Mister Impossible (Dreamer Trilogy #2)(26)

“A phone,” said Bryde again.

“You sound like a parrot. Yes, a phone, I got a phone.”

“Why?”

Now Ronan was beginning to feel foolish, as if he’d missed a lesson. “To call my family?”

“Do you think it’s wise to be looking in the rearview mirror?” Bryde asked.

There was something both uncomfortable and fatherly about this. Bryde treating them like children; Bryde knowing this dimly lit path they were on.

“Okay, Satan,” said Ronan, and Hennessy laughed hollowly from the dismal plaid couch.

“Get up,” Bryde said. “Wash off your face. We’re going on a walk.”

“Idea! You two go on a walk. I stay here and hate myself,” Hennessy said.

“Put on a coat,” Bryde replied. “It’s snowing.”

His dreamers grumbled and did as he said.

The cabin they emerged from was notched into the side of a mountain and looked even more remote and murdery than it had from the inside. There was nothing around it but trees and more trees. The driveway through the woods was barely more civilized than the rest of the forest floor.

To Ronan’s amazement, it was snowing. Lightly, without urgency, but enough to lend the night a peculiar brightness. In front of the cabin, the car was dusted with snow, which made it no more visible than before. It was emotionally hard to see, not literally. Snow and grime didn’t matter.

Ronan pulled his skullcap down over his ears. “Where are we walking to?”

Bryde said, “Up.”

So up they went.

These were foreign trees. Unlike the huge oaks and twisted beeches of Lindenmere, Ronan’s half-remembered fairy-tale trees, these were evergreens. Fat spruces with chunky bark and branchless trunks stretching into a snow-fogged sky kingdom. Still fairy-tale trees, but not from a tale Ronan had ever heard. Chainsaw flew above them, her wings strangely audible in the hush as they flapped.

“Are we there yet?” Hennessy asked.

“Up,” Bryde replied.

Up, up. Ronan’s calves strained as they headed up the steepening mountain. Here, the snow was thicker, the trees even bigger. The landscape seemed just as dreamy as the desert he’d just left. And as real.

Hennessy, he thought, are we still dreaming?

She didn’t turn her head. So he was awake, or at least he was in his dream alone, with a copy of Hennessy, a copy of Bryde. Reality was harder to define now.

“Do you know where we are?” Bryde asked them. They had reached their destination: a great, vast stump that must have once been a great, vast tree, larger than any of the others still standing. It was dusted with snow like everything else, which somehow made it seem more alive, not less. Ronan was put in mind of the way the snow dusted the backs of his father’s eternally sleeping cattle back at the Barns.

“Still Westva,” Hennessy replied. “Yeah?”

“West by God Virginia,” added Ronan, mimicking his old friend Gansey’s Southern accent before remembering none of these new acquaintances had ever met him. Here in the future, they didn’t know about his past. Maybe that was Adam’s attraction to it.

He felt that prickle of the Lace again.

Bryde said, “Yes. Quite nearly in the middle of the National Radio Quiet Zone. Over ten thousand square miles without radio, Wi-Fi, cell phone signal, or microwave ovens. Home of the largest steerable radio telescope in the world and several defunct alien research programs. One of the quietest night skies east of the Mississippi. Can you feel it?”

Of course not. Not now that he was awake. The ley power always seemed so clear to dreaming Ronan. Waking Ronan, however, couldn’t sense it even a little. In fact, it often felt like waking Ronan loved the things that seemed to actively interfere with it the most. Electricity, engines, motors, gasoline, adrenaline. And then dreaming Ronan—nightwashing Ronan—needed a world free of them. Perhaps this was why it was hard to see a future for himself. Bryde said there weren’t two of him. Bryde didn’t know.

“Can I feel it, or do I like it?” Hennessy asked. “Because those are different answers.”

Bryde gazed up at the massive spruces around them. A crawling white mist ghosted up from the light snowfall now, and the tree trunks were marked with little upside-down Vs of white where the precipitation had stuck to the rugged bark. “What do you hear?”

“Nothing,” said Ronan.

Nothing. Nothing.

There was no sound of distant trucks, no hum of generators, no slam of distant doors. There was just the soft, white silence around these huge trees. Mountain soil was so poor and yet they’d managed to become massive. Ronan wondered how long it had taken them to perform this feat.

Perhaps they grew better in the absence of noise.

As if reading his thoughts, Bryde said, “They’re all so young. Second growth. Beginning of the twentieth century, this was all twigs, because of logging. Looked like a war zone. Was, even. The army used to fire mortars here. Imagine this place razed and stubbled and smoking, the sounds of gunfire.”

Ronan couldn’t.

“Yes,” Bryde said. “Amazing what you can change in a century, if you have a purpose. Humankind razed this place, but humankind also built it back up again. Planted trees. Put up fences to keep the cattle out. Dragged the rivers into shape where trauma erased them. Replaced all the living things that grew along them to hold them in place. Deep down, there are always some that miss it. Do you really feel nothing at all, Ronan?”