Mister Impossible

by Maggie Stiefvater

  On the sidewalk, Jordan folded over some of the bills to Matthew.

  “Is this pity money?” Matthew said suspiciously.

  “What does that mean?”

  “I dunno, to make me feel like I was a grown-up.”

  “You did a job; I’m paying you for the job. Don’t get a complex. I know that’s what Lynch brothers seem to do, but try to avoid it.”

  He sighed. “Thanks, then. For back there, too.”

  The dreaminess. She’d forgotten how bad the episodes could be, how quickly they could come on. She’d forgotten how she’d been in the middle of one when Declan realized she was a dream. She’d forgotten why she had understood why it would drive him away. No one wanted to be the only man left awake.

  Ordinarily a dreamy episode would have defeated Jordan’s mood for the rest of the day, but she found her mood was still as light as it had been before. This was why she was here in Boston. This was why she was searching underneath the beds of strangers. This was why she had bought yet another ticket to the Gardner. She was finding a sweetmetal. She was getting a sweetmetal. She was staying awake. She was staying awake long enough to become great.

  Ronan Lynch still remembered the best dream he’d ever had. It was an old dream now, two years old. Maybe a little less. In the divide of before his father’s death and after, it was After. It was also After his mother’s death. It was Before Harvard. Before Bryde.

  By the time this one showed up, Ronan had a pretty long list of good dreams. Most of them were from Before, and most of them, like many good dreams, were wish fulfillment. There were the usual valuable-possession dreams: opening a bedroom door to discover that the mattress had been replaced by a very expensive trendy sound system. There were dreams of impossible abilities: flying, speeding, long jumps, one-two punches that knocked intruders clear into next year. Sex dreams ranked well, depending on the players involved (they could just as easily slide into nightmare territory). Places of unreal beauty often made the list—rocky green islands, clear blue lakes, flower-busy fields.

  And of course there were the ones where he had his family back.

  “What would you do if you accidentally brought your mother back?” Adam had asked one evening before he’d left for Harvard. “If you woke up with another Aurora, would you keep her?”

  “I’m not in the mood for word problems,” Ronan had replied.

  “You’ve thought about it, surely.”

  Of course he had. The ethics of replacing his father were clear enough—copying a real person was no bueno—but Aurora had already been a dream, which made the waters murkier. He wouldn’t have been content with a dreamt copy, but Matthew might be. Could he end Matthew’s grieving with another mother? Spare Declan the effort of raising Matthew by providing another mother? Did it do a disservice to his real mother’s memory, even if she was already a dream? What if he did it wrong? What if he brought back a copy identical except for one fatal flaw? An Aurora with a disinterest in loving Matthew. An Aurora who didn’t age. An Aurora who aged too fast. An Aurora with a desire to eat human flesh. What then, what then?

  “I hadn’t,” Ronan lied. He didn’t lie, especially to Adam, but he wanted the conversation to be over.

  “What if you brought another me back? What would you do with the extra Adam?” Adam asked, curious. Unbothered. He wasn’t squeamish and, in any case, it was just a thought exercise to him. His dreams weren’t going to cough up another Ronan.

  But Ronan’s dreams might. He’d lost sleep over this question, wondering if he truly had it in him to kill an unwanted dreamt human. He’d learned to kill in his dreams, of course. The second he realized he didn’t have enough control to prevent unwanted manifestation, he took down everyone in sight, and he’d accordingly woken with his share of corpses. But killing a dream after he’d woken? Killing them once they were real? That felt like a dangerous line to cross.

  “It’s not going to happen,” Ronan had said, “so it doesn’t matter.”

  “I think you ought to assume it’s going to happen at some point and make a plan,” Adam said.

  “It’s not going to happen,” Ronan repeated.

  But the threat had lodged inside him, and now dreams had to be unpopulated to land on the very good dream list. He could risk no more Matthews. No Auroras. Not even any little Opals, who was slightly more creature than human. It was too weighty.

  So, the best dream. This was what happened in the best dream. Ronan was in a car. It was a beautiful car. Beautiful in appearance—long, gleaming hood, glistening black wheels, glaring headlights with teeth-bared matte grill—and also in sound—engine heaving with power, exhaust growling with urgency. Every detail Ronan could see was art. Metal and wood, bone and vines. It was one of those dream objects that didn’t entirely make sense according to waking-world rules.

  The car was already in motion when the dream began. Ronan was driving it. He could see himself in the rearview mirror. He was older, this Ronan in the mirror, his jaw was more squared and stubbled. He wore something leather and cool.

  He didn’t know where he was coming from; the dream wasn’t interested in that. The dream was interested in where the car was going, and this was where the car was going: through a chain-link fence. Across cardboard boxes and plastic containers and toys. Over another little car in the middle of the asphalt, tires disintegrating the other car’s rear window as it went. It drove through a sign for a mattress store. Flattened an inflatable snowman in front of another store. Clipped a billboard, sending it all crashing down behind it.

  It took out bus stops and traffic lights, road signs and mailboxes.

  There were no people in this dream, so there was no screaming. No one to hurt. No one to bring back by accident. There was just the howl of the engine, the thump of the bumper, the grinding apocalypse beneath the tires. Music thumped from the car’s beautiful carved speakers. The whole dream could hear it.

  Finally, Ronan found himself speeding directly toward an identical car with an identical Ronan in it. It took him a moment to realize it wasn’t actually another car; it was the mirrored front of a club. The music from inside drowned out every other sound. It was the sort of music Ronan heard all the time when he was at Aglionby, the stuff that made him feel as if he truly were nothing like other people, not because he was gay or because his father had been murdered or because he could take things out of his dreams, but because he couldn’t bring himself to sing along to the shit other students sang along to. Funny how a handful of people loving a song you couldn’t stand could make you feel inhuman.

  In this dream, the best dream, Ronan and the dreamt car smashed right through the club’s window.

  There were no dancers. Just pounding music, strobe lights, glitter, and ten thousand alcoholic beverages on the floor where there should have been people.

  Ronan began to do donuts.

  The tires squealed; drinks flew; speakers toppled; plastic splintered; metal twisted; glass shivered.

  Destruction drowned out both the club’s music and Ronan’s and it was gorgeous.

  Then Ronan woke up. Heart pounding. Hands still clenched in fists. Ears ringing with remembered sound. Paralyzed. What had he brought back? Only the dream’s furious joy.

  That was the best dream.

  The first thing the dreamers destroyed with Bryde was an exit ramp. The battle was undramatic, uncontested. Once upon a time there was an exit ramp cut deeply into a mountain by bulldozers, a cloverleaf of asphalt imposed upon the wild. And then once upon a little later time, the exit ramp didn’t exist anymore. It was just a pile of rubble that returned the hillside to its natural form, the work of a transient storm dreamt to thrash just beneath the soil. Why did it even need to be there, a new highway, a new cloverleaf, in the middle of nowhere? Because it could be.

  Next there was the dump. Trash piled upon trash. Old groceries rotting, new appliances rusting, plastic bottles bleeding out the remainder of their contents. Ronan had never seen a dump so big, hadn�
�t believed such dumps existed in the United States. He hadn’t imagined there was so much trash in the country, much less in a single dump. It took all night even for a dreamt, blue fire to burn it all, and when the fire took the support buildings and the road leading to the dump, too, the dreamers didn’t stop it. It was only when the otherworldly flames began to creep toward the trailer park below that Bryde spat scornfully and signaled for Ronan to smother it with a quickly dreamt, dissolving blanket.

  The next to go was a brand-new shopping area, which was identical to the shopping area just a few miles away, which was identical to the shopping area just a few miles away, which was identical to the shopping area just a few miles away, which was identical to the shopping area just a few miles away, which was identical to the shopping area just a few miles away. The dreamers arrived and they put on their masks and less than an hour later it was all gone. Dug up. Dug under. A dreamt dirt dragon charged from the ground to destroy and then dissolved just as quickly when the chaos was through.

  After that, the dreamers destroyed an underwater transmission line, a 230 kV line that at once connected generators on opposite sides of a riverbank and also completely disordered the local ley line. As night fell, a school, a swarm, a hurricane of pitch-black dolphins had snaked toward the line. They were difficult to see in the water, since they reflected light in nearly the same way as the river water all around them. They were, after all, made almost entirely of dark ice. They were melting even as they swam toward their dreamt purpose, but not fast enough to ruin their mission. Only enough to chill the river as they dug through the silt and sediment down to the transmission line. Only enough that they could no longer swim at speed as they parted their bottlenoses to reveal shining hungry teeth. Only enough that by the time they had chewed through the work that had taken many months, there was nothing left to see of the dolphins but a few melting hearts at the bottom of the river.

  The dreamers traveled hundreds of miles each day to put distance between themselves and their latest crime. Over and over they drove to a destination, planned how best to destroy it, dreamt the tool of destruction, unleashed it, and then lingered long enough to make sure they’d left no trace of their dreaming behind. They disrupted a convoy of trucks carrying transformers. They aerosolized two acres of unused concrete parking lot outside a dying mall. They filled canals and emptied swimming pools. Everywhere they went looked different when they were gone. Or rather, it looked less different. More like it had before humans arrived.

  When they dreamt, Ronan dreamt of Ilidorin. He dreamt of the stump, and he dreamt of a slowly uncurling green shoot growing from its interior. It was getting stronger.

  Ronan was getting stronger, too.

  “What do you feel?” Bryde asked.

  They sat on the roofline of an abandoned Victorian, looking out over the battered town around it. It was just at sunset, and there was barely enough light to see shapes by natural light. The dreamers would’ve been visible on their perch if anyone had looked up, but no one in this town had looked up for decades.

  “Ronan,” prompted Bryde. “What do you feel?”

  Ronan didn’t answer. It was the kind of night that made him want to run and run and run until he couldn’t catch his breath, but that wasn’t the kind of feeling Bryde meant.

  “I feel like I can still smell that mill,” Hennessy said. “I will smell like it for the rest of my life.”

  The dreamers had just destroyed a pulp mill on the other side of town. It had been one of the worst smells Ronan had ever smelled, and that included the odors at the West Virginia Museum of Living History, the trash dump they’d destroyed, and the bodies he’d buried over the years. He wondered how long it would take people to notice it was gone. The mill. The smell. All of it. Would they notice the silhouette was missing from the horizon before the sun went down? Perhaps tomorrow when they arrived to work, only to discover the mill had been replaced with a meadow. Unless tomorrow was a weekend. Ronan had no idea what day of the week it was. Time worked differently now. Weekends felt like a concept that had been important Before.

  “What do you feel?” Bryde persisted. “Nothing?”

  “This dinosaur,” Ronan said, running his fingers over Chainsaw’s nubbly talons. The raven clutched the peak of the roof beside him and peered off at the disappearing sun, beak parted, as if imagining how good it would’ve tasted. “And the spine of this roof up my—”

  Hennessy gasped.

  Bryde just had time to grab her arm before she tumbled from the roof. Her fingers clung to him as he dragged her back up.

  Ronan didn’t have time to ask what had happened. It hit him next.

  Suddenly, he was electric.

  He was free, his thoughts flying into the air. He was trapped, his body fused to something deep in the earth. He was both these things at once. He felt as if he could do anything, anything he had ever possibly wanted to do, anything except untangle himself from that thing he was wound around. This thing, this thing. This entity, this energy, this whatever-it-was, it was what was making him so powerful, so alive.

  He understood it, he heard it, he was it—

  “Goddamn,” he whispered.

  Bryde smiled.

  It was an altogether different smile than Ronan had ever seen him wear, his light teeth visible in the deepening dark, his eyes half-closed, head thrown back. Euphoric. Relieved.

  “That’s the ley line,” Bryde said.

  Ronan felt it uncurl through him, like vines stretching toward the sun. It was the humming possibility of his dreams, the sense of ever-widening options, but he was awake.

  With a glorious cry, Chainsaw threw herself from the roof and soared high up into the air. Part of him felt like he might be able to join her.

  “Why is it doing that?” Hennessy asked in a small voice. Bryde was still holding her steady on the roof, a hand gripped very firmly around her upper arm.

  “It’s a surge,” he said. “It won’t last. If we are lucky, we will feel another. Perhaps a third. The heartbeat of a sick planet coming round.”

  Nightwash felt a million miles away, like something that could never touch Ronan. He was the night and he was the world and he was as infinite as them both.

  Chainsaw cawed up above and Ronan spontaneously leapt to his feet, keeping his balance easily on the ridge of the roof. He cawed back to his dreamt raven at the top of his lungs. The sound echoed all around the roofs of this dead town, making it sound like there was a whole flock of ravens, a whole flock of Ronans, even though there was just the pair of them.

  “It’s so strong,” Hennessy said, even though it was already beginning to wane.

  The world was changing. It was becoming a place someone like him had been made for.

  Bryde said, “This is only the beginning.”

  Carmen Farooq-Lane hadn’t told Lock about Jordan Hennessy’s sword.

  In the commotion of Rhiannon Martin’s death, she’d hastily shoved it through one of the galvanized fans at the end of the turkey barn. Later, after they’d all been briefed and the area was being cleaned up, she’d snuck it back into the rental car.

  It was not the first secret she’d kept from the Moderators, but it was certainly the most dramatic. The sword was nearly as tall as she was, and wondrously and impossibly made. It felt like an extension of her arm, no more or less heavy than her own hand. The hilt was stunning, smooth silvery metal engraved with the words from chaos, and when one was gripping it, one felt the words even when they weren’t visible. The blade was made of the night sky, a sentence absurd to say out loud but even more absurd to process. It did not look like a sword-shaped window into the night sky. It did not look like a blade painted to look like the night sky. It was the night sky. That was all there was to it. When she swung it—and she did, an embarrassing number of times, to Liliana’s amusement, taking it out in living rooms and hotel rooms and in the backyards of places where they stayed—it trailed starlight and moonlight, comets sparking and universe dus
t shimmering. It could slice through just about anything, but slice wasn’t exactly the right word, either. The blade won. It won like the night won, like the darkness won. It simply descended. Farooq-Lane suspected there was only one other weapon that would stop it: the sun blade last seen strapped to Ronan Lynch’s back.

  “It suits you,” Liliana said with an amused smile when Farooq-Lane took it out at the latest short-term rental cottage. The blade cast jabbering, checkered patterns of light through the dormant jasmine-covered pergola they stood under. It was a little chilly to sit outside but Liliana did anyway, to be close to Farooq-Lane, tucked into a faded wicker chair, knitting and bobbing one of her feet in a good-humored way. She was in her middle age now, the prime of her life. Her hair shone at this age, the many-sided tone that was red hair, in its own way impossible as a dream thing. As always, she’d tamed it with an ever-present blue fabric band, but the knot at the base of her pale neck was coming loose. The skin there always seemed as if it would be very soft.

  Farooq-Lane swung from chaos again, studying it, trying to understand both the sword and her fascination. “A weapon can’t suit someone.”

  But it sort of did, and she wasn’t sure how she felt about that. It was a dream, and she’d been working very hard to kill those for months.

  Farooq-Lane used the sword to write CARMEN in the dark. This really was a very nice cottage they were staying in at the moment, a sweet little bungalow with this pergola and a koi pond and vegetable garden behind it. All of the cottages were nice. They had to be. That was Liliana’s requirement to work for the Moderators. She had to be put up in places that felt like homes and she had to be put up in them with Farooq-Lane. A simple transaction. Stability for her present in exchange for visions of their future.

  Farooq-Lane’s relationship with the Moderators was supposed to be as equally simple. In exchange for her services as a Moderator, she received a sense of purpose. And it was simple, she told herself. Once one found out the world was in danger, who could walk away from that?