Mister Impossible (Dreamer Trilogy #2)(9)

Hennessy stood before a canvas as tall as herself. In her hand was a brush, which was also a knife. She could picture the feeling of the blade piercing the canvas, the way the weave would shrink back from the wound. How splendidly and dramatically it would ruin the perfect flat expanse of the canvas.

“Let’s have Hennessy the artist,” Bryde said sharply. “The Hennessy who creates instead of destroys. What would she do if she could do anything?”

“Jordan’s the one you’re talking about,” Hennessy said. “She’s the artist; I’m the forger.”

“There are not two of you.”

“You need glasses, mate,” Hennessy said.

“You were an artist before you made Jordan.”

But Hennessy couldn’t remember that far back. Not in a meaningful way.

“Fine,” Bryde said, annoyed. “Show me what she would do right now. I assume she listens better.”

How would Jordan use this dreamspace? What if Hennessy were the dream and Jordan were the one with all this incredible power instead?

Art, Jordan had told Hennessy once, is bigger than reality.

The knife disappeared; Hennessy was already painting. Beneath the brush’s soft bristles was a rich stripe of gorgeous purple, a purple no human had ever seen before.

Jordan would love it. Tyrian purple looked dowdy beside this color.

Why hadn’t Jordan tried harder to come with Hennessy on this latest adventure?

You know why, the dream snarled.

Jordan had taken off with Declan Lynch after mounting only the lamest of protests. She’d been waiting for an excuse to leave Hennessy for so long, and here it was.

Outside, the storm grew closer, the edges of the clouds geometric and dark.

“Stay on task,” Bryde ordered.

The purple paint on the canvas bled into the shape of lush purple lips. Hennessy’s lips. No. Jordan’s. Nearly the same, but different in important ways. Jordan’s lips smiled. Hennessy’s forged smiles from looking at other people’s mouths.

Carefully, Hennessy added a shadow, giving the lips dimension; the inky black was darker and truer than any black paint could be in waking life.

Bryde stood so fast he knocked the chair over. “Yes. Yes, that. This is what dreaming is for. Do not make a vegan copy of a burger. Eat a goddamn vegetable and love it.”

Had Declan kissed Jordan? Probably. Hennessy dipped her thumb in the pale feather pink on the palette, and then she swiped the pigment across the bottom lip. The highlight instantly rendered the mouth wet and full and anticipatory. It was more than real. It was super real. It wasn’t just what lips looked like. It was what they felt like. It was image and memory and sensation all together in the way dreams could be.

“Stop,” Bryde said. “That’s what you’re bringing back. Experience it. Don’t let it change. Ask the ley line to help you. It can—”

He broke off, and his expression went far away.

Hennessy suddenly thought, out of nowhere, wheels.

Wheels?

Bryde shouted, “Ronan Lynch! Stop that!”

She just had time to feel something a little like all the air going out of the room, which was funny, because she hadn’t been thinking about breathing in the dream.

Then everything disappeared.





Hennessy awoke with a start.

She was moving.

She was not just moving, she was moving fast.

It was like a movie. She saw herself from above, looking down, God gazing down on his creation. A slender Black girl with a fro full of debris tumbled ass over tits over ass again down hundreds of neatly stacked hay bales in an old barn. Her rag doll body was bizarrely caged in something that looked like an enormous wooden hamster wheel.

It was rare that the waking world made less sense than the dreaming one. But the bigger picture didn’t become clear until she careened all the way to the barn floor, breath busting from her paralyzed body.

The bigger picture was this: Wheels! Wheels! Wheels!

The thing she’d thought looked like a hamster wheel around her was a tangle of actual wheels. It was just one of many that filled the barn. There were muscular tractor wheels, fragile bicycle wheels, little toy wheels. Man-sized wooden carriage wheels. Child-sized plastic steering wheels. Spokes dangled from rafters. Rims wedged between hay bales. They ramped over mannequins and up against the doors. Every wheel had a single word printed or burned into it: tamquam. It looked like an art installation. A prank. Insanity.

It was breaking Hennessy’s brain.

One part of her mind whispered, This is how it’s always been. The wheels were always here. The other part, however, knew better. This was how it always worked when she saw other dreamers’ dreams manifest. They didn’t just magically appear. Instead, the dream magic edited her memory. Not completely. Just enough to create two realities. One where the dreams had always been there, and one where they hadn’t.

Brain-breaking.

“Ronan.” Bryde’s voice sounded irritated.

A delicate light hissed into existence, revealing Bryde halfway up the towering stack of old hay bales. The dreamers’ exploration of the living history museum had turned up three decent possibilities for dreaming locations: a small diorama re-creating the close sleeping quarters of a submarine, a single four-poster bed in a re-creation of some historical figure’s bedroom, and this, a large re-creation of an old hay barn, so realistic that it seemed likely it had probably already existed on the property pre-museum.