Hennessy’s hand shook with fury. “I get to do this. I already paid the admission for this ride.”
“Hennessy,” Bryde said a third time.
Hennessy’s words were flippant, although her voice was electric. “You’re not my real dad.”
“There are better ways to do that. Ways to make it matter more. Do you think I don’t know what you want?”
A ripple of tension.
Then Hennessy put the gun down.
“Let’s finish this,” Bryde said.
The Moderators watched them, dazed, motionless, ill with longing and dread, as the Zeds made their way to Lock. Bryde nodded a confirmation to Ronan and Hennessy. The two of them crouched before slipping on small black fabric sleeping masks.
For the briefest of moments they were blind bandits, and then, a second later, they both slumped to the ground in fast sleep.
The Zed in the Airstream trailer, watching with wide, shocked eyes, shouted, “Who are you?”
Bryde put his fingers to his lips.
Hennessy and Ronan dreamt.
When they woke just a few minutes later, a dead body lay beside Hennessy. Forger in life, forger in sleep. The corpse was identical in every way to the living body already lying in the dirt—she had dreamt a perfect copy of Lock. She was also temporarily paralyzed, as all Zeds were after dreaming something into being, so Ronan heaved her up in a fireman’s hold and carried her back to the hard-to-see car.
After they had gone, Bryde rolled the real Lock onto his side so he could face his copied body, so he could see the perfection of it and be horrified. Bryde crouched between the two Locks, a lithe, nimble Reynard beside Lock’s blunt power.
“This game of yours,” Bryde began, and there was no softness to his voice, “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.”
There was no change in the living Lock’s expression. Bryde reached into Lock’s pocket and took out a small parcel. Now Lock’s eyes swam into focus long enough to show real panic, but his fingers could only snatch limply, drugged by Ronan Lynch’s dreamt storm.
“This is mine now,” Bryde whispered, hiding away the parcel. His teeth were a fox’s little snarl. “The trees know your secrets.”
Lock’s mouth opened and closed.
Bryde stood.
He stopped by the Airstream trailer, where the spared Zed was talking with Ronan, and then they all drove away. The car in one direction, the trailer in another, leaving behind a catastrophe of Moderators scattered across the stubbled wheat.
Slowly the dreamt weather dissolved, and the fields returned to their previous, featureless peace.
It was as if the Zeds had never been there at all.
Far back from the others, from the safety of where they’d watched this all unfold, Farooq-Lane turned to Liliana and said, “Those three could end the world.”
Ronan Lynch still remembered the worst dream he’d ever had. It was an old dream now, two years old. Three? Four? As a kid, time had been slippery, and now, as an adult, or as a whatever-he-was, it was downright slimy. It had happened Before, that was all that mattered. Ronan used to divide his life into the time before his father’s death and the time after it, but now he divided it differently. Now it was Before he’d been good at dreaming. And After.
This was Before.
When the worst dream showed up, Ronan already had a vibrant catalog of memorable nightmares. What sort did you want? Perhaps the classic monster mash: talons, fangs, shaggy feathers dripping with rain. Public humiliation: in a movie theater trying to hide a runny nose, wiping endless snot on a ratty sleeve. Body horror? Scissors slipping and snipping right into an arm, the bone and tendons sliding free. Mind-fuckery was a perennial choice: entering a familiar room and being struck with a sense of hideous and unshakable wrongness that dug and dug and dug inside him until he awoke shaking and covered in sweat.
He had them all.
“Nightmares are lessons,” his mother Aurora had told him once. “They feel wrong because you know what’s right.”
“Nightmares are bitches,” his father, Niall, had told him once. “Let them smile at you, boy, but do not get their numbers.”
“Nightmares are chemical,” his boyfriend, Adam, had told him once. “Inappropriate adrenaline response to stimulus, possibly related to trauma.”
“Talk dirty to me,” Ronan had replied.
Here’s what nightmares were: real. At least for him. Everyone else woke up with cold sweats and a racing heart, but if Ronan wasn’t careful, he woke up with everything he’d been dreaming of. It used to happen a lot.
And it was starting to happen a lot again.
He was starting to think maybe Before and After weren’t as clearly defined as he’d thought.
This was what happened in the worst dream: Ronan turned on a light and saw a mirror. He was in the mirror. The Ronan in the mirror said to him: Ronan!
He woke with a start in his old bedroom at the Barns. Spine, sweaty. Hands, tingling. Heart, kick-kick-kicking at his ribs. Usual nightmare postgame. The moon wasn’t visible but he felt her looking in, casting shadows behind rigid desk legs and above the stretching wings of the ceiling fan. The house was silent, the rest of the family asleep. He got up and filled a glass with water from the tap in the bathroom. He drank it, filled another one.
Ronan turned on the bathroom light and saw the mirror. He was in the mirror. The Ronan in the mirror said to him: Ronan!
And he twitched awake again, this time for real.
Ordinarily, when one woke, it was obvious the dream was a pretender. But this time, dreaming about dreaming … it had felt so real. The floorboards; the cold, chipped tiles of
