He typed something into the phone and then ducked his head to look out of the car to watch RoboBee spin away to do his work.
Gansey went went went.
Northeast, through tangled roads Gansey had probably been on before but didn’t remember. Hadn’t he crawled over this entire state? The ravens led them over the mountains on twisting roads that turned to dirt and then back to asphalt. At one point, the Fisker clung to the side of a mountain and looked down a steep drop with nary a guardrail in sight. Then the road turned back to asphalt and trees hid the sky.
The ravens were instantly invisible behind the night-black branches, flying off in some direction without them.
Gansey slammed on the brakes and rolled down the window. Henry, without any questions, did the same. Both boys tilted their heads and listened. Winter trees creaked in the breeze; distant trucks rolled on the highway below; ravens called urgently to one another.
“There,” Henry said immediately. “Right.”
The Fisker charged ahead. They were headed along the ley line, Gansey thought. How far would the ravens fly? Washington, D.C.? Boston? All the way across the Atlantic? He had to believe they wouldn’t go where he could not follow. It ended tonight, because Gansey had said it ended tonight, and he had meant it.
The birds continued on, unerring. An interstate sign loomed in the dark.
“Does that say 66?” Gansey said. “Is that the ramp for 66?”
“I don’t know, man. Numbers confuse me.”
It was I-66. The birds swept forward; Gansey got on to the interstate. It was faster, but a little risky. There were no options to turn off if the ravens altered their path.
The birds didn’t waver. Gansey poured on speed, and more speed.
The birds were headed along the ley line, taking Gansey back towards Washington, D.C., and his childhood home. He had a sudden, terrible thought that that was precisely where they were leading him. Back to the Gansey home in Georgetown, where he learned that his ending was his beginning, and he finally accepted that he had to grow up to be just another Gansey with all that entailed.
“What did you say this was? I-66?” Henry asked, typing in his phone again as another sign flew by them proclaiming the fact of I-66.
“However do you drive?”
“I don’t. You do. Mile marker?”
“Eleven.”
Henry studied his phone, his face blue by its light. “Hey. Hey. Slow up. Cop in a mile.”
Gansey let the Fisker glide down to something closer to the speed limit. Sure enough, the dark paint of an unmarked police car glistened in the median a little less than a mile from when Henry had noted it. Henry saluted him as they drove by.
“Thank you for your service, RoboBee.”
Gansey let out a breathless laugh. “OK, now you – wait. Can RoboBee find us an exit?”
The ravens had been getting slightly further away from the interstate with each mile, and now it was becoming quite clear that they were diverging in a permanent way.
Henry tapped into his phone. “Two miles. Exit 23.”
Two miles in an ever-widening triangle would put a lot of space between the ravens and the car. “Can RoboBee keep up with the birds?”
“I’ll find out.”
So they barreled on ahead as the flock grew harder to see in the darkness and eventually disappeared. Gansey’s pulse raced. He had to trust Henry; Henry had to trust RoboBee. At the exit, Gansey sent the Fisker racing off the interstate. There was no sign of the ravens: only ordinary Virginia night all around them. He felt strange as he recognized where they were, near Delaplane, quite far from Henrietta now. This was a world of old money, horse farms, and politicians and tyre-company billionaires. It was not a place of archaic wild magic. By day it would reveal itself as a place of genteel loveliness, a place so long beloved and cultivated that it was impossible to imagine it running amok.
“Where now?” Gansey asked. They were driving into nowhere, into ordinariness, into a life Gansey had already lived.
Henry didn’t immediately reply, his head bowed over his phone. Gansey wanted to stomp the gas, but there was no point if they were going the wrong way.
“Henry.”
“Sorry sorry. Got it! Floor it, turn right when you can.”
Gansey did as directed with such efficiency that Henry placed a hand on the ceiling to brace himself.
“Yay,” said Henry. “Also, woo.”
And then, suddenly, there were the ravens again, the flock tumbling and remaking itself above the tree line, perfect black against the deep purple sky. Henry pounded the ceiling in silent triumph. The Fisker wheeled on to a broad, four-lane highway, empty in both directions. Gansey had only begun to accelerate again when the ravens swirled up in a tornado of birds, tossed aloft by an invisible updraught, changing course abruptly. The Fisker’s headlights found a real-estate sign at the end of a driveway.
“There. There!” Henry said. “Stop!”
He was right. The birds had peeled up the driveway. Gansey had already blown by it. He scanned ahead; there was no turnaround immediately in view. He would not lose the birds. He would not lose them. Rolling down his window, he craned his head out the window to be sure the night road behind him was still black, then backed up, the transmission whining in excitement.
“Aight,” said Henry.
The Fisker climbed the steep driveway. Gansey didn’t even pause as he considered that someone might be home. It was late, he was strange and memorable in this fancy car, and this was a private corner of an old-fashioned world. It didn’t matter. He would think of something to say to the home owners if it came to that. He would not leave the ravens. Not this time.