Mister Impossible (Dreamer Trilogy #2)(2)

Liliana had not yet learned.

Or it was possible she didn’t want to.

“All right, folks,” Lock said over the radio as they closed in. “Focus. We’ve done this before. No mistakes this time.”

Westerly Reed Hager. Farooq-Lane had seen the Zed’s photo, had read her file. It was all fives and tens. Fifty-five years old. Five foot ten. Ten addresses on file for the last five years. Five sisters, ten brothers, most of them off the record, off the grid, off the planet. An expanded view of a hippie pedigree. She lived in an Airstream trailer she’d owned for five years, pulled by a dark blue Chevy pickup truck she’d owned for ten. She had ten misdemeanors to her name, five for bad checks, five for criminal mischief.

Farooq-Lane didn’t think Westerly Reed Hager was likely to end the world.

“Carmen,” said Liliana. She sat in the passenger seat of the bullet-ridden rental car, currently an old woman. Everything about her was held with an easy control, her knobby old hands folded neatly as book pages in her lap. “I would hang back.”

The rental car’s radio switched on by itself. It began to play opera. This was a thing it did now, just like killing Zeds was a thing Farooq-Lane did now. If Farooq-Lane thought about it, the apocalypse had already happened, just inside her.

Farooq-Lane looked at Liliana. Then she looked at the empty road ahead.

She hung back.

The plan began to break.

One moment, the Moderators were alone in the nice day, the empty fields. And then it wasn’t just them. Somehow there was another car on the road ahead of them. It didn’t just pop into being, it just seemed to have always been there, and they’d not noticed it until then.

Bellos whispered, to no one in particular, “I’m already forgetting I’m seeing it.”

He was looking right at the strange car, but he wasn’t seeing it. He was looking, not seeing, looking, not seeing. He kept telling himself there’s a car, there’s a car, there’s a car, and nearly forgetting the truth of it every time. His mind was breaking.

The car slowed so the furniture truck was right on its ass.

A person appeared. A young woman. Dark skin, huge white smile. She was standing up through the strange car’s sunroof.

It was one of the three Zeds who’d gotten away on the banks of the Potomac. Jordan Hennessy.

“Oh, shit!” Bellos swiped for the radio before he realized that the arm he’d swiped with wasn’t there anymore.

Ramsay grabbed the radio instead, smashed the button on the side. “There’s a Zed. It’s—”

Hennessy gave them the finger before throwing something at their windshield.

The two men in the truck’s cab had just enough time to see that the projectile was a small, silvery orb before it exploded across the windshield. A metallic cloud burst around the truck.

The cloud was getting inside the cab. The radio was talking, Lock was talking. None of it seemed important. All that was important was looking at the cloud, watching the little glimmering motes hovering in the air, feeling each sparkly moment invade their nostrils, coat their sinuses, live in their minds. They were the cloud.

The truck hurtled off the highway, just missing the Airstream trailer. It churned several dozen yards into the dead wheat before coming to a lumpy halt.

“What’s going on?” shouted the radio.

No one answered.

Now the back of the truck was opening. The other Moderators were coming out, guns bristling.

To this point, guns had always won. Well, aside from the last time. And the time before that. And the one before that. And before that. But before that, it had been Moderators 200, Zeds 0, or whatever. The point was that, statistically, the guns would work.

“Stay sharp,” Lock said.

A few yards away, between the truck and the Airstream, a car door opened.

This shocked the emerging Moderators, who, like Bellos and Ramsay, found it difficult to remember seeing the strange car.

A young man stepped out. He had dark, buzzed hair and pale, chilly skin. His eyes were as blue as the sky above, though more suggestive of bad weather.

The young man was taking something from his jacket, a little glass bottle with a dropper top. He was uncapping it.

He was another one of them. Ronan Lynch.

“Oh, shit,” said a Moderator named Nikolenko.

Ronan Lynch squeezed drops of liquid onto the flattened wheat, and every drop released wind, fury, leaves. It was an East Coast winter squall contained in a bottle.

Impossible, dreamt, mind-bending.

It churned Moderators from their feet and sent bullets wide. It pummeled their bodies and thoughts. It was not just weather but also the feel of weather, the dread of it, the damp, pressed-down sloth of a socked-in late-year storm, and they couldn’t rise as it soaked them.

From the open door of the Airstream, Westerly Reed Hager watched Ronan walk among the stunned Moderators, kicking the guns from their hands, his clouds shifting and ebbing around him. The irascible storm from the eyedropper didn’t bother him; he was just another piece of it.

Hennessy also stalked among the not-quite-awake, not-quite-asleep bodies. Kneeling swiftly, she picked up one of the abandoned guns.

Then, just as quick, she put the weapon to its fallen owner’s temple.

The Moderator didn’t react; he was dazzled by dreams. She put it to his cheek instead. Pressed the barrel into his skin hard enough to pull his mouth up in a weird smile. The man’s eyes were misted, confused.