He understood it, he heard it, he was it—
“Goddamn,” he whispered.
Bryde smiled.
It was an altogether different smile than Ronan had ever seen him wear, his light teeth visible in the deepening dark, his eyes half-closed, head thrown back. Euphoric. Relieved.
“That’s the ley line,” Bryde said.
Ronan felt it uncurl through him, like vines stretching toward the sun. It was the humming possibility of his dreams, the sense of ever-widening options, but he was awake.
With a glorious cry, Chainsaw threw herself from the roof and soared high up into the air. Part of him felt like he might be able to join her.
“Why is it doing that?” Hennessy asked in a small voice. Bryde was still holding her steady on the roof, a hand gripped very firmly around her upper arm.
“It’s a surge,” he said. “It won’t last. If we are lucky, we will feel another. Perhaps a third. The heartbeat of a sick planet coming round.”
Nightwash felt a million miles away, like something that could never touch Ronan. He was the night and he was the world and he was as infinite as them both.
Chainsaw cawed up above and Ronan spontaneously leapt to his feet, keeping his balance easily on the ridge of the roof. He cawed back to his dreamt raven at the top of his lungs. The sound echoed all around the roofs of this dead town, making it sound like there was a whole flock of ravens, a whole flock of Ronans, even though there was just the pair of them.
“It’s so strong,” Hennessy said, even though it was already beginning to wane.
The world was changing. It was becoming a place someone like him had been made for.
Bryde said, “This is only the beginning.”
Carmen Farooq-Lane hadn’t told Lock about Jordan Hennessy’s sword.
In the commotion of Rhiannon Martin’s death, she’d hastily shoved it through one of the galvanized fans at the end of the turkey barn. Later, after they’d all been briefed and the area was being cleaned up, she’d snuck it back into the rental car.
It was not the first secret she’d kept from the Moderators, but it was certainly the most dramatic. The sword was nearly as tall as she was, and wondrously and impossibly made. It felt like an extension of her arm, no more or less heavy than her own hand. The hilt was stunning, smooth silvery metal engraved with the words from chaos, and when one was gripping it, one felt the words even when they weren’t visible. The blade was made of the night sky, a sentence absurd to say out loud but even more absurd to process. It did not look like a sword-shaped window into the night sky. It did not look like a blade painted to look like the night sky. It was the night sky. That was all there was to it. When she swung it—and she did, an embarrassing number of times, to Liliana’s amusement, taking it out in living rooms and hotel rooms and in the backyards of places where they stayed—it trailed starlight and moonlight, comets sparking and universe dust shimmering. It could slice through just about anything, but slice wasn’t exactly the right word, either. The blade won. It won like the night won, like the darkness won. It simply descended. Farooq-Lane suspected there was only one other weapon that would stop it: the sun blade last seen strapped to Ronan Lynch’s back.
“It suits you,” Liliana said with an amused smile when Farooq-Lane took it out at the latest short-term rental cottage. The blade cast jabbering, checkered patterns of light through the dormant jasmine-covered pergola they stood under. It was a little chilly to sit outside but Liliana did anyway, to be close to Farooq-Lane, tucked into a faded wicker chair, knitting and bobbing one of her feet in a good-humored way. She was in her middle age now, the prime of her life. Her hair shone at this age, the many-sided tone that was red hair, in its own way impossible as a dream thing. As always, she’d tamed it with an ever-present blue fabric band, but the knot at the base of her pale neck was coming loose. The skin there always seemed as if it would be very soft.
Farooq-Lane swung from chaos again, studying it, trying to understand both the sword and her fascination. “A weapon can’t suit someone.”
But it sort of did, and she wasn’t sure how she felt about that. It was a dream, and she’d been working very hard to kill those for months.
Farooq-Lane used the sword to write CARMEN in the dark. This really was a very nice cottage they were staying in at the moment, a sweet little bungalow with this pergola and a koi pond and vegetable garden behind it. All of the cottages were nice. They had to be. That was Liliana’s requirement to work for the Moderators. She had to be put up in places that felt like homes and she had to be put up in them with Farooq-Lane. A simple transaction. Stability for her present in exchange for visions of their future.
Farooq-Lane’s relationship with the Moderators was supposed to be as equally simple. In exchange for her services as a Moderator, she received a sense of purpose. And it was simple, she told herself. Once one found out the world was in danger, who could walk away from that?
“They never found any of my brother’s weapons,” Farooq-Lane said. She hadn’t realized she was going to say it out loud until she did, and then she almost immediately wished she hadn’t. She hoped Liliana hadn’t heard.
But Liliana stopped knitting.
“Do you really want to talk about this?” Liliana asked.
“No,” Farooq-Lane said. Then, the sword dipping a little in her hand, “It’s all right.”
“That sword’s deadly and you are afraid of how you like it.”
Liliana knew her well at every age. Farooq-Lane said, “You didn’t see her face. Jordan Hennessy’s. She wasn’t bringing out a weapon on purpose. Whatever that thing was that I cut … this sword seemed made to destroy it. That’s the opposite of intentionally destroying the world.”
Liliana began to knit again, jiggling her foot once more.
“You aren’t going to say anything?” Farooq-Lane asked.
“You already said it,” Liliana replied in her gentle way.
Farooq-Lane swung the sword again. “Accidentally ending the world is still ending the world, though.”
Liliana held the knitting out from her body. It was turning into a sock or a scarf or something long.
“So they have to be stopped no matter what,” Farooq-Lane said. “Well, controlled. We already know the apocalypse has to be generated by these Zeds. There’s no other explanation for why they keep showing up in your visions, even if we can’t tell what they’re doing.”
The Potomac Zeds’ acts of industrial espionage were getting bigger and bigger, although the Moderators had had as much luck intercepting them at this as with anything else. It was difficult to divine the purpose, but there undoubtedly was one. Even in light of this, though, Lock had recently announced they were going to return to their previous method of taking out other Zeds. The Potomac Zeds couldn’t blow up transistors and protect other Zeds, he reasoned. By taking up their old methods, the Moderators could stop one or the other instead of just twiddling their thumbs. Back to business as usual, he said, as soon as the location intel was processed on the next vision.
Business as usual.
“I’m going to quit,” Farooq-Lane said suddenly. She put the sword back in its scabbard, instantly reducing the light of the chilly backyard to just the subtle dazzle of the twinkle lights strung through the pergola. “I’m going to quit the Moderators.”