Bryde didn’t attend. He was still moving through the memory.
“Of course he has a stake in all this,” Hennessy said. “He told you he wanted to keep Matthew awake without you? He meant he wanted to stay awake. Fucking oedipal, man.”
“Shut up,” Ronan said. “What’s your big plan here? Shut down the ley lines to keep away the Lace?”
Hennessy popped finger guns at him.
Then she reached into her pocket and pulled out a silver orb. It was possible to tell, in the way of dreams, that even though it looked a lot like Bryde’s silver orb, it was not at all the same. It pulsed its intentions through the dream.
Its intention was this: Stop the ley line.
“So what now?” Hennessy asked. “We, like, battle forever? Is that going to be how it is? I try to make this thing that will shut down the line and you change the dream so I can’t remember what I was doing and round and round and round?”
The two Zeds eyed each other. The dream pulsed with unspoken feelings, but none of them were malice. Really, there were just two. One dreamer was feeling I need this to stop everything and the other dreamer was feeling I need this to start something.
And the other Zed, the Zed who was also a dream, kept going through the motions. He was walking toward an Airstream trailer that had just appeared in time for him to walk to it. Hennessy was somehow re-creating the memory perfectly for him, everything taken in with her artist’s eye and thrown back at him. She was very powerful when she was doing that.
On the horizon, the smoke continued to billow. The Smith Mountain Dam was there in the middle of these cornfields, being taken down slowly but surely by the unruly, otherworldly fire. Eerie dark herons circled above it, looking wispy as the smoke trail from a candle. They were ready to scoop up the fire and carry it wherever Ronan needed it to go. They would make the journey from Connecticut to the real dam in Virginia in very little time at all. Ronan was somehow holding the intention of the fire intact while also holding a conversation with Hennessy and also quietly shaping the dream into something else in the background without anyone noticing. He was very powerful when he was doing that.
“The Lace isn’t here now,” Ronan said. “As long as we work together, there’s no Lace. I can keep it away forever. We can take a break from what we’re doing. Hennessy, I found you before. You were drowning. I came looking for you. I wanted to do this with you. Do you remember? Don’t make me beg.”
Hennessy held the silver orb in front of one of her eyes and squinted, like it was a pirate’s eye patch. Both of them could sense it. It was not so much a presence as a non-presence. It was an absence of potential. It was a TV with the cord yanked from the wall. She didn’t say anything. Hennessy always had something to say, but she didn’t say anything.
“You fuck everyone this way,” Ronan said. His quiet changes to the dream were now visible to him, although still hidden to her. Slowly, birds were gathering behind her. Hundreds. Thousands. The fields were lousy with them. As he twitched his fingers by his side, they twitched, too, a gathering storm. They had a single intention built into them too: Get the orb from Hennessy. Destroy it so that Ronan could wake without it. Destroy it so Ronan could wake with his dam-destroying flames instead. “Have you thought about the consequences? You can’t deal so the whole world has to instead?”
“I’m the rubber and you’re the glue, Ronan Lynch,” Hennessy replied. “What’s funny is—Bryde’s you, and he’s still more right than you are. You’re still thinking like a non-dreamer. At least I’m thinking like a forger.”
She pointed behind him.
Ronan just had time to look and see that the real Hennessy stood there, holding another silver orb in her fingers. This one was even stronger than the other Hennessy was holding. It was not just the absence of sensation. It was a blanket of nothingness. It was noise-canceling, sound-deadening, pressure-relieving, stain-lifting, subscription-canceling, and his birds were pointed at the wrong Hennessy and the wrong orb and—
Hennessy woke up in the middle of the teahouse.
“Liliana,” said Carmen Farooq-Lane.
“I know,” replied Liliana.
They both looked at the little silver orb cupped in Hennessy’s paralyzed hands. They had not seen it appear. Instead, their minds bent and folded on themselves. One part of their brains tried to tell them the orb had always been there. The other part remembered that it had not.
The rule of dreamt objects is this: If it worked in the dream, it worked in real life.
Hennessy’s orb worked in the dream.
It worked in real life.
The effects upon the unseasonably nice afternoon were immediate.
Dreamt birds dropped out of the sky here and there, pinging off windshields and onto the sidewalk before coming to a rest, sleeping. Dreamt dogs suddenly slept at dog parks, much to their owners’ surprise. Cars veered off the road and into each other, their dreamt drivers suddenly staring into space.
A nanny pushing a pram outside a converted church in downtown Boston found herself pushing a child who could not be woken.
Social media lit up with reports of power outages as wind turbines mysteriously dozed to stillness.
At Logan Airport, a landing aircraft completely missed the runway and careened toward the bay. Air traffic control shouted to an unresponsive pilot before turning its attention to the radio reports of other planes dropping out of the sky across the globe.
In a very stuffy school office, Matthew Lynch put a hand to his burning-hot cheek.
“Are you all right, honey?” asked the school secretary.
“I’m sorry,” he muttered, and then he fell fast asleep.
In Declan Lynch’s apartment, Declan Lynch watched in astonishment as Lock stopped speaking midsentence and fell to his knees, followed by two of the other Moderators. In the shock, he leapt for the gun beneath the table. Ripping it from its place, he pointed it at one of the three remaining Moderators.
“What’s going on here?” Declan demanded.
But the others, too, swayed against each other. They were asleep before he got his answer.
Their sleep was the answer.
In a Connecticut picnic area, Bryde sat up, shaking leaves off his body and memory-cobwebs from his mind. He reached into the pocket of his gray jacket and looked at the sweetmetal he had stolen off Lock weeks and weeks before. It was not very strong, but it was enough. For now.
He looked then to Ronan Lynch, who still slept, leaves across his face.
“Wake up,” he said, but Ronan did not.
On the sidewalk in front of Declan’s apartment, Jordan stood with her head tilted back, listening to sirens wailing. In front of her, a bird plummeted thoughtlessly to the sidewalk with a surprisingly quiet flomp. She crouched beside it. It was a beautiful little thing, jeweled and impossible. She touched its chest softly. It was not dead. It was fast asleep.
Her heart was beating very, very fast.
She could feel the ley line sucking away from her. Away from everything. It was like feeling the air leaving a room. It was like that day all those weeks ago when Hennessy had dreamt an entire ocean into the room and she’d suddenly found herself inhabiting a world that wasn’t meant to support her. One couldn’t argue with an ocean. Either you had an oxygen tank or you didn’t.
At the end of the sidewalk, the door to the apartment building burst open. Declan stood in it, his jacket half-pulled on, his keys dangling in his hand. She didn’t need to be told that he had been coming to look for her. She could see it in his body language, in his face.
“Jordan,” he said. “You’re—”
She could see another bird falling from the sky, a larger one, at the end of the street. It set off the car alarm when it hit the windshield.
With wonder, she said to Declan, “I’m awake.”
She was very, very awake.
It really was a nice day.
END OF BOOK TWO
David: you accompanied me as I painsta
kingly planned the perfect heist over a series of months and then scrapped it for a completely different one with eighteen fewer steps. This is a metaphor. Thank you for the metaphor.
Sarah: you patiently held the canvas as I threw paint at it, splattering you, the walls, the floor, the ceiling, bystanders. You always just sighed and handed me another tube of paint when I ran out. This is a metaphor. Thank you for the metaphor.
Ed: you’re my sweetmetal, baby. This is a metaphor. Thank you for the metaphor.
MAGGIE STIEFVATER is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the novels Shiver, Linger, Forever, and Sinner. Her novel The Scorpio Races was named a Michael L. Printz Honor Book by the American Library Association. The first book in The Raven Cycle, The Raven Boys, was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year and the second book, The Dream Thieves, was an ALA Best Book for Young Adults. The third book, Blue Lily, Lily Blue, received five starred reviews. The final book, The Raven King, received four. She is also the author of All the Crooked Saints and Call Down the Hawk. An artist and a musician, she lives in Virginia with her husband and their two children. You can visit her online at maggiestiefvater.com.
Also by Maggie Stiefvater
The Dreamer Trilogy
Call Down the Hawk
The Raven Cycle
The Raven Boys
The Dream Thieves
Blue Lily, Lily Blue
The Raven King
The Wolves of Mercy Falls
Shiver
Linger
Forever
Sinner
All the Crooked Saints
The Scorpio Races
Copyright © 2021 by Maggie Stiefvater
All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Press, an imprint of Scholastic Inc., Publishers since 1920. SCHOLASTIC, SCHOLASTIC PRESS, and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
First edition, May 2021
Cover art © 2021 by Matt Griffin
Cover design by Christopher Stengel
e-ISBN 978-1-338-18838-7
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.
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