Its mate, the starfire blade, rested securely in one of Jordan Hennessy’s hands just a few yards from Farooq-Lane, its blade dripping moonlight and malice.
Jordan Hennessy’s eyes glittered with fury as she surveyed the scene.
Farooq-Lane was surprised to feel terror. It liquefied her knees, loosened her fingers. The Zed hadn’t seen her there crouched in the shadow of the turkey house, but she would if Farooq-Lane tried to lift her gun. And Farooq-Lane knew what that sword did. She’d have less of an arm than Bellos before she could even scream.
“Hennessy!” Bryde shouted. “Now, if ever!”
Two: seconds before the nightmare appeared.
In the first second, Hennessy put a little bit of dark cloth over her eyes—oh, it was a mask, Farooq-Lane saw it was a mask now, she’d forgotten the Zeds used them at the previous attack—and slumped to the ground in instant sleep.
After the next second, as Farooq-Lane lifted her gun to shoot the sleeping Zed, there was the nightmare.
It was hell. It was shape. It was non-shape. It was form. It was non-form. It was checkered and growing, it was shriveled and grasping. Farooq-Lane didn’t want to look at it, but she wasn’t going to look away. There was not much of it, and even though it didn’t seem to have a proper body, there was a distinct feeling that it was … abbreviated. There was supposed to be more of it. It was severed. Partial.
And it hated Jordan Hennessy.
The hate was bigger than anything else about it. Farooq-Lane could hear it like a battle cry and a sob.
But Jordan Hennessy didn’t lift a finger to shield herself. She was frozen on the ground, mask slid to the side, eyes horrified and miserable. The star sword sputtered beside her in the grass, throwing moonbeams a few inches here and there.
It was clear that whatever the Zed had intended to bring from a dream, this was not it. This thing wanted to kill Jordan Hennessy.
Farooq-Lane should have let it.
But instead, she leapt forward and seized the star sword. She only had a moment to feel the warmth of its hilt, the glory of its purpose, the strangeness of its power, and then she sliced through the nightmare with the blade.
There was a silent shudder as the nightmare splintered.
Farooq-Lane slashed again, and again. This weapon drove it back so completely that it seemed to have been made to drive it back. To decimate it. She slashed and slashed, until the final tiny scrap of the nightmare somehow managed to dart through the wall into the turkey house.
Inside, the animals screamed and screamed, and then everything was silent.
“Visionary!” howled another voice. A Moderator, Ramsay.
Farooq-Lane’s gaze found Ramsay standing beside one of the armored cars. She followed his gaze. On the porch, Rhiannon Martin crouched behind a concrete planter that danced with red laser points. If there had been a clear shot, she’d have been dead long before. Liliana stood beside her in teen form, her long elegant fingers pressed to her teeth in agony, tears glistening on her cheeks.
“Visionary!” shouted Ramsay again.
A red laser point danced across Liliana’s hands. Ramsay was pointing the gun at her.
“Ramsay!” shouted Farooq-Lane.
“You wanna live?” Ramsay shouted at Liliana. Lock was watching him. Not stopping him. “Have a vision! Now!”
Death by Visionary. Make Liliana kill the unreachable Zed. So damn clever. So damn clever.
Liliana was too far away for Farooq-Lane to hear, but she saw her shoulders heave with apocalyptic sobs. She was mouthing, I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry, and everything in Rhiannon Martin’s maternal body language was saying back, It’s okay, I understand.
Farooq-Lane saw the moment Rhiannon Martin steeled herself, and then the Zed stood up from behind the planter, arms by her side. She faced Ramsay without flinching.
We’re the villains, Farooq-Lane thought.
Ramsay shot Rhiannon Martin in the head.
One: the number of people Farooq-Lane didn’t hate in that entire place.
Liliana threw her arms over her eyes as her shoulders shook. She needed someone on her side. She needed Farooq-Lane.
Everything was going wrong.
Too late, Farooq-Lane realized that Jordan Hennessy was no longer paralyzed on the ground beside her. She was up, she was running.
A suddenly visible car raced toward her, flattening the grass, its rear door hanging open. Through the open door, Farooq-Lane saw that Bryde was driving. Ronan Lynch’s body was prone across the backseat. Not particularly vital-looking.
Jordan Hennessy threw herself through the open door into the car.
“Someone stop it!” shouted someone. Maybe Lock.
Hennessy locked eyes with Farooq-Lane just before she slammed the door shut.
The car vanished as if it had never been there.
Zero: Zed. 0.
No more, thought Farooq-Lane. No more.
Matthew thought something might have happened to Ronan.
He and Declan had just trespassed into a Harvard dorm building. Matthew didn’t realize at first that they were trespassing. He hadn’t paid much attention to how Declan approached the old brick dorm twice. First, just walking by, seeming to give the propped-open door no more or less interest than anything else in the cool midnight-blue-and-gold Cambridge evening. Second, after shedding his suit coat in the car and running his fingers through his curls until they were boyish and messy, returning to push through the door into the warm red-and-brown interior.
Inside, a haphazard line of college students led up a flight of stairs. Declan flippantly patted the shoulder of the closest with the back of his hand. “Hey. This the line for—?”
Matthew was startled to hear his brother’s voice. Instead of his usual sales-speak monotone, he sounded like one of the guys. He’d even changed how he stood. Previously alert and suspicious, he was now casual and inattentive, gaze pulled to a knot of pretty girls in the hall, then to his phone, then back to the student in line.
“The card thing, yeah,” the student replied. “It’s going fast.”
Declan joined the line and began to type away on his phone in his peculiar way, thumb and forefinger. He did not explain himself to Matthew. Perhaps he didn’t think he needed to. Perhaps a normal person would have guessed what they were doing there. Had Ronan dreamt Matthew to be an idiot? Ever since he’d found out he was dreamt, he’d been trying to think about things more like a real person, more like a grown-up, but it made his head hurt.
“Don’t pick your nails,” Declan murmured without looking up from his phone.
Matthew stopped picking his nails. They climbed a few stairs at a time. The student was right; the line went fast. Some of the students coming down the stairs were crying. There were no other clues to where the line might be headed.
It was when they were nearly to the top of the stairs that Matthew began to feel a little weird.
Not a lot weird. Maybe he was just sleepy. It was just … as they reached the head of the line, he avoided stepping on a discarded candy bar wrapper on the final stair, and for a second, he thought he was stepping over a brightly colored lily instead.
Nope nope nope, Matthew thought. Gonna be okay here.
By the time he pulled himself together, he realized what the wait was for: Adam Parrish. The stairs led to a tiny solarium, a wizard’s lofty lair thrust high over the quaint dark roofs of Cambridge. The haphazard arrangement of tables, chairs, and halogen lamps suggested that many students over many years had composed it. It smelled comfortingly old, like the Barns. Adam sat at a table right in the middle of it, looking gaunt and poised as he always did, his long hands parallel-parked on the edge of the table. On the table in front of him was a stack of tarot cards and a mug stuffed with bills and gift cards. In a chair near him was a gloriously large student wearing a sweater vest Matthew quite liked the look of.