Close to done? Farooq-Lane didn’t know much about the life spans of the Visionaries, but she knew the end was nothing you wanted to be around for. “I—”
“Look, princess,” Nikolenko interrupted, “you have the easiest assignment here. Take Lurch there and find the Zed he’s seeing. Be on the lookout for another Visionary to replace him. Call us when you find something. Then the grown-ups will fly in and take care of it so you don’t have to get your shoes dirty again.”
Farooq-Lane would not be made to feel bad for being a reluctant killer. She and Nikolenko glared at each other until the Visionary returned with a coffee.
“I won’t drink this,” he told Nikolenko. He had an accent. German, maybe. “Do you want it?”
Without hesitation, Nikolenko took it from his hand and dropped it into the trash can beside her, one smooth motion. “Problem solved. Check in with Lock when you get there, Farooq-Lane.”
Without another word, she departed. The Visionary eyed the trash can where the coffee had just met its end, and then he eyed Farooq-Lane.
Farooq-Lane held out a hand and introduced herself to her new charge. “Carmen Farooq-Lane.”
He shook her hand, then repeated her name carefully before introducing himself to his new keeper. “Parsifal Bauer.”
When she opened the envelope, two tickets for them slid out right into her hands, eager to be out of confinement. “I guess we’re going to be spending a lot of time together in … Washington, DC.”
As good a place to save the world as any.
7
The voice was back.
You’re wondering if this is real.
You want proof this is an actual encounter and not just a bit of subconscious mindfuckery.
What is real? Listen: You fall asleep, dream of feathers, and wake with a raven in your hands, and you’re still asking, What is real?
Ronan was dreaming of Bryde’s voice, but he was also dreaming of Lindenmere.
Lindenmere, Lindenmere.
It was a name out of a poem that had never existed. It didn’t sound dangerous.
Lindenmere, Lindenmere. It was a forest, or rather, it was a thing that was forest-shaped for now. Ronan had an idea that it had existed somewhere else for a very long time, and only now whispered its way into the world this time in the shape of a forest. It knew him, and he knew it, insofar that they could be known, both of them full of mysteries, even to themselves.
He was in love with it, and it with him.
As he walked between Lindenmere’s trees, he heard Bryde’s voice from somewhere beyond them. Perhaps Bryde was one of these massive gnarled oak trees. Perhaps he was one of the small specks flying overhead. Perhaps he was the flowers that curled around the brambles. Perhaps he was only Ronan’s subconscious.
“Lindenmere,” Ronan said out loud. “What is Bryde? Is he real?”
The leaves in the trees murmured. They put together words: You know.
And beyond them, Bryde’s voice continued.
You are bigger than that, bigger than what is real. You have been raised among wolves and now you’ve forgotten you have thumbs. Real was a word invented for other people. Scrub it from your vocabulary. I don’t want to hear you say it again. If you dream a fiction and wake with that fiction in your hands, it becomes fact.
Do you understand? For you, reality is not an external condition. For you, reality is a decision.
Still you long for what reality means to everyone else, even if it makes your world smaller. Maybe because it makes your world smaller.
Ronan climbed a mossy incline. The light here was shimmery, lush, golden, tangible. He skimmed his fingers through it and it clung to his skin, both feeling and sight. He repeated, “I wouldn’t have asked if I did.”
The trees murmured again. Dreamer.
Another dreamer? Here? A tiny cloud of luminous gnats parted around Ronan as he walked, scanning the feral undergrowth for signs of another human. He knew it was possible for a dreamer to meet him in dreamspace, but only one ever had, and that other dreamer had known Ronan in the waking world before he’d tried to find him in this otherworld.
Plus, he was dead now.
No one else knew Ronan was a dreamer.
Or they shouldn’t.
“I don’t believe you,” he said out loud. “I have trust issues.”
There’s a game children play with chalk and asphalt. Snail—that’s what it’s called. Chalk a spiral on the ground, a snail’s shell, and section it into ever-shrinking squares. Toss a pebble; wherever it lands, that box is off-limits. Now jump on one foot in a tightening spiral, careful not to land in the box with the pebble. You see how the game gets harder the more pebbles are thrown. The tighter the spiral twists. The goal is to get to the middle without falling over.
That’s the game we’re going to play, you and I.
“Maybe I don’t want to play a game,” Ronan said. His dreamy walking, which covered at the same time much ground and little, took him to a clearing bisected by a deep black stream. A floating plank served as a bridge, and parked on top of it was a vintage-looking motorbike that thrummed with life, the exhaust visible in a delicate shuddering breath behind it.
Adam was always talking about how he would trade his car for a motorcycle if he could. He’d like this bike, Ronan thought. It reminded him a little bit of Adam, in fact. Elegant and rough and ready at once.
When Ronan stepped up onto the hovering board-bridge, it quivered, but held. Below, the stream was an emotional truth rather than a physical one, the water present but not yet wet, not unless he turned his attention to it: This was the way of dreams.
He laid a hand on the cool leather seat of the bike. It already had Adam’s name stitched on the edge of it. Ronan ran his fingers along the dimpled constellation of embroidery. It felt real.
Every box will be a task.
I will be in the center at the end of it all.
First box—
“I don’t know if you’re real or a figment of my imagination,” Ronan said. “But I’m trying to work here.”
Let’s deal with that, first. An object lesson in real or not. I’m doing sums in my head, you want me to demonstrate my work on the margin. Fine.
First box: What is real.
First box: Ask your brother about the Fairy Market.
First box: They’ll be whispering my name.
Proof? It will have to do. You make reality.
Ronan rolled the motorcycle to shore. Behind him, the floating bridge bobbed up several inches, relieved of the weight of the bike. As it did, he suddenly discovered that the stream below it was filled not with black water, but with animals.
They seethed.
“Shit,” Ronan said.
Jump, skip, throw a pebble, next turn.
See you on the other side.
He woke up.
8
It was morning.
Ronan could hear all sorts of morning sounds. An electric shaver humming across the hall, music nattering away in another room, feet slap-shuffling up and down aged stairs. Outside he heard asthmatic leaf blowers, percussive car doors, garrulous students, grumbling delivery trucks, petulant horns.
He’d spent the night in Cambridge.
Ronan looked at himself from above.
It was as if he were an angel haunting his own body. A spirit. Ghost of Christmas Past. Whatever it was that floated above you and watched you sleep. Ronan Lynch’s thoughts gazed down upon Ronan Lynch’s body.