Mister Impossible

by Maggie Stiefvater

  Many of them were impossible, but it didn’t matter, because it was a dream, Ronan’s dream, and he could do what he wanted.

  Hennessy said, “You could dream anything, anywhere, and you bring us to a consumer playground with the logos only barely scrubbed off.”

  “Jealous much?” Ronan was all snotty arrogance again, as if he wouldn’t have drowned in nightwash if Bryde hadn’t brought them to another ley line in the nick of time.

  She wasn’t jealous. She was wary. Ley line energy boomed through the dream. She hadn’t felt this much ley power since she’d been in Ronan’s dreamt forest Lindenmere. It made the dream as lucid as any waking experience.

  If she had her Lace dream with this much power at her disposal …

  “We’re not doing the Lace dream,” Ronan said. “Chill out. What do we want out of these phones? They’ve gotta be untraceable, I guess. Portable. What else does a phone do?”

  Why didn’t Adam text me back?

  Because they were sharing the dreamspace, she heard his thought like a shout. It traveled through the dream with a retinue of amorphous sub-thoughts. Was Adam injured, was he bored with Ronan, did he prefer the company of his urbane new friends, calm down, Ronan, stop being needy, Ronan, get yourself together, Ronan, you’re always the car crash, Ronan. It would have been polite to pretend she hadn’t heard any of it, but Ronan and Hennessy had never been polite to each other and she didn’t see the point in starting now. “What’s your boy like?”

  Ronan picked up a slender phone the size of a business card and made a big show of examining it for suitability. He didn’t reply.

  “So he’s ugly,” Hennessy said. “Or a complete cock-up.”

  Ronan studied another phone that looked like an umbrella. “What do you think he’s like?”

  “I honestly have no idea,” Hennessy said. “Who would be attracted to you as a love match? Has he got crushingly low self-esteem? Is he one of those soft boys who hide in the firm pecs of their scary partners? Is he a witch? Did he say a spell wrong and you appeared and now you’re bound for life?”

  “Yeah,” Ronan said. “That one.”

  Hennessy leaned over one of the shelves. The tediously normal-looking cell phone on it brightened to display a photograph of two young men as the lock screen. One was Ronan, laughing explosively. The other was a rather self-contained-looking fellow, striking in an unusual sort of way, smirking a bit at whatever he’d just said. They were not exactly opposites but their appearances nonetheless gave the impression they were. Ronan’s dark, dramatic eyebrows, the other guy’s light, barely visible ones. Ronan’s emotions screamed upon his face while the other guy’s whispered. “Is that him?”

  Ronan addressed the dream at large. “Traitor. You didn’t have to show her.”

  “He doesn’t look like he’s filling a hole inside himself with your toxic presence,” Hennessy said. She kind of hated looking at them together. It made her feel ugly inside. “Are you guys in love five-ever or do you think you’re a pretty board game to pass his time?”

  Now she sounded ugly, too.

  But Ronan just picked up another phone and, after a space, mused, “Your phone can be simpler than mine, of course. You’ll only need to be able to call Jordan, right? There’s no one else?”

  A single question, clear and factual. What a weapon. And he’d delivered it in the same tone he might have said anything else, so she didn’t notice the blade of its meaning until it was stuck inside her.

  Suddenly, Hennessy had a very clear understanding that the cruel exterior Ronan Lynch wore was not all posture.

  Every lock screen in the shop briefly showed Hennessy’s face. But it was not truly Hennessy. It was Trinity, June, Brooklyn, Madox, Jay, Alba, Octavia, Farrah, Jordan. All dead. Almost all dead. It would have been easier, in some ways, if Jordan were dead, too. Simpler, anyway.

  Ronan said nothing else. He just let the silence do its violent work.

  She found she was both awed and grateful for this bit of nastiness in response to hers. “Did you want to drink my arterial blood after that slash, or just roll around in it?”

  “Whatever,” Ronan said, but it was clear they had come to an accord. He picked up a matte-black phone. It was the size of an acorn, and when he clipped it onto his earlobe, it looked just like a tunnel piercing, making him look even more like a hulking goth than he had before.

  She could feel him thinking: Small. Subtle. It’ll only place and take calls, not text, but that’s fine. Fuck texting. I don’t care about texting. I don’t need to text ever again.

  Even in his own head he lied to himself.

  Ronan said suddenly, “Can you imagine if all dreams were like this? It’s so easy.”

  “Okay, Bryde,” Hennessy said mockingly.

  “You really don’t see the appeal?”

  “Of shopping for electronics in your head?”

  He studied her, eyebrows knit. He was trying to understand her, and maybe he could understand part of her, the part of her that was a lot like him. But he’d been good at this for too long. She’d been bad at it for too long. They were beginning to be shaped like it. The space between those two truths was vast and checkered with Lace.

  “Hold my beer,” Ronan said.

  The electronics store melted away.

  They were in a blistering red desert. Before them were two motorcycles in liquid black, their wasp-waisted bodies glistening with a permanent wet sheen, the compound eyes of their headlights pointed down an arrow-straight road. It was both darkly inviting and subtly wrong.

  Hennessy glanced at him. “Is that what you think the desert looks like? Have you ever been? That looks like an alien planet.”

  “If you think you can do better, let’s see it.”

  It was a challenge. Just like Bryde. Change the dream. It had taken Ronan no effort at all.

  Closing her eyes, Hennessy remembered the last time she had been through a real desert. Don’t think about the Lace. She could not make her mind put herself in a desert, so she imagined how she would paint it on a canvas. And in that moment, she felt the dream help her. Creativity prickled through her like a burst of adrenaline. Everything suddenly seemed easier to hold in her head all at once.

  Hennessy opened her eyes.

  The desert had changed. This desert wasn’t red at all; it was white and pink and cream and striated with orange and black and yellow. The sand was knotted and complicated with crisp sagebrush dried by current heat and flat cactus swollen with past luck. The two dreamers stood in a valley. Mesas rose in the distance, pale underwater castles shaped by a sea that had long abandoned this world. The sky overhead was bluer than any sky in the world.

  This was a real desert, but a real desert by way of Hennessy. Exaggerated, heightened, made more itself. Made art.

  “Fuck,” Ronan breathed, and he didn’t bother to hide his awe.

  Maybe, Hennessy thought, there was a world where she could be good at this.

  The Lace was nowhere.

  And then they were on the bikes and they were tearing through that painted desert.

  Ronan conjured a flock of white birds that skimmed fast and low beside them.

  Hennessy painted a fork in the road, the asphalt smearing out like a brushstroke.

  Ronan whirled music beneath their tires, pounding bass through the desert.

  Hennessy transformed the scene from day to night, the purpled sky rich as berries, the sand pink and blue.

  Ronan cast both bikes into the air.

  Fear-free exhilaration, the only destination up. Hennessy could feel the ascent in every part of her body. The gravity weighting her stomach. The breeze against her arms. The sense of endless space above and below. Up, up, up.

  Hennessy let out a scream, just to hear herself howl, as they flowed up through the darkening night. Then, suddenly, they broke through a cloud she hadn’t even realized they’d been passing through. Up here, the air was thin and cold and wonderful, everything tinged the furious ras
pberry red of a nearly gone sunset. Ronan looked worlds away from the version of himself she’d seen only hours before in the fast-food restaurant. There he had been defeated, guilty, both victim of circumstance and architect of said circumstance. Here he was powerful, confident, joyful, a cheerful king. Hennessy versus Jordan.

  But maybe not. Maybe, Hennessy thought again, there was a world where she was good at this.

  The two dreamers coasted up there in the incredible sky for however long time lasted in dreams, sucking in big pure breaths of air, feeling the ley line swirl around them and through them.

  Then Ronan said, “We gotta wake up. Keeping the Lace out of here is giving me a headache.”

  His words took a few seconds to land.

  When they did, they cut deep. Deeper than his intentionally cruel question had before, although she was sure he hadn’t intended it this time.

  Hennessy said, “So you’ve been patronizing me this whole time, is that it?”

  “What?”

  “This whole time you’ve been letting me think we’re, what, equals?” The desert was shredding around them. The bikes were gone.

  Ronan peered around, bemused. “Are you pissed?”

  “You let me think I was doing this.”

  “You were doing it. This is your desert.” But he couldn’t disguise his wince. “Goddamn, it’s strong.”

  “Right. Sure. You babysat me.”

  “I just took some of the weight—”

  “And didn’t tell me?”

  Ronan’s expression was puzzled as the checkered shape of the Lace cast itself across his face. “You know this is what you always do.”

  Yeah, she did. Except she’d thought she was getting better. Learning, finally.

  The sky was pulsing, and with each dark pulse, the shadow of the Lace was printed across it. It was the Lace dream. It was always the Lace dream. It was always going to be the Lace dream.

  Ronan pressed a hand to his temple. “I can’t—”

  Ronan hadn’t thought much about the future.

  This was a way he and Adam had always been opposites. Adam seemed to only think about the future. He thought about what he wanted to happen days or weeks or years down the road, and then he backfilled actions to make it happen. He was good at depriving himself in the now in order to have something better in the later.

  Ronan, on the other hand, couldn’t seem to get out of the now. He always remembered consequences too late. After a bloody nose. A broken friendship. A huge tattoo. A cat with human hands. But his head didn’t seem built to hold the future. He could imagine it for just a few seconds until, like a weak muscle, his thoughts collapsed back into the present.

  But there was one future he could imagine. It was a little bit of a cheat, because it was buried in a memory, and Ronan was better at thinking of the past than the future. It was an indulgent memory, too, one he’d never have copped to out loud. There wasn’t much to it. It was from the summer after Adam had graduated, the summer he’d spent with Ronan at the Barns. Ronan had come in from working on the fences outdoors and tossed his work gloves onto the grass-cluttered rug by the mudroom door. As he did, he’d seen that Adam’s mechanic gloves were lined up neatly on top of his shoes. Ronan had already known Adam was inside the house, but nonetheless, the image made him pause. They were just gloves, grease-stained and very old. Thrifty Adam always tried to get as much wear out of things as possible. They were long and narrow like Adam himself, and despite their age and stains, they were otherwise impeccably clean. Ronan’s work gloves, in comparison, were cruddy and creased and coarse-looking, tossed with carefree abandon, the fingers lassoed over Adam’s.

  Seeing the two pairs tumbled together, a nameless feeling had suddenly overwhelmed Ronan. It was about Adam’s gloves here, but it was also Adam’s jacket tossed on a dining room chair, his soda can forgotten on the foyer table, him somewhere tossed with equal comfort in the Barns, his presence commonplace enough that he was not having to perform or engage with Ronan at all times. He was not dating Ronan; he was living in Ronan’s life with him.

  Shoes kicked off by the door, gloves off.

  A future. A good future. One Ronan had always liked thinking about. But the feeling of the Lace was still stuck to Ronan. It was hard to shake its insistent dread. It was getting all over the memory of Adam’s gloves. It was reminding him how even though it was a great memory, a great future, it hadn’t been enough for Ronan. If it had been enough, he’d still be waiting safely at the Barns until it came true. Instead, the Lace feeling murmured, he was here, jeopardizing that future more and more with every act.So how much did he really treasure that memory?

  Not enough to keep it safe.

  “I trust you enjoyed your dreaming,” Bryde said.

  As Ronan’s dream paralysis came to an end, a light came on, revealing the small hunting cabin Bryde had brought them to a few hours after the episode at the fast-food restaurant. Two decayed deer heads on the wall stared at Ronan with strained expressions. A lamp made of antlers lit a plaid sofa. Ronan had been too stupid with nightwash to notice any of these details when they’d arrived. Now they seemed quaint, charming, relieving in their mundanity. The Lace was fading.

  He didn’t know how Hennessy had lived with it for so long.

  “What did you bring back?” Bryde asked. The way he asked the question somehow seemed to imply he knew the answer already but wanted to hear them explain themselves, a teacher asking a child to explain their stick drawing.

  “A phone,” Ronan said.

  “A phone,” echoed Bryde.

  “An untraceable phone.”

  “A phone,” said Bryde again.

  “You sound like a parrot. Yes, a phone, I got a phone.”

  “Why?”

  Now Ronan was beginning to feel foolish, as if he’d missed a lesson. “To call my family?”

  “Do you think it’s wise to be looking in the rearview mirror?” Bryde asked.

  There was something both uncomfortable and fatherly about this. Bryde treating them like children; Bryde knowing this dimly lit path they were on.

  “Okay, Satan,” said Ronan, and Hennessy laughed hollowly from the dismal plaid couch.

  “Get up,” Bryde said. “Wash off your face. We’re going on a walk.”

  “Idea! You two go on a walk. I stay here and hate myself,” Hennessy said.

  “Put on a coat,” Bryde replied. “It’s snowing.”

  His dreamers grumbled and did as he said.

  The cabin they emerged from was notched into the side of a mountain and looked even more remote and murdery than it had from the inside. There was nothing around it but trees and more trees. The driveway through the woods was barely more civilized than the rest of the forest floor.

  To Ronan’s amazement, it was snowing. Lightly, without urgency, but enough to lend the night a peculiar brightness. In front of the cabin, the car was dusted with snow, which made it no more visible than before. It was emotionally hard to see, not literally. Snow and grime didn’t matter.

  Ronan pulled his skullcap down over his ears. “Where are we walking to?”

  Bryde said, “Up.”

  So up they went.

  These were foreign trees. Unlike the huge oaks and twisted beeches of Lindenmere, Ronan’s half-remembered fairy-tale trees, these were evergreens. Fat spruces with chunky bark and branchless trunks stretching into a snow-fogged sky kingdom. Still fairy-tale trees, but not from a tale Ronan had ever heard. Chainsaw flew above them, her wings strangely audible in the hush as they flapped.

  “Are we there yet?” Hennessy asked.

  “Up,” Bryde replied.

  Up, up. Ronan’s calves strained as they headed up the steepening mountain. Here, the snow was thicker, the trees even bigger. The landscape seemed just as dreamy as the desert he’d just left. And as real.

  Hennessy, he thought, are we still dreaming?

  She didn’t turn her head. So he was awake, or at least he was in his dream alone, w
ith a copy of Hennessy, a copy of Bryde. Reality was harder to define now.

  “Do you know where we are?” Bryde asked them. They had reached their destination: a great, vast stump that must have once been a great, vast tree, larger than any of the others still standing. It was dusted with snow like everything else, which somehow made it seem more alive, not less. Ronan was put in mind of the way the snow dusted the backs of his father’s eternally sleeping cattle back at the Barns.

  “Still Westva,” Hennessy replied. “Yeah?”

  “West by God Virginia,” added Ronan, mimicking his old friend Gansey’s Southern accent before remembering none of these new acquaintances had ever met him. Here in the future, they didn’t know about his past. Maybe that was Adam’s attraction to it.

  He felt that prickle of the Lace again.

  Bryde said, “Yes. Quite nearly in the middle of the National Radio Quiet Zone. Over ten thousand square miles without radio, Wi-Fi, cell phone signal, or microwave ovens. Home of the largest steerable radio telescope in the world and several defunct alien research programs. One of the quietest night skies east of the Mississippi. Can you feel it?”

  Of course not. Not now that he was awake. The ley power always seemed so clear to dreaming Ronan. Waking Ronan, however, couldn’t sense it even a little. In fact, it often felt like waking Ronan loved the things that seemed to actively interfere with it the most. Electricity, engines, motors, gasoline, adrenaline. And then dreaming Ronan—nightwashing Ronan—needed a world free of them. Perhaps this was why it was hard to see a future for himself. Bryde said there weren’t two of him. Bryde didn’t know.

  “Can I feel it, or do I like it?” Hennessy asked. “Because those are different answers.”

  Bryde gazed up at the massive spruces around them. A crawling white mist ghosted up from the light snowfall now, and the tree trunks were marked with little upside-down Vs of white where the precipitation had stuck to the rugged bark. “What do you hear?”

  “Nothing,” said Ronan.

  Nothing. Nothing.

  There was no sound of distant trucks, no hum of generators, no slam of distant doors. There was just the soft, white silence around these huge trees. Mountain soil was so poor and yet they’d managed to become massive. Ronan wondered how long it had taken them to perform this feat.