Mister Impossible

by Maggie Stiefvater

Bryde laughed. It was a laugh like his smile, contained and cunning. “Every plugged-in machine, every flat-black road, every stacked-up suburb, every humming cell. Choked and flattened and drowned and suppressed. Can you imagine a world where you could dream anywhere?”

  “God,” Hennessy said.

  Ronan pressed his ear into his shoulder as he felt the nightwash trickle down his neck. “Why aren’t we doing that?”

  “You,” Bryde answered simply. “It’s not a game for the reckless. It’s not a game for those who go to sleep and bring everything they see back with them. It is a game that requires control, and right now you two have precious little of it. Look at your face. Feel your guts turning to grime, Ronan? Your game is this: Stop sucking. That is hard enough for you right now.”

  “Hey,” Hennessy said. “I love a good roast, but come on now.”

  Bryde waved a hand. “Why do you think we stopped here? When you two dream, there are consequences for every other dreamer who is living a little too far away from a ley line. Do you think you’ve killed anyone with your casual dreaming? Do you think you’ve pulled the ley line out from beneath a dreamer who needed it more than you? Has anyone died in nightwash because of some plaything you pulled from a dream?”

  It was too easy to imagine. All the enormous things Ronan had dreamt over the years. All the living creatures, all the noisy machines. An entire forest. A brother. He couldn’t quite bear to think too hard about it. Not now, not with the nightwash eating away at him. Guilt was never too far away anyway.

  “You can’t hide away from the consequences of who you are,” Bryde said. “Don’t laugh at me, Hennessy. How much power do you think it required to pull out all those girls with your face? You cannot do this carelessly. You’re not children anymore.”

  Nightwash trickled out of Ronan’s nostril. Hennessy threw her remaining fries back over the counter. They didn’t look at each other.

  “You’re right,” Ronan said finally. “Now I really do feel shittier.”

  “Good,” Bryde replied. “Lesson over.”

  As best the FBI could tell, Nathan Farooq-Lane had killed twenty-three people.

  The twenty-three victims had no connection to each other, at least not as far as the investigators had managed to work out. Clarisse Match, grocery clerk and single mother. Wes Gerfers, retired dentist and amateur poet. Tim Mistovich, grad student and internet troll. So on, so forth. They were from all different walks of life. Different professions. Different generations. The only thing they had in common was that they’d all twenty-three been found with an open pair of scissors somewhere at the crime scene.

  Twenty-three was a bad number.

  But it wasn’t the worst number, in Carmen Farooq-Lane’s opinion. This one was the worst: sixteen. That was the age her brother had been when he’d killed his first victim. He’d been a junior. She’d been a freshman. What had she been doing while he was stalking his first kill? She’d been joining clubs, that’s what. Chess club. Art club. Debate club. Economics club. Mixed martial arts club. Young Citizens for Abolishing Hunger club. If there was a club at their high school, Carmen Farooq-Lane had joined it and was a model member.

  You have a bizarre fascination with running in packs, Nathan had told her once as they walked to school together. They need you, Carmen. You don’t need them.

  In spring of her freshman year, spring of Nathan’s junior year, the school’s star quarterback Jason Mathai had disappeared. The day after he didn’t come to school, the janitor found four pairs of scissors, one at each of the school’s main entrances. Open, like a cross. Later, investigators would try to understand why there had been four at this first murder when there was only one at each of the others. But of all the puzzles surrounding her brother, this one made sense to Farooq-Lane. This was his maiden voyage and he wanted to be sure it was noticed. One pair of scissors for each entrance, just in case.

  He was sixteen. Farooq-Lane was clueless.

  She was clueless even though scissors were Nathan’s thing. He drew them in his sketchbooks. Hung them on his walls and over his bed. Hung them over her bed until she made him take them down. They were enough of his thing that she remembered mentioning the presence of the scissors to him as the rumors flew through the school, because she thought he’d find it curious.

  But no part of her thought: Nathan killed Jason Mathai.

  And definitely no part of her thought: I need to tell someone before he kills twenty-two others.

  Later, the murders made the news. The journos tried out several names for the mysterious killer. The Cutter. The Mad Tailor. The Cloth Butcher. The Scissors Killer. None of them stuck. It would have been different if the killer had murdered the victims with scissors, but all of them had been killed by bizarre explosive devices.

  Farooq-Lane knew none of this; she didn’t have time to read news like that. She’d gone to college and found new clubs. Then she’d graduated and found a landlord and Alpine Financial, which was kind of like a club, but for adults.

  If she’d been paying attention, would she have noticed it? Her job was patterns, systems, analyzing the past to create better futures. Twenty-three murders was a lot of data.

  But maybe it wouldn’t have mattered.

  You want everything to make sense, but things don’t, Nathan had told her once. You fall in love with everything that makes sense and ignore everything that doesn’t.

  After her parents’ death, the FBI had shown her the manifesto they’d found tucked in his junior-year yearbook. It was nothing like the crisp, well-spoken brother she thought she knew. Instead, it wandered and fretted and threatened and despaired.

  The Open Edge of the Blade

  by Nathan Farooq-Lane

  Only the open edge of the scissor blade is pure.. Once it has closed it has exhausted its potential.. Purity is apartness.. Purity is potentiality.. So much of the world is dull too dull to ever cut.. Or was once open and is now closed.. The dull scissors were never scissors they were only lawn ornaments.. They are scissor-shaped but they were never going to have a purpose.. They are no better or worse than the closed scissors.. The closed scissors are also no longer scissors because they once could cut but now are closed.. All that is important is the open edge of the blade which is still pure.. These are the blades that have purpose.. Purity is purpose.. Purpose is purity.. There is no room for the shears to open if there are too many closed scissors in the box.. Making room means deletion.. Not cutting because cutting leaves pieces and pieces take room, just different room.. Deletion is erasure which makes space for the open edge of the blade..

  And so on for a dozen typed pages.

  Had Nathan Farooq-Lane made sense?

  She’d asked herself since then if there had been something about his external self that would have allowed her to predict this internal self. She asked herself if her parents would still be alive if she had. But he was one system she’d never been able to fit into a spreadsheet.

  Later, the Moderators had found her and told her Nathan was a Zed, someone who could take things out of his dreams, and that all the peculiar explosive devices had actually been dreams.

  “I know it can be hard to believe,” Lock had said.

  But Nathan had killed twenty-three people starting at age sixteen. She could believe anything about him now. What she’d actually thought then was: The Moderators would have had to kill him at age fifteen to save all those lives.

  “Well, this is creepy as hell,” Lock rumbled.

  The leader of the Moderators was tanklike as he powered down a hall in the West Virginia Museum of Living History. Broad shoulders. Fat-soled athletic shoes crunching debris beneath them. Everywhere Lock’s flashlight beam illuminated looked war-torn. Hanging ceiling tiles. Peeling paint. Faded, knocked-over furniture.

  The ruined museum was unsettling, but Lock wasn’t talking about that. He was talking about the mannequins.

  Someone had filled the hall with a troupe of mannequins from the museum exhibits. Recently. Ev
erything here was covered with great, soft layers of dust, but the mannequins had handprints all over their arms and chests. Fresh. A few days old at most. Farooq-Lane shone her flashlight on each as she passed. Sailor. Baker. Homemaker. Policeman. A Zed could stand among them and the Moderators wouldn’t know until they were on top of them.

  “Oh, come on,” said one of the other Moderators, delivering a sudden kick at the homemaker. The mannequin heaved to the side, heavier than expected, and fell into the arms of a surprisingly sturdy train conductor with mismatched eyes. “There’s no Zed here. We’d already be completely screwed if there was.”

  The Moderator wasn’t wrong. Every recent encounter with the Zeds had ended the same as the encounter with the Zed in the Airstream, with the Moderators defeated and confused, and generally feeling like absolute idiots. These new Zeds were boggling their minds. Literally. Farooq-Lane understood that even this ruse of mannequins was mostly to play with their heads. It wouldn’t stop the Moderators for long—it was just to unsettle them. It was Nathan’s scissors.

  Lock shone a flashlight into a mannequin’s face. It was a chef. He—Lock, not the chef—said, “The Visionary saw us confronting the Zeds in her vision. That means we’re supposed to be successful in the future, only it gets changed. We will find a way through this.”

  “Where is the Visionary anyway?” one of the other Moderators asked, a little nervously. The other Moderators were all very afraid Liliana was going to blow them up. A reasonable fear. She’d accidentally blown up a family of ducks during her last vision.

  “She’s waiting in the car,” Farooq-Lane said. “But she’s very stable at this age.”

  “Very stable at this age.” One of the other Moderators mimicked Farooq-Lane’s crisp way of speaking, which, to Farooq-Lane’s surprise, sounded a lot like Nathan. “She’d be more stable if she’d turn that stuff inside. Like every. Other. Visionary. Until Miss Carmen here.”

  Just a few weeks before, Farooq-Lane would have spent time wondering what she could possibly do to prove her loyalty to the Moderators. But not anymore. No longer did she find them the all-knowing righteous arm of the law. The failures of the past few weeks had changed all of them. The Moderators had all separated neatly into Team Discouraged or Team Cagey or Team Angry.

  Carmen Farooq-Lane was Team Restore Order.

  This was no longer only about a possible future apocalypse. The Potomac Zeds had pushed this into a new realm for her. Using dreams to mess with people’s minds was a system-breaking, society-ending weapon, and there was no longer any doubt in her that something had to change.

  So she didn’t let the Moderators’ needling rattle her. She shone her flashlight slowly over the mannequins they’d just walked through. She had a funny thought that there were twenty-three of them. She counted them.

  Twenty-three.

  But Nathan was dead, and they were chasing three entirely different Zeds who had nothing to do with him. It was coincidence, not magic. Her subconscious had taken in information about her surroundings while her active mind was doing something else. There was a term for it. Unconscious cognition? Priming? One of those. She’d taken some courses in college.

  This is your guilt, Farooq-Lane told herself, letting herself acknowledge it. Guilt for not stopping Nathan. Guilt for getting him killed. Guilt for feeling guilty. Guilt for killing so many Zeds over the last several months.

  Guilt for not asking questions.

  They had come to an enormous ruined space, a tree bursting through the collapsed roof, the night sky visible overhead. Farooq-Lane shivered in the suddenly brisk air. This ruin was what they were trying to prevent. Humanity wiped out. Every human accomplishment reduced to rubble and vines. Civilization was so tenuous. This museum had been important to someone, once. If a Zed had made this, she thought, it could have been made supernaturally permanent. This was the real danger of Zeds, she thought. The scale of it. Humans could only do so much. Zeds could kill infinite people, start infinite fires, create infinite destructive legacies.

  A gun went off.

  Everyone jumped; Farooq-Lane hit the deck. As the ferns tickled her cheek and her palms pressed the cold rubble beneath her, she wondered, Is this real?

  It felt real. But she’d seen what the Potomac Zeds could do to perception.

  A moment later, Lock rumbled, “That was very unprofessional.”

  Farooq-Lane lifted her head. One of the Moderators—Ramsay, of course—was holding a pistol, the barrel still visibly smoking in a flashlight beam. In his other hand he held half a limp black snake. The other half of it had been shot away. As Farooq-Lane watched, the ruined end of the snake slowly twisted in a muscle memory of life.

  She had to look away.

  Nathan’s words about clubs came back to her. She didn’t need them, he’d said. They needed her.

  Did they?

  “Weapons discharge only when I deem it necessary,” Lock intoned. “This area is obviously clear. Let’s move on.”

  The Moderators found themselves in an old hay barn illuminated by a dozen naked lightbulbs high in the rafters. It was entirely filled with both old, dry hay bales and wheels of all kinds. The wheels were clearly a Zed’s work, but there did not seem to be any Zeds in evidence. Were they a by-product of dreaming? Were they a message?

  Farooq-Lane made her way slowly through the wheels, spinning them here, turning them there. Each had the word tamquam on it, although she didn’t know the significance. She stepped out the other side of the barn. Cold air whipped across her cheeks, smelling of wilderness.

  She stopped in her tracks.

  Lock was leaning up against the exterior of the barn, his bald head slumped to one side.

  It was not the real Lock, of course.

  The real Lock was emerging to stand beside Farooq-Lane. The real Lock was exhaling noisily. The real Lock was putting his hands on his hips and saying nothing.

  This other Lock was dead. Or rather, he was simply not alive. He had never been alive. He was just another mannequin, but with Lock’s exact face. He wore Lock’s usual track pants and sneakers, but the matching jacket was missing. Instead he wore a white T-shirt with words handwritten across it. Thirty pieces of silver.

  Farooq-Lane felt something thrill inside her. “What does it mean?”

  Lock said, “It means we need to find a different way to kill these three Zeds before this gets out of hand.”

  Hennessy couldn’t really fathom what it was like to be bad at art.

  There was evidence that she had been, of course. Somewhere in the closets of her father’s Pennsylvania suburban home were journals full of her early drawings. Languishing in some English rubbish heap were grotty canvases she had painted over again and again. That old art was wrong in all the ways non-artists tended to notice: mismatched eyes, physically impossible nostrils, incorrect rooflines, broccoli-shaped trees, dog-nosed cows. And it was also wrong in all the ways artists noticed: poor use of value, inattention to edges, uneven line weight, lazy composition, muddy colors, sloppy palette choice, impatient layers, derivative stylization, tentative brushwork, overuse of medium, underuse of planning, unintentional fugliness.

  Even her art-making process had been bad. She remembered what it was like to not be sure if a drawing was going to “turn out.” She’d sit down with a clothing catalog or a photograph of a model pulled up on her father’s laptop. Then she’d sharpen her pencil and think, I hope this works. She’d fuss over the likeness for hours. Hours! She couldn’t even imagine now how she’d been spending all that time. What took her so long on a casual pencil sketch? She remembered agonizing over the eye placement, over the puzzling shape at the corner of a mouth, the absolute purgatory that was a woman’s chin, but she didn’t remember why such things had been confusing.

  Her head knew what it wanted to do. Why did her hand disobey? Noses veered petulantly. Rib cages went barrel-shaped, feet and hands turned into a four-piece mismatched tool set. She remembered actually howling in frustration as
she wadded up an attempt. Stabbing canvases with scissors. Hurling paint tubes across J. H. Hennessy’s studio.

  She remembered how when she did turn up with a good result, she’d return to it several times over the course of the day, taking it out again and again to flush with pleasure and surprise and accomplishment. She had no idea why it had gone well and so she couldn’t be sure it would ever happen again.

  Hennessy remembered this, but she didn’t feel it. Somehow all the pain hadn’t managed to carry through the years. No part of her expected to fail when she sat down at a canvas now. She knew how the paint would behave. She knew what her brushes were capable of. No part of her doubted that whatever she was looking at would travel through her eyes, down her arms, and out onto the blank space before her.

  Once, one of her clients had asked her if she considered herself a prodigy. They’d been standing in front of a Cassatt she’d forged for him.

  “No,” Hennessy had said. “I’m a forgery of a prodigy.”

  But she knew she was good. No amount of thinking about how bad she used to be would change that. She might suck at everything else about being a human and a dreamer, but as an art forger—she might not be the best, but she was at least one of the best.

  That accomplishment seemed pointless now. There was no one to show it to who mattered. They were all dead.

  All except for Jordan, who had always mattered the most anyway. But where was she now?

  “I am so fucking good at this,” Ronan said.

  The two of them were in one of those electronic boutiques that took itself very seriously. Indirect neon lighting, backlit products, every shelf rounded and modern. Phones of every shape and size lined the shelves and tables. There were traditional cell phones. Wall-mounted hard lines. Phones shaped like piggy banks and phones shaped like fake teeth, phones shaped like model cars and phones shaped like ceramic birds. Phones like dish-soap bubbles and phones like bank pens with fake flowers affixed to the end of them.