Adeline let out an incredulous laugh. “You’ve got to be kidding. If Dean is the Dreadmare, how could he be an ally? That thing literally tore through Helena’s reverie.”
“It saved us.”
“It executed Poesy’s orders. There’s a difference and you know it.”
Kane felt himself turning red. Of course Adeline called out this contradiction right away.
“Wait,” Ursula said. “I mean it’s possible, right? It’s not the strangest thing we’ve seen.”
Adeline shrugged and pulled out her phone. “I’ve got to get back.”
Ursula gave Kane an encouraging nod. “Kane, what do you think we should do?”
Kane’s knuckles were white around the edges of the book. “Talk to him. Learn more. We could get his file from school and see where he lives and…go there. And talk to him.”
“That’s a bad plan,” Elliot said. “We don’t know enough.”
“Exactly,” Kane said. “That’s why we need to investigate, dumbass.”
“He’s not on Insta,” Adeline said as she scrolled through her phone. “Not on Snapchat.”
Kane kept his voice level. “Isn’t that weird? And you said it yourself. You think he has something to do with my accident.”
Adeline shrugged again. “That was just a hunch.”
“Well, this is a hunch, too!”
“Both of you stop it,” Elliot said. “We can’t be operating off hunches. It’s too dangerous. And what if you’re right, Kane? What if he is the Dreadmare? Do you really plan to fight that thing?”
Kane absolutely did not want to fight the Dreadmare. He wanted to kiss the Dreadmare. Maybe. He slumped, defeated.
“Well, this has been great,” Adeline said, still on her phone. “Urs, did you bring me the you-know-what?”
Ursula looked around furtively, then pulled another bag of granola out of her windbreaker. She passed it to Adeline with cool discretion, like it was an illicit substance. Adeline took it with just as much drama, winking at Ursula.
“These girls get grabby after hour two, and I don’t share my snacks. You guys should leave soon. Kane’s sister is going to show up in about twelve minutes for her string ensemble.”
She left, leaving Elliot and Ursula to talk Kane down.
Elliot said, “I’m sorry Kane, but we need to focus on what we know. We know we need to unravel the reveries before Poesy does, or else she’ll take them away. We know she used you to break into Helena’s reverie, so unless we really mess up again, we’re good.” He didn’t say it, but he meant Kane blowing the whistle. “We need to prioritize our security first before we go on the offense against Poesy to get back Helena’s reverie, and hopefully Helena herself. People are going to start asking questions any day now, and we need to make sure we don’t come up as the answers or else we can’t help anyone. Does that make sense?”
“Yeah,” Kane mumbled.
Elliot ducked to look Kane in the eye. “Yeah, as in you’re good?”
A plan was forming in Kane’s mind, a daydream he had entertained in the event the Others didn’t agree. He looked at Elliot and attempted a perfectly resigned smile.
“I’m good,” he lied.
• Twenty-Five •
HANDS
It was a clear and bright night in the Cobalt Complex. Moonlight drenched everything, icy and pure, so that the gutted buildings were carved from luminous ivory and encrusted in silver. The fog of Kane’s breath wreathed his neck as he pedaled over bleached concrete. Frogs and loon-song told him he was nearing the river. It was one o’clock in the morning.
Kane skidded to a stop. A second later, so did Ursula.
“I can’t believe we’re here,” she huffed. “I can’t believe you tricked me into doing this.”
“I didn’t trick you. I just told you I was doing it one way or the other, and you’re a good enough friend to recognize a request without making me beg.”
“Yes, Kane, that’s what we humans call a trick.”
Kane gave her a wry smile. It had actually been Ursula who called Kane after their meeting, which had left them both restless. And as soon as Kane knew Ursula also felt the need to do something, to take actual action, his mind was made up. Ursula’s mind, he sensed, was made up, too, but she’d complained the whole way here. Probably to balance out the guilt she felt about sneaking behind Elliot and Adeline’s backs. That, and her usual nervousness. This was not a great idea, and they both knew it.
They weren’t being stupid, though. Kane had left a note for Sophia with instructions to call Adeline and Elliot if he wasn’t back by sunrise. Then he’d packed a bag with his red journal, The Witches, some chalk, and an old aluminum baseball bat he found in the garage. Just in case. Then he and Ursula met near the bridge, dressed in all black, the reflectors on their bikes taped over as they careened toward the complex’s eastern edge.
Biking through it, Kane thought about how the complex was, in some ways, its own reverie. An entire city imagined into being, then abandoned to the slow melt of neglect, then forgotten altogether as the world folded over it. Connecticut was full of these lost worlds, and the more Kane thought to look for them, the more certain he was that they slumbered everywhere. Just across this river, or beyond that hill, or behind that curtain. In many ways, the Cobalt Complex was the perfect place to bait nightmares into the light.
They reached the mill, Kane’s chosen spot.
“You sure he’s gonna show?”
“I’m sure,” Kane said.
Kane drew a huge number eight into the tilted pavement, big enough to stand in each loop. While he did, he thought of Helena. He owed her and Adeline for a lesson learned too late: sometimes a person’s dreams are all they have and taking them away can break a heart or even stop a body. The act of crushing a dream can’t be minimized. At best, it’s mean. At worst, it’s murder. Either way, Kane had let Poesy take what was not Kane’s to give, and it was time to set things right. To get Helena back, and help her heal, if that was even possible.
And they needed Dean’s help to do just that.
Kane stood back from his work. The moon winked at them from the river, and the few cicadas that remained this late in the season sang beneath the silence.
Minutes passed. Nothing happened.
“This worked before?” Ursula whispered.
“Yeah.”
“Does he like, get a notification or something?”