Since meeting Ronan and Bryde, she’d spent more time than ever before wondering what it was like for other people to dream. She dreamt of the Lace. Always and forever. But most other dreamers had a different dream each night. Although she must have dreamt of something besides the Lace at some point, she could neither remember nor imagine what that was like.
She wondered how Ronan and Bryde found her in dreamspace. They fell asleep, had their own dream, and then—
“Be present,” Bryde said. “Stop wandering. How much power do you feel?”
A fuckload, Hennessy thought. Enough to dream something huge. Enough to bring the Lace out in its entirety.
“Stop calling the Lace,” Bryde said. “I won’t let it come back.”
I wasn’t calling it.
Bryde smiled thinly. Other people revealed themselves when they smiled. Tough folks became teddy bears; sentimental huggers revealed sharp-toothed gossips; shy people showed goofy clowns; class clowns turned out to be bitter depressants. But not Bryde. He was an enigma before and an enigma after.
“Where is your voice? Be present. Now look. I’ve given you a canvas and you’ve left it blank,” Bryde said, gesturing around them. Now that the Lace was gone, the dream held just their conversation, nothing else. “Laziness is the natural child of success. Who, after struggling up the ladder, feels like building another ladder? The view is already good. You’re not trying. Why?”
Hennessy’s voice was still just thought. There’s a word for someone who tries the same thing over and over again expecting a different result.
“Artist?” suggested Bryde. “You didn’t use to mind failure.”
She was annoyed that he was right.
Hennessy had spent her youth studying how pigment behaved, how badger bristles splayed paint versus squirrel versus hog versus kolinsky sable, how complementary colors accentuated each other or canceled each other out, how the human skeleton was constructed beneath the skin, working on every flat surface that presented itself to her. Trying. Failing. She’d also spent an equal amount of time, or more, on training her mind. Perception and imagination were always the weakest link in any artist’s chain. Eyes saw what they wanted to see instead of what was truly there. Shadows became too dark. Angles went crooked. Shapes got elongated, crushed. The brain had to be taught to see without feeling, and then to put feeling back in.
Fail, try again, fail, try again.
She couldn’t remember how she’d ever had the bandwidth to do that for so many hours and days and weeks and years.
“This is better,” Bryde said.
The dream had become a studio.
Hennessy hadn’t consciously thought of putting them in a studio, but dreams were crafty bastards that way. They gave you what you wanted, not what you said you wanted.
The studio was as good as reality. It smelled wonderful and productive, earthy and chemical. Multiple easels displayed canvases in all sizes. Paint glistened on palettes. Brushes stood on handles like bristled bouquets. Drop cloths covered the old wood floor. Bryde sat in a chair next to a wall of windows, his legs crossed casually, arm across the back of the chair. Jordan would have said he’d make a good portrait subject. The view beyond him was a city of historical buildings and close-set trees and invading highways. A distant storm mounted, the clouds tattered and checkered.
The dream was trying hard, in the way that dreams do, to imply that Hennessy had been to this studio before, although she knew she hadn’t.
It’s Jordan’s studio, the dream said. If you don’t recognize it, it’s only because it’s been too long since you’ve seen her. Why don’t you keep up with her like you used to?
Hennessy disagreed. “She doesn’t keep up with me.”
“There you are. Found your voice,” Bryde said. “You are not two things. You are not Hennessy, asleep, and Hennessy, awake. You are more than the sum of your feelings, your id. You are also the things you have learned to do about them. Dreaming, waking. They’re the same thing for you; when will you believe it? Put something on that canvas. The ley line is listening. Ask it for what you want.”
Hennessy stood before a canvas as tall as herself. In her hand was a brush, which was also a knife. She could picture the feeling of the blade piercing the canvas, the way the weave would shrink back from the wound. How splendidly and dramatically it would ruin the perfect flat expanse of the canvas.
“Let’s have Hennessy the artist,” Bryde said sharply. “The Hennessy who creates instead of destroys. What would she do if she could do anything?”
“Jordan’s the one you’re talking about,” Hennessy said. “She’s the artist; I’m the forger.”
“There are not two of you.”
“You need glasses, mate,” Hennessy said.
“You were an artist before you made Jordan.”
But Hennessy couldn’t remember that far back. Not in a meaningful way.
“Fine,” Bryde said, annoyed. “Show me what she would do right now. I assume she listens better.”
How would Jordan use this dreamspace? What if Hennessy were the dream and Jordan were the one with all this incredible power instead?
Art, Jordan had told Hennessy once, is bigger than reality.
The knife disappeared; Hennessy was already painting. Beneath the brush’s soft bristles was a rich stripe of gorgeous purple, a purple no human had ever seen before.
Jordan would love it. Tyrian purple looked dowdy beside this color.
Why hadn’t Jordan tried harder to come with Hennessy on this latest adventure?
You know why, the dream snarled.
Jordan had taken off with Declan Lynch after mounting only the lamest of protests. She’d been waiting for an excuse to leave Hennessy for so long, and here it was.
Outside, the storm grew closer, the edges of the clouds geometric and dark.
“Stay on task,” Bryde ordered.
The purple paint on the canvas bled into the shape of lush purple lips. Hennessy’s lips. No. Jordan’s. Nearly the same, but different in important ways. Jordan’s lips smiled. Hennessy’s forged smiles from looking at other people’s mouths.
Carefully, Hennessy added a shadow, giving the lips dimension; the inky black was darker and truer than any
