This time, when he got up for that glass of water, the real glass, the waking glass, he was sure to marvel his fingertips over everything he passed, reminding himself of how specific waking reality was. The bumpy plaster walls. The rubbed-smooth curve of the chair-rail molding. The puff of air from behind Matthew’s door as he pushed it open to see his younger brother sleeping.
You’re awake. You’re awake.
This time, in the bathroom, he paid attention to the moon slatted through the blinds, the faded copper stain around the base of the old faucet. These were details, he thought, the sleeping brain couldn’t invent.
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 then he woke in his bed again.
Again, again.
Shit.
He gasped for air like a dying thing.
Ronan couldn’t tell if he was awake or if he was dreaming, and he no longer knew how to interrogate the difference. He examined every part of both dream and waking and felt no seam between them.
He thought: I might be doing this forever. Trying to wake, never knowing if he had succeeded.
Sometimes he wondered if he was still in that dream. Maybe he had never woken at all. Maybe every impossible thing that had happened since that Ronan! in the mirror, all the outrageous events of his high school years, good and bad, had been in his head. It was as plausible an explanation as any.
The worst dream.
Before, he thought he’d always know the difference between dream and waking. What was real and what he’d invented. But After—
“Wake up, white boy, we’re here,” Hennessy said.
Ronan woke as the car pulled to a stop, tires crunching gravel, brush scratching the exterior. He had been stretched in the backseat; now he sat up, pressing the heel of his hand to the crick in his neck. On the other side of the backseat, Chainsaw, his dreamt raven, scrabbled inside her box, sensing they were about to get out. Automatically, he reached for his phone to check for texts before remembering it was gone.
Outside, the cold afternoon had turned to a warm, golden evening. Flat-roofed buildings huddled around a commercial parking lot, the gutters gilded fondly by the late-day light. It was the sort of complex that looked as if it ought to have school buses parked in front of it, and sure enough, Ronan spotted a faded sign: WEST VIRGINIA MUSEUM OF LIVING HISTORY. An unhindered tree-of-heaven grew around the sign, and tributaries of overgrown cracks ran through the parking lot. End-of-season leaves curled auburn and purple wherever the breeze couldn’t reach.
The Museum of Living History looked like it had been dead for decades.
Just the kind of place Bryde usually brought them. In the weeks since they’d fled from the Moderators on the bank of the Potomac, Bryde had directed them to collapsed houses, empty vacation rentals, shuttered antique stores, vacant airport hangars, disused hiking shelters. Ronan couldn’t tell if Bryde’s preference for the decrepit was grounded in secrecy or aesthetic. It felt like secret didn’t have to be synonymous with abandoned, but Bryde nevertheless brought them to places that few human hands had touched in recent memory. These lodgings always lacked creature comforts, but Ronan couldn’t complain. The three of them were alive, weren’t they? Three dreamers, wanted by the law, still standing, bristling with piss and vinegar as they climbed out of their dreamt car.
Bryde said, “Listen. What do you hear?”
He said this every time they got someplace new.
Ronan heard the dry hiss of the wind through trapped leaves. The distant roar of trucks on the highway. The murmur of an unseen airplane. A dog barking. Some kind of buzzing generator far away. The soft whoosh of Chainsaw’s wings. Watching the black-feathered bird rise above the three of them in this strange warm place filled him with a feeling he couldn’t describe, one he’d been feeling more and more since they’d fled. It was like a fullness. A presence, a realness. Before, he had been hollow, drained. No, draining. Becoming empty. And now there was something inside him again.
Listen, Bryde said, and Ronan listened. What did he hear? His pulse in his ears. The stir of his blood. The movement of his soul. The hum of the thing that was filling him.
It couldn’t be happiness, he thought, because he was far from his brothers and from Adam. He worried about them, and surely he couldn’t be happy if he was worried.
But it felt a lot like happiness.
“When the last human dies, there will still manage to be a plane whining over the empty forest,” Bryde said.
Although he was complaining, his voice remained measured. He was, in most ways, the polar opposite of his mercurial pupils. Nothing startled him nor sent him flying off the handle. He did not laugh hysterically or burst into rageful tears. He did not swagger or self-abase, indulge or self-abnegate. He simply was. Everything about his posture announced him not as an apex predator, but rather as something powerful enough that he could opt out of the predator-prey scenario entirely. All of this without a tousled lock of tawny hair out of place.
He’s sort of a dandy, Hennessy had said to Ronan privately, on the first day. Like, a super-dandy. He beat all the other dandies and now he’s the boss-dandy, the one you have to defeat to get that button-down shirt of his.
Ronan didn’t like the word dandy, but he understood what she was trying to say. There was something light and insubstantial about Bryde, something dissonant with the weight of his purpose. Ever since he’d met Bryde, in person, Ronan had thought there was something surprising about him, a mismatch, a weird join-up of the wires in Ronan’s brain, like he was thinking of one word but saying another. It meant that every time Ronan looked at Bryde for long, it felt as if
