| “ | There are some people like that, you know? The darkest minds tend to hide behind the most unlikely faces. | ” |
–Chubs about Clancy, in The Darkest Minds | ||
Clancy James Beaumont Gray, also known as the "Slip Kid", is the son of President Gray. He was one of the first children to be admitted at Thurmond in an attempt to find a so-called "cure" for IAAN. President Gray allowed scientists to operate on Clancy as long as there was no visible scarring.
Biography (Books)
Early Life
Clancy as a child would’ve been known as a kid hiding behind his mothers skirts.
He was targeted and bullied by kids in his school because of his parents and would get back at them by using his abilities. His father was extremely abusive to Clancy early on in his life and its made a aware that his mother abandoned him early on too. He was caught using his power against his dad on camera.
Clancy was the first child to be released from Thurmond, as proof to the United States that the rehabilitation camps worked. After he was repeatedly tortured.
When his father found out Clancy still had access to his powers, he sent a Secret Service agent to assassinate Clancy. The assassin was unsuccessful.
Clancy eventually met Olivia and Hayes. The three of them set up East River at an abandoned camping ground with Clancy being the leader. Kids with IAAN abilities are sheltered and are apparently helped to contact their families.
Clancy is described as being handsome and smart with a narcissistic and manipulative personality.
The Darkest Minds
Clancy is first mentioned by Ruby while she is still in Thurmond. Portraits of him are hung around the work camp as a reminder that they too could one day be "healed" and "rehabilitated" as Clancy purportedly was.
Later, while Ruby is looking through a newspaper, she comments that she has never seen an updated picture of Clancy. They always recycled the childhood portrait whenever the media reports on his "charitable" activities. She also comments that there is a rumour that Clancy too, is an Orange. Meaning he possibly only one of Oranges three left alive, the other two being Ruby and Martin.
Clancy with the help of two others, created a safe haven called East River, a place where many IAAN afflicted kids seek safe refuge. It is run by Clancy, who goes by the alias "Slip Kid". He encourages them to wear black to symbolise the fact they don't separate themselves by colour like the government work camps did.
When Ruby, Zu, Liam and Chubs arrive in East River, he is surprised to see Ruby. He recites her entire history in front of her friends, before apologising and saying he supposedly discovered and read her files while spying on different networks. He then recognises Liam and offers them all safe haven at East River for as long as they need. As Ruby leaves his office, he sends her a mental image of himself kneeling with a rose and saying "Forgive me?" in side of her mind.
Clancy offers to teach Ruby how to better control her powers. During their lessons they appear to develop somewhat of a friendship, although it is implied that Clancy has one-sided romantic feelings towards Ruby. During one session together, Clancy uses his powers to make Ruby kiss him. This is his way of attempting to force her to let her guard down, so he will gain information about how she uses her powers to make people lose memories, which is what he wanted all along. Clancy eventually uses his powers to paralyse Ruby, and her memories of the incident are hazy, (and to clarify, the scene didn’t involve rape. The author implied herself Ruby wasn’t raped). This is ultimately what causes Ruby and her friends to attempt to leave East River.
As Ruby, Liam, and Chubs attempt to leave, however, Clancy catches them, forcing Hayes to brutally attack Liam. Soon after, Clancy leaks the location of East River, hoping that his father will send an army of Reds under Project Jamboree, so that he can control them himself. Just before the forces arrive, Clancy tricks Ruby into coming to his aid, only to paralyse her as the army arrives. Ruby asks Clancy if the situation had been reversed, would he have run to her aid, to which he replies that he would have walked slowly.
Instead of sending the Reds, however, President Gray sends PSFs, which sends Clancy into a fit of rage. Just before he can harm Ruby, however, Chubs sends him flying back and leaves with her. During the fighting, Clancy escapes, but he leaves his laptop behind with a small amount of charge, along with a note telling Ruby that he lied before, and that he would have run to help her had the situation been reversed.
Never Fade
Clancy seems to be a looming presence to Ruby. When she catches herself using her powers in ways she dosnt like, her mind compares herself to Clancy. There’s even a scene where she’s imagining him whisper to her that she’s his believing she sunk to his low. As Ruby is traveling with her friends, she gets a message from Cate, but her and Vida recognise that the texts don’t add up to how Cate talks.
When they meet up at the location where Cate told them to go knowing it’s not her, Ruby realises it’s Clancy. Things go down and Clancy convinces them that something is going on back where actually Cate is. Really he’s tricking them to just take him there so he can steal his mother’s research of the cure that he despises. Clancy ends up being knocked out and locked in a closet. And when the palace is bombed he’s able to escape, only to be taken prisoner by Ruby and the people she’s with.
In The Afterlight
Clancy is forced along as a prisoner and later locked in a cell. He constantly tries to convince Ruby as to why the cure is bad. Letting her see how he was constantly tortured as a child and then belittled for what they were doing to him. Ruby took advantage of that moment to seep further into his head for his mother whom he apparently wrecked the mind of. It’s revealed that while Ruby slept Clancy controlled her and made her contact his dads enforcements to invade on them. When Clancy tried to escape Nico, Ruby and his mother confronted him. His mother being the one to shoot him.
Clancy had the ‘operation‘ forced onto him. It’s clear in the moments after where he had to stand next to his father. That he saw the ability as the only power he had against his father and anyone that tried to harm him again. Ruby takes pity on Clancy struggling with his new life, with the past that he can’t let go and erases his memory with a new happy one.
The Darkest Legacy
Clancy is met by Zu when she’s all grown up, as he plays the roll of a privileged white boy who‘s just an innocent green. He implies that Ruby would visit him sometimes and open up. He worried that he was her only friend, though it can be perceived that was him just manipulating his words.
It becomes clear that he had his memories back. He tricked Ruby and made a deal with someone to get him away from his mother.
Nothing else is yet to be known.
Personality
Clancy appears to be double sided in most of the books. He is very clever and cunning, able to manipulate people with his sweet talk, not including his mind abilities. He can get very hateful as he does towards the end of ´Never Fade. But normally, he can be submissive and cowardly, only attacking when the time is right.
Physical Description
Clancy Gray is said to have thick wavy black hair with a widow's peak on his hairline. He has a long nose, thin lips, and a couple moles which Ruby says she 'memorized' after six years at Thurmond staring at his portrait. He has dark eyes, which Ruby thinks could not be captured in their full essence in the portraits, the same way they didn't predict how handsome he'd turned out with age and he is the colour orange.
Relationships
Ruby Daly
Clancy has kept tabs on Ruby for an extremely long time. He read all the reports he could gather about her and reading them until he, presumably, memorized them. Clancy offers to help Ruby learn how to use her powers in order to figure out how she forces people to lose memories but is not successful. There are many times he tricks Ruby for his own gain.
Liam Stewart
Clancy disrupts Ruby and Liam's relationship by spending much of his time doing lessons with Ruby. However, Liam's true hatred for Clancy stems from the incident at East River, When Clancy manipulates Ruby in a way that is unforgivable..
Nico
Nico loved Clancy as the Orange was his hero and Clancy did care for Nico in some way. Nico and Clancy were both experimented on in Thurmond and built a sort of relationship when Clancy used his orange powers to manipulate the doctors at times to attempt to lessen the pain for him and Nico. At some point Clancy began to use him as a tool for his plans, the first time we are told about him using Nico is when he uses Nico to hack Cate and Vida's chatter conversation.