It took out bus stops and traffic lights, road signs and mailboxes.
There were no people in this dream, so there was no screaming. No one to hurt. No one to bring back by accident. There was just the howl of the engine, the thump of the bumper, the grinding apocalypse beneath the tires. Music thumped from the car’s beautiful carved speakers. The whole dream could hear it.
Finally, Ronan found himself speeding directly toward an identical car with an identical Ronan in it. It took him a moment to realize it wasn’t actually another car; it was the mirrored front of a club. The music from inside drowned out every other sound. It was the sort of music Ronan heard all the time when he was at Aglionby, the stuff that made him feel as if he truly were nothing like other people, not because he was gay or because his father had been murdered or because he could take things out of his dreams, but because he couldn’t bring himself to sing along to the shit other students sang along to. Funny how a handful of people loving a song you couldn’t stand could make you feel inhuman.
In this dream, the best dream, Ronan and the dreamt car smashed right through the club’s window.
There were no dancers. Just pounding music, strobe lights, glitter, and ten thousand alcoholic beverages on the floor where there should have been people.
Ronan began to do donuts.
The tires squealed; drinks flew; speakers toppled; plastic splintered; metal twisted; glass shivered.
Destruction drowned out both the club’s music and Ronan’s and it was gorgeous.
Then Ronan woke up. Heart pounding. Hands still clenched in fists. Ears ringing with remembered sound. Paralyzed. What had he brought back? Only the dream’s furious joy.
That was the best dream.
The first thing the dreamers destroyed with Bryde was an exit ramp. The battle was undramatic, uncontested. Once upon a time there was an exit ramp cut deeply into a mountain by bulldozers, a cloverleaf of asphalt imposed upon the wild. And then once upon a little later time, the exit ramp didn’t exist anymore. It was just a pile of rubble that returned the hillside to its natural form, the work of a transient storm dreamt to thrash just beneath the soil. Why did it even need to be there, a new highway, a new cloverleaf, in the middle of nowhere? Because it could be.
Next there was the dump. Trash piled upon trash. Old groceries rotting, new appliances rusting, plastic bottles bleeding out the remainder of their contents. Ronan had never seen a dump so big, hadn’t believed such dumps existed in the United States. He hadn’t imagined there was so much trash in the country, much less in a single dump. It took all night even for a dreamt, blue fire to burn it all, and when the fire took the support buildings and the road leading to the dump, too, the dreamers didn’t stop it. It was only when the otherworldly flames began to creep toward the trailer park below that Bryde spat scornfully and signaled for Ronan to smother it with a quickly dreamt, dissolving blanket.
The next to go was a brand-new shopping area, which was identical to the shopping area just a few miles away, which was identical to the shopping area just a few miles away, which was identical to the shopping area just a few miles away, which was identical to the shopping area just a few miles away, which was identical to the shopping area just a few miles away. The dreamers arrived and they put on their masks and less than an hour later it was all gone. Dug up. Dug under. A dreamt dirt dragon charged from the ground to destroy and then dissolved just as quickly when the chaos was through.
After that, the dreamers destroyed an underwater transmission line, a 230 kV line that at once connected generators on opposite sides of a riverbank and also completely disordered the local ley line. As night fell, a school, a swarm, a hurricane of pitch-black dolphins had snaked toward the line. They were difficult to see in the water, since they reflected light in nearly the same way as the river water all around them. They were, after all, made almost entirely of dark ice. They were melting even as they swam toward their dreamt purpose, but not fast enough to ruin their mission. Only enough to chill the river as they dug through the silt and sediment down to the transmission line. Only enough that they could no longer swim at speed as they parted their bottlenoses to reveal shining hungry teeth. Only enough that by the time they had chewed through the work that had taken many months, there was nothing left to see of the dolphins but a few melting hearts at the bottom of the river.
The dreamers traveled hundreds of miles each day to put distance between themselves and their latest crime. Over and over they drove to a destination, planned how best to destroy it, dreamt the tool of destruction, unleashed it, and then lingered long enough to make sure they’d left no trace of their dreaming behind. They disrupted a convoy of trucks carrying transformers. They aerosolized two acres of unused concrete parking lot outside a dying mall. They filled canals and emptied swimming pools. Everywhere they went looked different when they were gone. Or rather, it looked less different. More like it had before humans arrived.
When they dreamt, Ronan dreamt of Ilidorin. He dreamt of the stump, and he dreamt of a slowly uncurling green shoot growing from its interior. It was getting stronger.
Ronan was getting stronger, too.
“What do you feel?” Bryde asked.
They sat on the roofline of an abandoned Victorian, looking out over the battered town around it. It was just at sunset, and there was barely enough light to see shapes by natural light. The dreamers would’ve been visible on their perch if anyone had looked up, but no one in this town had looked up for decades.
“Ronan,” prompted Bryde. “What do you feel?”
Ronan didn’t answer. It was the kind of night that made him want to run and run and run until he couldn’t catch his breath, but that wasn’t the kind of feeling Bryde meant.
“I feel like I can still smell that mill,” Hennessy said. “I will smell like it for the rest of my life.”
The dreamers had just destroyed a pulp mill on the other side of town. It had been one of the worst smells Ronan had ever smelled, and that included the odors at the West Virginia Museum of Living History, the trash dump they’d destroyed, and the bodies he’d buried over the years. He wondered how long it would take people to notice it was gone. The mill. The smell. All of it. Would they notice the silhouette was missing from the horizon before the sun went down? Perhaps tomorrow when they arrived to work, only to discover the mill had been replaced with a meadow. Unless tomorrow was a weekend. Ronan had no idea what day of the week it was. Time worked differently now. Weekends felt like a concept that had been important Before.
“What do you feel?” Bryde persisted. “Nothing?”
“This dinosaur,” Ronan said, running his fingers over Chainsaw’s nubbly talons. The raven clutched the peak of the roof beside him and peered off at the disappearing sun, beak parted, as if imagining how good it would’ve tasted. “And the spine of this roof up my—”
Hennessy gasped.
Bryde just had time to grab her arm before she tumbled from the roof. Her fingers clung to him as he dragged her back up.
Ronan didn’t have time to ask what had happened. It hit him next.
Suddenly, he was electric.
He was free, his thoughts flying into the air. He was trapped, his body fused to something deep in the earth. He was both these things at once. He felt as if he could do anything, anything he had ever possibly wanted to do, anything except untangle himself from that thing he was wound around. This thing, this thing. This entity, this energy, this whatever-it-was, it was what was making him so powerful, so alive.