“Yeah,” Ronan said. “That one.”
Hennessy leaned over one of the shelves. The tediously normal-looking cell phone on it brightened to display a photograph of two young men as the lock screen. One was Ronan, laughing explosively. The other was a rather self-contained-looking fellow, striking in an unusual sort of way, smirking a bit at whatever he’d just said. They were not exactly opposites but their appearances nonetheless gave the impression they were. Ronan’s dark, dramatic eyebrows, the other guy’s light, barely visible ones. Ronan’s emotions screamed upon his face while the other guy’s whispered. “Is that him?”
Ronan addressed the dream at large. “Traitor. You didn’t have to show her.”
“He doesn’t look like he’s filling a hole inside himself with your toxic presence,” Hennessy said. She kind of hated looking at them together. It made her feel ugly inside. “Are you guys in love five-ever or do you think you’re a pretty board game to pass his time?”
Now she sounded ugly, too.
But Ronan just picked up another phone and, after a space, mused, “Your phone can be simpler than mine, of course. You’ll only need to be able to call Jordan, right? There’s no one else?”
A single question, clear and factual. What a weapon. And he’d delivered it in the same tone he might have said anything else, so she didn’t notice the blade of its meaning until it was stuck inside her.
Suddenly, Hennessy had a very clear understanding that the cruel exterior Ronan Lynch wore was not all posture.
Every lock screen in the shop briefly showed Hennessy’s face. But it was not truly Hennessy. It was Trinity, June, Brooklyn, Madox, Jay, Alba, Octavia, Farrah, Jordan. All dead. Almost all dead. It would have been easier, in some ways, if Jordan were dead, too. Simpler, anyway.
Ronan said nothing else. He just let the silence do its violent work.
She found she was both awed and grateful for this bit of nastiness in response to hers. “Did you want to drink my arterial blood after that slash, or just roll around in it?”
“Whatever,” Ronan said, but it was clear they had come to an accord. He picked up a matte-black phone. It was the size of an acorn, and when he clipped it onto his earlobe, it looked just like a tunnel piercing, making him look even more like a hulking goth than he had before.
She could feel him thinking: Small. Subtle. It’ll only place and take calls, not text, but that’s fine. Fuck texting. I don’t care about texting. I don’t need to text ever again.
Even in his own head he lied to himself.
Ronan said suddenly, “Can you imagine if all dreams were like this? It’s so easy.”
“Okay, Bryde,” Hennessy said mockingly.
“You really don’t see the appeal?”
“Of shopping for electronics in your head?”
He studied her, eyebrows knit. He was trying to understand her, and maybe he could understand part of her, the part of her that was a lot like him. But he’d been good at this for too long. She’d been bad at it for too long. They were beginning to be shaped like it. The space between those two truths was vast and checkered with Lace.
“Hold my beer,” Ronan said.
The electronics store melted away.
They were in a blistering red desert. Before them were two motorcycles in liquid black, their wasp-waisted bodies glistening with a permanent wet sheen, the compound eyes of their headlights pointed down an arrow-straight road. It was both darkly inviting and subtly wrong.
Hennessy glanced at him. “Is that what you think the desert looks like? Have you ever been? That looks like an alien planet.”
“If you think you can do better, let’s see it.”
It was a challenge. Just like Bryde. Change the dream. It had taken Ronan no effort at all.
Closing her eyes, Hennessy remembered the last time she had been through a real desert. Don’t think about the Lace. She could not make her mind put herself in a desert, so she imagined how she would paint it on a canvas. And in that moment, she felt the dream help her. Creativity prickled through her like a burst of adrenaline. Everything suddenly seemed easier to hold in her head all at once.
Hennessy opened her eyes.
The desert had changed. This desert wasn’t red at all; it was white and pink and cream and striated with orange and black and yellow. The sand was knotted and complicated with crisp sagebrush dried by current heat and flat cactus swollen with past luck. The two dreamers stood in a valley. Mesas rose in the distance, pale underwater castles shaped by a sea that had long abandoned this world. The sky overhead was bluer than any sky in the world.
This was a real desert, but a real desert by way of Hennessy. Exaggerated, heightened, made more itself. Made art.
“Fuck,” Ronan breathed, and he didn’t bother to hide his awe.
Maybe, Hennessy thought, there was a world where she could be good at this.
The Lace was nowhere.
And then they were on the bikes and they were tearing through that painted desert.
Ronan conjured a flock of white birds that skimmed fast and low beside them.
Hennessy painted a fork in the road, the asphalt smearing out like a brushstroke.
Ronan whirled music beneath their tires, pounding bass through the desert.
Hennessy transformed the scene from day to night, the purpled sky rich as berries, the sand pink and blue.
Ronan cast both bikes into the air.
Fear-free exhilaration, the only destination up. Hennessy could feel the ascent in every part of her body. The gravity weighting her stomach. The breeze against her arms. The sense of endless space above and below. Up, up, up.
Hennessy let out a scream, just to hear herself howl, as they flowed up through the darkening night. Then, suddenly, they broke through a cloud she hadn’t even realized they’d been passing through. Up here, the air was thin and cold and wonderful, everything tinged the furious raspberry red of a nearly gone sunset. Ronan looked worlds away from the version of himself she’d seen only hours before in the fast-food restaurant. There he had been defeated, guilty, both victim of circumstance and architect of said circumstance. Here he was powerful, confident, joyful, a cheerful king. Hennessy versus Jordan.
But maybe not. Maybe, Hennessy thought again, there was a world where she was good at this.
The two dreamers coasted up there in the incredible sky for however long time lasted in dreams, sucking in big pure breaths of air, feeling the ley line swirl around them and through them.
Then Ronan said, “We gotta wake up. Keeping the Lace out of here is giving me a headache.”
His words took a few seconds to land.
When they did, they cut deep. Deeper than his intentionally cruel question had before, although she was sure he hadn’t intended it this time.
Hennessy said, “So you’ve been patronizing me this whole time, is that it?”
“What?”
“This whole time you’ve been letting me think we’re, what, equals?” The desert was shredding around them. The bikes were gone.
Ronan peered around, bemused. “Are you pissed?”
“You let me think I was doing this.”
“You were doing it. This is your desert.” But he couldn’t disguise his wince. “Goddamn, it’s strong.”
“Right. Sure. You babysat me.”
“I just took some of the weight—”