But that wasn’t what Farooq-Lane and Liliana seemed to believe.
The three women were on the second floor of a convoluted, historical teahouse, in a small room filled with overstuffed chairs, beanbags, end tables, and travel books. Plinking music played overhead. They had it to themselves. It was very intimate and safe-feeling, which was the opposite of everything Hennessy had been doing for the past few weeks. Past few years. Farooq-Lane had driven them there as Liliana, in the passenger seat, used Farooq-Lane’s phone to search for an appropriate place to talk. It was a very different experience from Hennessy’s previous travel. When looking for good places to crash and discuss plans, Bryde and Ronan would not have filtered their searches for “warm ambiance” and “free parking.” It was clear from watching Farooq-Lane and Liliana that they had traveled together a lot and that they were both comfort-loving creatures.
It was also clear they had crushes on each other.
“This is all very life-affirming,” Hennessy told them from her place in a beanbag, “enriching, and all that, but what of it? So if it’s not fair, and it’s not easy, it’s still there. There’s still this thing hanging over me every time I dream, and if Ronan and Bryde have their way, I won’t be able to stop it.”
Liliana murmured something into Farooq-Lane’s ear, which made Farooq-Lane’s beautiful face go consternated. They both looked at Hennessy.
“So I understand completely if you decide to kill me,” Hennessy said, talking fast. “I’ve been thinking about it a lot. On previous episodes, it would’ve been a very selfish decision, on account of my ladies and how they relied on me for their existence, but on this current run, everyone else dead, mostly, fate of the world in hands, well—” She spread her hands, or at least the best she could, considering she had a hot chocolate in one of them. “It’s the selfless thing to do, really.”
“We have a different idea,” Farooq-Lane said.
Hennessy narrowed her eyes. “Do you mean you both had this idea, or she has an idea, and whispered it to you just now?”
Liliana smiled sweetly. “I told you she was clever.”
Farooq-Lane’s businesslike expression didn’t change. “Can you dream something to suppress the ley line?”
Hennessy had one dream. The Lace. Always the Lace. She was a bar with a single beer on tap. She was about to tell them this, but in the past, Jordan had always told Hennessy, “You’re not allowed to shoot down any more of my ideas until you’ve had one of your own.”
So she didn’t shoot it down. She sank down into the beanbag and stared at them instead.
“I don’t believe killing yourself is the answer,” Farooq-Lane said. “You have value, too.”
“Ma’am, we’ve just met,” Hennessy said.
Liliana broke in. “Do you know what it means to be a Visionary, Hennessy? I don’t always look like this. Sometimes I’m a girl. Sometimes I’m a woman. Sometimes I am this, what you see now. Every time I change between these ages, I have a vision of the future, and all the sound that has happened or will happen in the intervening years comes out of me. It destroys everyone close enough to hear it. Over the years, I have met and will meet people who urge me to turn this vision inward. If I do that, I will no longer shift between ages, and I will no longer be a danger to those around me. But eventually, that method will kill me instead.”
“I take it since we’re talking to the old version of you, you picked door number one,” Hennessy said. “Keep exploding?”
“Most Visionaries die very young,” Liliana said. “Too young to change the world. I’m still here not because I think my life is valuable—although I do think that—but because staying alive means I have more visions, and the more visions I have, the more I can save the world from itself. You have value, too, Hennessy, value that comes from staying alive.”
“And if you turn off the ley line,” Farooq-Lane said, “no more Zeds—dreamers—have to die. You’re all only as dangerous then as you would be as normal people. You can only hurt or help as many people as anyone else.”
She’d corrected herself, but Hennessy preferred the first term she’d used. Zed. That’s right. Zero. Nothing. Loser.
“You don’t have to feel this fear and pain all the time. You’re allowed to stop it,” Farooq-Lane said.
“I know you have no love for yourself,” Liliana broke in again, and her voice was so gentle that Hennessy felt absurdly close to tears again. They burned; she hated them. She wanted it to stop. How badly she wanted it to stop. “So you might not make this decision for yourself, because you don’t think you deserve it. You can make it for others. It would be noble to stop it.”
Stopping the ley line meant stopping Jordan in her tracks.
Farooq-Lane seemed to guess what she was thinking. “If the end of the world comes, your dreams will die with the rest of us. This way they’ll fall asleep. That doesn’t have to be forever. Death is forever.”
I wish you were dead, she’d told Jordan.
Why do you always do this? Jordan asked.
Hennessy almost wished that Farooq-Lane and Liliana had told her they were going to have to kill her after all. It wasn’t exactly that she wanted to die. She just didn’t want to live with herself.
“You’re forgetting one thing,” she said. “I only ever dream of the Lace. All day every day, it’s the Lace superstore. I can’t dream something to shut down the ley line. I only ever dream of the
