Ronan and Hennessy exchanged another look.
This was not what Ronan would have considered the correct response to the three of them showing up on one’s doorway.
But he kind of liked it.
“You might as well come in so they can paw at you,” said the woman. “Not that you’re here for me, but I’m—”
“Angelica,” Bryde said as he stepped past her into the cramped hallway. “Angelica Aldana-Leon. Yes. I know. They told me.” As her mouth dropped open, he lifted a closed fist and said to the five children, “Presents, but not until you tell me what they are.”
“Are they the seeds?”
“Are you real?”
“He said not to ask that!”
Bryde opened his closed hand and let a single seed drop from it into each of their palms. “Now, how do you make them grow?”
They conferred like it was a game show. Then one whispered the answer to the other, and together they clapped the seeds in their hands. Each immediately exploded into a bright blue lily, and just then, Ronan realized, stupidly, that they were all dreamers, each of these children, and Bryde must have come to them in their dreams, too, and shown them these dreamt seeds he was going to give them.
Ronan searched inside himself for the same jealousy he’d first felt over Rhiannon, but that wasn’t what he felt at all.
“The children told me that it’s you who have stopped the …” Angelica asked them, making a gesture to her eyes and nose. The nightwash.
“The slop!” shouted one of the boys.
“Thank you. Thank you so much. I don’t know how to thank you for what you’re doing, so just, thank you, you have saved them,” Angelica said, with feeling.
“You’re welcome,” Bryde said. “I don’t know how long it will hold, but we will keep working.”
Ronan stared at the kids, who stared back up at him. Now he understood why Angelica looked frightened and exhausted. Dreamers. Little dreamers, like he had been once, but growing up in a world where a lack of ley energy was killing them. He wondered how many dreamers had died of the nightwash without knowing anyone else like them existed, or knowing that they could save themselves by moving to a place with more energy.
This was why they were doing what they were doing.
He looked down. One of the kids had his hand and was shaking it, trying to get him to follow. Another was giggling furiously as Chainsaw sat on her shoulder, working hard to be extraordinarily gentle with her talons.
Same, Chainsaw, he thought.
A third hugged his leg, and without thinking, he draped a hand over her head, his unconscious remembering both Matthew and Opal. He had forgotten what it was like to hug and be hugged during these last few weeks. It felt like ages since these small comforts.
Angelica said something in brisk Spanish and the children began to argue noisily among themselves. In English, she told them, “The children will show you where you can put your things. I’m sorry, it is bunk beds for you two boys. We don’t have much room.”
“That’s all right,” Bryde said. “It will be nice to have a shower and a meal for a night.”
Hennessy was whisked away and Bryde and Ronan left in a bedroom with the promised bunk beds. There was nothing fancy about the beds—they were just raw wood screwed together with a can-do attitude and mismatched blankets—but the entire situation was homier than any place they had stayed since leaving.
Bryde didn’t seem to care. No sooner had he silently set his bag on the lower bunk than he turned to go.
“Wait a second,” Ronan said. “Wait a damn second.”
Bryde paused and Ronan nearly lost his nerve. He hadn’t expected Bryde to listen.
“What did we do?” Ronan asked.
Narrowing his eyes, Bryde shook his head a little.
Ronan pressed on. “Haven’t we been trying? What more do you want from us? We go where you tell us to go, we do what you tell us to do. You asked me to listen, and I listened. What did I do? What did I fuck up?”
Bryde’s expression changed. “I’m not angry with you. Is that what you think?”
“I don’t know what to think.”
“I don’t, either,” Bryde said. “Why does Adam keep trying to find you in the dreams these past few days?”
Tamquam
“And why,” Bryde went on, “are you keeping him out?”
Ronan felt his face go hot, his hands go cold. He hadn’t thought Bryde would notice. “You don’t know him. He can’t put things down. He’s thorough. He cares. The fact he found a way to look for me in dreamspace as soon as we started getting more energy out there just proves it. If I let him meet up with me in dreamspace, he won’t stop researching the Moderators and all of this stuff until he’s solved it. I’m not going to be the one who gets him kicked out of Harvard.”
“For his own good,” Bryde said, but not as if he believed or disbelieved, just as if he was anticipating the rest of Ronan’s sentence. Then he looked away, and as he did, he had that same expression that had made Ronan think he was upset with them. His eyebrows set, eyes tight, mouth tight. Not as effortless as the Bryde they’d met all the weeks ago. In a low voice, he said, almost to himself, “No, I’m not angry at you. You have done everything I’ve hoped. You and Hennessy are much different than I expected. Better than I expected.”
Ronan’s mouth opened and closed. It was such the opposite of what he was expecting to hear that he didn’t have any words at all.
“No, I am not angry at you,” Bryde continued. “I’m tired. I’m proud. I’m confused. I’m sad, because I know things can’t stay like they are now. We are working even now to change things and it will never be like this moment again. It is a ridiculous way to think, to be more interested in the present than the future, and if it were you or Hennessy, I would never permit it. I won’t lose my way. I know that. But I can imagine it. It is me—it is me I am angry with.”
It meant more to Ronan than he thought to hear all these words, even if he didn’t entirely understand them.
“We are nearly to the final step,” Bryde said. “There is only the dam left. Then it will be a different game entirely.”
“Why are we here, then?” Ronan asked, and Bryde’s mouth turned rueful, which made Ronan think he had been expecting Ronan to ask something else, although he couldn’t imagine what that something else might be.
“This is just a reward. This is just so you can see why we’re doing it and sleep a night on a real pillow and bask in the gratitude of one of the many voices who have your names on their lips these days. You’re a hero. Enjoy it.”
A hero. It was an unfamiliar concept. Ronan had been the villain for so long, if he had been anything. The one in trouble, the one written up on the slip, the one being chased, the one being accused. And before that he had been the young dreamer. Secret. Forever. Now he was a hero to a family of young dreamers who would never have to feel alone.
Both Bryde and Ronan jumped as they heard a trilling sound. It was Ronan’s dreamt phone. He’d nearly forgotten he still had it; he hadn’t used it since that first call to Declan.
And it was Declan now. There was no way to identify the caller visually, of course, since the dreamt phone just looked like a tunnel piercing. But nevertheless, something about the ring strongly implied that it was Declan.