Nathan’s words about clubs came back to her. She didn’t need them, he’d said. They needed her.
Did they?
“Weapons discharge only when I deem it necessary,” Lock intoned. “This area is obviously clear. Let’s move on.”
The Moderators found themselves in an old hay barn illuminated by a dozen naked lightbulbs high in the rafters. It was entirely filled with both old, dry hay bales and wheels of all kinds. The wheels were clearly a Zed’s work, but there did not seem to be any Zeds in evidence. Were they a by-product of dreaming? Were they a message?
Farooq-Lane made her way slowly through the wheels, spinning them here, turning them there. Each had the word tamquam on it, although she didn’t know the significance. She stepped out the other side of the barn. Cold air whipped across her cheeks, smelling of wilderness.
She stopped in her tracks.
Lock was leaning up against the exterior of the barn, his bald head slumped to one side.
It was not the real Lock, of course.
The real Lock was emerging to stand beside Farooq-Lane. The real Lock was exhaling noisily. The real Lock was putting his hands on his hips and saying nothing.
This other Lock was dead. Or rather, he was simply not alive. He had never been alive. He was just another mannequin, but with Lock’s exact face. He wore Lock’s usual track pants and sneakers, but the matching jacket was missing. Instead he wore a white T-shirt with words handwritten across it. Thirty pieces of silver.
Farooq-Lane felt something thrill inside her. “What does it mean?”
Lock said, “It means we need to find a different way to kill these three Zeds before this gets out of hand.”
Hennessy couldn’t really fathom what it was like to be bad at art.
There was evidence that she had been, of course. Somewhere in the closets of her father’s Pennsylvania suburban home were journals full of her early drawings. Languishing in some English rubbish heap were grotty canvases she had painted over again and again. That old art was wrong in all the ways non-artists tended to notice: mismatched eyes, physically impossible nostrils, incorrect rooflines, broccoli-shaped trees, dog-nosed cows. And it was also wrong in all the ways artists noticed: poor use of value, inattention to edges, uneven line weight, lazy composition, muddy colors, sloppy palette choice, impatient layers, derivative stylization, tentative brushwork, overuse of medium, underuse of planning, unintentional fugliness.
Even her art-making process had been bad. She remembered what it was like to not be sure if a drawing was going to “turn out.” She’d sit down with a clothing catalog or a photograph of a model pulled up on her father’s laptop. Then she’d sharpen her pencil and think, I hope this works. She’d fuss over the likeness for hours. Hours! She couldn’t even imagine now how she’d been spending all that time. What took her so long on a casual pencil sketch? She remembered agonizing over the eye placement, over the puzzling shape at the corner of a mouth, the absolute purgatory that was a woman’s chin, but she didn’t remember why such things had been confusing.
Her head knew what it wanted to do. Why did her hand disobey? Noses veered petulantly. Rib cages went barrel-shaped, feet and hands turned into a four-piece mismatched tool set. She remembered actually howling in frustration as she wadded up an attempt. Stabbing canvases with scissors. Hurling paint tubes across J. H. Hennessy’s studio.
She remembered how when she did turn up with a good result, she’d return to it several times over the course of the day, taking it out again and again to flush with pleasure and surprise and accomplishment. She had no idea why it had gone well and so she couldn’t be sure it would ever happen again.
Hennessy remembered this, but she didn’t feel it. Somehow all the pain hadn’t managed to carry through the years. No part of her expected to fail when she sat down at a canvas now. She knew how the paint would behave. She knew what her brushes were capable of. No part of her doubted that whatever she was looking at would travel through her eyes, down her arms, and out onto the blank space before her.
Once, one of her clients had asked her if she considered herself a prodigy. They’d been standing in front of a Cassatt she’d forged for him.
“No,” Hennessy had said. “I’m a forgery of a prodigy.”
But she knew she was good. No amount of thinking about how bad she used to be would change that. She might suck at everything else about being a human and a dreamer, but as an art forger—she might not be the best, but she was at least one of the best.
That accomplishment seemed pointless now. There was no one to show it to who mattered. They were all dead.
All except for Jordan, who had always mattered the most anyway. But where was she now?
“I am so fucking good at this,” Ronan said.
The two of them were in one of those electronic boutiques that took itself very seriously. Indirect neon lighting, backlit products, every shelf rounded and modern. Phones of every shape and size lined the shelves and tables. There were traditional cell phones. Wall-mounted hard lines. Phones shaped like piggy banks and phones shaped like fake teeth, phones shaped like model cars and phones shaped like ceramic birds. Phones like dish-soap bubbles and phones like bank pens with fake flowers affixed to the end of them.
Many of them were impossible, but it didn’t matter, because it was a dream, Ronan’s dream, and he could do what he wanted.
Hennessy said, “You could dream anything, anywhere, and you bring us to a consumer playground with the logos only barely scrubbed off.”
“Jealous much?” Ronan was all snotty arrogance again, as if he wouldn’t have drowned in nightwash if Bryde hadn’t brought them to another ley line in the nick of time.
She wasn’t jealous. She was wary. Ley line energy boomed through the dream. She hadn’t felt this much ley power since she’d been in Ronan’s dreamt forest Lindenmere. It made the dream as lucid as any waking experience.
If she had her Lace dream with this much power at her disposal …
“We’re not doing the Lace dream,” Ronan said. “Chill out. What do we want out of these phones? They’ve gotta be untraceable, I guess. Portable. What else does a phone do?”
Why didn’t Adam text me back?
Because they were sharing the dreamspace, she heard his thought like a shout. It traveled through the dream with a retinue of amorphous sub-thoughts. Was Adam injured, was he bored with Ronan, did he prefer the company of his urbane new friends, calm down, Ronan, stop being needy, Ronan, get yourself together, Ronan, you’re always the car crash, Ronan. It would have been polite to pretend she hadn’t heard any of it, but Ronan and Hennessy had never been polite to each other and she didn’t see the point in starting now. “What’s your boy like?”
Ronan picked up a slender phone the size of a business card and made a big show of examining it for suitability. He didn’t reply.
“So he’s ugly,” Hennessy said. “Or a complete cock-up.”
Ronan studied another phone that looked like an umbrella. “What do you think he’s like?”
“I honestly have no idea,” Hennessy said. “Who would be attracted to you as a love match? Has he got crushingly low self-esteem? Is he one of those soft boys who hide in the firm pecs of their scary partners? Is he a witch? Did he say a spell wrong and you appeared and now you’re bound for life?”