“I was trying,” Ronan finally snarled.
“So was Hennessy, and you took it from her,” Bryde said. Man, that little rubbishy part of Hennessy was having a field day. “Did you manage to find your painting, Hennessy?”
“The haystack has not produced a needle thus far,” she said.
Bryde flicked his eyes around the barn. Dreams could sometimes end up quite far away from their dreamer, especially when they were big, but there was no sign of any of the large things from the dream, like a canvas, or the chair he’d been sitting on.
Then she spotted it.
On her thumb, there was the faintest smear of feather-pink paint, the same pink she’d smeared across the canvas in the dream. This was what she’d been paralyzed for, just a mere scraping of dried pigment. She supposed Jordan would’ve been delighted to see it. It wasn’t a dreamt copy of Hennessy. And it wasn’t the Lace. Technically, that was huge progress, even if it didn’t feel like it. Sometimes, as Ronan had just demonstrated, it was as much about what you didn’t dream as what you did.
She showed her thumb to Bryde as if she were hitchhiking. “Found it.”
Bryde rounded on Ronan again. “So you pulled the ley right out from beneath her. What a gentleman. How much is left now? What do you feel?”
Ronan looked like a cat doused with water.
“Right, you can’t, I forgot,” Bryde went on. “The fairy tales we tell ourselves are so comforting in times of darkness. I’ll tell you how much: very little. The ley line bent over backward for a barn full of wheels going nowhere. And if the Moderators drove up right now, where would you be? Up shit creek and unable to dream a paddle.”
The rubbishy part of Hennessy was still rubbishy and pleased to see Ronan getting reamed out, but the rest of her felt bad enough to come to his rescue.
“Pity, too,” she said, leaping to her feet. “I needed that ley line. I was just warming up. I was going to bring out Max Ernst’s entire cabin in Sedona. With Max Ernst inside it. And a bunch of his art. Maybe his wife, too. He built that thing with his own two hands after surviving two wars, did you know? The cabin, I mean, not the wife. I think she was from New York. Or maybe she moved there after Ernst died. I don’t remember, but I think she was the one who said there was no such thing as a woman artist, there was just an artist. Oh, I was also going to dream that bird thing of his, in your honor, Ronan Lynch. He was like you, had that bird alter ego, couldn’t tell the difference between birds and humans. Loplop.”
“Hennessy, this isn’t—” Bryde started.
She blew on. “I knew I’d have the name if I thought about it hard enough. Kept thinking it was rabbity, and it was. Lop. Lop. Yeah, so, the cabin, the studio, the Dadaist. It was going to be my dreaming masterwork, inspired by these dioramas. That’s the way a good artist works, isn’t it? She takes in the things around her and delivers not a copy but a response to the world she’s absorbed. I behold this supposed West Virginia Museum of Living History with its static figures frozen in staged historical moments and I raise you real people in actual historical properties, a surrealist in a surrealist piece. Now that’s living art. That’s what Dadaism is all about. This is the Hennessy museum, discounts available for children under twelve and parties over twenty!”
Bryde gave her a withering look, but it had worked—all her words had drained him of his. He just shook his head and tossed Ronan’s jacket at him. “Get your things. It’s three hours to the next nearest ley line. We’ve got to get going before this one turns the lack of ley into an emergency again.”
“I’m not that damn fragile,” Ronan protested.
Bryde just said, “Don’t forget your bird.”
After Bryde stalked off through the doors, Hennessy held out an arm to help Ronan up from the hay. “Must’ve been a helluva dream.”
“Oh, fuck off,” Ronan said.
“Fuck off yourself. You’re welcome.”
Ronan shouldered on his jacket. “What was it going to be? Your dream. Don’t say Ploplop.”
“Loplop, you Neanderthal,” Hennessy said. She didn’t want to talk about the dream. She didn’t want to talk about Jordan. She just wanted to keep moving so she didn’t have to think about any of it too hard while she was awake, because when she thought about it, she got sad, and when she got sad, she got angry, and when she got angry, she wanted to kill Moderators, and when she wanted to kill Moderators, Bryde told her to bide her time. She didn’t want to bide her time. “That’s the crankiest I’ve ever seen him. Maybe he’ll get tired of us and piss off to whatever he was doing before.”
This was a topic she and Ronan had already discussed, briefly in whispers, when they had moments here and there without Bryde. Who was this person they were following? Where had he been before? They knew he’d been infamous when they first met him, that his name was already whispered around black markets … but for what? And how eager was he to get back to it?
Ronan rubbed a thumb over the wheel closest to him, pressing his fingers into the etched word tamquam. This was a thing Hennessy was learning about Ronan Lynch: He always thought he was keeping his secrets by keeping his mouth shut, but he ended up telling them in other ways.
He said, “But what were you dreaming about really?”
“A lady never tells,” Hennessy said, “and it’s impolite to ask.”
“Whatever.”
“Jordan.”
“I
