Mister Impossible (Dreamer Trilogy #2)(12)

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.