Mister Impossible (Dreamer Trilogy #2)(18)

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.”