Mister Impossible (Dreamer Trilogy #2)(37)

He didn’t understand.

His head hurt.

Rhiannon had jumped up and instantly produced tissues from somewhere: It was that kind of house, she was that kind of woman. She pressed one to Ronan’s face and rested a comforting hand on his back, a gesture so firmly maternal that Ronan couldn’t tell if he felt ill from the nightwash or from grief.

“Is it a nosebleed?” she asked.

“Nightwash,” Bryde said. “Some call it the Slip. Others the Black Dog. It has many names. It means a dreamer is in a place where there isn’t much ley energy or has waited too long between dreams.”

“I’ve never had this happen to me,” Rhiannon said.

“You haven’t opened the door as many times as he has,” Bryde said. “He broke the hinge the moment he came through it and now it’s come right off.”

“Is it dangerous?” she asked.

“Very. If he doesn’t get to ley energy or dream something into being, the most dangerous,” Bryde said. “So we need you to make a decision.”

“Bryde’s right,” Hennessy said abruptly. She was staring into the mirror still. “You should come with us. There’s only the past here. Fuck the past.”

Rhiannon worked her hands over each other. “I need more time.”

Bryde looked out the window again. There was nothing to see but that gray sky. “I don’t know how much time we have.”





Ten: that was the number of times Farooq-Lane had seen Liliana the Visionary switch ages in pursuit of the perfect trap for the Potomac Zeds.

Before the Potomac Zeds had come along, the Moderators had simply pursued every Zed in every lead a Visionary had shared with them. The details of the vision were researched and located, and then the Zed was tracked and killed. That would no longer work. Lock asked the Moderators for new ideas.

Nobody had one. Nobody but Farooq-Lane.

It had come to her after they’d left the run-down museum, provoked by the image of the tree reaching through the split-open roof. A tree in a very surprising place. Several weeks before, a fortune-teller at the underground Fairy Market had hissed at her: If you want to kill someone and keep it a secret, don’t do it where the trees can see you.

Maybe, she thought, that was how Bryde was getting his intel.

Implementing her idea was rocky at first. Visionaries weren’t jukeboxes. The Moderators couldn’t put a quarter in and request a vision of a Zed located in a treeless place. Visionaries were more like weather systems, and their visions were like tornadoes where the center always contained a Zed and a fiery end of the world.

Scrolling through tornadoes was impossible, but they all traded in impossibilities now.

Liliana drove herself to a vision again and again for Farooq-Lane, trying to skip ahead to a different future, a treeless future.

Nine: the number of injured civilians so far. The visions were so risky. Farooq-Lane worked out quickly that the teen version of Liliana was the most dangerous, because she hadn’t yet developed any sense of when one was coming on. One minute she could be paging through blank journals in a bookstore with Farooq-Lane, and in the next—disaster.

Parsifal, the previous Visionary, hadn’t cycled between ages until the very end of his timeline, when he started to lose control of his ability to turn them inward. Lock had gingerly suggested this method to a crying teen Liliana after a particularly unexpected vision had decimated a handful of nearby squirrels.

“That just sounds like slow-motion suicide,” Liliana had told him.

He hadn’t had an answer for her. The Moderators were always making judgment calls about whose life was worth saving and whose wasn’t, and they hadn’t, to this point, ever come out on the side of the Visionaries.

But Farooq-Lane had.

“It’s not Liliana’s fault she’s dangerous,” Farooq-Lane had said. “She tries to make sure no one else is around. I don’t think we should try to convince her to turn it inward.”

Lock had been dubious. “Now who’s committing slow-motion suicide?”

Eight: the number of yarn shops Farooq-Lane had visited until the oldest Liliana found enough skeins in the color that she said would suit Farooq-Lane. This Liliana had a good sense of when visions were coming on, which meant time with her could be spent less on survival and more on creature comforts. Ancient Liliana was very much about domestic pleasures. Knitting! She was intent on teaching Farooq-Lane, because she remembered teaching her.

This was the strangest part of the oldest Liliana—she remembered a lot of what she’d already lived through, and a lot of that seemed to involve Farooq-Lane. In her past. In Farooq-Lane’s future. Somewhere along their collective timelines. Thinking about it too hard hurt Farooq-Lane’s brain.

“Thank you for standing up for me,” the old Liliana told her once, in her precise, gentle way. “About turning the visions inward.”

“Did you remember me doing that?” Farooq-Lane asked.

“It was a very long time ago. So it was a lovely surprise to be reminded. Well. Not a surprise. A gift. I knew you were a good person.”

Farooq-Lane wished she’d met Liliana before she’d met the Moderators.

Seven: how many meetings the Moderators held to work out the logistics of an attack that would occur without being in the presence of a tree at any stage. A good deal of these get-togethers were devoted to debating if getting information from trees was even possible. Farooq-Lane thought disbelief was a waste of time when their quarry was also impossible.