Bryde said, “You wanted me.”
“I wanted someone real.”
Reality doesn’t mean anything to someone like you. Bryde didn’t have to say it. Ronan already knew it. He knew everything Bryde knew, deep down.
“It’s harder than I thought,” Bryde said. “Being out here. I thought it would be simpler. I thought I knew what I wanted. But it’s so much louder. It’s so, so much louder. I get … confused.”
Ronan’s heart was breaking.
“Your quest,” Ronan said.
“Your quest,” said Bryde.
Ronan closed his eyes. “You’re just a dream.”
Bryde shook his head. “We already know what you think about that, because I told you. What do you feel, Ronan Lynch?”
Betrayed. Alone. Furious. He felt like he had nightwash even though he didn’t. He felt like he couldn’t stand to look at Bryde for one more second. He felt like he couldn’t stand to be in his own head one more second. He felt like he couldn’t tell if he had ever woken up from that worst dream.
The black ocean boiled and then burned. Ronan’s mind boiled and then burned. Everything could burn if you hit it hard enough.
“Nothing,” Ronan said. “I can’t feel anything.”
The grass was also burning now. The flaming waves had lapped the pebbly shore, which caught fire, and then the ascending cliff face had caught fire, and then the strange flames had wicked over the edge and caught the dirt and then the grass. The fire whispered to itself as it did its work. Its language was secret, but Ronan got the gist. It was starving.
Bryde said, “Right now, Hennessy is trying to dream something to shut down the ley line for good. Can you feel her? We can go stop her, or I can go stop her, or you can try to stop me and let the ley line be shut down and kill all of this. Either way. You have to make a decision. Is this my quest, is it your quest, or is it nothing? For once in your life, stop lying. Stop hiding behind me. Ronan Lynch, what do you want?”
In the dream, sweet Aurora’s voice came through gently. She was telling Ronan he had to bury it.
He took a deep, shuddering breath. The fire was burning everything except for them.
“I want to change the world.”
When the ley line disappeared, it was a very nice day.
All of New England was experiencing an unseasonably warm afternoon, but it was a good kind of unseasonably warm. Not warm enough to make all the conversations center around anything unpleasant like climate change and the growing price of avocados. But warm enough that residents could shed their coats and gloves and get some of the ol’ steps in, take the kid for a walk, knock the spiders off the badminton set in the garage.
Days like this, they said, remind you what it’s all about.
Three Zeds were dreaming busily on this unseasonably warm afternoon and thus not able to enjoy it. Two of them, Bryde and Ronan Lynch, slept just a few yards away from a car that was very difficult to see. They had not been dreaming long, but already dried oak leaves had flickered from the woods around them and lit upon their clothes. There is a certain wrongness to seeing leaves settled on a body. It is not the same as leaves drifting over a rooftop or a fallen log. It makes one anxious to see it. It is wrong. Opposite.
The third dreamer, Hennessy, dreamt on an oversized beanbag in a small room in a tea shop. Two women watched her closely. One of the women, a woman so old that numbers no longer felt relevant to describe her age, gently brushed her fingers across Hennessy’s forehead as she slept. The other woman stood watchfully at the door, her hands on a dreamt sword with the words from chaos etched on the hilt. She was ready to swing it at once should Hennessy wake with a nightmare instead of a dream to save them all.
“I don’t have a good feeling about this,” the woman with the sword said.
“It will be all right,” the old woman replied, brushing her fingers over the dreamer’s forehead again, but her hand was trembling a little.
The people who loved the dreaming Zeds were also unable to enjoy the warm afternoon.
Adam Parrish, who loved Ronan, sat on the floor of his dorm room alone, a single candle lit, his tarot cards stacked face up beside it. He stared into the flame, throwing his mind out into the dreamspace. He was trying to reach Ronan Lynch, but it was like a phone that kept ringing and ringing. This was a dangerous game, but he kept trying. He let his mind wander a little farther from his body each time.
Ronan! Ronan! But instead he kept catching glimpses of Bryde. Everything felt hot. He could smell smoke. He was smoke, drifting, drifting.
Oh, Ronan, what have you done, he thought miserably. What are you doing?
Matthew Lynch, who also loved Ronan, had gone walking. Not wandering like a dream, but walking like an ordinary teen, with purpose. While Declan was occupied with secretive errands, Matthew had set up an appointment with a local school for a tour. He was going to finish high school. He’d decided. He didn’t know what he was going to do afterward, but until then, he was going to take Jordan’s advice and start treating himself as real until Declan did, too. It was a very stuffy school office, though, and he could see the day through the tiny window next to him. It was hard not to wish he was out there instead.
He found himself quite suddenly thinking about fire. He wasn’t sure why. He touched his cheek. It was hot. The school hadn’t adjusted their heating for this unseasonable day.
Declan Lynch, who also loved Ronan, was cornered in his own apartment by a handful of extremely pissed-off Moderators. They had just lost three Zeds at a rose garden and had no Visionary to provide further leads. They had not immediately decided how they were going to use Declan to get their hands on Ronan, but they had decided they would grab him first and then figure out the finer points later. He was all they had.
“I’m no good as leverage,” Declan told them. He thought about the gun he’d taped to the bottom of the kitchen table. It was four feet away, but might as well have been four hundred. Even if he could somehow get it, what was one gun against a room full of them? “As far as he’s concerned, he thinks I just tried to get him killed.”
He couldn’t help but think about how Bryde’s little dreamt orb would have let him walk out untouched. How Ronan’s sundogs spilled from the bottle would have emptied this apartment instantly. Such power. Such power for just a very few people to hold.
Oh, Ronan, he thought, suddenly angry that his brother could never see the bigger picture, the long game. What are you going to do now?
Jordan, who loved Hennessy, was walking from her studio to Declan’s apartment, head down, eyebrows furrowed, reading a news story on her phone. It was about a massive Boston street race that had sent seven drivers to area hospitals in critical condition. The chief of police had given a statement urging drivers to remember that life was not a video game or a movie franchise; actions like this had real consequences. She wondered if the play against Bryde had worked; Declan wasn’t picking up his phone.
I wish you were dead, Hennessy had told her.
Jordan’s cheeks felt hot as she walked. Fiery. Her chest ached and burned. She didn’t know why Hennessy had to be like this. If they were still living together, they would have talked it out by now. Hennessy would have calmed down, gotten sad instead of mad, and eventually just gone limp, giving up. They would have once more reached equilibrium. Well, not they. Jordan was rarely the emergency. Hennessy was the emergency.