After nearly a minute, when Ronan wasn’t sure if Declan was really still there but refused to say You still there? Declan finally said, “He’s dangerous, Ronan. They’re not wrong about him. I know you’re not like that. I know you wouldn’t kill people. I know you care about your future. About Matthew. About Adam. About—”
Ronan hung up on him.
For several long minutes the car was silent. Ronan’s mind turned over the rose garden again. Not the beginning, this time, but the end. When he and Bryde had run, and Hennessy hadn’t.
“Are you going to do it or not?” Bryde asked softly. “Make a decision.”
Ronan wasn’t sure how he knew exactly what he’d been thinking, but he wasn’t wrong. He rubbed his finger on his ear by the phone, thinking, deciding, and then he told the dreamt phone to dial another number.
It was time.
“Ronan?” Adam asked, surprised. He had picked up immediately, even though the display name would have just looked like nonsense.
“Why didn’t you text back?”
“Text … back? You didn’t call. It’s been weeks.”
“But why didn’t you text back?”
There was quiet. Almost quiet. Wherever he was, Adam was moving locations; there was the sound of a door closing. “I was on a motorcycle. Then I was taking an exam. Then I was probably, I don’t know, sleeping. I don’t remember. I came to see you, I was making time best I could. It wasn’t that long. I did text back. How could I know that you were going to ditch your phone? Ronan, you didn’t call.”
His accent was gone. It was like talking to a stranger. Ronan had thought this would feel different. Or maybe he didn’t. He didn’t know. His chest was still burning. Fire roared through him, right to the ends of his hands and toes. “I’m calling now.”
“I didn’t know what was happening,” Adam said. “I didn’t know what you were doing, if you were even alive. I didn’t know if we were … if it … what …”
Ronan repeated, “I’m calling now. I need to see you.”
“You’re here?” Adam said, even more surprised than he had been when he first picked up. “Oh.”
There was something about that Oh that Ronan didn’t like the shape of. It seemed sad. Not as if Adam was sad when he said it. But more like something about that Oh was going to make Ronan sad. But he plunged ahead anyway. “Can you let us lie low for a few hours while we figure out what’s going on with Hennessy?”
Adam didn’t reply right away. Then he said, “Who’s ‘us’?”
“Me and Bryde. They have—they have Hennessy, I think.” Ronan knew this was a lie. Or at least a partial truth. Bryde hadn’t seen it, but Ronan had. He’d seen Hennessy turn around. He’d let her. God, everything was going to shit.
Adam said, very precisely, “You can come lie low.” Then, in case Ronan hadn’t understood him, he repeated, “You.”
“How big of a douche do you think I am?”
“The Lace is afraid of him, Ronan. I am, too. Let him take this heat.”
And then Ronan understood why the Oh had made him so sad. He’d known it subconsciously before, but now he knew it clearly: Adam had known Declan was betraying the dreamers. He had known the Moderators would be waiting in the rose garden.
They’d all been in on it.
Part of Ronan was here in this invisible car racing away from his family, but part of Ronan was also in that memory of being curled in Ilidorin as he nearly lost himself to nightwash for good. Bryde had tried to warn them about the others when he first introduced them to Ilidorin, and Ronan and Hennessy had blown him off. They’d been so offended by his contempt for the dreamt phones, but now Ronan understood it exactly. Only, the truth was worse than what Bryde had warned. It wasn’t simply that Declan and Adam didn’t want to leave their own lives to come fight his battle with him. They actively wanted to stop the battle altogether.
They wanted the world to change just enough to keep Ronan alive. Alive, but not living. That was good enough for them.
It wasn’t good enough for him.
“Ronan, you know what I’m saying’s true,” Adam said. “You know what’s going on here. If you think about it, you have to—”
Ronan hung up on him, too.
He plucked the dreamt phone from his ear, rolled down the window, and threw it out as hard as he could.
Then he leaned his head back against the seat as they drove out of the city with one less dreamer than they’d arrived with.
Twenty minutes.
Alarm.
Twenty minutes.
Alarm.
Twenty minutes.
Alarm.
Twenty minutes.
Alarm.
That was how Hennessy had been living at the beginning of all this, and that’s how she had been living since she left the house with the young dreamers.
She set the timer on her dreamt phone, and twenty minutes later, when it went off, she set it again. She had to wake up enough between each alarm to make sure she didn’t fall back into a deep sleep. It could not be an eight-hour sleep interrupted dozens of times. It had to be dozens of sleeps for eight hours.
“But that’s not survivable,” Carmen Farooq-Lane said. “Or fair.”
Farooq-Lane was a very put together sort of young woman, so put together it was difficult to discern her true age. When she said it, it seemed obvious. Like it made sense. Like the situation had been stripped of emotion, taken down to the studs, and revealed as unsound. Of course it was not survivable. Of course it was not fair.
“They shouldn’t have made so light of the Lace,” Liliana said in her sweet old-lady voice. “It was never going to be as easy as simply asking it to go away.”
Liliana the Visionary was a very put together sort of old woman, so put together it was difficult to discern her true age, too. When she said
