Ramsay grabbed the radio instead, smashed the button on the side. “There’s a Zed. It’s—”
Hennessy gave them the finger before throwing something at their windshield.
The two men in the truck’s cab had just enough time to see that the projectile was a small, silvery orb before it exploded across the windshield. A metallic cloud burst around the truck.
The cloud was getting inside the cab. The radio was talking, Lock was talking. None of it seemed important. All that was important was looking at the cloud, watching the little glimmering motes hovering in the air, feeling each sparkly moment invade their nostrils, coat their sinuses, live in their minds. They were the cloud.
The truck hurtled off the highway, just missing the Airstream trailer. It churned several dozen yards into the dead wheat before coming to a lumpy halt.
“What’s going on?” shouted the radio.
No one answered.
Now the back of the truck was opening. The other Moderators were coming out, guns bristling.
To this point, guns had always won. Well, aside from the last time. And the time before that. And the one before that. And before that. But before that, it had been Moderators 200, Zeds 0, or whatever. The point was that, statistically, the guns would work.
“Stay sharp,” Lock said.
A few yards away, between the truck and the Airstream, a car door opened.
This shocked the emerging Moderators, who, like Bellos and Ramsay, found it difficult to remember seeing the strange car.
A young man stepped out. He had dark, buzzed hair and pale, chilly skin. His eyes were as blue as the sky above, though more suggestive of bad weather.
The young man was taking something from his jacket, a little glass bottle with a dropper top. He was uncapping it.
He was another one of them. Ronan Lynch.
“Oh, shit,” said a Moderator named Nikolenko.
Ronan Lynch squeezed drops of liquid onto the flattened wheat, and every drop released wind, fury, leaves. It was an East Coast winter squall contained in a bottle.
Impossible, dreamt, mind-bending.
It churned Moderators from their feet and sent bullets wide. It pummeled their bodies and thoughts. It was not just weather but also the feel of weather, the dread of it, the damp, pressed-down sloth of a socked-in late-year storm, and they couldn’t rise as it soaked them.
From the open door of the Airstream, Westerly Reed Hager watched Ronan walk among the stunned Moderators, kicking the guns from their hands, his clouds shifting and ebbing around him. The irascible storm from the eyedropper didn’t bother him; he was just another piece of it.
Hennessy also stalked among the not-quite-awake, not-quite-asleep bodies. Kneeling swiftly, she picked up one of the abandoned guns.
Then, just as quick, she put the weapon to its fallen owner’s temple.
The Moderator didn’t react; he was dazzled by dreams. She put it to his cheek instead. Pressed the barrel into his skin hard enough to pull his mouth up in a weird smile. The man’s eyes were misted, confused.
Ronan looked at the gun, and then he looked at Hennessy. It seemed obvious she was about to blow the man’s brains out.
It was unclear whether or not the man was one of the Moderators who had killed her entire family. It was clear, however, that this nuance didn’t matter to her.
“Hennessy.”
This voice came from the third Zed who’d arrived in the strange car. He was a dapper blond with close-set, hawkish eyes and an expression that suggested he knew what the world was thinking and didn’t care for it.
Bryde.
“Hennessy,” he said again.
The gun seemed to get larger in her hand the longer it was pressed to the man’s head. This was no dream magic. This was just the magic of violence. It was a sustainable form of energy, violence. It powered itself.
Hennessy’s hand shook with fury. “I get to do this. I already paid the admission for this ride.”
“Hennessy,” Bryde said a third time.
Hennessy’s words were flippant, although her voice was electric. “You’re not my real dad.”
“There are better ways to do that. Ways to make it matter more. Do you think I don’t know what you want?”
A ripple of tension.
Then Hennessy put the gun down.
“Let’s finish this,” Bryde said.
The Moderators watched them, dazed, motionless, ill with longing and dread, as the Zeds made their way to Lock. Bryde nodded a confirmation to Ronan and Hennessy. The two of them crouched before slipping on small black fabric sleeping masks.
For the briefest of moments they were blind bandits, and then, a second later, they both slumped to the ground in fast sleep.
The Zed in the Airstream trailer, watching with wide, shocked eyes, shouted, “Who are you?”
Bryde put his fingers to his lips.
Hennessy and Ronan dreamt.
When they woke just a few minutes later, a dead body lay beside Hennessy. Forger in life, forger in sleep. The corpse was identical in every way to the living body already lying in the dirt—she had dreamt a perfect copy of Lock. She was also temporarily paralyzed, as all Zeds were after dreaming something into being, so Ronan heaved her up in a fireman’s hold and carried her back to the hard-to-see car.
After they had gone, Bryde rolled the real Lock onto his side so he could face his copied body, so he could see the perfection of it and be horrified. Bryde crouched between the two Locks, a lithe, nimble Reynard beside Lock’s blunt power.
“This game of yours,” Bryde began, and there was no softness to his voice, “will only end in pain. Take a look. The rules are changing. Do you understand? Do you understand what we could do? Leave my dreamers alone.”
There was no change in the living Lock’s expression. Bryde reached into Lock’s pocket and took out a small parcel. Now Lock’s eyes swam into focus long enough to show real panic, but his fingers could only snatch limply, drugged by Ronan Lynch’s dreamt storm.
“This is mine now,” Bryde whispered, hiding away the parcel. His teeth were a fox’s little snarl. “The trees know your secrets.”
Lock’s mouth opened and closed.
Bryde stood.
He stopped by the Airstream trailer, where the spared Zed was talking with Ronan, and then they all drove away. The car in one direction, the trailer in another, leaving behind a catastrophe of Moderators scattered across the stubbled wheat.
Slowly the dreamt weather dissolved, and the fields returned to their previous, featureless peace.
It was as if the Zeds had never been there at all.
Far back from the others, from the safety of where they’d watched this all unfold, Farooq-Lane turned to Liliana and said, “Those three could end the world.”
Ronan Lynch still remembered the worst dream he’d ever had. It was an old dream now, two years old. Three? Four? As a kid, time had been slippery, and now, as an adult, or as a whatever-he-was, it was downright slimy. It had happened Before, that was all that mattered. Ronan used to divide his life into the time before his father’s death and the time after it, but now he divided it differently. Now it was Before he’d been good at dreaming. And After.
This was Before.
When the worst dream showed up, Ronan already had a vibrant catalog of memorable nightmares. What sort did you want? Perhaps the classic monster mash: talons, fangs, shaggy feathers dripping with rain. Public humiliation: in a movie theater trying to hide a runny nose, wiping endless snot on a ratty sleeve. Body horror? Scissors slipping and snipping right into an arm, the bone and tendons sliding free. Mind-fuckery was a perennial choice: entering a familiar room and being struck with a sense of hideous and unshakable wrongness that dug and dug and dug inside him until he awoke shaking and covered in sweat.