Mister Impossible (Dreamer Trilogy #2)(45)
“What do you feel?” Bryde asked.
Free. Trapped. Alive. Guilty. Powerful. Powerless. Ronan felt everything but the ley line.
Hennessy sighed.
Bryde said, “Saving the ley lines is about seeing the pattern. It’s hard to see the pattern when you’re in it, but humans do the same things again and again; they are not that complicated. In a pair, they are individuals. Unique. Unlike. If you have half a dozen, two or three will remind you of each other. By the time you have one hundred, two hundred, you see types repeated again and again. Place two types together; they react a certain way. Place them with a different type; they react a different but equally predictable way. Humans form into groups along the same lines again and again; they fracture into smaller groups along other predictable lines again and again. One hundred and fifty, Dunbar’s number. That is how many connections humans can support before things begin to fall apart and remake. Again, again. Humans dance as elegantly as clockwork stars move across the sky, but they do not see it because they are the stars.”
They were very far up. Thousands of meters, feet dangling, pressed together on the dreamt hoverboard, cheeks burning with cold, lungs burning with the thinness of the air. The wind moved them this way and that; they were only in danger of falling if they completely resisted the flow. They were not in a dream but it felt like a dream, and for the first time, Ronan felt a little like he understood how Bryde could say there were not two of him.
Bryde continued. “The nonhuman world has patterns, too. Look at the veins of a leaf, your hand, a tree, gold through rock, a river headed to sea, lightning. And again, again, not just in the visible, but also the invisible. In airflow, particles, sound waves, ley lines, too, veining across this poor, battered home of ours. Again, again, again. Everything predicts everything else. Everything affects everything else.”
Ronan felt Hennessy shiver. He leaned his skull against her skull, and without pause or snark, she leaned back.
“It doesn’t take much to disrupt the pattern. Look at that river there. Over the years, silt has built up along its banks, which slows it. And as it slows, it becomes less able to move the silt, so it slows further, so there is even more silt, and so it slows even more. As it slows, the river twists harder away from the obstacle, looking for the path of least resistance. Twist, slow, twist, slow, until the curves are so tight that it becomes just a bent lake here and then a small pond there and then finally the water’s driven below ground. This, too, is what happens to the ley lines.”
Ronan could almost imagine it. The glowing energy of the ley line glistening across the landscape below, pulsing beneath the mountains, seeping into the rivers. Everything had felt obvious and connected in his last dream, when he was curled inside Ilidorin, and some of that connectivity lingered.
“Slowly the ley lines get shut down one by one by electricity and roads and trash and noise and noise and noise and noise.” Bryde sucked in a deep breath. “Which is why we dreamers are forced to go from vein to vein as they collapse behind us.”
“So a dreamer’s just a parasite,” Hennessy said. “We’re nothing without them.”
“Is your brain a parasite?” Bryde asked.
“Yes,” she said immediately.
“Your lungs, your kidneys, your hands? Your heart pumps blood through your entire body. Take away the blood and things begin to fail. Does that make the brain lesser than the blood? The left hand a servant to the veins that power it? We need the ley line. The ley line needs us. The world needs us. Eventually, if we all die—and we are dying, some more quickly than others—so the rest will go. Our passing, a symptom of a bigger disease.”
“And if we fix the ley lines?” Ronan asked. “The disease goes away?”
Bryde didn’t answer right away. He let the wind buffet him; that was the way to keep from being knocked off the board. To bend, not break. Then he said, “A healthy body can withstand illness. Can live alongside it. A world full of ley energy doesn’t support dreamers and dreams only along the lines any more than a healthy body is only vital directly along the veins. It is vital from head to toe. Brain and lungs, kidney and hands. Fix the ley lines, and dreamers and dreams simply exist wherever they like.”
A world where Matthew could just live.
A world where Ronan could just dream.
A world where every dream was clear and crisp and easy to navigate, so there were never accidents or nightmares.
He wanted it.
It had been so long since he’d wanted something to happen, instead of wanting something to not happen. He’d forgotten what it felt like. It was equal parts great and terrible. It burned.
“Restoring the ley lines is a game of dominos,” Bryde said. “If we addressed each domino separately, we would never be done. Dominos would be set back up as soon as we turned our backs. And we’d be stopped before we were anywhere close to done. But instead we focus only on the dominos that will knock over many others.”
“Cool metaphor,” Ronan said. “What are the dominos?”
“You already know,” Bryde said dismissively. “All the obstacles blocking ley energy. Human noise.”
“And what is ‘knocking them over’?” Hennessy said. “Please tell me it’s blowing shit up.”
“Sometimes,” Bryde admitted. “Often.”
Hennessy made a contented noise.