Mister Impossible (Dreamer Trilogy #2)(90)
Ronan didn’t know if he could stay focused with his thoughts as they were now. He wasn’t thinking about the future. He was thinking about the past.
Bryde said, “I’ll do my best to focus the dream. It will be different after this. Last push.”
They dreamt.
In the dream, they were at the dam. Because it was Bryde’s dream, it was vividly rendered. Ronan could see it, smell it, feel the unseasonably warm breeze on his skin. They were walking. He could feel it as if he were awake. The bite of his boot on the zigzagging walkway the two of them followed. The echo of their steps off the back of the low concrete visitors’ center, which they passed. The tickle of gnats swarming from the overgrown dry brush. The buzz of a stink bug woken by the heat.
Ronan would have been hard pressed to identify how it was any different from waking life.
“What do you feel?” Bryde asked.
“Don’t ask me that while we’re dreaming,” Ronan said. “It fucks me up.”
They had come to a viewing area at the end of the walkway. Wordlessly, they leaned on the railing to look at the vast white dam. The scale of it was difficult to hold. On one side was the glittering blue water of the artificial lake, and on the other, hundreds of feet below, held back by the curved dam, was more glittering water, the choked Roanoke River. All about were mountains. The lake looked odd somehow, the water strange as it climbed the slopes, although Ronan couldn’t understand why.
“They’re drowned,” Bryde said. “These mountains were never meant to have water up to their chins; picture this as a river valley instead. The dam did this. There are towns beneath that lake, if you can imagine. Beautiful, isn’t it? Like a cemetery. How would you destroy it?”
For quite a long time the two of them stood there as Ronan studied the dam and thought of what the smallest, easiest dream would be to destroy it. Before he’d fallen asleep, he’d been imagining something strong enough to bust through the dam itself, but that now seemed unacceptable. This was more water than he had pictured. All of these gallons would have to go somewhere, and who knew how many houses and roads had been built downstream of this now.
He didn’t want to kill anyone.
So it would have to be something gradual. Something with a bit of warning. Not a lot. Just enough to let people get out of the way. Not slow enough for them to stop it. Inexorable, unfixable.
His heart was beating hard in his chest. Just a few days ago he’d been contemplating how he felt about destroying a trash dump, and here he was figuring out how to take down a project that surely had cost billions of dollars and taken years to build. The electricity it generated was used to power all the vacation homes he could see dotting the mountains. Probably. Ronan didn’t know a lot about how electricity worked.
He thought about how wonderful it was to dream in Lindenmere, where the ley line was good, where Lindenmere was focusing him, where everything was as he liked it. He imagined what it would be like to make that even better. He thought about the little Aldana-Leon dreamers. He thought about Rhiannon Martin’s mirrors. He thought about Matthew. He thought about himself, what it would be like to live without fearing he would manifest rooms of murder crabs or bleed to death from nightwash.
He also thought about how Declan was worried that this was something he couldn’t come back from.
“It is frightening how fast the world sickens,” Bryde said. “Decades ago it seemed like we had years. Years ago it seemed like we had months. Months ago it seemed like days. And now every day, every minute, every second, it is harder to be a dreamer. It’s so noisy. Even here in these mountains, it is so noisy. How they shout at us all, even in our sleep. Soon there will be no place for the quiet things, the things that undo themselves when they have to shout. Soon there will be no place for secrets, the secrets that lose their mystery when they are uncovered. Soon there will be no place for the strange, no place for the unknown, because everything will be cataloged and paved and plugged in.”
Ronan thought about Adam’s gloves set upon his shoes in the mudroom.
He thought about wanting to feel like he had been made for something more than dying.
“I know you are two things,” Bryde said. “I know you are of both worlds. That will never change.”
“What if it’s too much?” Ronan asked. “I don’t know if I want to do it.”
“You do.”
“You can’t just say I do. You don’t know what I’m feeling.”
Bryde’s voice was very, very soft. “I know you’ve already made this decision. You made it long ago.”
“On a hoverboard floating in the air? After Rhiannon Martin was killed?”
“Further back than that.”
“When we decided to go with you?”
“Further back than that.”
“No,” said Ronan.
“Yes.”
All of Ronan’s frustration burst out of him, so strongly that the dream shivered with it. The air shimmered. The lake simmered. He was tired of the lessons. The games. The riddles. For some reason, he suddenly remembered the long-ago Christmas starlings bursting around him as Declan watched. That agony again of wanting to fly and being unable to explain it to anyone else.
He was suddenly either very afraid, or very furious. He snarled, “You can’t know when I made the decision!”