Mister Impossible (Dreamer Trilogy #2)(19)

But Hennessy pressed on. “Must’ve required a lot of practice. Wonder who you were practicing them on. ’Course, you could’ve been practicing them on us. But we wouldn’t remember, would we?”

He ignored this, too. “Do what you have to do, Ronan.”

Ronan was the one who’d asked them to stop for food, even though he knew it wasn’t really allowed under the unspoken rules of their outlaw lifestyle. Food came from the cabinets and fridges of empty houses, places without cameras, places without people. Crackers and canned goods, deli meat and apples. But his hunger had been growing in the car and now his body was howling that it couldn’t last much longer.

“To the fryer!” cried Hennessy as she vaulted over the counter.

Ronan, however, went straight to the customer who stood motionless at the pickup counter. Not perfectly motionless, not like a statue. But rather like someone who had been walking through a store and just remembered she had forgotten something important back at home.

She didn’t blink or flinch as Ronan took a grease-spotted bag from one of her hands. He dumped the contents on the counter, unwrapped them, and ate them, one after another. A burger. Some fries. An apple pie.

He was still starving.

He took the milkshake from her other hand and drank it, too. Strawberry. Brain freeze. He finished it anyway, slamming the cup down on the counter as if it were a completed shot.

Still starving.

A guy at a nearby table had just started to unwrap his cheeseburger; Ronan completed the task for him as the guy blinked off into space. Down the hatch. Then the large fries next to it. Then his date’s chicken burger, even though it was disgusting. The pickle she’d abandoned beside it.

Still starving.

Hennessy’s voice rose from the kitchen area. “If you’d told me before all this that the best food in the world was stolen French fries, I would have laughed in your face. Which only goes to show you, one doesn’t know what one doesn’t know.”

At the next booth, Ronan ate a melting soft serve. Another burger. A salad with an orange, slimy dressing, and raw onions. A paper plate of hash browns.

Still starving.

He hurled the paper plate to the ground. Next table.

Bryde watched him, expressionless.

Hennessy’s monologue was getting closer. “I’m rededicating my life to these French fries. Before this time, I was a sinner, finding pleasure in wine, women, song, and, sometimes, cocaine and grand theft auto, living moment to moment, not thinking about the consequences of my actions on my own body or others, but now I have seen the light and I will instead worship at the altar of stolen fries. I will paint murals in their honor. I will rename myself Tuber.”

Ronan ate chicken nuggets, a hot dog, another milkshake, a barbecue sandwich, a corn dog, and some fried okra.

“Can we stop pretending it is food you’re wanting now?” Bryde asked mildly.

Ronan sank into a booth. The food sat inside him, heavy and pointless.

Starving.

Bryde stood at the end of the booth. “What do you feel?”

“Come on.”

“You might not be able to feel the ley line, but you can feel what happens to you when you don’t have it, Greywaren. Still, you pretend what you really need right now is a cheeseburger. Look around you. Look at yourself. We’re fleeing because of your wheels, and this is where you come. There aren’t two of you. Greywaren, do you even know what it means?”

Ronan realized this was the teachable moment. This was the reason Bryde had used one of his precious orbs to hit up a fast-food joint. Ronan didn’t know what Greywaren meant, but he knew it was important. His first dreamt forest, Cabeswater, had called him that. His current forest, Lindenmere, called him that. His dead father had somehow known to call him that. And Bryde knew this name for him.

He didn’t know what he was supposed to be learning, so he gazed off at nothing, sullen.

Bryde tapped Ronan’s jaw with a single finger. “Protector and guardian—that is what you are supposed to be. King and shepherd both. But look at you, sick in your avoidant gluttony. There are not two of you. Your waking self cannot ignore what your dreaming self needs, because they are the same. Now you tell me. What is it you’re really feeling?”

He pointed at Ronan’s ear.

Very slowly, Ronan reached up to his ear and pressed a finger into it. When he withdrew it, his fingertip was slicked with a dark ooze.

Nightwash.

He was not starving for food. He was starving for the ley line. He was starving for dreaming.

“Why is it always me?” he asked.

Bryde said, “I just told you.”

The nightwash came to Ronan far more often than it came to Hennessy. It came when he waited too long between taking something from his dreams, as if to punish him for not doing what he had been built to do. But it also came to him when he was too far from the ley line, as if to punish him for trying to live a life that was built for someone else. Once the ooze started, he had less and less time before he began to feel ill, and presumably, less and less time before it eventually would kill him.

“I’m getting worse,” he muttered.

“Yes,” Bryde said.

“Why even bother with me, then?”

“Because it is not just you. This mountain city used to be alive with ley energy. Did you see the river we drove beside for dozens of miles, the river this city straddles? It should be flowing with energy. This should be a mountain town of dreamers. But it fades, like the entire world fades. It breathes more and more slowly, and no one is listening to mark the end of its pulse. Few, I suppose. Few are listening.”