Her head knew what it wanted to do. Why did her hand disobey? Noses veered petulantly. Rib cages went barrel-shaped, feet and hands turned into a four-piece mismatched tool set. She remembered actually howling in frustration as she wadded up an attempt. Stabbing canvases with scissors. Hurling paint tubes across J. H. Hennessy’s studio.
She remembered how when she did turn up with a good result, she’d return to it several times over the course of the day, taking it out again and again to flush with pleasure and surprise and accomplishment. She had no idea why it had gone well and so she couldn’t be sure it would ever happen again.
Hennessy remembered this, but she didn’t feel it. Somehow all the pain hadn’t managed to carry through the years. No part of her expected to fail when she sat down at a canvas now. She knew how the paint would behave. She knew what her brushes were capable of. No part of her doubted that whatever she was looking at would travel through her eyes, down her arms, and out onto the blank space before her.
Once, one of her clients had asked her if she considered herself a prodigy. They’d been standing in front of a Cassatt she’d forged for him.
“No,” Hennessy had said. “I’m a forgery of a prodigy.”
But she knew she was good. No amount of thinking about how bad she used to be would change that. She might suck at everything else about being a human and a dreamer, but as an art forger—she might not be the best, but she was at least one of the best.
That accomplishment seemed pointless now. There was no one to show it to who mattered. They were all dead.
All except for Jordan, who had always mattered the most anyway. But where was she now?
“I am so fucking good at this,” Ronan said.
The two of them were in one of those electronic boutiques that took itself very seriously. Indirect neon lighting, backlit products, every shelf rounded and modern. Phones of every shape and size lined the shelves and tables. There were traditional cell phones. Wall-mounted hard lines. Phones shaped like piggy banks and phones shaped like fake teeth, phones shaped like model cars and phones shaped like ceramic birds. Phones like dish-soap bubbles and phones like bank pens with fake flowers affixed to the end of them.
Many of them were impossible, but it didn’t matter, because it was a dream, Ronan’s dream, and he could do what he wanted.
Hennessy said, “You could dream anything, anywhere, and you bring us to a consumer playground with the logos only barely scrubbed off.”
“Jealous much?” Ronan was all snotty arrogance again, as if he wouldn’t have drowned in nightwash if Bryde hadn’t brought them to another ley line in the nick of time.
She wasn’t jealous. She was wary. Ley line energy boomed through the dream. She hadn’t felt this much ley power since she’d been in Ronan’s dreamt forest Lindenmere. It made the dream as lucid as any waking experience.
If she had her Lace dream with this much power at her disposal …
“We’re not doing the Lace dream,” Ronan said. “Chill out. What do we want out of these phones? They’ve gotta be untraceable, I guess. Portable. What else does a phone do?”
Why didn’t Adam text me back?
Because they were sharing the dreamspace, she heard his thought like a shout. It traveled through the dream with a retinue of amorphous sub-thoughts. Was Adam injured, was he bored with Ronan, did he prefer the company of his urbane new friends, calm down, Ronan, stop being needy, Ronan, get yourself together, Ronan, you’re always the car crash, Ronan. It would have been polite to pretend she hadn’t heard any of it, but Ronan and Hennessy had never been polite to each other and she didn’t see the point in starting now. “What’s your boy like?”
Ronan picked up a slender phone the size of a business card and made a big show of examining it for suitability. He didn’t reply.
“So he’s ugly,” Hennessy said. “Or a complete cock-up.”
Ronan studied another phone that looked like an umbrella. “What do you think he’s like?”
“I honestly have no idea,” Hennessy said. “Who would be attracted to you as a love match? Has he got crushingly low self-esteem? Is he one of those soft boys who hide in the firm pecs of their scary partners? Is he a witch? Did he say a spell wrong and you appeared and now you’re bound for life?”
“Yeah,” Ronan said. “That one.”
Hennessy leaned over one of the shelves. The tediously normal-looking cell phone on it brightened to display a photograph of two young men as the lock screen. One was Ronan, laughing explosively. The other was a rather self-contained-looking fellow, striking in an unusual sort of way, smirking a bit at whatever he’d just said. They were not exactly opposites but their appearances nonetheless gave the impression they were. Ronan’s dark, dramatic eyebrows, the other guy’s light, barely visible ones. Ronan’s emotions screamed upon his face while the other guy’s whispered. “Is that him?”
Ronan addressed the dream at large. “Traitor. You didn’t have to show her.”
“He doesn’t look like he’s filling a hole inside himself with your toxic presence,” Hennessy said. She kind of hated looking at them together. It made her feel ugly inside. “Are you guys in love five-ever or do you think you’re a pretty board game to pass his time?”
Now she sounded ugly, too.
But Ronan just picked up another phone and, after a space, mused, “Your phone can be simpler than mine, of course. You’ll only need to be able to call Jordan, right? There’s no one else?”
A single question, clear and factual. What a weapon. And he’d delivered it in the same tone he might have
