Mister Impossible

by Maggie Stiefvater

  Like a pet, he thought.

  All around him, unseasonable fireflies winked in and out. As Matthew watched them fade in and out even on this cool fall day, he wondered what kind of dream Ronan had been having to produce them. He wondered what kind of dream Ronan had been having to produce him.

  His mind kept shouting the truth at him: You are a dream.

  He hadn’t told anyone, but he was terrified of falling asleep forever. He’d already had a taste of it. Every time the ley line faltered, he went all … dazed. Enchanted. His feet began to walk, his body began to move, his mind went somewhere else. When he came to, he always found himself in a completely different location, his disobedient body having tried to take him closer to ley energy.

  As trees took the place of the fields on either side of the driveway, Matthew hurled the entire box of crackers away from himself. The hand-cat said “Meow” in a disturbingly articulate way as it retrieved the box, but then a few little winged weasel things rushed out of the underbrush to fight for it until the cardboard box ripped asunder.

  Matthew plunged past them, ready for the walk to be over.

  “Matthew, stop,” Declan called. “I’ll go around.”

  He meant to spare Matthew the security system Ronan had dreamt for the Barns since they left, a peculiar, invisible net of dreams that covered the end of the driveway. It not only made the entrance to the Barns very difficult to see, it also made you feel terrible if you did try to enter. Anyone who stepped into the net immediately began to relive bad memories. Awful memories. Stuff you thought you’d forgotten and stuff you wished you had. Stuff so wretched that people just gave up and went back the way they’d come.

  Matthew was sort of drawn to it.

  Secretly he frequented the end of the driveway while Declan was occupied in the farmhouse all day on his boring calls on his burner phone, and secretly he would suck in his breath and plunge into the net of bad memories again and again.

  He didn’t know why.

  “Matthew,” Declan said. He was cuffing his pants. There was a long way around the security system if one picked through the woods in just the right way, but even the right way snagged one’s slacks with brambles. It was a testament to how much Declan wanted to avoid the security system that he’d tromp through the woods instead.

  Matthew edged toward the end of the driveway. “I’ll get it.”

  “You are being even more ridiculous than usual.”

  “BRB,” Matthew said.

  “Matthew, for crying out—”

  Matthew plunged into the security system.

  The memories hit him like they always did, fresh as when they happened. His brain could not separate them from the truth.

  This is what he remembered: losing himself. His thoughts slid into muddy dreaming. He climbed his school’s roof. The ground plunged hundreds of feet away. His body was unworried about the height.

  This is what he remembered: He was mid-sentence with Jacob on the soccer field, and then he was forgetting what he was saying while he was saying it, and then he was watching Jacob wait and wait and wait for him to remember his train of thought as it never returned.

  This is what he remembered: He was being woken by Declan by the banks of the Potomac River and realizing he’d walked there yet again without knowing it, and seeing all the creatures Ronan had dreamt dozing around him and realizing he was like them, he was a dream, he was a dream.

  This is what he remembered: He was walking, dreaming, walking, sleeping, obeying a power outside himself.

  Matthew.

  A voice said his name.

  This was the memory that he kept coming back for.

  Sometimes, when he lost himself, he thought he heard someone calling to him. Not in a human voice. Not in a dream voice. In a voice-voice, in a language he felt like maybe was his real language.

  He didn’t understand any more than that. So he kept coming back again and again.

  Then Matthew was through the security system and facing the empty, wooded country road and the mailbox on an ordinary, chilly day in the present. There was a faded wood cabinet behind the mailbox for the delivery drivers to leave parcels in, but there were no parcels today. Instead, there were a few pieces of junk mail (boring) and an art museum postcard addressed to Declan (even more boring).

  Lame. His sour mood remained.

  He plunged back through the security system.

  This time it gave him a memory he didn’t want at all, that was just him having to leave Aurora behind in Ronan’s dreamt forest Cabeswater before it was destroyed. The memory hadn’t been bad when it happened, even though Matthew never liked saying goodbye to her, but it was terrible now because he knew it was the last time he saw her before she died.

  She wasn’t your real mother, Matthew told himself. She wasn’t even Declan’s real mother. She was just a dreamt copy.

  But it never made him feel any better, so he was swiping a tear away when he emerged in front of Declan again. This infuriated him, too.

  “Was that worth it?” Declan asked drily.

  Matthew handed over the mail. “No groceries. We’re out of peanut butter.”

  “There’s a man in Orange who I think will sell us a Sentra for cash. Then we’ll be able to do some shop …” Declan’s voice trailed off as he turned the postcard over.

  “Is it from Ronan?” asked Matthew. It didn’t seem very Ronan-y. The postcard featured a painting of a woman dancing with the words ISABELLA STEWART GARDNER MUSEUM, BOSTON, MA, printed over it.

  Declan didn’t answer; his cheeks were a little flushed.

  “What is it?” Matthew could hear himself sounding a little whingy and was annoyed. Stop being a kid, he told himself.

  Declan was smiling. He was trying not to, but he was. He had ironed his voice flat, though, so that if one hadn’t seen his face, one would think it was just a normal day, normal mail. “How do you feel about a trip to Boston?”

  Matthew looked at the dreamt fireflies still winking in and out around them. Ronan’s dreams. Just like him.

  “Anywhere’s better than here,” Matthew said.

  “Finally,” Declan replied, “something we agree on.”

  What do you feel?” Bryde asked.

  “Shitty,” Ronan replied.

  “I said what, not how. Hennessy?”

  “I feel nothing,” Hennessy said. “Except the feel of my arteries closing in anticipation. Smell that grease. I love it.”

  Bryde shut the car door. “This isn’t going to make you feel better.”

  “It’s not going to make me feel worse,” Ronan replied.

  “If life’s taught me anything,” Hennessy said, “it’s that you can always feel worse.”

  It had been nearly twenty-four hours since the three dreamers had left the Museum of Living History. They were parked in front of Benny’s Dairy Bar, a decades-old fast-food joint located somewhere in West Virginia. The sun burned golden over the worn-down mountains surrounding the town. The dreamers’ shadows stretched thin across the faded lot.

  Ronan was starving.

  Bryde shot an attentive look around at their surroundings as Hennessy shivered and Ronan spat. The sparse parking lot, the decaying town, the quiet road. He was looking for Moderators. Moderators were why they were here instead of bedded down on a ley line; they’d barely left the day before when Bryde had suddenly ordered Hennessy to send Burrito in a completely different direction. He’d gotten information, somehow, in the mysterious way he sometimes did, that Moderators were close. They couldn’t risk leading them to their destination. Safer to stay in the invisible car until the coast was clear.

  Which meant they’d spent the past twenty-four hours dozing in the car and driving in circles.

  “Get down here,” Ronan said to Chainsaw, who had flapped to a nearby tree.

  “Let’s get this exercise over with,” Bryde said. “This entire process is merely for demonstration, so I hope you are in an educational frame of mind.”

/>   Ding! cried the door as the three dreamers entered Benny’s Dairy Bar, where they found booths bolted to the walls, hard tables bolted to the floor, soft locals bolted to seats, thin burgers bolted to hands. Above the counter was a menu board without any pretense or spin: HAMBURGER. CHEESEBURGER. 2 PATTY. 3 PATTY. FRIES. DOUBLE FRY. SOFT SERVE 1. SOFT SERVE 2. Behind the counter, employees wore purple Benny’s T-shirts. Golden oldies played overhead. Something something Mrs. Brown has a lovely daughter something something. It had a vague bleach smell, which might have otherwise turned Ronan off. But not right then. He instead thought only about the other smell: Grease. Salt. Food.

  As they stepped in, everyone in the restaurant stared. Six diners. Two standing in line at the counter. One at the pickup area. A cashier. Probably another few employees in the back. Witnesses, that was what they called them, people who would remember a Black girl in a crochet crop top and leather, a dude with a shaved head and a raven now back on his shoulder, and a hawk-nosed man with an expression that suggested he’d never felt fear in his life.

  This was why they never stopped at restaurants.

  Hennessy held out her hands grandly. “This is a stickup.”

  Bryde sighed heavily and fished one of his dreamt silver orbs out of the pocket of his gray jacket. At one of the tables, a teen was already lifting a cell phone to take a video or photo of the newcomers.

  Bryde said, very simply, “No.”

  With a gentle flick of his wrist, he tossed the orb. He didn’t have many. He said they were “expensive,” and Ronan believed it. Ronan wouldn’t have known the first thing about dreaming them into being—he would have been too afraid to. Because they messed with emotions, and they twisted thoughts, and they erased memories, some more permanently than others. Ronan was uneasy dreaming anything that altered free will; the bewildering security system at the Barns was the furthest he was willing to go. Bryde’s orbs, on the other hand, were like dreaming brain surgery. Such sophistication required more control than Ronan felt he had.

  Pwinnnnnnng! The tossed orb hit the teen’s poised cell phone. Both went flying. The phone, toward Bryde’s feet. The orb, under a booth.

  Bryde pocketed the fallen cell phone.

  “Hey!” said the teen.

  “You can’t do that,” remarked the cashier. But he didn’t say anything else because a second later, Bryde’s orb exploded.

  A cloud of confusion billowed out from inside it; it began to work on the diners almost immediately. Some gazed at each other in confusion. Some slumped over. The orb wasn’t designed to knock people out, but it was hard to predict how people would react to having their thoughts paused and memories flattened out.

  “Your balls really are nifty things,” Hennessy said. “Love to get my hands on them.”

  Bryde ignored this. “Time is of the essence.”

  But Hennessy pressed on. “Must’ve required a lot of practice. Wonder who you were practicing them on. ’Course, you could’ve been practicing them on us. But we wouldn’t remember, would we?”

  He ignored this, too. “Do what you have to do, Ronan.”

  Ronan was the one who’d asked them to stop for food, even though he knew it wasn’t really allowed under the unspoken rules of their outlaw lifestyle. Food came from the cabinets and fridges of empty houses, places without cameras, places without people. Crackers and canned goods, deli meat and apples. But his hunger had been growing in the car and now his body was howling that it couldn’t last much longer.

  “To the fryer!” cried Hennessy as she vaulted over the counter.

  Ronan, however, went straight to the customer who stood motionless at the pickup counter. Not perfectly motionless, not like a statue. But rather like someone who had been walking through a store and just remembered she had forgotten something important back at home.

  She didn’t blink or flinch as Ronan took a grease-spotted bag from one of her hands. He dumped the contents on the counter, unwrapped them, and ate them, one after another. A burger. Some fries. An apple pie.

  He was still starving.

  He took the milkshake from her other hand and drank it, too. Strawberry. Brain freeze. He finished it anyway, slamming the cup down on the counter as if it were a completed shot.

  Still starving.

  A guy at a nearby table had just started to unwrap his cheeseburger; Ronan completed the task for him as the guy blinked off into space. Down the hatch. Then the large fries next to it. Then his date’s chicken burger, even though it was disgusting. The pickle she’d abandoned beside it.

  Still starving.

  Hennessy’s voice rose from the kitchen area. “If you’d told me before all this that the best food in the world was stolen French fries, I would have laughed in your face. Which only goes to show you, one doesn’t know what one doesn’t know.”

  At the next booth, Ronan ate a melting soft serve. Another burger. A salad with an orange, slimy dressing, and raw onions. A paper plate of hash browns.

  Still starving.

  He hurled the paper plate to the ground. Next table.

  Bryde watched him, expressionless.

  Hennessy’s monologue was getting closer. “I’m rededicating my life to these French fries. Before this time, I was a sinner, finding pleasure in wine, women, song, and, sometimes, cocaine and grand theft auto, living moment to moment, not thinking about the consequences of my actions on my own body or others, but now I have seen the light and I will instead worship at the altar of stolen fries. I will paint murals in their honor. I will rename myself Tuber.”

  Ronan ate chicken nuggets, a hot dog, another milkshake, a barbecue sandwich, a corn dog, and some fried okra.

  “Can we stop pretending it is food you’re wanting now?” Bryde asked mildly.

  Ronan sank into a booth. The food sat inside him, heavy and pointless.

  Starving.

  Bryde stood at the end of the booth. “What do you feel?”

  “Come on.”

  “You might not be able to feel the ley line, but you can feel what happens to you when you don’t have it, Greywaren. Still, you pretend what you really need right now is a cheeseburger. Look around you. Look at yourself. We’re fleeing because of your wheels, and this is where you come. There aren’t two of you. Greywaren, do you even know what it means?”

  Ronan realized this was the teachable moment. This was the reason Bryde had used one of his precious orbs to hit up a fast-food joint. Ronan didn’t know what Greywaren meant, but he knew it was important. His first dreamt forest, Cabeswater, had called him that. His current forest, Lindenmere, called him that. His dead father had somehow known to call him that. And Bryde knew this name for him.

  He didn’t know what he was supposed to be learning, so he gazed off at nothing, sullen.

  Bryde tapped Ronan’s jaw with a single finger. “Protector and guardian—that is what you are supposed to be. King and shepherd both. But look at you, sick in your avoidant gluttony. There are not two of you. Your waking self cannot ignore what your dreaming self needs, because they are the same. Now you tell me. What is it you’re really feeling?”

  He pointed at Ronan’s ear.

  Very slowly, Ronan reached up to his ear and pressed a finger into it. When he withdrew it, his fingertip was slicked with a dark ooze.

  Nightwash.

  He was not starving for food. He was starving for the ley line. He was starving for dreaming.

  “Why is it always me?” he asked.

  Bryde said, “I just told you.”

  The nightwash came to Ronan far more often than it came to Hennessy. It came when he waited too long between taking something from his dreams, as if to punish him for not doing what he had been built to do. But it also came to him when he was too far from the ley line, as if to punish him for trying to live a life that was built for someone else. Once the ooze started, he had less and less time before he began to feel ill, and presumably, less and less time before it eventually would kill him.

  “I’m
getting worse,” he muttered.

  “Yes,” Bryde said.

  “Why even bother with me, then?”

  “Because it is not just you. This mountain city used to be alive with ley energy. Did you see the river we drove beside for dozens of miles, the river this city straddles? It should be flowing with energy. This should be a mountain town of dreamers. But it fades, like the entire world fades. It breathes more and more slowly, and no one is listening to mark the end of its pulse. Few, I suppose. Few are listening.”

  Hennessy asked, “Hold up. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of kicking ass, taking names, so on, so forth, but if we’re all going to bite it eventually because the world’s dying, why save anyone from the Mods? Is it sport to you?”

  “It’s not sport to me.” Bryde kept standing over Ronan. “What do you feel?”

  “I can’t do that,” Ronan said. “I’ll never be able to do that. Not while I’m awake.”

  “Don’t tell me my business. Not while you’re bleeding black. I have been at this for so much longer than you.” Bryde looked out the big glass windows at the trees at the edge of the parking lot, his eyes narrowed, his profile prickling that thing inside Ronan, that feeling of serendipity, of knowing, not-knowing, knowing, not-knowing, and then Bryde asked, “Do you two want to know what I was doing before you?”

  Hennessy and Ronan exchanged a look.

  “It wasn’t dreamers I was saving,” Bryde said. “It was ley lines.”

  Good, thought Ronan. Deep inside him he felt a certain peace, even alongside the turmoil of the nightwash. Good. This was even better than what he had hoped. Yes, good. Long ago, Ronan had helped to wake the single ley line that ran beneath his forest. He had not known this was what he wanted of Bryde until he said it.

  “And what were you saving the ley lines from?” Hennessy asked.