He didn’t want to kill anyone.
So it would have to be something gradual. Something with a bit of warning. Not a lot. Just enough to let people get out of the way. Not slow enough for them to stop it. Inexorable, unfixable.
His heart was beating hard in his chest. Just a few days ago he’d been contemplating how he felt about destroying a trash dump, and here he was figuring out how to take down a project that surely had cost billions of dollars and taken years to build. The electricity it generated was used to power all the vacation homes he could see dotting the mountains. Probably. Ronan didn’t know a lot about how electricity worked.
He thought about how wonderful it was to dream in Lindenmere, where the ley line was good, where Lindenmere was focusing him, where everything was as he liked it. He imagined what it would be like to make that even better. He thought about the little Aldana-Leon dreamers. He thought about Rhiannon Martin’s mirrors. He thought about Matthew. He thought about himself, what it would be like to live without fearing he would manifest rooms of murder crabs or bleed to death from nightwash.
He also thought about how Declan was worried that this was something he couldn’t come back from.
“It is frightening how fast the world sickens,” Bryde said. “Decades ago it seemed like we had years. Years ago it seemed like we had months. Months ago it seemed like days. And now every day, every minute, every second, it is harder to be a dreamer. It’s so noisy. Even here in these mountains, it is so noisy. How they shout at us all, even in our sleep. Soon there will be no place for the quiet things, the things that undo themselves when they have to shout. Soon there will be no place for secrets, the secrets that lose their mystery when they are uncovered. Soon there will be no place for the strange, no place for the unknown, because everything will be cataloged and paved and plugged in.”
Ronan thought about Adam’s gloves set upon his shoes in the mudroom.
He thought about wanting to feel like he had been made for something more than dying.
“I know you are two things,” Bryde said. “I know you are of both worlds. That will never change.”
“What if it’s too much?” Ronan asked. “I don’t know if I want to do it.”
“You do.”
“You can’t just say I do. You don’t know what I’m feeling.”
Bryde’s voice was very, very soft. “I know you’ve already made this decision. You made it long ago.”
“On a hoverboard floating in the air? After Rhiannon Martin was killed?”
“Further back than that.”
“When we decided to go with you?”
“Further back than that.”
“No,” said Ronan.
“Yes.”
All of Ronan’s frustration burst out of him, so strongly that the dream shivered with it. The air shimmered. The lake simmered. He was tired of the lessons. The games. The riddles. For some reason, he suddenly remembered the long-ago Christmas starlings bursting around him as Declan watched. That agony again of wanting to fly and being unable to explain it to anyone else.
He was suddenly either very afraid, or very furious. He snarled, “You can’t know when I made the decision!”
“I can,” Bryde said softly. “Because I know when you dreamt me.”
What is real?
You make reality.
Just like that, Ronan was in the worst dream again. The dam was gone. The lake was gone. The warmth and clarity of Bryde’s dream was gone, replaced with Ronan’s old nightmare. He was standing in the bathroom of the Barns and there was a Ronan in the mirror. Behind him, Ronan could see the reflection of Bryde standing in the doorway.
“No,” he said.
Bryde said, “I only came because you asked me.”
“No.”
“Don’t say no. You know. You knew.”
“I didn’t know.”
“You knew,” Bryde insisted. “Deep down, you had to know. You had to ask for it, or it wouldn’t have happened.”
The dream changed. It was Lindenmere now. They were surrounded by Ronan’s massive trees, standing in the clearing where he had heard Bryde’s voice with Hennessy that day. The dream was impossible to separate from reality. The details were perfect. Every lacy fern. Every growing patch of lichen. Every mote of dust and insect gleaming in the air.
“No,” Ronan said again. “They knew your name. They knew the rumors.”
“You dreamt the rumors.”
“No. I can’t do that. Only you can do that sort of stuff. The orbs—”
“You dreamt it into me.”
The forest was alive with sound. Distant wings. Claws. Talons. Mandibles. Even after all these lessons, Ronan was no less likely to corrupt a dream than when he’d brought the murder crabs out at Adam’s dorm, when push came to shove. “Why are you doing this?”
“Why did you keep Adam out of your dreams?” Bryde asked. “You were sure he would know. You wanted to pretend.”
He frowned, just a little, and Ronan could feel that he was mentally driving the encroaching claws and talons out of the dream. Effortless. Controlled where Ronan was not.
“I didn’t want anything,” Ronan said. That was a lie. The dream threw it back at him. He thought he might throw up. “You knew about Hennessy. I didn’t know about Hennessy.”
“I know what Lindenmere knows,” Bryde said quietly. “I am both of you.”
Oh, God. Now Ronan was playing it all back in his head. He was going over everything Bryde had taught him. He was trying to recall the first time he’d seen Bryde. The first
