Jordan rushed across the room and held Hennessy so fast that Hennessy stumbled and had to catch herself on the doorjamb.
“I thought you were dead,” Hennessy said in a hollow voice.
“They’re dead,” Jordan whispered. “They’re all dead.”
Matthew went to Ronan to have his head embraced, like when he was younger, and Ronan hugged him tightly.
“I’m sorry I lied,” he told Matthew. Declan and Ronan held gazes over the top of Matthew’s golden curls. In that shared gaze Ronan saw what the destroyed town house already implied: It had been bad.
Declan said, “Without your monsters we’d be dead. Are they—”
Ronan shook the water bottle. “They’re in here.” He handed the bottle to Matthew, who pulled out of his embrace to sit on the bed and study it. “There you go, kid, don’t say I never gave you anything.”
Declan snatched the bottle away from Matthew. “It’s like giving a gun to a toddler. Do you know what these things do? Did you see before you sent them?”
Ronan shook his head.
Declan put the water bottle firmly back in his hand. “I’d put this on a high shelf. Look on the other side of the bed.”
A brief recce to the other side of the room revealed that there was an arm between the bed and the window, and a lot of blood that Ronan assumed used to be in the arm. He turned back in order to verify that it didn’t belong to either Matthew or Declan. It didn’t seem to. He searched inside himself for regret and couldn’t find it. He looked for fear, too, but all he could find was incandescent rage.
“We need to talk,” Declan said. He pulled his gaze from Jordan and Hennessy. “Because they’ll be back.”
The Visionaries never wanted to do it after seeing an attack. Lock had gotten used to it. They were gung ho ready to fight for the cause when they first met the Moderators, and then they saw how it really went down, and they all got cold feet. For a while Lock thought the answer was to keep them away from the attacks if at all possible, but then he realized that was futile, too. Eventually they saw the attacks in their visions, so one way or another the moment of reckoning was always coming.
Liliana was no different. He had checked into the same hotel as Farooq-Lane and Ramsay, and when he saw her with Carmen in the hotel lobby, he could tell that she wasn’t going to be the sort with an iron stomach. She was more the gauzy, weeping, green peace type. People who looked like her wanted to do this to make the world a better place and people who looked like her rarely saw how shooting teenagers in the head and guts was making the world a better place.
So he already knew before they went out that it was going to require some negotiation after he returned.
And when it was all done with, he knew he was going to do whatever it took, because her intel was gold.
Sure, it had been a shit show. Bellos now had one arm. Ramsay had gotten shot in the same arm he’d gotten stabbed with a crucifix in, that was just his bum arm, but at least he still had it. Nikolenko had a motherfucking bite—a bite!—on her neck. Some odd number of dreams had gotten away. It was impossible to tell if any of those girls had been the original Jordan Hennessy. Ronan Lynch was nowhere to be found.
But that wasn’t Liliana’s fault. Her intel had been spectacular. Specific, brilliant, special information about two entirely separate Zeds in two entirely different locations. She was the Visionary they’d been absolutely waiting for. He’d never seen anything like it.
It looked like this thing might actually get fixed, where this thing was the apocalypse.
Good. He hadn’t seen his dog in ages.
Many people wouldn’t consider Lock’s job a plum job; heading up a largely clandestine task force didn’t allow for many public accolades and didn’t pay as well as the private sector. But Lock didn’t work for those things, he worked for the sense of purpose, for the acquisition of trust, for the eventual building of a pyramid of humans who assumed he would get the job done right the first time. He assumed that at the end of all this, assuming the world got saved, he could trade in this cache for fun and prizes of indeterminate nature.
Lock strode up to Farooq-Lane in the hotel bar. “How is she?”
“She wants to quit,” Farooq-Lane hissed. He’d never seen her so angry. It was as unseemly as her grief had been when her brother had been shot. One wanted to give her something to put over her face until she could get her dignity back. “And why do you think that might be? Maybe put Ramsay on a leash or just put him down entirely.”
“If we swapped Ramsay out, do you think that would be enough to change her mind?”
“It might not be enough to change my mind,” Farooq-Lane said.
Lock gave her a look. He didn’t say anything to her, but the look said it to her instead. The look said, remember that we talked about this. The look said, remember that we’re not entirely sure you didn’t know about all the shit your brother did before we caught him. The look said, remember that we could always begin a long and messy public investigation to find out if you were complicit. The look said, you’re not changing your mind. The look said, also by the way we’re saving the world and who opts out of that?
Farooq-Lane averted her eyes in the face of this look. She said, “I think it’ll take more than that.”
Lock said, “What’s her room number?”
Farooq-Lane said, “Two fifteen. For now.”
“Get some sleep, Carmen,” Lock said. “We need your wonderful brain sharp. You’ve done very well this week.”
He rode up the elevator to the second floor and walked down the hall. Liliana was in an end suite that Lock knew would still take out the occupants of at least ten other hotel rooms if she hadn’t yet learned to turn the visions inward. God, he couldn’t even imagine how good her intel would be if she learned to focus them in. This thing would be over before it began. The Zeds wouldn’t have a chance.
Lock knocked on Liliana’s door. Three authoritative knocks. The first said: answer. Second: the. Third: door.
She did.
“May I come in?” he asked.
Her nose and eyes were red from tears. She let him in.
He sat on the edge of her sofa and patted it to indicate she should balance out the other end. She did.
“I understand you found today very unpleasant,” he said, “because it was very unpleasant.” He had discovered there was no reason to beat around the bush. No point spinning such a gross truth into anything less gross; it was already emblazoned in their minds. “I don’t have to tell you why we’re doing it because you can see firsthand for yourself. It’s an unpleasant task we simply can’t do without you.” The next step was always to remind them of why they had been willing to do it in the first place. “I completely understand if you have to leave us, but I’d ask that you’d please help us find another Visionary to take your place before you do.” Then it was important, Lock found, to let them realize they weren’t trapped. Trapped creatures did desperate things and so you wanted to remind them the window was open even if they could not fly through it immediately without being a bag of dicks. “But if you do stay with us, I promise you that we will do our best to make it worthwhile.”
Finally, Lock had discovered it was important in the first few minutes of meeting a new Visionary to discover what it was they wanted most in the world, and see if it was at all within your power to offer it. People were straightforward. Girls, guns, gold, as the song went.
Lock looked at this crying redheaded girl, and he read her body language, and he guessed what she wanted. “If you stay on with us, I was thinking that what we could do is get you out of this hotel and we’d get you into a rental cottage you could return to between each trip and keep you in short-term rentals at each place we went to so you could feel more like you were at home. You’d have a Moderator with you each place to help you get whatever you needed to eat or wear.”
This Visionary wanted stability, he guessed. She wanted a place where she didn’t have to worry about explodin
g innocents to bits. A place she didn’t have to put her toothbrush back in her luggage each night. She didn’t seem to have any luggage. Probably she wanted that, too, but he’d hold that for later.
Liliana lowered her eyelashes; they were as red as the hair on her head. She was truly lovely, but in such an extreme way that Lock realized it must be part of what made her a Visionary. They all had some strange attribute that worked upon the present in odd ways, and this must be part of hers.
She was thinking about it.
She chewed her lip, then made a decision. “Can Farooq-Lane stay with me?”
So the world had broken.
The world had broken, and in the end, Declan wasn’t sure there was anything he could have done to stop it. He didn’t know if the people who had busted into his town house had come because he hadn’t been careful enough, or because he had called attention to himself, or because he had called a Boston number about The Dark Lady, or because he had called a number about Boudicca, or because of none of those things.
He just knew the world had broken and now neither of his brothers was safe.
STOP DREAMING.
They sat in the Shenandoah Café. It was quite some distance from the town house, which seemed important, and it was a public place, which seemed very important, and it was open twenty-four hours on weekends, which seemed very, very important.
They weren’t really talking. They were supposed to be, but after some preliminary catch-up, they’d all fallen silent. Hennessy leaned her head on Jordan’s shoulder, looking battered and exhausted and miserable and relieved that Jordan’s shoulder was there to hold her up. Jordan stared off at some knickknacks on the wall. Not dreamy, but haunted. Matthew stared at Jordan, and why wouldn’t he? The first living dream he’d seen since he’d learned he was one. Ronan clenched and unclenched his fist on the table, staring out the front door at their two cars parked in the lot. He kept looking at his phone: There was an unanswered text to Adam on it. Declan was waiting for his phone to attend to him, too. He had dictated emails and texts to Matthew as they drove here, put calls in and left voicemails, putting out all the feelers he dared to those who might know who was killing dreamers in DC.
Their server, Wendy, leaned in with a large platter.
“I brought you double apple fritters,” she said. “You kids seem like you’ve had a rough night.”
“I knew I liked her,” Hennessy said after she’d gone, and put her head down on her arms. It was uncanny to see her beside Jordan. They were the same girl, but they were also very much not. They had the same face and used it entirely differently. It was hard to believe Hennessy was the dreamer. Jordan seemed like she should’ve come first. Hennessy was … less.
Don’t think about it, Declan thought to himself. Just stop.
The phone rang.
But it was not Declan’s; it was Ronan’s. SARGENTO said the caller ID.
Ronan swept it up and put it to his ear. He put his head down and listened, saying very little. What does Gansey say? No. But why … no. No, stay away. Have you heard from Ad—Have you heard from Parrish? Couple of hours. I know. I know.
After he hung up, Ronan said, “They talked to Mr. Gray.”
Both of the older Lynch brothers took a moment to square their jaws. Their relationship with Mr. Gray was complicated: He was the man who had been ordered to kill Niall Lynch. Niall was just one of the many people he had killed for his employer, Colin Greenmantle, who was blackmailing him. Did that make him Niall’s killer? Yes. Did that make him his murderer? Possibly. Or possibly Mr. Gray was the weapon in Greenmantle’s hand.
Mr. Gray had spent much time since his freedom from Greenmantle trying to make it up to the Lynch brothers, although killing someone’s parent just wasn’t the kind of thing a relationship ever bounced back from. Regardless, it meant that he would always provide information if he could.
But the Lynches would never talk to him.
“He said all that’s on the street is that a group is killing dreamers, and they have government backing. There’s a lot of them.”
“Why?” Matthew asked.
“They don’t know why.”
“How many is ‘a lot’?” Declan asked.
“Enough that there was another attack going on in South Africa while they were attacking the town house tonight, apparently,” Ronan said.
The world was broken, Declan thought. It was broken and could not be fixed.
He thought, And I never actually lived, either.
“How do they know, then, about the dreamers?” Jordan asked. “We didn’t even know you existed until you showed up on our door, did we?”
Because dreamers were meant to be secret, Declan thought. Because they all knew secrecy was the only way to survive. Fuck, he thought helplessly. What now?
“And I didn’t know about you until Bryde,” Ronan said. “Oh. Do you remember what he said, Hennessy? When he left.”
Hennessy turned her head so that her voice was audible. “‘The world’s going to shit.’ He knew. It surprised him, but he knew.”
“Declan,” Ronan said, “don’t tell me not to.”
“What am I telling you not to?”
“Don’t tell me not to chase Bryde,” Ronan said. “Don’t tell me to keep my head down.”
Everything in Declan wanted to, though. The world could always be broken more. As long as his brothers were alive, there was always worse that could happen.
“Tell me some other way,” Ronan went on. “Tell me something that’s not asking Bryde for help and I’ll do it.”
Declan hated this. The old familiar twist of his stomach. The rank sourness of danger. It wasn’t fear for himself, he realized. Because it had been dangerous to go see the new Fenian, but that hadn’t felt like this. That had been illicit and thrilling, and not just because he had Jordan with him. Because his father’s criminal blood pumped through him. No, Declan hated the idea of his brothers being in danger. “What good would he do? You don’t know anything about him.”
“We know he’s powerful,” Hennessy said. “We know they were talking about him at the Fairy Market.”
“He knows about more dreamers than just us,” Ronan added. “And he knows more about how it works than I do. We know the monster in Hennessy’s head is afraid of him.”
“But it will take both of you to convince him,” Jordan said. “Isn’t that what you said when we got here? You and Hennessy both. And she only has one more dream left.”
Hennessy sat up. “I can do it.”
Jordan said, “There’s no fallback.”
“I can do it,” Hennessy said. “Or go out trying. It’s this or the next time the black ooze—the nightwash—comes anyway.”
Ronan said, “We can do it. I know it.”
It was unlike Ronan to lie.
He cut his eyes away from Declan. “What about you guys?”
Matthew broke in, “I don’t want to pretend.”
Declan regarded his youngest brother. He looked different than he had just a few days before, because for the first time in several months, he’d lost sleep. He had dark circles beneath his pleasant eyes, and lines around his ordinarily smiling mouth.
He went on, “I went to soccer and all I could think about was how you said I might not have internal organs.”
“M—” started Declan.
“It’s just not real,” Matthew said. “It’s not real to pretend like any of the other guys are going to walk off campus and not remember why they did. It’s not real to pretend they’re all walking to Great Falls. It’s not real, it’s just not real. I want to be real. I want to know why it’s happening. I want to know if I can stop it. There’s no point otherwise, D, there’s just no point.”
“Okay,” said Declan softly.
Everyone at the table looked at him.
Declan was powerless to deny Matthew a thing he wanted anyway, but it was more than that. It was that he’d given up everything and gotten nothing for it in return. It was that
he wasn’t a dreamer, and he wasn’t a dream, and he couldn’t be human; there was nothing left. Just a turquoise ocean with no sign that he’d ever been. Something had to change.
“We’ll go to the Barns,” he said. “It’s hidden, right? We’ll look for answers from there. We won’t pretend anymore.”
“And Ronan and I will contact Bryde,” Hennessy said. “Jordan, I want you to go with Declan and Matthew.”
Jordan sat by herself in the corner of the booth, one leg up on the booth beside her now that Hennessy had sat up. She somehow seemed more real than any of them. A dream, but more real than Declan. This was all so tangled.
“If she comes,” Declan said, “I’ll make sure she’s taken care of if something happens to Hennessy.”
Jordan eyed her dreamer, and then she eyed Declan, and then Ronan. She shook her head. “No. I’m coming to watch you sleep.”
“Jordan,” Hennessy said. “Please go with him. In case something happens.”
Jordan shook her head. “I’m not leaving you to do this alone.”
“Jordan,” Hennessy begged. “The others are all dead. They died thinking I just left them, that I wasn’t even trying. I saw their faces. Please let me do this thing for you. Please. Please just be safe.”
All of this was the opposite of safe, but Declan knew what she meant. She didn’t really mean safe, any more than his life before this had been safe. She meant something I can control.
“Jordan,” Declan said, “I’ll let you drive.”
Great Falls sounded wild at night. There were no tourists, no car sounds, no day birds calling. There was just the massive surge of millions of gallons of water rushing down from West Virginia toward the Atlantic, and the trees murmuring in sympathy.
It was cold, finally cold, properly November. They parked the car in a parking lot over a mile away from the falls; they planned to walk the rest of the way in since the park was closed from dusk until dawn. That was how they wanted it. Empty. Undisturbed.
It would have been better to dream closer to the ley line, but none of them felt like they had that kind of time. And they already well knew that Great Falls was the best source of alternate power close by.
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