Chapter 70: Picking Up a Drowned Rat
Clary was doing that thing where you hold your hand flat over your eyes like a visor, which does essentially nothing against vertical rain but feels like taking action, and hurrying through the wet streets anyway.
Unlike the last time she'd been moving fast through a city night, she was smiling.
The rain intensified. Her jacket was soaked through, her hair was past the point of caring, and the red sports car had been pacing her for half a block with the particular patience of something that had already made a decision and was waiting for her to catch up.
Her cello was in that car.
She bit her lip, stepped to the curb, and knocked on the window.
"Any chance I can ride with my instrument instead of drowning separately?"
Rango looked at her — water dripping off her hair, mascara doing its best — and laughed. "Get in."
The rain outside turned the city into a smeared watercolor, streetlights bleeding yellow into wet asphalt.
The moment she was inside, a dry towel appeared from somewhere that she couldn't immediately account for.
"Thanks." She pressed it to her face, then looked at the seat. "Sorry — I'm soaking your interior."
"McQueen's fine with it," Rango said, and lightly tapped the dash. "Right?"
Two large eyes materialized on the windshield — she genuinely flinched — and McQueen's voice filled the car with the particular energy of someone who had been waiting for an opportunity to weigh in. "McQueen does not mind the water. McQueen minds scratches. McQueen's paint is a custom tri-coat that took six weeks and involved a guy in—"
"McQueen," Rango said.
"McQueen is just providing context."
Clary stared at the windshield. "Is he — is this like KITT? From Knight Rider?"
"I don't have a scanner bar," McQueen said, sounding mildly offended. "And KITT was a Trans-Am. I have significantly better taste."
"He's not a blessed object or a haunted car or anything with a clean category," Rango said. "He's just McQueen. Same with Ted." He nodded toward the small bear on the dash. "We stopped trying to file them under something a few years ago."
"Huh." Clary turned this over. "Back in the UK there's actually a whole — I mean, there are things like them. Items or animals that developed consciousness and abilities. Everyone just assumes it's angelic interference, divine blessing, that kind of thing. There's a cat in Edinburgh that can not only talk but apparently has a thing with blades."
"You think the blessing explanation is right?"
"I think it's the explanation people reached for and nobody pushed back on it, so it stuck." She shrugged. "Hearsay calcified into lore. Happens a lot in Shadow Hunter circles."
"Same in hunting," Rango said. "Half the entries in our family's journal turned out to be one guy's theory that everybody else just copied down."
Clary smiled, and it was a real one, the kind that reached her eyes. "You know what's funny? I haven't laughed in probably two weeks."
He glanced over. "What's going on?"
She'd normally deflect — she was aware it was a deflection, had been doing it since the Institute, everyone being very careful with her in a way that made her feel fragile when she mostly felt confused. But Rango wasn't being careful. He'd asked like someone who actually wanted to know and had the time.
So she told him.
A few months ago she'd been a sophomore at NYU with a 2.4 GPA and a Wednesday night cello lesson and no knowledge of anything beyond the normal world. Then a demon had come for someone she loved, and the world had cracked open, and she'd found out that her whole life — her father, her history, what she was — had been something other than what she'd been told.
Her real father was alive. Her stepfather, who she'd thought was her father, had kept her from all of it on purpose, out of love or out of fear or some combination that she was still untangling.
She'd taken a leave from school. She was learning to fight. She was trying to figure out who she was without the story she'd always told herself.
Rango listened without the face people made — the careful, slightly pained listening face that meant they were preparing a supportive response. He just listened.
"Okay," he said, when she'd finished. "How are you doing with the actual Shadowhunter training? Your mom says you're good?"
"She says I'm a natural. Which — I think that's true, actually. That part doesn't feel hard."
"GPA before the leave. What were we working with?"
She made a face. "Does it matter?"
"I'm asking because the path forward looks different depending on the answer."
"...2.4."
He nodded slowly. "Here's the honest version, and you can tell me to mind my own business. In a normal world with a 2.4, I'd say fight for it anyway, finish the degree, a lot of doors are credential-gated. But the world isn't normal. You know that better than most people your age. And the skills you're building — there aren't exactly career placement offices for it, but there is a real infrastructure, and being good at it matters more than a transcript." He paused. "The decision's yours. I just think it's worth looking at it without pretending the world you're operating in is the standard one."
Clary nodded slowly. Her gaze drifted to him with the subtle quality of someone who thought they were being subtle and wasn't quite.
He was — objectively, she noted, purely as an observation — very good-looking. Not in the polished way of the older Shadowhunters who'd grown up in the Institute and held themselves like they knew it. More like someone who'd gotten knocked around and come out the other side with something in his face that the unscathed version wouldn't have had. She'd had a type since she was fifteen and she was not going to think about it.
She looked out the window.
"Hey." Rango's voice shifted slightly. "You okay?"
"Mm. Yeah." She cleared her throat. "What about you? You've got somewhere you need to be and you look like someone used you for practice."
"Someone did," he said, and there was a rueful quality to it that made her think it had been intentional and he'd gotten something from it. Then he was quiet for a moment — not the easy quiet of before but something more deliberate — and he exhaled slowly.
"What?" Clary asked.
"There's something—" He stopped. Shook his head slightly. "Never mind, it's not your problem."
Her hand covered his on the console before she'd decided to do it. Old reflex. She'd always been like this, Simon had said, her whole life, someone shows a crack and you go toward it.
"We're in the same very weird world," she said. "Talk."
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