Call Down the Hawk (Dreamer, #1)(104)

“Okay,” Ronan said. “Hennessy, are you ready?”

Hennessy blinked up. She was overwhelmed in a way she had no language for. “For what?”

He said, “To dream.”





66

Ramsay was in town.

Farooq-Lane had just been up all night, had just dragged one dead body into a rental car and added another living one, and now, Ramsay was in town. Ramsay of all people.

Farooq-Lane’s feelings on J. J. Ramsay were uncomplicated: She hated him. She thought he sounded like an overgrown frat boy. All the people who worked with Lock had their complicated reasons, but it was hard to imagine Ramsay having a complicated anything. Farooq-Lane had been disconcerted to learn that he had a really high-powered job. When he was not packing up a drone next to a dead body, he apparently consulted for corporations that had gotten themselves into trouble with other countries’ governments. According to LinkedIn, he could sound like a frat boy in the five different languages most commonly used in the global business market. Farooq-Lane could also speak in the five different languages most commonly used in the global business market, but she suspected the two of them sounded very different when they did.

“Heyyy, I don’t make the rules,” Ramsay said, sounding Ramsayish over the rental car’s speakers. Even Liliana, the new Visionary, frowned a little in the passenger seat. Douchebag was a universal language. Farooq-Lane hoped she wasn’t going to regret picking up this phone over the Bluetooth. “Lock does.”

He’d just told Farooq-Lane that he’d landed and that she needed to meet him, Lock’s orders. Now? Farooq-Lane had asked, her fingers tight enough on the steering wheel that they felt wrapped around it a few times. I have a new Visionary. She hadn’t added: And I haven’t slept all night, and I watched someone die, and I have already been across the greater DC area on a treasure hunt for someone who might explode into another age and kill me at any time.

But she was thinking it.

“No time like the present,” Ramsay said. “Lock ’n’ load. And I hear you got a body to put in the back forty, so you need me anyway.”

He hung up.

After he did, as they cruised southward toward Springfield, Farooq-Lane took just a few seconds to attempt a reconstruction of the Carmen Farooq-Lane who had originally joined the Moderators. That young woman had been a sea of calm. She had been the picturesque statue in the airport as chaos seethed around her. She had been the member of the meeting who sat elegantly on the other side of the table, listening to heightened voices and watching wringing hands, and then quietly broke in with a cool-headed solution. When she was a child, she’d once seen a feather drift down and touch lightly on the surface of a pond. The feather had not sunk, nor even really broken the surface tension. Instead, it had landed light as a butterfly, trembling just enough to look alive, and slowly turned end over end in the breeze. She’d recalled that image again and again and again in her teens. Farooq-Lane was that feather.

She was that feather.

She was. That. Feather.

Then she tried to explain to the ethereal old Visionary in the passenger seat. “We’re a task force. He’s part of the task force. We …”

“I remember a little,” Liliana said.

She was the opposite of Parsifal in many ways, and not just because she was very elderly, though she was. Once she’d been pulled free of the chest freezer, Farooq-Lane had seen that the Visionary was even older than she’d originally thought. She was agelessly old. Her long hair, now gathered back into two long braids, tricked one into thinking she was younger, but the depth of the wrinkles around her eyes and mouth spoke to many years behind her. She had a far-eyed look about her, as if she was seeing beyond the traffic and buildings to something more important. Farooq-Lane had immediately gotten her some chicken and rice and tea, and, in a low voice, Liliana had thanked the meat for feeding her before quietly and neatly eating the entire thing without comment. So unlike Parsifal.

I am that feather, Farooq-Lane told herself.

“You remember what?” Farooq-Lane asked. “A … vision?”

“No, just a memory,” Liliana said. “It’s been a very long time, though, so I don’t remember it well. You are hunting dreamers?”

“Zeds. Yes.”

“Right,” Liliana said. “Yes, and you are Marchers. No. Moderators. Yes? See, it comes back to me. You are trying to stop that fire.”

It still gave Farooq-Lane a jolt of adrenaline to hear it confirmed. Yes, the fire. The fire that would eat the world. She risked a glance over at her as she drove. “How does this work? What age are you really right now?”

Liliana rested her head back, stroking the ends of one braid absently. “At this age, I know that’s not a useful question for someone like me. I do so like being this age, it’s very peaceful.” She sensed that Farooq-Lane wasn’t satisfied, so she added, “I think I must spend more of this year as one of the younger ages, because my memories are very distant now. I remember the moment we met well. I knew you were coming.”

She set her hand on top of Farooq-Lane’s with such fondness, fingers slid familiarly through Farooq-Lane’s, that Farooq-Lane flinched.

“I forgot,” Liliana said, going back to fussing with her braids instead. “You’re still very young. I’m grateful you rescued me.”