“I trusted you,” she said to Liliana.
Liliana gestured for Farooq-Lane to look behind her.
One figure returned quietly to the rose garden.
There was a proud line to the shoulders, to the lifted chin. A coiled power to the walk, which was more like a stalk. The eyes were intense and bright. But the shape of the mouth was at odds with the rest of it. Something about the expression there was miserable. Vulnerable.
Jordan Hennessy.
“You have my sword,” she said, stopping among the ruined thorns of the old roses.
Warily, Farooq-Lane stepped in front of Liliana. She put her hand on the hilt warningly. Her heart was beating fast again; who knew what deadly dreams this Zed might be carrying. “I don’t want to fight. We’re not here for you.”
“I know. I’m here for you.” Hennessy made a big performance of turning her pockets inside out and showing the interior of her leather jacket. Then she held her hands out on either side of her like a reveal. “I’m giving up. This is what it looks like when I give up.”
“How do I know this isn’t a trap?” Farooq-Lane asked.
“Life’s a trap,” Hennessy said in a sort of bleak, funny way.
Liliana stepped out from behind Farooq-Lane, her face gentle and unsurprised, and Farooq-Lane realized that Liliana had known this was how it was going to happen. She’d seen this in her vision. This moment. Not Farooq-Lane slicing through Bryde. She’d let Farooq-Lane climb into that freezing water, knowing that she would fail to stop Bryde when she sprang out. She’d known it was a ridiculous plan and had let it play through for this moment. Not killing Bryde, but acquiring this Zed, one more Zed than any other plan had ever managed.
Would it have all worked the same way if Farooq-Lane had been in on it from the beginning?
Trust was a hard thing.
“It’s all right,” Liliana told Hennessy. She walked straight up to her as if she wasn’t one of the three most dangerous Zeds in the country, and she clasped one of Hennessy’s hands with such warmth that the Zed stared at her. “We all finally found each other.”
Match heads flaring. Plastic melting. Paper twisting. Gasoline smoking. Anything can burn if you hit it hard enough to jam oxygen atoms into its core. Ronan’s heart incinerated.
I’m driving, Bryde had said. You’re unfit.
He was right.
As the Boston skyline got smaller in the invisible car’s rearview mirror, Ronan kept blinking as if things would get clear, and they never got clear. Or maybe they were too clear. Every streetlight, every skeleton tree, every billboard etched itself in his vision, every detail perfectly visible so that he couldn’t concentrate on any one part of it. He sat bolt upright in the passenger seat, his leg jiggling. If he were driving, he’d mash that gas pedal down and see how much speed he’d really dreamt into this thing. If he were driving, he’d smash this whole car into something so it could burn too.
His phone had been ringing continuously for the past ten minutes.
Furiously, he chucked it onto the dash. It pinged off the windshield and slid across the dash, then slipped down by Bryde’s footwell.
Only one person had known where they were going to be.
Only one person.
Declan.
Bryde wordlessly leaned to get the little phone without looking, then dropped it in Ronan’s palm.
How many minutes had Declan waited before betraying Ronan to the Moderators? Maybe he had already done it before he got in touch with Ronan at the Aldana-Leons’. While Ronan was meeting the little dreamers whose lives he’d saved, Declan was making plans with the Mods. Casually bringing Ronan in for them. Knowing Ronan always came when called.
“Either talk to him or silence it,” Bryde said. “Make a decision.”
Ronan clipped the phone to his ear and answered it. “What.”
“Thank God,” Declan said. “Where are you?”
“Like I will ever tell you that again. You fucking blew it, asshole. New low, even for you. Was it thirty pieces of silver or did you get them to adjust it up for inflation?”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I wish that was true. I wish to God it was. You’re the only one who knew where we were going to be. Fuck! You’re always hustling. Negotiating for the greater part of nothing. You’re like a broker for irrelevance.”
“Hey now—” Declan started.
“All you care about is finding something to keep Matthew awake. To keep your life in place. You watch the world screw us over on a large scale over and over, and—all I needed was for you to stay out of the way. I never asked for anything else. Just stay the hell out of the way.”
“I wasn’t trying to stop you.”
Ronan looked out the window but now it was the opposite of before; his eyes weren’t taking in anything. He saw the rose garden again and again. Encountering not Matthew walking through the trellis, but a woman flying at them with Hennessy’s stolen sword in hand. “Were you just willing to take the risk they might kill me, too?”
“I was doing it for you.”
Ronan laughed. He laughed, and laughed, and laughed. It wasn’t funny. Nothing was funny.
When he had stopped, Declan said, “I had to get you away from him. The risk was worth it to get you away from him.” When Ronan didn’t reply, he said flatly, “They didn’t get him, did they.”
Behind the wheel, Bryde’s expression didn’t change. He looked neither angry nor surprised. He knew Declan had betrayed him, but he had not said a word against him. He hadn’t said much at all, since they escaped.
“You’re still with him,” Declan said. It wasn’t a question. “You’ve left the city.”
Ronan knew when silence was the meanest thing to deploy and he understood that now was the time.
He let
