it was slowing.
“There he is,” Henry said, same as he had at Raven Day. “It is a terrible thing to see someone else scared, isn’t it?”
“What is in my hand?”
“A secret. I am going to trust you with this secret,” Henry said. Now he sounded a little uncertain himself. “Because I want you to trust me. But to do that, if we are to be friends, you have to know the truth.”
Henry took a deep breath, and then he took his hand off the top of Gansey’s palm to reveal a bee of extraordinary size.
Gansey barely had time to react when Henry touched his fingers again.
“Easy, Mr Gansey. Look again.”
Now that Gansey had settled, he could see that it wasn’t an ordinary bee at all; it was a beautiful robotic insect. Beautiful was perhaps not the best word, but Gansey couldn’t immediately think of another. The wings, antennae, and legs were clearly fashioned of metal, with fine articulated joints and thin wire wings, but it was as delicately and elegantly coloured as a flower petal everywhere else. It was not alive, but it looked vital. He could see it in this darkness because it had a tiny heart that emitted an amber glow.
Gansey knew that Henry’s family was in the business of robotic bees, but he had not thought of this when he considered robotic bees. He felt fairly certain that he had seen images of robotic bees, and while they had been impressive bits of nanorobotics, they were nothing like actual bees, having more in common with tiny helicopters than with living insects. Henry’s bee, though, was fearfully and impossibly constructed. It reminded him so strongly of Ronan’s dream objects that it was hard to shake the idea once it had occurred to him.
Henry dug his phone out of his pocket. Tapping rapidly, he brought up a rainbow-slicked screen that was somehow just as strange to look at. “RoboBee interfaces with ChengPhone via this app. It’s fingerprint specific, so you see I press my finger here and tell it what I want it to find – RoboBee, find great hair! – oh and look, there it goes.”
Gansey startled violently as the bee took flight with the same sound as before, lifting into the air and alighting upon his hair. The weight of it there was even worse than having it in his palm. Stiffly, he said, “Could you remove that? It makes me very uncomfortable.”