“We have a different idea,” Farooq-Lane said.
Hennessy narrowed her eyes. “Do you mean you both had this idea, or she has an idea, and whispered it to you just now?”
Liliana smiled sweetly. “I told you she was clever.”
Farooq-Lane’s businesslike expression didn’t change. “Can you dream something to suppress the ley line?”
Hennessy had one dream. The Lace. Always the Lace. She was a bar with a single beer on tap. She was about to tell them this, but in the past, Jordan had always told Hennessy, “You’re not allowed to shoot down any more of my ideas until you’ve had one of your own.”
So she didn’t shoot it down. She sank down into the beanbag and stared at them instead.
“I don’t believe killing yourself is the answer,” Farooq-Lane said. “You have value, too.”
“Ma’am, we’ve just met,” Hennessy said.
Liliana broke in. “Do you know what it means to be a Visionary, Hennessy? I don’t always look like this. Sometimes I’m a girl. Sometimes I’m a woman. Sometimes I am this, what you see now. Every time I change between these ages, I have a vision of the future, and all the sound that has happened or will happen in the intervening years comes out of me. It destroys everyone close enough to hear it. Over the years, I have met and will meet people who urge me to turn this vision inward. If I do that, I will no longer shift between ages, and I will no longer be a danger to those around me. But eventually, that method will kill me instead.”
“I take it since we’re talking to the old version of you, you picked door number one,” Hennessy said. “Keep exploding?”
“Most Visionaries die very young,” Liliana said. “Too young to change the world. I’m still here not because I think my life is valuable—although I do think that—but because staying alive means I have more visions, and the more visions I have, the more I can save the world from itself. You have value, too, Hennessy, value that comes from staying alive.”
“And if you turn off the ley line,” Farooq-Lane said, “no more Zeds—dreamers—have to die. You’re all only as dangerous then as you would be as normal people. You can only hurt or help as many people as anyone else.”
She’d corrected herself, but Hennessy preferred the first term she’d used. Zed. That’s right. Zero. Nothing. Loser.
“You don’t have to feel this fear and pain all the time. You’re allowed to stop it,” Farooq-Lane said.
“I know you have no love for yourself,” Liliana broke in again, and her voice was so gentle that Hennessy felt absurdly close to tears again. They burned; she hated them. She wanted it to stop. How badly she wanted it to stop. “So you might not make this decision for yourself, because you don’t think you deserve it. You can make it for others. It would be noble to stop it.”
Stopping the ley line meant stopping Jordan in her tracks.
Farooq-Lane seemed to guess what she was thinking. “If the end of the world comes, your dreams will die with the rest of us. This way they’ll fall asleep. That doesn’t have to be forever. Death is forever.”
I wish you were dead, she’d told Jordan.
Why do you always do this? Jordan asked.
Hennessy almost wished that Farooq-Lane and Liliana had told her they were going to have to kill her after all. It wasn’t exactly that she wanted to die. She just didn’t want to live with herself.
“You’re forgetting one thing,” she said. “I only ever dream of the Lace. All day every day, it’s the Lace superstore. I can’t dream something to shut down the ley line. I only ever dream of the Lace.”
The music plinked overhead. The beanbag hugged Hennessy. She drank some of her hot chocolate. The reviews Liliana had read on the way over were right. It really was good hot chocolate. It would be a good last meal.
Liliana looked at Farooq-Lane, her expression sympathetic and soft.
Farooq-Lane looked at Hennessy, her expression sympathetic and hard. Then she reached behind her to lay from chaos, in its scabbard, in front of Hennessy and her beanbag.
“Then explain this,” she said.
Ronan hadn’t meant to dream Matthew.
It had been Christmastime. Short days. Long nights. He always got restless that time of year. Anticipation built in him as the days got smaller, until around the end of December, the feeling eventually burst and left him feeling more ordinary again.
He knew now that it had been a surge of the ley line. But back then, as a child, as a dreamer who was not permitted to give words to the dreaming, he hadn’t known anything but that restlessness. It was a feeling that was only shored up by Declan’s behavior. If Ronan became more alive as they crept toward winter solstice, Declan became less so. His eyes developed bags. His moods got short. The brothers did not fight then like they did when they were older, but the seeds were already sleeping in the cold soil.
That particular winter had been unseasonably warm, and a few days before Christmas, Aurora sent the boys outside to kick a ball around. To Ronan’s delight, the brothers discovered that the dun-colored fields around the farmhouse were lousy with starlings. Hundreds, perhaps thousands. When the birds first saw the brothers emerge from the house, they lifted up in a great swath of dark dots in the sky, like music notes on a page, but they quickly landed again just a few yards farther away.
This was much better than kickball. For quite a while they instead played a game of who can get closer to the flock.
Ronan won. This was partially because he was shorter than Declan and thus more clandestine, but it was also because he wanted it more. He was fascinated by this flock of flyers, this many-headed entity that was not tied to the ground. The birds were individuals, but when they lifted off, it was together, in something even more magnificent than they could ever be on their own. Ronan didn’t have words for how they made him feel, but he loved them. He wished he knew how to explain it to Declan.
“I’d like a bird army,” he said.
Declan’s lip curled. “I don’t think that would be very interesting.”
“You’re never into anything. You’re the most boring person I know.”
Declan retrieved the ball. The game was clearly over.
Without warning, Ronan ran directly into the flock. There was a brief moment of stillness and then they all took off at once, surrounding him.
It was so much like a dream. Wings upon wings upon wings. Too many birds to count. Too many voices to pick out individual sounds. He raised his arms. Ground and air seethed with birds, hiding both so thoroughly that it didn’t seem entirely impossible that he had left the ground with them.
Imagine flying, he thought. Imagine flying while awake. Imagine dreaming while awake—
Then the birds had gone and he was just a boy standing on the ground. He was not flying. Being awake was nothing like dreaming. His older brother was a few feet away, the ball tucked under his arm, looking at him with an expression of vague irritation.
Ronan had never known such agony, and he didn’t even have words for it.
A few nights later, on the shortest night of the year, Ronan dreamt of the birds, only now they were ravens, not starlings, and there were fewer of them. They were gathered in the field in a purposeful way, studying something in the grass. They were muttering to themselves: make way, make way, make way.