He turned back to the mirror. Nightwash was running from his nose. This was why he had been feeling strange earlier. Because his body was betraying him again.
The mirror tried to show him the truth of the nightwash, and it made him feel even stranger. He always saw it as toxic. As defeat. As a symbol of failing to dream, of being weak far from the ley line. But the mirror said: This nightwash is from trying. This is the consequence of striving.
He didn’t understand.
His head hurt.
Rhiannon had jumped up and instantly produced tissues from somewhere: It was that kind of house, she was that kind of woman. She pressed one to Ronan’s face and rested a comforting hand on his back, a gesture so firmly maternal that Ronan couldn’t tell if he felt ill from the nightwash or from grief.
“Is it a nosebleed?” she asked.
“Nightwash,” Bryde said. “Some call it the Slip. Others the Black Dog. It has many names. It means a dreamer is in a place where there isn’t much ley energy or has waited too long between dreams.”
“I’ve never had this happen to me,” Rhiannon said.
“You haven’t opened the door as many times as he has,” Bryde said. “He broke the hinge the moment he came through it and now it’s come right off.”
“Is it dangerous?” she asked.
“Very. If he doesn’t get to ley energy or dream something into being, the most dangerous,” Bryde said. “So we need you to make a decision.”
“Bryde’s right,” Hennessy said abruptly. She was staring into the mirror still. “You should come with us. There’s only the past here. Fuck the past.”
Rhiannon worked her hands over each other. “I need more time.”
Bryde looked out the window again. There was nothing to see but that gray sky. “I don’t know how much time we have.”
Ten: that was the number of times Farooq-Lane had seen Liliana the Visionary switch ages in pursuit of the perfect trap for the Potomac Zeds.
Before the Potomac Zeds had come along, the Moderators had simply pursued every Zed in every lead a Visionary had shared with them. The details of the vision were researched and located, and then the Zed was tracked and killed. That would no longer work. Lock asked the Moderators for new ideas.
Nobody had one. Nobody but Farooq-Lane.
It had come to her after they’d left the run-down museum, provoked by the image of the tree reaching through the split-open roof. A tree in a very surprising place. Several weeks before, a fortune-teller at the underground Fairy Market had hissed at her: If you want to kill someone and keep it a secret, don’t do it where the trees can see you.
Maybe, she thought, that was how Bryde was getting his intel.
Implementing her idea was rocky at first. Visionaries weren’t jukeboxes. The Moderators couldn’t put a quarter in and request a vision of a Zed located in a treeless place. Visionaries were more like weather systems, and their visions were like tornadoes where the center always contained a Zed and a fiery end of the world.
Scrolling through tornadoes was impossible, but they all traded in impossibilities now.
Liliana drove herself to a vision again and again for Farooq-Lane, trying to skip ahead to a different future, a treeless future.
Nine: the number of injured civilians so far. The visions were so risky. Farooq-Lane worked out quickly that the teen version of Liliana was the most dangerous, because she hadn’t yet developed any sense of when one was coming on. One minute she could be paging through blank journals in a bookstore with Farooq-Lane, and in the next—disaster.
Parsifal, the previous Visionary, hadn’t cycled between ages until the very end of his timeline, when he started to lose control of his ability to turn them inward. Lock had gingerly suggested this method to a crying teen Liliana after a particularly unexpected vision had decimated a handful of nearby squirrels.
“That just sounds like slow-motion suicide,” Liliana had told him.
He hadn’t had an answer for her. The Moderators were always making judgment calls about whose life was worth saving and whose wasn’t, and they hadn’t, to this point, ever come out on the side of the Visionaries.
But Farooq-Lane had.
“It’s not Liliana’s fault she’s dangerous,” Farooq-Lane had said. “She tries to make sure no one else is around. I don’t think we should try to convince her to turn it inward.”
Lock had been dubious. “Now who’s committing slow-motion suicide?”
Eight: the number of yarn shops Farooq-Lane had visited until the oldest Liliana found enough skeins in the color that she said would suit Farooq-Lane. This Liliana had a good sense of when visions were coming on, which meant time with her could be spent less on survival and more on creature comforts. Ancient Liliana was very much about domestic pleasures. Knitting! She was intent on teaching Farooq-Lane, because she remembered teaching her.
This was the strangest part of the oldest Liliana—she remembered a lot of what she’d already lived through, and a lot of that seemed to involve Farooq-Lane. In her past. In Farooq-Lane’s future. Somewhere along their collective timelines. Thinking about it too hard hurt Farooq-Lane’s brain.
“Thank you for standing up for me,” the old Liliana told her once, in her precise, gentle way. “About turning the visions inward.”
“Did you remember me doing that?” Farooq-Lane asked.
“It was a very long time ago. So it was a lovely surprise to be reminded. Well. Not a surprise. A gift. I knew you were a good person.”
Farooq-Lane wished she’d met Liliana before she’d met the Moderators.
Seven: how many meetings the Moderators held to work out the logistics of an attack that would occur without being in the presence of a tree at any stage. A good deal of these get-togethers were devoted to debating if getting information from trees was even possible. Farooq-Lane thought disbelief was a waste of time when their quarry was also impossible.
Some of these meetings were spent discussing the Potomac Zeds. Their backgrounds, their families, their hopes and dreams. They got ahold of Jordan Hennessy’s father and asked him if he had any idea where she was.
“I thought she was already dead,” Bill Dower said. He sounded disappointed, if he sounded anything at all. “Huh.”
They got ahold of Ronan Lynch’s boyfriend’s Harvard roommate.
“They broke up after he trashed our dorm,” the student said in a plummy voice. “I never expected to hear his name again, honestly. What did he do now?”
They tried to find Ronan Lynch’s brothers, but after the attack that had cost Bellos his arm, Declan and Matthew Lynch had gone off the radar.
“Their stuff is gone from the town house,” one of the Moderators said, somewhat impressed. “Did anyone see them come back for it?”
No one had.
And no one knew a damn thing about Bryde.
Six: how many got away. Six Zeds who would have previously been targets were saved from death by their proximities to trees in Liliana’s visions. Lock would have still liked to have killed them. But the trees would tattle their plans. Trees! They were everywhere, once you started regarding them as the enemy. Lining sidewalks. Sprouting from green islands in parking lots. Nodding at the edges of farms. For a little while it seemed like there might not ever be a vision without trees in it. Several times, Farooq-Lane had to beg them to keep their eyes on the prize. Did they all want to look like fools again?
Really, she was glad to stop killing for a bit. She hadn’t counted how many deaths she’d been responsible for that year because she was worried it would be twenty-three. She and Nathan would be even Steven.
Five: how many agencies cooperated in the planning of the attack on the Pennsylvania farm. Deep in a broad valley, the closest trees were acres and acres away. Thanks to the agency coordination, the Moderators were equipped as they had never been before. Some wore noise-canceling headphones. Others wore protective goggles. There were dogs with keen noses. Trucks with keen armor. A guy with a flame
-thrower. A woman with a Stinger. This might be the only chance they had to corner the Potomac Zeds. It had to count.
“No hanging back like you did the other times, Carmen,” Lock said. Not cruelly, but firmly. “This is your plan. You take lead. Bring Liliana.”
Farooq-Lane swung wildly between hoping she was right and fearing she was wrong. This could be the attack that ended it all.
Four: the number of Zeds in the big stone house when the Moderators broke through the door.
There was just a second to see the scene, the Potomac Zeds arranged around a formal sofa like a portrait. Rhiannon Martin, towel in hand, face shocked. Jordan Hennessy, crouched on the sofa arm like a cat. Ronan Lynch, black liquid oozing down his face, slumped against Bryde. A second to think, it worked! Well, they were visible, which was already an improvement.
And then Farooq-Lane glimpsed a silver orb flying toward her.
Farooq-Lane wasn’t sure how she even saw it in time, but her arm was already swinging her pistol. It connected with the orb like a small baseball bat and knocked it right through the windowpane.
“Hello and fuck you,” Hennessy said, pulling out a brilliantly bright sword.
Then it was chaos.
There were bursts of gunfire. Tremendous swipes of light arced through the dim hallways. Someone screamed in a very unselfconscious way. A voice rose: “Hennessy, what are you waiting for? Now!”
They braced themselves for a dreamt horror, but no dreamt horror came. There was just a frantic race outside as the agency woman fired the Stinger directly into the house. What ensued seemed to be an ordinary foot chase, an ordinary gun battle. How astonishing that these things had become commonplace to Farooq-Lane. How astonishing that the Zeds had not yet unleashed anything worse.
Three: the number of yards Farooq-Lane discovered were between her and Jordan Hennessy. She had been trying to find a place where she wouldn’t get shot in the cross fire—she dimly suspected some of the Moderators might take pleasure in the excuse—and had been pressed against the barn, which still smelled of the turkeys that had lived and died in it. She had no idea where Liliana was. Everything was masks and riot shields and faceless agents like a war zone.
But there was Jordan Hennessy, staring up at two figures moving through the commotion: Bryde and Ronan Lynch. The first dragging the second. Ronan Lynch’s face was still streaming that black ooze, and even from here, Farooq-Lane could see his chest heaving for air. They were being rounded on by Moderators, but Bryde was keeping them at bay with a sunfire sword, one of the two weapons they’d used to get away on the banks of the Potomac.
Its mate, the starfire blade, rested securely in one of Jordan Hennessy’s hands just a few yards from Farooq-Lane, its blade dripping moonlight and malice.
Jordan Hennessy’s eyes glittered with fury as she surveyed the scene.
Farooq-Lane was surprised to feel terror. It liquefied her knees, loosened her fingers. The Zed hadn’t seen her there crouched in the shadow of the turkey house, but she would if Farooq-Lane tried to lift her gun. And Farooq-Lane knew what that sword did. She’d have less of an arm than Bellos before she could even scream.
“Hennessy!” Bryde shouted. “Now, if ever!”
Two: seconds before the nightmare appeared.
In the first second, Hennessy put a little bit of dark cloth over her eyes—oh, it was a mask, Farooq-Lane saw it was a mask now, she’d forgotten the Zeds used them at the previous attack—and slumped to the ground in instant sleep.
After the next second, as Farooq-Lane lifted her gun to shoot the sleeping Zed, there was the nightmare.
It was hell. It was shape. It was non-shape. It was form. It was non-form. It was checkered and growing, it was shriveled and grasping. Farooq-Lane didn’t want to look at it, but she wasn’t going to look away. There was not much of it, and even though it didn’t seem to have a proper body, there was a distinct feeling that it was … abbreviated. There was supposed to be more of it. It was severed. Partial.
And it hated Jordan Hennessy.
The hate was bigger than anything else about it. Farooq-Lane could hear it like a battle cry and a sob.
But Jordan Hennessy didn’t lift a finger to shield herself. She was frozen on the ground, mask slid to the side, eyes horrified and miserable. The star sword sputtered beside her in the grass, throwing moonbeams a few inches here and there.
It was clear that whatever the Zed had intended to bring from a dream, this was not it. This thing wanted to kill Jordan Hennessy.
Farooq-Lane should have let it.
But instead, she leapt forward and seized the star sword. She only had a moment to feel the warmth of its hilt, the glory of its purpose, the strangeness of its power, and then she sliced through the nightmare with the blade.
There was a silent shudder as the nightmare splintered.
Farooq-Lane slashed again, and again. This weapon drove it back so completely that it seemed to have been made to drive it back. To decimate it. She slashed and slashed, until the final tiny scrap of the nightmare somehow managed to dart through the wall into the turkey house.
Inside, the animals screamed and screamed, and then everything was silent.
“Visionary!” howled another voice. A Moderator, Ramsay.
Farooq-Lane’s gaze found Ramsay standing beside one of the armored cars. She followed his gaze. On the porch, Rhiannon Martin crouched behind a concrete planter that danced with red laser points. If there had been a clear shot, she’d have been dead long before. Liliana stood beside her in teen form, her long elegant fingers pressed to her teeth in agony, tears glistening on her cheeks.
“Visionary!” shouted Ramsay again.
A red laser point danced across Liliana’s hands. Ramsay was pointing the gun at her.
“Ramsay!” shouted Farooq-Lane.
“You wanna live?” Ramsay shouted at Liliana. Lock was watching him. Not stopping him. “Have a vision! Now!”
Death by Visionary. Make Liliana kill the unreachable Zed. So damn clever. So damn clever.
Liliana was too far away for Farooq-Lane to hear, but she saw her shoulders heave with apocalyptic sobs. She was mouthing, I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry, and everything in Rhiannon Martin’s maternal body language was saying back, It’s okay, I understand.
Farooq-Lane saw the moment Rhiannon Martin steeled herself, and then the Zed stood up from behind the planter, arms by her side. She faced Ramsay without flinching.
We’re the villains, Farooq-Lane thought.
Ramsay shot Rhiannon Martin in the head.
One: the number of people Farooq-Lane didn’t hate in that entire place.
Liliana threw her arms over her eyes as her shoulders shook. She needed someone on her side. She needed Farooq-Lane.
Everything was going wrong.
Too late, Farooq-Lane realized that Jordan Hennessy was no longer paralyzed on the ground beside her. She was up, she was running.
A suddenly visible car raced toward her, flattening the grass, its rear door hanging open. Through the open door, Farooq-Lane saw that Bryde was driving. Ronan Lynch’s body was prone across the backseat. Not particularly vital-looking.
Jordan Hennessy threw herself through the open door into the car.
“Someone stop it!” shouted someone. Maybe Lock.
Hennessy locked eyes with Farooq-Lane just before she slammed the door shut.
The car vanished as if it had never been there.
Zero: Zed. 0.
No more, thought Farooq-Lane. No more.
Matthew thought something might have happened to Ronan.
He and Declan had just trespassed into a Harvard dorm building. Matthew didn’t realize at first that they were trespassing. He hadn’t paid much attention to how Declan approached the old brick dorm twice. First, just walking by, seeming to give the propped-open door no more or less interest than anything else in the cool midnight-blue-and-gold Cambridge evening. Second, after shedding his suit coat in the car and runn
ing his fingers through his curls until they were boyish and messy, returning to push through the door into the warm red-and-brown interior.
Inside, a haphazard line of college students led up a flight of stairs. Declan flippantly patted the shoulder of the closest with the back of his hand. “Hey. This the line for—?”
Matthew was startled to hear his brother’s voice. Instead of his usual sales-speak monotone, he sounded like one of the guys. He’d even changed how he stood. Previously alert and suspicious, he was now casual and inattentive, gaze pulled to a knot of pretty girls in the hall, then to his phone, then back to the student in line.
“The card thing, yeah,” the student replied. “It’s going fast.”
Declan joined the line and began to type away on his phone in his peculiar way, thumb and forefinger. He did not explain himself to Matthew. Perhaps he didn’t think he needed to. Perhaps a normal person would have guessed what they were doing there. Had Ronan dreamt Matthew to be an idiot? Ever since he’d found out he was dreamt, he’d been trying to think about things more like a real person, more like a grown-up, but it made his head hurt.
“Don’t pick your nails,” Declan murmured without looking up from his phone.
Matthew stopped picking his nails. They climbed a few stairs at a time. The student was right; the line went fast. Some of the students coming down the stairs were crying. There were no other clues to where the line might be headed.
It was when they were nearly to the top of the stairs that Matthew began to feel a little weird.
Not a lot weird. Maybe he was just sleepy. It was just … as they reached the head of the line, he avoided stepping on a discarded candy bar wrapper on the final stair, and for a second, he thought he was stepping over a brightly colored lily instead.
Nope nope nope, Matthew thought. Gonna be okay here.
By the time he pulled himself together, he realized what the wait was for: Adam Parrish. The stairs led to a tiny solarium, a wizard’s lofty lair thrust high over the quaint dark roofs of Cambridge. The haphazard arrangement of tables, chairs, and halogen lamps suggested that many students over many years had composed it. It smelled comfortingly old, like the Barns. Adam sat at a table right in the middle of it, looking gaunt and poised as he always did, his long hands parallel-parked on the edge of the table. On the table in front of him was a stack of tarot cards and a mug stuffed with bills and gift cards. In a chair near him was a gloriously large student wearing a sweater vest Matthew quite liked the look of.
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