Call Down the Hawk (Dreamer, #1)(105)

It was too outside of Farooq-Lane’s understanding of time to make easy sense. For a few miles, she navigated traffic and thought about it, and then she said, “So you know the future right now.”

“I suppose that is a way of looking at it. I remember my past, which includes some of your future. I think I am very old right now, though, so these are decades-old memories.”

“If they’re decades old,” Farooq-Lane said, “that must mean that we did it. That we stopped the end of the world. Isn’t that how it works? If you’re looking back at this from someone who becomes decades older than this memory? It means you are still alive after all this.”

Liliana frowned, and for the first time, something like distress flitted across her face. “I think I am harder to kill than humans.”

That completely silenced the car. Before Parsifal, Farooq-Lane wouldn’t have been shocked to hear this said out loud. She would have completely cosigned the concept of Visionaries as something human-shaped but not human. Their abilities, after all, defied all understanding of life as everyone else understood it; human seemed like an unuseful classification for them, just as it was dubiously useful for the Zeds. But then she’d spent time with Parsifal, aggravating, dead Parsifal, and he just seemed like a kid born under an unlucky star. She’d sort of begun to decide that the Moderators doubted the Visionaries’ humanity in order to feel less bad about their deaths.

But Liliana’s words reversed all that.

Liliana said in a soft voice, “It still troubles me how fragile you are.”

“Badda boom, badda bing,” J. J. Ramsay remarked, zipping the top of the drone’s case, speaking loudly to be heard over the booming music, thundering tribal beats. “This puppy does it all.”

Farooq-Lane should have recognized the address, but she supposed she had come to it by a very different way the last time she was here. Ramsay and Farooq-Lane stood just inside a familiar split-level house in Springfield, surrounded by colorful teapots and rugs.

The old Zed’s house.

“You didn’t wait for the others,” Farooq-Lane told Ramsay.

Between them was the body of the old Zed who had given Parsifal three pieces of biscotti he’d actually liked. Ramsay had shot her before Farooq-Lane arrived. The body was laid out in a very undramatic way, on its stomach, arms by its side, head turned, as if the woman had decided to sleep in the middle of the floor. The only sign that she might not have opted voluntarily for this was that one of her ballet flats had come off and was parallel parked beside her foot instead. That, and she was missing the back of her head.

“Wait for the others?” he said. “You are the others.”

Farooq-Lane crossed the carpet to turn down the speakers on the cheap boom box. It, too, had been painted, as if this Zed couldn’t help but splash color on everything she saw. “And it was already done when I got here. Why did you even call me?”

Ramsay didn’t hear the irritation in her voice. He was not particularly tuned to the subtleties of life. “Confirmation so that Lock doesn’t get on my back.”

“You didn’t even confirm she was a Zed before you did this?” demanded Farooq-Lane.

This he heard. Hooking his thumbs in the belt loops of his khakis, he swiveled to her, pelvis first. “Gimme some credit, Carmen—”

“Ms. Farooq-Lane.”

He grinned at her. “Some credit, Carmen. My drone friend and I caught her dreaming before I busted in. But I need you to do your little cataloguing job with everything else here. Lock said you found another Visionary? ’Bout damn time. Where’s he at?”

“She’s waiting in the car.”

“Not a flight risk?”

“She’s invested in our mission,” Farooq-Lane said, even though she hadn’t even begun to try to recruit Liliana. “Saving the world.” She said this to remind him their mission was not having a good time shooting people.

“Saving the w-w-w-wonderful world!” trilled Ramsay, to a tune she was probably supposed to know. “Carmen, you’re a gas.”

The most infuriating thing about Ramsay was that he knew she hated the way he talked to her and didn’t bother to alter it. It felt as if there should be consequences for being a boring, grown frat boy who enjoyed making people uncomfortable, and yet there did not seem to be. For a moment they stared at each other over the limp body, and then she told herself, Just do your job so you can figure out someplace safe to house Liliana.

Silently she catalogued all the dream objects in the Zed’s home. They were similar to the crafts in the living room and the colorful thing she’d seen through the kitchen door. Brilliantly colored, confusing, fluid. There were not many. They were placed on the back of the toilet, on the windowsill by the cactus, the bedside table, the way you’d put pottery you’d done in college that you were proud of.

Parsifal had been right. This Zed was never going to be the kind of dreamer who dreamt the end of the world into being.

I am that feather, Farooq-Lane thought.

When she returned to the living area, Ramsay was sitting backward on a chair right next to the body, talking to Liliana, who stood in the doorway, her eyes gentle and regretful. He held up a finger as if Farooq-Lane had been about to interrupt him and finished his thought. “All these fuckers know each other, that’s what we’re learning, so it’s best to hit them fast and close together, or they’ll warn each other.”