Mister Impossible (Dreamer Trilogy #2)(40)
“Don’t pick your nails,” Declan murmured without looking up from his phone.
Matthew stopped picking his nails. They climbed a few stairs at a time. The student was right; the line went fast. Some of the students coming down the stairs were crying. There were no other clues to where the line might be headed.
It was when they were nearly to the top of the stairs that Matthew began to feel a little weird.
Not a lot weird. Maybe he was just sleepy. It was just … as they reached the head of the line, he avoided stepping on a discarded candy bar wrapper on the final stair, and for a second, he thought he was stepping over a brightly colored lily instead.
Nope nope nope, Matthew thought. Gonna be okay here.
By the time he pulled himself together, he realized what the wait was for: Adam Parrish. The stairs led to a tiny solarium, a wizard’s lofty lair thrust high over the quaint dark roofs of Cambridge. The haphazard arrangement of tables, chairs, and halogen lamps suggested that many students over many years had composed it. It smelled comfortingly old, like the Barns. Adam sat at a table right in the middle of it, looking gaunt and poised as he always did, his long hands parallel-parked on the edge of the table. On the table in front of him was a stack of tarot cards and a mug stuffed with bills and gift cards. In a chair near him was a gloriously large student wearing a sweater vest Matthew quite liked the look of.
“Hello,” Declan said.
Adam’s tone was dry. “Everyone in your family likes to make a surprise entrance, don’t they?”
Declan smiled blandly and tapped the side of his phone on the table, glancing around at the surroundings with the same judgmental gaze he used when double-checking Matthew’s room-cleaning abilities.
“Fletcher,” Adam said, “would you let the line know that we’re done for the night?”
The other student pushed out of a chair and, waving his own phone, said, “Of course. You should know Gillian’s still going on about break. That’ll be the topic of debate.”
“I’ll be down in a minute.”
They were left discreetly alone.
“Aglionby would be so proud to see you using all your talents here at Harvard,” Declan said. He turned over the top card of the deck. The writing on the bottom read Seven of Swords, but the art was too wiggly and complicated for Matthew to focus on.
“Aglionby would be proud to see two of its students here at Harvard at the same time,” Adam replied evenly.
“I see you lost your accent.”
“I see you lost your jacket.”
This all felt like a conversation in another language, one that Matthew would never speak. He couldn’t give too much thought to that, however, because suddenly he felt really weird.
His head went weird first, then his legs. His head felt sluggish, but his legs felt the opposite. That walky feeling usually meant he was about to forget what he was doing and end up someplace entirely different.
Nope, he told his legs. Be like a normal person.
Declan and Adam had moved on from whatever they’d been talking about and were instead talking about Declan being a bit of a gossip sensation, according to Adam’s latest conversation with Mr. Gray, the Lynch son calling in favors and making himself useful in the market, going legit for a year. Rumor was people were courting him for jobs. Were they? Matthew couldn’t tell if he should have been able to tell that by Declan’s constant brisk texting and phone calls.
“Even if that were true,” Declan said, “I’m not getting into that world.”
Adam laughed in a hollow way. “You aren’t in it already?”
Declan didn’t flinch, and for the first time, Matthew thought he might be seeing the situation in a complicated, real, grown-up way. Because when he looked at Declan’s blank, businesslike expression, he thought about how he could have just taken it at face value. But instead he saw how, if he squinted, he could see a little tension around Declan’s lips, a little tilt to his chin. He saw how this secret language showed that his older brother was both flattered and tempted by the statement.
“The other rumor is that Ronan is into some kind of bio-weapons,” Adam said, and for the first time, a little wrinkle appeared in between his fair eyebrows, making him look more like the boy Matthew knew from before. “Leading Moderators on a merry chase with capital-U Unexplained weaponry.”
In a bland voice, Declan asked, “Have you spoken to him recently?”
Instead of answering, Adam replied, “Do you know anything about Bryde yet?”
Then Matthew lost a bit of time, which he only realized because when he next came to, he was sitting in a chair by the window with no recollection of how he’d gotten there. Adam was standing close to Declan and they were muttering in low voices. One of them was saying Matthew.
“Matthew, seriously,” Declan said. “Wake up.”
Once Declan had spoken, Matthew realized the voice saying Matthew before hadn’t been Declan’s voice. It had been that voice he sometimes heard when he lost himself. The voice he sought when he threw himself into the security system at the end of the driveway.
Matthew blinked up at Declan. He was so frustrated that he couldn’t follow his conversation with Adam. It seemed like a very important, grown-up conversation. He tried to recapture the mindset that had allowed him to decode Declan’s expression before, but it all felt too complex.