No.
Ronan tried to think if Bryde had ever told him anything that Ronan himself didn’t already know, that Lindenmere, as a forest situated on the ley line, able to see other events along the ley line, wouldn’t have known.
Oh, God. Bryde getting his information from the trees. Bryde often knowing what Ronan was thinking before he spoke. Ronan looking at Bryde and thinking he looked familiar, or something, and shying away from what he actually already knew. The rabbit hole kept leading down. He couldn’t find bottom. He was still falling.
The dream was now an Irish shoreline. An ancient hawk flew over the black ocean. Ronan could taste the salt in his mouth. Cold shot through him, a damp cold that made it all the way to his bones. It didn’t feel like a dream. It felt like reality. It felt exactly like reality. Ronan could no longer tell the difference between them.
Bryde said, “You wanted me.”
“I wanted someone real.”
Reality doesn’t mean anything to someone like you. Bryde didn’t have to say it. Ronan already knew it. He knew everything Bryde knew, deep down.
“It’s harder than I thought,” Bryde said. “Being out here. I thought it would be simpler. I thought I knew what I wanted. But it’s so much louder. It’s so, so much louder. I get … confused.”
Ronan’s heart was breaking.
“Your quest,” Ronan said.
“Your quest,” said Bryde.
Ronan closed his eyes. “You’re just a dream.”
Bryde shook his head. “We already know what you think about that, because I told you. What do you feel, Ronan Lynch?”
Betrayed. Alone. Furious. He felt like he had nightwash even though he didn’t. He felt like he couldn’t stand to look at Bryde for one more second. He felt like he couldn’t stand to be in his own head one more second. He felt like he couldn’t tell if he had ever woken up from that worst dream.
The black ocean boiled and then burned. Ronan’s mind boiled and then burned. Everything could burn if you hit it hard enough.
“Nothing,” Ronan said. “I can’t feel anything.”
The grass was also burning now. The flaming waves had lapped the pebbly shore, which caught fire, and then the ascending cliff face had caught fire, and then the strange flames had wicked over the edge and caught the dirt and then the grass. The fire whispered to itself as it did its work. Its language was secret, but Ronan got the gist. It was starving.
Bryde said, “Right now, Hennessy is trying to dream something to shut down the ley line for good. Can you feel her? We can go stop her, or I can go stop her, or you can try to stop me and let the ley line be shut down and kill all of this. Either way. You have to make a decision. Is this my quest, is it your quest, or is it nothing? For once in your life, stop lying. Stop hiding behind me. Ronan Lynch, what do you want?”
In the dream, sweet Aurora’s voice came through gently. She was telling Ronan he had to bury it.
He took a deep, shuddering breath. The fire was burning everything except for them.
“I want to change the world.”
When the ley line disappeared, it was a very nice day.
All of New England was experiencing an unseasonably warm afternoon, but it was a good kind of unseasonably warm. Not warm enough to make all the conversations center around anything unpleasant like climate change and the growing price of avocados. But warm enough that residents could shed their coats and gloves and get some of the ol’ steps in, take the kid for a walk, knock the spiders off the badminton set in the garage.
Days like this, they said, remind you what it’s all about.
Three Zeds were dreaming busily on this unseasonably warm afternoon and thus not able to enjoy it. Two of them, Bryde and Ronan Lynch, slept just a few yards away from a car that was very difficult to see. They had not been dreaming long, but already dried oak leaves had flickered from the woods around them and lit upon their clothes. There is a certain wrongness to seeing leaves settled on a body. It is not the same as leaves drifting over a rooftop or a fallen log. It makes one anxious to see it. It is wrong. Opposite.
The third dreamer, Hennessy, dreamt on an oversized beanbag in a small room in a tea shop. Two women watched her closely. One of the women, a woman so old that numbers no longer felt relevant to describe her age, gently brushed her fingers across Hennessy’s forehead as she slept. The other woman stood watchfully at the door, her hands on a dreamt sword with the words from chaos etched on the hilt. She was ready to swing it at once should Hennessy wake with a nightmare instead of a dream to save them all.
“I don’t have a good feeling about this,” the woman with the sword said.
“It will be all right,” the old woman replied, brushing her fingers over the dreamer’s forehead again, but her hand was trembling a little.
The people who loved the dreaming Zeds were also unable to enjoy the warm afternoon.
Adam Parrish, who loved Ronan, sat on the floor of his dorm room alone, a single candle lit, his tarot cards stacked face up beside it. He stared into the flame, throwing his mind out into the dreamspace. He was trying to reach Ronan Lynch, but it was like a phone that kept ringing and ringing. This
