Somewhere, the other two Lynch brothers were racing across the state toward the Barns. Hennessy had watched Ronan and Matthew hug, and then watched Ronan and Declan face each other. Ronan had kicked the ground like he was mad at it. Declan had said, I’ll see you at the Barns.
And then Jordan and Hennessy had said goodbye. Maybe the last time they would ever see each other again, their faces that looked so like each other and yet were nothing alike. Jordan, who’d always believed in the world, and Hennessy, who’d always known it was waiting for her to die. The Hennessy who had never seen the Lace, and the Hennessy who had.
“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” Hennessy had said. It was a joke.
“Bring me back a T-shirt,” said Jordan. Another joke.
Then they had hugged, tightly.
Hennessy didn’t want Jordan to go to sleep forever.
And now they were at Great Falls. Hennessy and Ronan lay in the middle of Overlook 1, looking up at the black leaves against the black sky, uncomfortably similar to the appearance of the Lace. The water sounded impossibly close when her head was resting on the boards, like it was just inches below the deck.
She was tired, because she was always tired, but she didn’t know how she would ever sleep like this. Knowing it might be the last time she did.
After several minutes, she asked, “What do you think he’ll be like?”
“Bryde? I don’t know.”
“What do you want him to be like?” Hennessy asked.
“Better at this than me,” Ronan said.
“What’s this?”
“Dreaming. Staying alive. Knowing what to do about the nightwash. Knowing what to do with Matthew. Knowing what to do with these dreamkillers. What do you want him to be like?”
She wanted him to tell her how to stay alive. She wanted him to tell her how to save Jordan for good, so that she no longer had to rely on Hennessy, who was always and ever unreliable. She wanted Jordan to have the life she deserved.
“Sexy as hell,” Hennessy said.
They both laughed.
Every sound seemed amplified; their laugh boomed.
A bright square illuminated the night as Ronan checked his phone. He was looking for a response to his last text to MANAGEMENT. Hennessy could see a wall of text that Ronan had sent about Bryde, and then, on its own line, where Ronan had texted Tamquam. It was marked unread.
He put the phone away.
She could tell that he had been hoping for a reply before they did this.
“Okay. Okay,” Ronan said. “You go to sleep first, because I know how to find you in dreamspace. But that means when you fall asleep, you have to make something to keep the Lace away from you. Immediately. You can’t get shunted out of that dream before I get there to call Bryde, or you die, and the game’s all up.”
She didn’t answer.
“You did it in Lindenmere. You saw how I did it.”
She did. Not just with those little baubles of joy, but with those sundogs. The most incredible part of watching Ronan manifest them hadn’t been the sundogs themselves. It had been when Ronan said to the vast dreamspace that knew every part of him: I’m trusting you. A savage fuckup like Ronan could trust his subconscious that deeply.
Could she?
“I’ll make something, too,” Ronan said. “As soon as I see you.”
She was so afraid.
“Hennessy?” Ronan said, in a slightly different voice.
“Lynch.”
“I’ve been alone a long time,” he said.
Part of her thought that he hadn’t, though. His brothers, his boyfriend, his friends who called him with information in the middle of the night.
But the bigger part of her understood it, because she’d been alone, too. Because at the end of the day, no one else could fathom what it was like living with these endless possibilities inside your head.
Hennessy had come tonight thinking she didn’t want Jordan to sleep forever if this failed.
But now she knew this, too: She didn’t want to die, either.
She reached between them and fumbled until she felt his leather wristbands, then found his hand. She held it. He held back tightly.
Ronan was in hell.
He was dreaming.
The Lace was everywhere; it was the entire dream. It was wrong to say it surrounded him, because that would imply that he still existed, and he wasn’t sure of that. The dream was the Lace. He was the Lace.
It was hell.
It was the dreamt security system.
It was Adam’s scream.
It was his last forest dying.
It was his father’s battered body.
It was his mother’s grave.
It was his friends leaving in Gansey’s old Camaro for a year’s trip without him.
It was Adam sitting with him in the labyrinth in Harvard telling him that it was never going to work.
It was tamquam, marked unread.
The Lace.
It would kill him, too, it said. You have nothing but yourself and what is that?
But then there was a furious flash of light, and in it, he felt a burst of hope.
He was part of something bigger.
He remembered what he had promised Hennessy. Something. A weapon. Something. He felt it in his hand. He looked. It was no longer just him and the Lace. It was now his body, his hand, and in his hand, the hilt he’d woken with in the BMW after chasing Mór Ó Corra.
“Hennessy?” he shouted.
There was no answer.
Shit.
He had fallen asleep and come here.
And she had fallen asleep and gone where she always went. Into the Lace. Maybe already dead.
“Hennessy!” he shouted. “Lindenmere, are you here? Is she here?”
The Lace pressed in, hungry, dreadful.
If only Opal were here, or Chainsaw. He needed one of his psychopomps. He needed to have Adam strengthening the ley energy while he dreamt. He needed—
He needed another dreamer.
He shouted, “We’re more than this, Hennessy!”
That slice of light came again, so brightly white that he couldn’t look at it. He realized now it had been behind the Lace the entire time, and he’d glimpsed it before through one of the ragged holes. It was spinning in a massive circle, and it was getting closer.
Hennessy was behind it. She was spinning a strip of light around in front of her, and it was pressing the Lace away from her. Not vanquishing it, but not allowing it any closer.
It was a sword. Every time it cut the air it released pure white light like the moon and stars.
“Bryde gave this to me,” Hennessy said. Her face was caught in wonder.
Ronan looked at the hilt in his hand. It now had a beautiful black blade to match the hilt. Ronan lifted it, and as he did, it carved a line of sun glow behind it.
The Lace fell back.
Together they might not be able to vanquish Hennessy’s old dream, but they could hold it at bay.
Now they could get their breath. Now they could get their breath enough to say it together: “Bryde.”
The very first dream Ronan had ever been truly proud of, truly euphoric over, had been a copy.
It had been in high school. Ronan wasn’t good at surviving high school and he wasn’t good at surviving friendship, and so while his friend Gansey’s back was turned, he’d stolen Gansey’s car. It was a beautiful car. A 1973 bright orange Camaro with stripes right up its hood and straight down its ass. Ronan had wanted to drive it for months, despite Gansey forbidding it.
Maybe because of him forbidding it.
Within hours of stealing it, Ronan had totaled it.
Gansey hadn’t wanted him to drive it because he thought he’d grind the clutch, or curb it, or burn out the tires, or maybe, maybe blow the engine.
And here Ronan had totaled it.
Ronan had loved Richard C. Gansey III far more than he loved himself at that point, and he hadn’t known ho
w he was going to ever face him when he returned from out of town.
And then Joseph Kavinsky had taught him to dream a copy.
Before that, all of Ronan’s dreams—that he knew about, Matthew didn’t count—had been accidents and knickknacks, the bizarre and the useless. When he’d successfully copied a car, an entire car, he’d been out of his mind with glee. The dreamt car had been perfect down to the last detail. Exactly like the original. The pinnacle of dreaming.
Now a copy was the least impressive thing to him. He could copy anything he put his mind to. That just made him a very ethereal photocopier. A one-man 3-D printer.
The dreams he was proud of now were the dreams that were originals. Dreams that couldn’t exist in any other way. Dreams that took full advantage of the impossibility of dreamspace in a way that was cunning or lovely or effective or all of the above. The sundogs. Lindenmere. Dreams that had to be dreams.
In the past, all his good dreams like this were gifts from Lindenmere or accidents rather than things he had consciously constructed. He was beginning to realize, after listening to Bryde, that this was because he’d been thinking too small. His consciousness was slowly becoming the shape of the concrete, waking world, and it was shrinking all his dreams to the probable. Bryde was right: He needed to start realizing that possible and impossible didn’t mean the same thing for him as they did for other people. He needed to break himself of the habit of rules, of doubt, of physics. His what if had grown so tame.
You are made of dreams and this world is not for you.
He would not let the nightwash take him and Matthew.
He would not let this world kill him slowly.
He deserved a place here, too.
He woke.
Ronan saw himself from above. Strangely lit. Brightly lit. Hennessy lay opposite him, also motionless. A sword lay on each of their chests, a matching pair. Ronan’s hands were clasped over the hilt that read VEXED TO NIGHTMARE and Hennessy’s over a hilt that read FROM CHAOS. Both were sheathed in dark leather.
She’d done it.
They’d done it.
They’d held the Lace at bay, Hennessy had manifested something other than herself in the dream, and she’d come back to waking neither bleeding nor with a copy of herself. There was still a gap at her tattoo where another rose could fit.
Ronan heard voices; shouting.
This was wrong.
The lights striping across them were wrong. Headlights, or flashlights.
Move, he told his body.
But his body could not be hurried.
If those dreamkillers had tracked them here somehow, and if they found them before the paralysis wore off, it wouldn’t matter if these swords performed as they did in the dream. They’d be shot where they lay.
Move, he told his body.
It was nowhere near movement. He was still looking at himself from above.
“Over here!” shouted one of the voices, drawing nearer to the observation deck.
No.
Now he could hear trees rustling, leaves being kicked up, boots on gravel. They were coming down to the viewing area. There’d be no time for negotiation, for threat, for anything but dying.
“Don’t come any closer,” said a very familiar voice.
It was calm, level, infinitely less surreal when spoken into a walking space instead of into Ronan’s dreams.
The speaker was not visible from Ronan’s limited vantage point, but Ronan knew who it was regardless.
Bryde.
“I suggest you stop right there, or I will be forced to detonate my weapon,” Bryde said calmly. Nearby. Just out of sight. Ronan could only stare at himself and Hennessy from above.
“Show yourself!” called a rough voice.
Bryde, if anything, sounded amused. “I’d rather not. Let’s have a bit more room. And in front, please put your guns down. This is uncivilized.”
Finally, Ronan was getting a glimpse of the black sky above. He was returning to his body.
“Who are you?” demanded one of the other voices farther up the path.
“You already know me as Bryde.”
“What do you want?”
“How about a conversation,” Bryde said, “before you rush in here and shoot any more people in the head.”
Ronan could move. Finally. He said, “I’m sitting up.”
“Do you hear that?” Bryde called. “They’re sitting up. Don’t anyone do anything stupid. Like I said, let’s not drive me to a massacre.”
Ronan and Hennessy looked up the path. There were dozens of people. Probably sixty. Some of them were dressed in normal clothing, but plenty more were in uniform. Bulletproof vests.
Ronan squinted in the direction of Bryde’s voice. He saw a figure among the trees, eyes glinting, cast in darkness. He could feel his pulse racing.
One of the dreamkillers shouted, “What do you want?”
“Why are you trying to kill us?”
“Not trying,” Hennessy said. “Why are you killing us? You killed my entire family. We weren’t doing shit to you.”
“We have it on very good authority that one of you Zeds is going to end the world,” rumbled one of the members of the party. “It’s not personal. That’s simply too much power for one person.”
“What kind of authority?” sneered Ronan.
“Good,” said the voice. “I thought I said that before.”
“So you just want us to die?” Hennessy demanded.
“Or stop dreaming,” suggested another one of the party.
Bryde broke in gently, “That’s a little facetious, don’t you think? We all know by now that dreamers must dream. So that’s not truly a bargain any of you or us could strike. That’s a thing you offer so that you can sleep at night. That’s the story you tell your children when you call them. That’s not a thing you tell another adult with a straight face.”
“My girls were just trying to survive,” said Hennessy. “You killed them for nothing. For nothing.”
“Look,” said a quiet voice. It belonged to a woman with dark hair and a very clean linen suit. “Maybe we can work with you if you give yourselves up. Do you want to work with us?”
“Carmen,” said the rumbly voice. “That’s not …”
“No,” Hennessy said. “You gunned down my family. How about you just leave us alone and we leave you alone? Like you would anyone else in this country?”
“You’re not anyone else,” said the rumbly voice.
In a low voice, Bryde said to Ronan and Hennessy, “This isn’t a negotiation, it’s stalling. We’re about to be shot at with some very large weapons. I told you what it meant if you called me.”
“More hiding,” Ronan said.
“Running and hiding are two different things.”
“How long?” Ronan asked.
“As long as it takes.”
His phone had still not buzzed; he had no answer from Adam. He wasn’t going to get one before he had to make up his mind.
Ronan put his hand on the hilt of VEXED TO NIGHTMARE. If he pulled the sword from the scabbard, there’d be no denying what he was. Everyone here would know what he was capable of. This was not just a vendor at the Fairy Market and a few black market onlookers. This was a crowd of sixty, a good majority of whom would consider such proof of dreaming a definite death sentence.
Hennessy and Ronan looked at each other.
They pulled the swords free.
VEXED TO NIGHTMARE gleamed blindingly. The blade was made of the sky, and the sun blasted along every inch of it. As he swung it in an enormous arc over his head, it shimmered and dripped and blasted sunlight out from it, obscuring him. Beside him, Hennessy had unsheathed FROM CHAOS and now it gleamed with the cold, pure white of the full moon, and when she swung it, sparks and stars and fuming comet trail dripped and blasted out from it, hiding the rest of them from view.
It forced the dreamkillers back even more surely than it had forced back the Lace.
Bryde st
epped into this furious light. He was older than Ronan and Hennessy, but hard to say by how much. His eyes were intense and clever over his hawkish nose. He was tawny-haired and tall, with an understated confidence to his movement, a tidy way of carrying his height. He looked like a man who didn’t have to posture, who knew his strength. He looked like a man who didn’t lose his temper very easily. He looked, Ronan thought, like a hero.
Bryde said, “Now we dream.”
In his hands was a very familiar shape: a clone of the hoverboard that Ronan had dreamt back in Harvard.
He threw it down. It bobbed to Hennessy and Ronan and hovered just above the ground.
Ronan swirled VEXED TO NIGHTMARE one more time, creating a new shower of blinding light, and then Bryde, Ronan, and Hennessy climbed onto the hoverboard, gripping one another.
Bryde, in front, pitched the board over the surging and furious river.
When the light cleared, the dreamers were gone.
END OF BOOK ONE
This book was a very long time coming, and for a nearly a year, I didn’t believe in it. I was too ill for stories, which was not a kind of ill I thought was possible, but it turns out that one should avoid harboring parasites if at all possible because they never pay enough rent to justify their occupation. Because it took such a very long time to diagnose and then even longer to cure, the story of my illness would probably take more words to tell than this book, but it is not overstating to say that this book wouldn’t exist without the medical team at Charlottesville’s Resilient Roots Functional Medicine, Ryan Hall, and Robert Abbott, MD. I can’t thank them enough in helping me stagger my way back to health.
My dear friends and longtime critique partners Brenna Yovanoff and Sarah Batista-Pereira were there every arduous step of the way, putting up with more bitching than any two humans should have to put up with, even when I was half-asleep. You’ve always been good at meeting me in my dreams anyway.
I’m intensely grateful to my editor, David Levithan, and my agent, Laura Rennert, for their forbearance. They saw many things in their inboxes that were not books before they finally got to see a book. Thank you for giving me time to blink awake.
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