Mister Impossible (Dreamer Trilogy #2)(63)

Declan wasn’t sure he liked the sound of the last bit. Power surges sounded clinical and manageable. Heartbeats sounded living, and living things were unpredictable and hard to control.

“And then something really happened last night,” Adam said. “Look here.”

They faced a more modern building labeled SCIENCE CENTER. Casting a furtive glance up and down the street, Adam crouched beside a concrete bench built into the wall. Reaching beneath it, he scraped out a large handful of debris.

Then he showed it to Declan.

To Declan’s surprise, it was not leaf litter, but beetles. Some were small, ordinary-looking insects, black and unremarkable. Others were huge and spotted, with the portentous grace of elephants. Some had massive forked antlers. Others were brilliantly blue, with galaxies of stars glittering through the color.

Declan did not have to be told they were not native to Cambridge.

“These are the Rockefeller beetles. Some of them. Do you know what those are? There’s one hundred thousand of them on display in the Museum of Natural History just over there.” Adam plucked one from his handful and showed it to Declan. The bullet-shaped beetle was ferociously green. It also had a perfect little hole straight through it when he held it up to the sun. “That’s where the pin would go, to hold it to the mount.”

“Dreams,” Declan said.

Adam nodded grimly.

“Whatever happened, this pulse, it was strong enough to wake up these dreams. Long enough for them to find a way out of their cases in the museum to get over here. Not long enough to keep them awake.”

“How did you find out about this?”

Adam carefully swept the beetles back under the bench. “I was doing readings and I got lost in one of the cards when it surged. After I got myself back, I came out looking for where it was coming from, just in time to see them crawling across the road here.”

Lost himself. Got himself back. There were entire emotional tomes in between those words.

“All right,” Declan said. “So the city woke up. For a while.” He hadn’t told Adam about the sweetmetals, and Paranoid Declan was loath to give away more information, but he asked, carefully, “Why do you think it has anything to do with Ronan? Could it be from a power source an outsider’s bringing in?”

Adam frowned at him, and Declan was nearly certain he knew Declan was withholding information. Adam, as a secretive creature, understood secrets. But Adam just asked, “How much do you know about what Ronan’s been doing?”

Declan shook his head. He knew only that Ronan, Hennessy, and Bryde were interfering with the Moderators’ attempt to kill other dreamers. That had seemed noble. Useful. An acceptable outlet for Ronan’s abilities and rebelliousness. Perhaps he had just wanted it to be. He’d wanted fewer ducklings for once.

Adam said, “There’s no concrete evidence, but Ronan and the others have been implicated in over twenty incidents of industrial espionage.”

Surprise was not the emotion Declan was feeling, so some part of him must have known. Suspected, anyway. This was the other shoe dropping.

“What kind of industrial espionage?”

“I got access to some of the agencies’ documents,” Adam said casually. This, Declan thought, was why those kids in the waffle line couldn’t truly be Adam’s bosom friends. Adam was reading intelligence documents about his boyfriend and they were googling celebrity chefs. “They’ve been taking down power grids. Server farms. Corporate waste sites. That power outage a few weeks ago, the one that affected those tens of thousands in Delmarva? That was them. Transmission line. The price tag is in the billions.”

“Billions,” echoed Declan. It was a lot to take in. “What’s the goal?”

“The Moderators don’t know, or at least they haven’t put it in writing. I think I can guess, though. Overnight, I compared the dates and times of the espionage with the surges, and they match up. They match up exactly. I think Ronan and the others have been working to clear obstacles from the ley lines to make them stronger. Every time they do, that creates a chain reaction that means this line under Boston and Cambridge, this line that was dormant—it surges, too. Has Matthew been having fewer of those strange episodes lately?”

Declan didn’t know. He hadn’t asked. Matthew hadn’t said. Theoretically Declan had been thinking nonstop about a sweetmetal to secure his future, but actually, this was what Declan had been thinking nonstop about: Jordan Hennessy.

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Adam said. “He should be feeling great every time one of these surges happen.”

Declan didn’t see the problem with that, and he said so.

Adam pointed to the beetles. “You don’t see a problem with that?”

“I see something that means eventually Matthew could stay awake on his own, am I right?”

Adam’s voice was patient, as if Declan were a child. “Multiply that times thousands. Imagine a world where all the things the Ronan Lynches of the planet have dreamt over the years begin to wake up. Over the decades. Centuries. Think about legends that could be talking about dreams. Think about all the monsters. Dragons. Minotaurs. How many of those things are just stories and how many of those things were dreams that are sleeping now because the dreamers died long ago? Right now, Ronan’s limited by how strong the ley line is. How many Ronans are there? What would they do without any limits? Stop thinking about Matthew for a second and think.”