Bryde stood so fast he knocked the chair over. “Yes. Yes, that. This is what dreaming is for. Do not make a vegan copy of a burger. Eat a goddamn vegetable and love it.”
Had Declan kissed Jordan? Probably. Hennessy dipped her thumb in the pale feather pink on the palette, and then she swiped the pigment across the bottom lip. The highlight instantly rendered the mouth wet and full and anticipatory. It was more than real. It was super real. It wasn’t just what lips looked like. It was what they felt like. It was image and memory and sensation all together in the way dreams could be.
“Stop,” Bryde said. “That’s what you’re bringing back. Experience it. Don’t let it change. Ask the ley line to help you. It can—”
He broke off, and his expression went far away.
Hennessy suddenly thought, out of nowhere, wheels.
Wheels?
Bryde shouted, “Ronan Lynch! Stop that!”
She just had time to feel something a little like all the air going out of the room, which was funny, because she hadn’t been thinking about breathing in the dream.
Then everything disappeared.
Hennessy awoke with a start.
She was moving.
She was not just moving, she was moving fast.
It was like a movie. She saw herself from above, looking down, God gazing down on his creation. A slender Black girl with a fro full of debris tumbled ass over tits over ass again down hundreds of neatly stacked hay bales in an old barn. Her rag doll body was bizarrely caged in something that looked like an enormous wooden hamster wheel.
It was rare that the waking world made less sense than the dreaming one. But the bigger picture didn’t become clear until she careened all the way to the barn floor, breath busting from her paralyzed body.
The bigger picture was this: Wheels! Wheels! Wheels!
The thing she’d thought looked like a hamster wheel around her was a tangle of actual wheels. It was just one of many that filled the barn. There were muscular tractor wheels, fragile bicycle wheels, little toy wheels. Man-sized wooden carriage wheels. Child-sized plastic steering wheels. Spokes dangled from rafters. Rims wedged between hay bales. They ramped over mannequins and up against the doors. Every wheel had a single word printed or burned into it: tamquam. It looked like an art installation. A prank. Insanity.
It was breaking Hennessy’s brain.
One part of her mind whispered, This is how it’s always been. The wheels were always here. The other part, however, knew better. This was how it always worked when she saw other dreamers’ dreams manifest. They didn’t just magically appear. Instead, the dream magic edited her memory. Not completely. Just enough to create two realities. One where the dreams had always been there, and one where they hadn’t.
Brain-breaking.
“Ronan.” Bryde’s voice sounded irritated.
A delicate light hissed into existence, revealing Bryde halfway up the towering stack of old hay bales. The dreamers’ exploration of the living history museum had turned up three decent possibilities for dreaming locations: a small diorama re-creating the close sleeping quarters of a submarine, a single four-poster bed in a re-creation of some historical figure’s bedroom, and this, a large re-creation of an old hay barn, so realistic that it seemed likely it had probably already existed on the property pre-museum.
Bryde climbed down the hay bales, complaining as he did. “Aren’t you tired of doing this?”
Because this wasn’t the first time Ronan had trashed a place since they’d begun traveling with Bryde. He’d filled a thru-hiking shelter with bleeding rocks. Destroyed the living room of an abandoned rambler with a very small tornado. Busted out the wall of a cheap, cash-only motel with an invisible car. He’d trashed rooms with dead earthworms and hissing microphones, school textbooks and expired bacon. Every zip code they’d stayed in had been left with Ronan Lynch’s indelible mark.
Hennessy had to admit, a small, rubbishy part of her was glad for all of this. Because as long as Ronan Lynch, the great Ronan Lynch, was fucking up at this level, it made Hennessy’s inability to kick the Lace from her dreams not quite as damning.
“Hennessy, are you awake?” Bryde asked the air.
Hennessy couldn’t yet reply. Or move. Dreamers always did this after a successful dream; they saw their temporarily paralyzed bodies from above for a few minutes. She was still getting used to the idea that this paralysis didn’t have to be synonymous with shame. Before all this, it had always meant she’d made another copy of herself. It had meant failure. Now, even though she couldn’t see what she’d brought back from the dream, she was sure, at least, it wasn’t another Jordan Hennessy.
No more copies.
Ever.
She’d never been so long without any of her girls before.
Jordan, Jordan.
“The world shouts at you. The waking world, the dreaming world. You don’t have to listen to it, but you do. And until you learn to shout louder than it, we’re going to keep having this happen.” Bryde had uncovered Ronan from beneath a pile of hay bales and wheels like the prize in the bottom of a cereal box. His star pupil was just as paralyzed as Hennessy, so Ronan couldn’t escape the lecture as Bryde went on. “I expect better from you. How long did it take us to find a place with this much power in the bank? And what did you write a check for? This. This shit. Did you give half a thought to any other dreamer while you were doing this? No, you just ran your mouth and out this came.”
Aaaaaaaaand Hennessy was back. She could feel her body again, and she was looking at the world through her own eyes. Shouldering off her cage of wheels, she searched the hay around her, looking for whatever object she had brought back from her dream. The painting. The brush. The palette. Something. But all she found was hay and wheels and yet more hay.
Bryde was still going.
