Mister Impossible

by Maggie Stiefvater

  Bryde was still going. “And what a way to die. Suffocated under rotting food for cows that don’t exist anymore. The Greywaren—isn’t that what your forest Lindenmere calls you? Dreamer and protector? Dreamer and protector and fool with lungs full of silage if I hadn’t been here. For what?”

  “I was trying,” Ronan finally snarled.

  “So was Hennessy, and you took it from her,” Bryde said. Man, that little rubbishy part of Hennessy was having a field day. “Did you manage to find your painting, Hennessy?”

  “The haystack has not produced a needle thus far,” she said.

  Bryde flicked his eyes around the barn. Dreams could sometimes end up quite far away from their dreamer, especially when they were big, but there was no sign of any of the large things from the dream, like a canvas, or the chair he’d been sitting on.

  Then she spotted it.

  On her thumb, there was the faintest smear of feather-pink paint, the same pink she’d smeared across the canvas in the dream. This was what she’d been paralyzed for, just a mere scraping of dried pigment. She supposed Jordan would’ve been delighted to see it. It wasn’t a dreamt copy of Hennessy. And it wasn’t the Lace. Technically, that was huge progress, even if it didn’t feel like it. Sometimes, as Ronan had just demonstrated, it was as much about what you didn’t dream as what you did.

  She showed her thumb to Bryde as if she were hitchhiking. “Found it.”

  Bryde rounded on Ronan again. “So you pulled the ley right out from beneath her. What a gentleman. How much is left now? What do you feel?”

  Ronan looked like a cat doused with water.

  “Right, you can’t, I forgot,” Bryde went on. “The fairy tales we tell ourselves are so comforting in times of darkness. I’ll tell you how much: very little. The ley line bent over backward for a barn full of wheels going nowhere. And if the Moderators drove up right now, where would you be? Up shit creek and unable to dream a paddle.”

  The rubbishy part of Hennessy was still rubbishy and pleased to see Ronan getting reamed out, but the rest of her felt bad enough to come to his rescue.

  “Pity, too,” she said, leaping to her feet. “I needed that ley line. I was just warming up. I was going to bring out Max Ernst’s entire cabin in Sedona. With Max Ernst inside it. And a bunch of his art. Maybe his wife, too. He built that thing with his own two hands after surviving two wars, did you know? The cabin, I mean, not the wife. I think she was from New York. Or maybe she moved there after Ernst died. I don’t remember, but I think she was the one who said there was no such thing as a woman artist, there was just an artist. Oh, I was also going to dream that bird thing of his, in your honor, Ronan Lynch. He was like you, had that bird alter ego, couldn’t tell the difference between birds and humans. Loplop.”

  “Hennessy, this isn’t—” Bryde started.

  She blew on. “I knew I’d have the name if I thought about it hard enough. Kept thinking it was rabbity, and it was. Lop. Lop. Yeah, so, the cabin, the studio, the Dadaist. It was going to be my dreaming masterwork, inspired by these dioramas. That’s the way a good artist works, isn’t it? She takes in the things around her and delivers not a copy but a response to the world she’s absorbed. I behold this supposed West Virginia Museum of Living History with its static figures frozen in staged historical moments and I raise you real people in actual historical properties, a surrealist in a surrealist piece. Now that’s living art. That’s what Dadaism is all about. This is the Hennessy museum, discounts available for children under twelve and parties over twenty!”

  Bryde gave her a withering look, but it had worked—all her words had drained him of his. He just shook his head and tossed Ronan’s jacket at him. “Get your things. It’s three hours to the next nearest ley line. We’ve got to get going before this one turns the lack of ley into an emergency again.”

  “I’m not that damn fragile,” Ronan protested.

  Bryde just said, “Don’t forget your bird.”

  After Bryde stalked off through the doors, Hennessy held out an arm to help Ronan up from the hay. “Must’ve been a helluva dream.”

  “Oh, fuck off,” Ronan said.

  “Fuck off yourself. You’re welcome.”

  Ronan shouldered on his jacket. “What was it going to be? Your dream. Don’t say Ploplop.”

  “Loplop, you Neanderthal,” Hennessy said. She didn’t want to talk about the dream. She didn’t want to talk about Jordan. She just wanted to keep moving so she didn’t have to think about any of it too hard while she was awake, because when she thought about it, she got sad, and when she got sad, she got angry, and when she got angry, she wanted to kill Moderators, and when she wanted to kill Moderators, Bryde told her to bide her time. She didn’t want to bide her time. “That’s the crankiest I’ve ever seen him. Maybe he’ll get tired of us and piss off to whatever he was doing before.”

  This was a topic she and Ronan had already discussed, briefly in whispers, when they had moments here and there without Bryde. Who was this person they were following? Where had he been before? They knew he’d been infamous when they first met him, that his name was already whispered around black markets … but for what? And how eager was he to get back to it?

  Ronan rubbed a thumb over the wheel closest to him, pressing his fingers into the etched word tamquam. This was a thing Hennessy was learning about Ronan Lynch: He always thought he was keeping his secrets by keeping his mouth shut, but he ended up telling them in other ways.

  He said, “But what were you dreaming about really?”

  “A lady never tells,” Hennessy said, “and it’s impolite to ask.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Jordan.”

  “I said whatever.”

  “And I said Jordan.”

  If he had pressed her harder, she would have talked about it, and part of her wanted him to, but instead he just kicked one of the wheels. It occurred to her, in a distant way, that maybe he wanted her to press him about his dream, too. Something must have bothered him enough that he couldn’t prevent all these wheels from driving out of his head, after all. But the idea of holding the weight of his drama on top of her own felt like too much.

  So they just silently assembled themselves. Hennessy got her sword. Ronan got his bird. At the door, he turned to survey what he had done. All those wheels. He was an unusual silhouette with the raven crouched on his shoulder, the sword strapped to his back. Hennessy thought he would have made a fairly good portrait subject, if everything about him wasn’t supposed to be secret, which made her think about how, in her dream, she’d thought about how Jordan would’ve thought Bryde an appropriate portrait subject.

  “I wonder what she’s up to,” Hennessy said. “What she and your brother are up to.”

  Ronan’s voice was dry and disappointed as he turned away. “Bet they’re having a blast.”

  Jordan felt a little bad about stealing Declan Lynch’s car.

  Not overwhelmingly bad. Not enough to keep her up nights (or rather, mornings, since she was a night owl). Not enough that she wished she could go back and do it differently. Just enough that sometimes she saw a Volvo of the same make and model and had a vague, niggling sensation of wrongness. The opposite of the Volvo brand. The opposite of the Jordan brand.

  Really it was this: A few weeks before, she’d left the oldest and youngest Lynch brothers at a rural Virginian rest stop in the middle of the night, their faces lit up by the taillights as she drove their car away. Matthew—surprised, everything perfectly round, round face, round eyes, round mouth—looking, as ever, much younger than his seventeen years. And Declan—unsurprised. Arms crossed. Mouth a straight line. Eyes closing to form an Of course, it’s always something, isn’t it? expression just as he got too small to see in her rearview mirror. But it was a minor betrayal. Jordan had known Declan was resourceful enough to find another transportation method for the rest of the journey to the Barns. And she’d also known the bad guys who’d tried to kill the brothers earlier weren’
t in close enough pursuit to put them in any danger in the interim.

  Probably.

  That probably was what she felt a little bad about. Gambling with other people’s lives was usually more what the Hennessy half of Jordan Hennessy would do. Jordan was the more thoughtful half, usually.

  Declan Lynch was on her mind now, even though there was no Volvo in sight, because of the party invite in her hands. Heavy card stock, matte black with a bold white cross painted on it, rounded edges that felt good to press your fingers against. JORDAN HENNESSY AND GUEST, you are invited.

  She knew it was a Boudicca party. That was their logo, their colors—that painted blunt cross, that black and white. Boudicca was a ladies-only crime syndicate that offered protection and marketing in exchange for what looked a lot like luxurious servitude. They’d tried previously to recruit both Jordan and Hennessy, thinking they were talking to a single entity, a pretty, high-class art forger. Neither were interested. Jordan already had enough limits on her movement. Hennessy didn’t play well with others.

  But Boudicca had “coincidentally” texted Jordan the night she, Declan, and Matthew had fled from the banks of the Potomac River. Opportunity of interest for you in Boston given circumstances, please arrange in-person appointment for more information.

  And then she’d stolen the car to check it out.

  It was a sort of Hennessy thing to do.

  She felt, as noted, a little bad about it.

  But it was done now and Jordan was by her lonesome, putting on her lipstick in a discolored bathroom mirror. The whole bathroom was a little unpleasant to look at in a way that turned right around to being pleasant in a shabby way. It was nestled in the corner of a generous space in Fenway Studios, a grand historical building constructed a hundred years earlier to house nearly fifty artists. Old wood floors, twelve-foot windows, fourteen-foot ceilings, vintage radiators slinking along the plaster walls like ribby animals, easels and supplies set up everywhere, speakers that didn’t work with Jordan’s new burner phone but did with the boom box she found in the closet. It was not meant to be a place to live and it was entirely possible her couch surfing violated a city code, but the owner, an artist who blew up nude photographs and painted bigger, more colorful boobs on top of them, wasn’t the type to be fussed about such things. It was only supposed to be until she found a roommate, anyway.

  How long did Jordan think she was going to get to do this for?

  As long as she could.

  Jordan put on her leather jacket and examined the look in the mirror. She didn’t have a lot of choices; she had the clothing she’d fled in, this orange bodice she’d found in a very nice consignment shop in South Boston, and a T-shirt and joggers she’d bought because God knew if this guy came to work in the middle of the night to paint another one of his fucked-up nudes, she wanted to be clothed. And although she’d been doing a little forgery work here and there since arriving in the city, taking deposits, impressing tourists at the holiday fairs with some quick cheap works, she’d been saving that money.

  For what? For the future. The future. A foreign concept. Back in DC, she hadn’t had a future. She, and all the other girls, had an expiration date set by Hennessy. When Hennessy died, it was game over for all of them. As dreams, they’d fall into permanent sleep without their dreamer. Until then, they all shared the same life—Hennessy’s life—living as her and as each other. The girls shared this uncertainty every day. Would the dreaming kill Hennessy today? Would the drugs, the cars, the self-hatred? Would today be the day they fell asleep in the middle of the sidewalk?

  It hung over them every day.

  It was hard enough to put one’s life in another’s hands; it was even harder when those hands were as reckless as Hennessy’s.

  Jordan tried to live life to the fullest. What else could she do? Not just wait.

  But in the end, the girls hadn’t fallen asleep unexpectedly.

  They were killed. Violently. Unnecessarily. The Moderators hadn’t bothered to find out if any of them was the dreamer before taking them all out. They’d lived like Hennessy and they died like she was supposed to.

  Outside, Jordan hugged her too-thin jacket around her and put some speed to her feet. The party was in Back Bay, a ten- or fifteen-minute journey if she hoofed it. As she walked, she looked not at the glowing businesses on the ground floor but rather up at the apartments and lofts above. No one in Boston seemed to care that you could see them in their offices and homes; they went about their business and expected you to go about yours. It became like a screensaver of activity. Jordan, like all the girls, was a city person, and Boston was a good city for Jordan’s kind of art. And it felt good to be in a new place after being stranded for so long in DC trying to solve the escalating problem of Hennessy’s dreaming.

  The other girls would have loved it, too. Poor June, Trinity, Brooklyn, Madox. Poor Octavia, Jay, Alba, Farrah. Poor girls who never got futures.

  Jordan owed it to them to live a life, since they never got a chance. She couldn’t control Hennessy’s recklessness or the Moderators’ ruthlessness. But she could control her own fearlessness. She was going to live as big a life as she could, for as long as she could.

  She arrived at the party.

  Parties were like people—they came in lots of different shapes and sizes. They had different hopes and dreams and fears. Some of them were needy. Others were self-contained and only needed you to have a good time. Some were warm, garrulous. Others were chilly, exclusionary.

  Jordan could see at once that this party was a very grown-up party, a party that took itself seriously. See and be seen. Et cetera. The venue was small: an after-hours Back Bay art gallery. Age knuckling the burnished floors. Abstract paintings brightening the walls. Provocative sculpture complicating the corners. It was all very nice. One felt smarter to see it. Cultured. The partygoers were beautiful: women, all of them. Lovely dark skin, beautiful blond curls, freckles pebbled across cheekbones, big rounded hips, pale midriffs, golden shoulder blades, dresses and heels of every color and length and height. Jordan didn’t recognize all of them, but she recognized enough to get the gist. CEOs. Diplomats. The daughters of presidents and the mothers of drug barons. Actresses. Musicians. Corn cereal heiresses and influencers made good. Celebrities, too, but, you know, proper celebrities; they didn’t point at each other and say, Look, there’s so and so. They acted cool. Peerish.

  Boudicca.

  “What can I get you?” asked the bartender. She had outrageously red hair, ridiculously red hair, poured from a bottle or a volcano.

  Immediately Jordan’s mind began to consider the challenge of how she would paint it. There were plenty of interesting red pigments, but she didn’t think they’d do the trick on their own. Probably to achieve that eye-popping red, she’d surround it with a green background. Green added to red dulled it. Green painted beside red made both colors look more like themselves. Red and green were complementary colors, on either side of the color wheel. Funny how opposites made each color look brighter.

  “What do you have that’s cheap?” Jordan asked.

  The bartender looked up through her eyelashes. Her eyes were green. “Open bar, for you.”

  Jordan flashed a huge smile. “What do you have that’s orange?”

  “Do you want sweet or sour?”

  “Oh, I’m not going to drink it. It’s to match my top.”

  The bartender did her best and Jordan tipped her with some of her precious forgery money and then took her orange top and orange drink to mingle. Fake-mingle. Really, she just wanted to information-gather. Jordan had crashed enough parties to be good at this, but she was thrown by all the famous faces here. Were these members or clients or both?

  This felt higher stakes than it had in DC.

  Higher stakes, she reminded herself, but same game. She knew how to play it. It was just forgery, after all. Forgery of people rather than art. The key was to remember to be better than a mere copy or mimic. If one painted exactly what
one saw as accurately as possible, the result might be technically correct but was also stilted. Brittle. If one ran into a technical snag in its re-creation, the whole process ground to a halt. One had to stick to the script. But with forgery, the surface details were less important than the rules that proved them. Every work of art had rules: Paint was allowed to pool in the corners, lines were feathery at their ends as the brush was lifted, mouths were exaggerated for drama, blacks were unsaturated, so on, so forth. And if one learned enough of them, one could create endless new works based upon those rules and pass them off as creations by the original artist.

  Humans were the same. They had rules that proved their behavior. Discover the thesis and you had them.

  Jordan used this principle to forge a partygoer who had been mingling. Her lips carried a holdover laugh from a funny conversation she’d just left. She let out an audible breath as she stole a quick look at her phone, as if she’d just grabbed a moment between chats to check her business email. She nodded over her shoulder as she walked from a group, subtly suggesting she had just had a good talk. When people tried to catch her eye, she lifted a finger and pointed to a group in another room, indicating, Catch you in a bit, I’m on my way to a preexisting condition.

  In this way she existed in the party without being of it, gathering information instead of giving it away.

  Which was how she discovered that these were clients. She wasn’t sure what they all thought they were here to purchase, but they were decidedly here with wallets at the ready. What could this spangled company all have in common with each other? What could they possibly have in common with her?

  “Jordan Hennessy!”

  An older woman had drawn alongside her. She was far more dowdy than the other partygoers, dressed in a houndstooth dress with a hedgehog pin over her right breast. She had a glass of wine in her hand and she was a little messy in the way people sometimes are when they’re drunk, but Jordan could tell she was not drunk. She was just like that. “Jordan Hennessy, it’s been a GD long time.”