Hennessy, thought Jordan, why didn’t you give me all your memories?
None of them guessed the fate of the afternoon was currently playing out inside the minds of the dreaming Zeds.
The Zeds moved inside a shared dream that jerked from one thing to another.
First it was the Lace, jagged and hateful.
Then it was the Smith Mountain Dam with a slow, sentient fire picking away at its base.
Then it was the Game, with each Zed in a different car jockeying for control of both the race and the dream.
It was a studio, it was a farm, it was a parking lot dumpster with opera singing sweetly, it was a teen girl in a gallery looking for Hennessy, it was a fire dragon exploding over a car, it was a bullet in a woman’s head, it was Bryde crouched next to Lock’s body in a featureless field.
“This game of yours,” Bryde said to Lock’s body, “this game of yours will only end in pain. Take a look. The rules are changing. Do you understand? Do you understand what we could do? Leave my dreamers alone.”
“Bryde,” Ronan said, but Bryde didn’t attend.
“Thanks for the focus. I couldn’t do that without you here,” Hennessy said. She stood by the invisible car, watching Bryde plow through his lines from the memory. “God! Remember when you told me to kill my clones? And then we basically ran away with yours?”
She knew about Bryde. She knew because the dream had presented the knowledge to her without remark, as dreams sometimes do. The knowledge was this: Bryde was a dream. Bryde was Ronan’s dream.
“How are you doing that to him?” Ronan asked.
Hennessy narrowed her eyes at the horizon, where smoke billowed. “I heard him tell that Moderator a clever thing at the rose garden—did you hear him? He said he didn’t play mind games. He just turned the sound down on the stuff that didn’t matter. Why didn’t he teach us that shit? That’s shit I can use. I’m using it now! He gave us such a hard time about what was real and what was a dream, but he was talking about himself, too, wasn’t he? He doesn’t know what he really is any more than we do. What’s real now, Bryde? What do you feel?”
Bryde didn’t attend. He was still moving through the memory.
“Of course he has a stake in all this,” Hennessy said. “He told you he wanted to keep Matthew awake without you? He meant he wanted to stay awake. Fucking oedipal, man.”
“Shut up,” Ronan said. “What’s your big plan here? Shut down the ley lines to keep away the Lace?”
Hennessy popped finger guns at him.
Then she reached into her pocket and pulled out a silver orb. It was possible to tell, in the way of dreams, that even though it looked a lot like Bryde’s silver orb, it was not at all the same. It pulsed its intentions through the dream.
Its intention was this: Stop the ley line.
“So what now?” Hennessy asked. “We, like, battle forever? Is that going to be how it is? I try to make this thing that will shut down the line and you change the dream so I can’t remember what I was doing and round and round and round?”
The two Zeds eyed each other. The dream pulsed with unspoken feelings, but none of them were malice. Really, there were just two. One dreamer was feeling I need this to stop everything and the other dreamer was feeling I need this to start something.
And the other Zed, the Zed who was also a dream, kept going through the motions. He was walking toward an Airstream trailer that had just appeared in time for him to walk to it. Hennessy was somehow re-creating the memory perfectly for him, everything taken in with her artist’s eye and thrown back at him. She was very powerful when she was doing that.
On the horizon, the smoke continued to billow. The Smith Mountain Dam was there in the middle of these cornfields, being taken down slowly but surely by the unruly, otherworldly fire. Eerie dark herons circled above it, looking wispy as the smoke trail from a candle. They were ready to scoop up the fire and carry it wherever Ronan needed it to go. They would make the journey from Connecticut to the real dam in Virginia in very little time at all. Ronan was somehow holding the intention of the fire intact while also holding a conversation with Hennessy and also quietly shaping the dream into something else in the background without anyone noticing. He was very powerful when he was doing that.
“The Lace isn’t here now,” Ronan said. “As long as we work together, there’s no Lace. I can keep it away forever. We can take a break from what we’re doing. Hennessy, I found you before. You were drowning. I came looking for you. I wanted to do this with you. Do you remember? Don’t make me beg.”
Hennessy held the silver orb in front of one of her eyes and squinted, like it was a pirate’s eye patch. Both of them could sense it. It was not so much a presence as a non-presence. It was an absence of potential. It was a TV with the cord yanked from the wall. She didn’t say anything. Hennessy always had something to say, but she didn’t say anything.
“You fuck everyone this way,” Ronan said. His quiet changes to the dream were now visible to him, although still hidden to her. Slowly, birds were gathering behind her. Hundreds. Thousands. The fields were lousy with them. As he twitched his fingers by his side, they twitched, too, a gathering storm. They had a single intention built into them too: Get the orb from Hennessy. Destroy it so that Ronan could wake without it. Destroy it so Ronan could wake with his dam-destroying flames instead. “Have you thought about the consequences? You can’t deal so the whole world has to instead?”
“I’m the rubber and you’re the glue, Ronan Lynch,” Hennessy replied. “What’s funny is—Bryde’s you, and he’s still more right than you are. You’re still thinking like a non-dreamer. At least I’m thinking like a forger.”
She pointed behind him.
Ronan just had time to look and see that the real Hennessy stood there, holding another silver orb in her fingers. This one was even stronger than the other Hennessy was holding. It was not just the absence of sensation. It was a blanket of nothingness. It was noise-canceling, sound-deadening, pressure-relieving, stain-lifting, subscription-canceling, and his birds were pointed at the wrong Hennessy and the wrong orb and—
Hennessy woke up in the middle of the teahouse.
“Liliana,” said Carmen Farooq-Lane.
“I know,” replied Liliana.
They both looked at the little silver orb cupped in Hennessy’s paralyzed hands. They had not seen it appear. Instead, their minds bent and folded on themselves. One part of their brains tried to tell them the orb had always been there. The other part remembered that it had not.
The rule of dreamt objects is this: If it worked in the dream, it worked in real life.
Hennessy’s orb worked in the dream.
It worked in real life.
The effects upon the unseasonably nice afternoon were immediate.
Dreamt birds dropped out of the sky here and there, pinging off windshields and onto the sidewalk before coming to a rest, sleeping. Dreamt dogs suddenly slept at dog parks, much to their owners’ surprise. Cars veered off the road and into each other, their dreamt drivers suddenly staring into space.
A nanny pushing a pram outside a converted church in downtown Boston found herself pushing a child who could not be woken.
Social media lit up with reports of power outages as wind turbines mysteriously dozed to stillness.