Ronan! Ronan! But instead he kept catching glimpses of Bryde. Everything felt hot. He could smell smoke. He was smoke, drifting, drifting.
Oh, Ronan, what have you done, he thought miserably. What are you doing?
Matthew Lynch, who also loved Ronan, had gone walking. Not wandering like a dream, but walking like an ordinary teen, with purpose. While Declan was occupied with secretive errands, Matthew had set up an appointment with a local school for a tour. He was going to finish high school. He’d decided. He didn’t know what he was going to do afterward, but until then, he was going to take Jordan’s advice and start treating himself as real until Declan did, too. It was a very stuffy school office, though, and he could see the day through the tiny window next to him. It was hard not to wish he was out there instead.
He found himself quite suddenly thinking about fire. He wasn’t sure why. He touched his cheek. It was hot. The school hadn’t adjusted their heating for this unseasonable day.
Declan Lynch, who also loved Ronan, was cornered in his own apartment by a handful of extremely pissed-off Moderators. They had just lost three Zeds at a rose garden and had no Visionary to provide further leads. They had not immediately decided how they were going to use Declan to get their hands on Ronan, but they had decided they would grab him first and then figure out the finer points later. He was all they had.
“I’m no good as leverage,” Declan told them. He thought about the gun he’d taped to the bottom of the kitchen table. It was four feet away, but might as well have been four hundred. Even if he could somehow get it, what was one gun against a room full of them? “As far as he’s concerned, he thinks I just tried to get him killed.”
He couldn’t help but think about how Bryde’s little dreamt orb would have let him walk out untouched. How Ronan’s sundogs spilled from the bottle would have emptied this apartment instantly. Such power. Such power for just a very few people to hold.
Oh, Ronan, he thought, suddenly angry that his brother could never see the bigger picture, the long game. What are you going to do now?
Jordan, who loved Hennessy, was walking from her studio to Declan’s apartment, head down, eyebrows furrowed, reading a news story on her phone. It was about a massive Boston street race that had sent seven drivers to area hospitals in critical condition. The chief of police had given a statement urging drivers to remember that life was not a video game or a movie franchise; actions like this had real consequences. She wondered if the play against Bryde had worked; Declan wasn’t picking up his phone.
I wish you were dead, Hennessy had told her.
Jordan’s cheeks felt hot as she walked. Fiery. Her chest ached and burned. She didn’t know why Hennessy had to be like this. If they were still living together, they would have talked it out by now. Hennessy would have calmed down, gotten sad instead of mad, and eventually just gone limp, giving up. They would have once more reached equilibrium. Well, not they. Jordan was rarely the emergency. Hennessy was the emergency.
Hennessy, thought Jordan, why didn’t you give me all your memories?
None of them guessed the fate of the afternoon was currently playing out inside the minds of the dreaming Zeds.
The Zeds moved inside a shared dream that jerked from one thing to another.
First it was the Lace, jagged and hateful.
Then it was the Smith Mountain Dam with a slow, sentient fire picking away at its base.
Then it was the Game, with each Zed in a different car jockeying for control of both the race and the dream.
It was a studio, it was a farm, it was a parking lot dumpster with opera singing sweetly, it was a teen girl in a gallery looking for Hennessy, it was a fire dragon exploding over a car, it was a bullet in a woman’s head, it was Bryde crouched next to Lock’s body in a featureless field.
“This game of yours,” Bryde said to Lock’s body, “this game of yours will only end in pain. Take a look. The rules are changing. Do you understand? Do you understand what we could do? Leave my dreamers alone.”
“Bryde,” Ronan said, but Bryde didn’t attend.
“Thanks for the focus. I couldn’t do that without you here,” Hennessy said. She stood by the invisible car, watching Bryde plow through his lines from the memory. “God! Remember when you told me to kill my clones? And then we basically ran away with yours?”
She knew about Bryde. She knew because the dream had presented the knowledge to her without remark, as dreams sometimes do. The knowledge was this: Bryde was a dream. Bryde was Ronan’s dream.
“How are you doing that to him?” Ronan asked.
Hennessy narrowed her eyes at the horizon, where smoke billowed. “I heard him tell that Moderator a clever thing at the rose garden—did you hear him? He said he didn’t play mind games. He just turned the sound down on the stuff that didn’t matter. Why didn’t he teach us that shit? That’s shit I can use. I’m using it now! He gave us such a hard time about what was real and what was a dream, but he was talking about himself, too, wasn’t he? He doesn’t know what he really is any more than we do. What’s real now, Bryde? What do you feel?”
Bryde didn’t attend. He was still moving through the memory.
“Of course he has a stake in all this,” Hennessy said. “He told you he wanted to keep Matthew awake without you? He meant he wanted to stay awake. Fucking oedipal, man.”
“Shut up,” Ronan said. “What’s your big plan here? Shut down the ley lines to keep away the
