“You can fit two more people in the backseat,” Hennessy said.
“Not if the person in the backseat’s lying down.”
“Good point. If you’re spooning, you could probably stack four or five people back there. Two more in the trunk.”
“Dreamers!” Bryde said, silencing them.
He stood at the double doors at the end of the mannequin-filled hall, his hands upon the door handles. All that was truly visible of him in the darkness was that tawny tousle of hair, his pale neck, and the light stripe down each of his gray jacket’s sleeves. It made him look a bit like a stick figure or a skeleton, the bare minimum required to appear human.
As he pushed open the doors, warm light poured into the hallway.
The space on the other side was as large as a gymnasium. The roof had collapsed long ago. The golden evening found its way down through the jagged hole as a striving tree covered with creeper found its way up through it. The dust dazzled in the light. Everything smelled like real life, not one of five hundred scents piped in.
“Yes,” Bryde said, as if answering a question.
It was like a cathedral to ruination. Pigeons burst up from the shadows with a puff of sound. Ronan fell back in surprise; Hennessy threw a reflexive hand over her head. Bryde didn’t flinch, watching them vanish through the roof. Chainsaw threw herself after them with a joyful ark, ark, ark, sounding enormous and menacing.
“Balls,” Ronan hissed, annoyed to have been startled.
“Tits,” added Hennessy.
As they stepped farther in, another batch of birds burst from a pollen-coated carriage, knocking a mannequin onto its face.
“See how it’s become a museum to something entirely different,” Bryde said. “Look how honest it is now.”
Because of all the leaf litter and undergrowth, it was difficult to say what the exhibit had originally been, although an ivy-covered vintage firetruck a few yards away from the carriage suggested a street scene. Bryde loved the memory of human effort.
“How many years did it take for this to happen?” Bryde asked aloud. He laid his palm flat against the trunk of the big tree and gazed up through the split roof. “How many years did this have to be untouched before a tree could grow again? How many more years will it take before this place disappears entirely? Will it ever? Or will a post-museum forever be a museum to humans? When we dream something, how long will it last? This is why we do not dream something absolute, something infinite; we are not so egotistical as to assume it will always be wanted or needed. We have to think of what will become of our dreams after we are gone. Our legacy.”
Ronan’s legacy was a destroyed Harvard dorm room, an invisible car, and a sword with the words vexed to nightmare etched on the hilt.
Everything else he’d dreamt would fall asleep the moment he died.
Hennessy froze.
She froze so thoroughly that Ronan also froze, looking at her, and because he had frozen, too, Bryde eventually turned and assessed.
He simply said, “Ah.”
Unhurried, he reached down into the underbrush by Hennessy’s feet. He straightened, holding a black snake just behind its head. The snake’s muscular body rippled subtly in his grip.
Head cocked, Bryde studied it. It studied him.
“It’s cold for you, friend,” he told it. “Is it not time for your sleep?” To Ronan and Hennessy, he said, “She is not the deadliest thing in this room. In the wild, this black snake will only live a decade or so, and the only thing she will hurt is just as many mice as she needs to stay alive. Elegant. Efficient. Wonderful, really. She is the in-out of a measured breath.”
He offered the snake to Hennessy.
If there was any part of Hennessy that was afraid of the snake, she didn’t show it. She simply took it, mimicking his hold behind its eyes.
The snake twisted wildly, body undulating right by Hennessy’s arm, and Hennessy’s torso twisted, too, bowing out of the way of the grasping tail. Then girl and snake seemed to reach an agreement, and they stood quietly in the undergrowth.
“She’s a fucking knockout. I would paint her,” Hennessy said.
“Look at her,” Bryde said. “Really look. Memorize her. What are the rules of her? If you were to dream her, what would you need to know?”
Ronan, high school dropout, had never been one for school, but he liked this. He liked all of it. He liked taking in the effortless, perfect way the hexagons of the snakeskin butted up against each other. He liked watching how the dry, cool skin seemed armored, inflexible, until she moved and it all contracted and expanded, the muscles moving beneath the surface like an entirely different creature lived beneath the skin.
He liked being asked by a dreamer to think about her in the context of his dreams.
Finally, Bryde took the snake from Hennessy and released her carefully back into the underbrush. He said, somewhat bitterly, “This is a museum to the waking; what would the artifacts of a world of dreamers look like? This is a civilization so sure of its own inadequacy and entitlement that it forever tries to drown out the din of other species with its own miserable white noise of failed ambition and masturbatory anxiety. A few voices cry out against it—what if those voices were the majority? What a world. Now: masks.”
Ronan withdrew his mask from his jacket. The two simple, silken masks had been one of the first things they’d dreamt with Bryde—masks that made the wearer go instantly to sleep. Bryde vastly preferred them to the dreamt sleeping pills Ronan had used before they met.
Don’t eat dreams, Bryde had chastised him. At best they’ll starve you and at worst they’ll control you. Dreams are like words, they’re like thoughts. They always mean more than one thing. Are you sure those pills only made you sleep?
Ronan’s hands felt hot; his heart was beginning to pound. It had only taken a few weeks for the masks to generate a Pavlovian response in him.
Bryde swept his gaze over the ruined space. “Let’s find a safe place to dream.”
To dream. To dream: urgently, purposefully. To dream: with other dreamers.
That enormous, warm feeling was charging up inside Ronan again, big enough now that he could tell what it was:
Belonging.
Hennessy dreamt of the Lace.
It was always the same dream.
It was dark. She was meaningless in this dream. Not a cog in a machine, not a blade of grass in a field. Possibly a speck of dust in the baleful eye of a loping beast, blinked away. But nothing more.
Slowly, the dream illuminated, and the light revealed a thing that had been there all along. A thing? An entity. A situation. Its edges were jagged and geometric, intricate and ragged, a snowflake beneath a microscope. It was enormous. Enormous not like a storm or a planet, but enormous like grief or hatred.
This was the Lace.
It was not really a thing one saw. It was a thing one felt.
When Hennessy had first dreamt Jordan into being, Jordan slept curled up behind her, her presence at once comforting and off-putting. Comforting because she was warm, familiar, entirely the same as Hennessy. But also off-putting because Hennessy, used to sleeping alone for ten years, would startle awake as Jordan’s breath just barely moved the hairs on the back of her neck. It’s impossible to prepare for the creeping strangeness of having dreamt a copy into being. Hennessy didn’t know what she owed Jordan beyond a body here in the waking realm. She didn’t know whether she and Jordan were going to be best friends or rivals. She didn’t know if Jordan might try to usurp Hennessy’s life. She didn’t know what to do if Jordan rejected it and struck off on her own. She didn’t know what to do if Jordan embraced it and stayed with Hennessy forever and ever and ever. It was possible she might not be alone ever again, but she didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad thing.