Mister Impossible

by Maggie Stiefvater

  “Dreams,” Declan said.

  Adam nodded grimly.

  “Whatever happened, this pulse, it was strong enough to wake up these dreams. Long enough for them to find a way out of their cases in the museum to get over here. Not long enough to keep them awake.”

  “How did you find out about this?”

  Adam carefully swept the beetles back under the bench. “I was doing readings and I got lost in one of the cards when it surged. After I got myself back, I came out looking for where it was coming from, just in time to see them crawling across the road here.”

  Lost himself. Got himself back. There were entire emotional tomes in between those words.

  “All right,” Declan said. “So the city woke up. For a while.” He hadn’t told Adam about the sweetmetals, and Paranoid Declan was loath to give away more information, but he asked, carefully, “Why do you think it has anything to do with Ronan? Could it be from a power source an outsider’s bringing in?”

  Adam frowned at him, and Declan was nearly certain he knew Declan was withholding information. Adam, as a secretive creature, understood secrets. But Adam just asked, “How much do you know about what Ronan’s been doing?”

  Declan shook his head. He knew only that Ronan, Hennessy, and Bryde were interfering with the Moderators’ attempt to kill other dreamers. That had seemed noble. Useful. An acceptable outlet for Ronan’s abilities and rebelliousness. Perhaps he had just wanted it to be. He’d wanted fewer ducklings for once.

  Adam said, “There’s no concrete evidence, but Ronan and the others have been implicated in over twenty incidents of industrial espionage.”

  Surprise was not the emotion Declan was feeling, so some part of him must have known. Suspected, anyway. This was the other shoe dropping.

  “What kind of industrial espionage?”

  “I got access to some of the agencies’ documents,” Adam said casually. This, Declan thought, was why those kids in the waffle line couldn’t truly be Adam’s bosom friends. Adam was reading intelligence documents about his boyfriend and they were googling celebrity chefs. “They’ve been taking down power grids. Server farms. Corporate waste sites. That power outage a few weeks ago, the one that affected those tens of thousands in Delmarva? That was them. Transmission line. The price tag is in the billions.”

  “Billions,” echoed Declan. It was a lot to take in. “What’s the goal?”

  “The Moderators don’t know, or at least they haven’t put it in writing. I think I can guess, though. Overnight, I compared the dates and times of the espionage with the surges, and they match up. They match up exactly. I think Ronan and the others have been working to clear obstacles from the ley lines to make them stronger. Every time they do, that creates a chain reaction that means this line under Boston and Cambridge, this line that was dormant—it surges, too. Has Matthew been having fewer of those strange episodes lately?”

  Declan didn’t know. He hadn’t asked. Matthew hadn’t said. Theoretically Declan had been thinking nonstop about a sweetmetal to secure his future, but actually, this was what Declan had been thinking nonstop about: Jordan Hennessy.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” Adam said. “He should be feeling great every time one of these surges happen.”

  Declan didn’t see the problem with that, and he said so.

  Adam pointed to the beetles. “You don’t see a problem with that?”

  “I see something that means eventually Matthew could stay awake on his own, am I right?”

  Adam’s voice was patient, as if Declan were a child. “Multiply that times thousands. Imagine a world where all the things the Ronan Lynches of the planet have dreamt over the years begin to wake up. Over the decades. Centuries. Think about legends that could be talking about dreams. Think about all the monsters. Dragons. Minotaurs. How many of those things are just stories and how many of those things were dreams that are sleeping now because the dreamers died long ago? Right now, Ronan’s limited by how strong the ley line is. How many Ronans are there? What would they do without any limits? Stop thinking about Matthew for a second and think.”

  And now it began to spool out in Declan’s mind, a future where dreamers with ambition broke the economy, changed the art world, dreamt escalating weapons. Niall and Ronan’s skill hadn’t been threatening because it had been limited both by ability and by scope—they wanted to live in the world as it was. But someone with absolute power and no checks or balances, Declan thought, someone with ambition …

  “This isn’t about just keeping Matthew awake,” Adam said. “This is a bigger plan. This is a strategy.”

  “That doesn’t sound like Ronan.”

  “Why do you think I said we needed to talk about Bryde?”

  Bryde.

  “Declan,” Adam said, “the Moderators have special psychics. Visionaries, they call them. They’ve seen the future, and they think Ronan and the others are going to dream the apocalypse. That’s why they’re trying to kill him and Hennessy and Bryde. They think they’re going to end the world.”

  Adam went on, his voice low. “There’s something out there. A thing that would end the world if it could, a kind of collective nightmare. I saw it the last time I scryed. A dreamer could bring it back. They wouldn’t even have to be trying to do it on purpose. You’ve seen what Ronan can do. Just one bad dream with enough ley energy to make it real, and then it’s game over. The Moderators have a point, is what I’m trying to say. Think about it. They have a point. And that’s even if there’s no bigger plan than just making the ley lines powerful again.”

  For a moment they were quiet. Declan sat on the concrete bench and looked back down the street at Harvard. He thought about how, at the beginning of the semester, Ronan had come here to look for apartments, and Declan had really believed that his loud brother might possibly live a quiet life like that, for Adam’s sake.

  “Has he called you?” Declan asked, knowing the answer already, not because of anything Adam had said, but because of all the things he hadn’t.

  Adam just looked at him.

  “Do you trust Ronan?” Declan asked. His brother was many things, he thought, but murderer he was not. Even at his worst, it was only himself he’d wanted to destroy, and that hadn’t seemed to be the Ronan he heard on the phone. Ronan’s sin was immediacy, not villainy.

  Adam looked pensive. “I don’t trust Bryde.”

  “That doesn’t answer the question.”

  But Adam just flicked a remaining beetle back under the bench and turned his face into the coming sunset.

  Declan understood then that Adam Parrish was allowing him not much closer than he’d let those friends in the waffle truck line. This was still just a corner of the situation. A very different corner than he would share with his Harvard buddies, but still. Need-to-know basis. No more. Actual closeness and truth had been reserved for only one person, and Declan’s relationship to that person was the only reason he was being given even this much of a look at Adam’s concerns.

  “What do you want me to do about it?” Declan asked.

  Adam said, “Is he taking your calls?”

  Growing up, the Lynch family hadn’t talked about the dreaming.

  It seemed unfathomable now, that their entire livelihood had been based upon dreams, that two-fifths of them had been dreams, that two-fifths of them had been dreamers, and yet they did not talk about it. Niall Lynch sold dreams on the black market, and Declan took calls from buyers for dreams, and yet they did not talk about it. Aurora was a dream, and Niall had always known that if something happened to him, the children would immediately become orphans of a sleeping mother, and yet they did not talk about it. Ronan accidentally dreamt a brother into being, and had to teach himself how to prevent it from happening again, and yet they did not talk about it.

  Ronan had thought there was no one else like him in the world, and it had nearly killed him, and yet they didn’t talk about it.

  Looking back now, Ronan tried again and again to understa
nd it from Niall and Aurora’s point of view. Perhaps they thought the children would be less likely to betray the secret if they didn’t have words for it. Perhaps they thought Ronan might grow out of the dreaming if he didn’t pay attention to it. Perhaps they had lost trust in humans so thoroughly that they numbered their sons among the untrustworthy.

  He didn’t remember the first time he’d dreamt something into being. He didn’t remember dreaming Matthew. He did remember, however, one of the only times they talked about his dreaming.

  Ronan had been young. He didn’t remember if Matthew existed yet. Memories were like dreams that way—they skipped the parts that weren’t interesting to them at the time. He had been playing in the back fields at the Barns, the deep sloping pasture that now contained the pond he and Adam had dug. He was young enough that he wasn’t allowed out alone, so Aurora had been there with him, reading a book under the shade of a tree, laughing to herself every so often.

  How idyllic it must have been, he thought now. Young Ronan, tumbling through the waist-high grass. Beautiful Aurora, sprawled in one of her light dresses in the grass, hair golden as Matthew’s or Bryde’s, a book in one hand, the other finding grapes out of the basket she’d brought with them. Overhead, the clouds in the summer blue had been as inviting and drowsy as an afternoon comforter.

  Ronan had fallen asleep. He did not remember this; he only remembered the waking. He remembered waking in the grass and being unable to move. Not his legs asleep, but all of him, his mind looking down at his body sprawled in the grass near his beautiful, sweet mother.

  And then the memory skipped to him plucking something from the grass to show to Aurora. It was a book like the one she’d been reading, but much smaller, sized for his child palms.

  “What do we have here?” she asked him, putting hers away.

  “Open it.”

  Aurora let the tiny volume fall open. Inside there were not pages, but a summer sky graced with towering white clouds. She poked her fingers into the book and watched the clouds part around them. The sky was in the book but it was also over the book, a page and a sky, two-dimensional and three-dimensional at once as it towered upward.

  “Look at you, Mr. Impossible,” Aurora whispered fondly. She opened and closed it several times to see if the sky would change. It did. From day to night to day again. Sun to stars to sun. “Now let’s bury it.”

  “Bury it,” echoed Ronan. He wanted to show it to Declan. To Niall. He wanted to put it on his shelf.

  Aurora stood up and brushed the grass off her skirt. “Little things like this are best as secrets. It’s very important to remember that.”

  It didn’t feel important to remember that. It felt important to show it to someone. Ronan tried to understand. “For how long?”

  She kissed the top of his head. “Forever.”

  Forever?

  “This seems like a really nice place,” Hennessy said. “Are we here to destroy it?”

  Burrito had just driven past acres of dried, unharvested cornfields to arrive at a house old enough to have a name on a brick pillar by the drive: Barnhill. The cornfields went right up to a neat little yard, and then there was the square white house, and beyond that was dried marsh grass, and then, presumably, were marshes, and eventually the sea. The entire property had a haunted, lonely loveliness. One would not find it by accident.

  Ronan agreed with Hennessy. It did seem like a really nice place. It reminded him of the Barns, and he did not want to destroy it.

  Bryde didn’t answer, just gazed at the house as they pulled the invisible car up to the separate garage. He had not been quite the same since the server farm, although Ronan couldn’t put his finger on what had changed. He wanted to say that it was something like an additional gravity, an investment in the task, but no one had ever been as invested in this as Bryde. He seemed withdrawn from them. Introspective. It was, Ronan thought, as if he were angry or disappointed with Ronan or Hennessy, although he couldn’t think of what they might have done to vex him.

  “Get your things,” he said finally, already opening his door. “No, not just your sword. Your bags.”

  “We’re staying here?” Ronan asked in surprise. The lights were on inside the house and it had a decidedly lived-in look to it. Not Bryde’s style. Not his style at all.

  “If we’re murdering people and taking their house,” Hennessy said, “can I eat first? Actually, I guess I could eat them. I’m hungry enough to eat a baby. Are there going to be babies?”

  But Bryde was already off and nearly to the porch of the house, even more disinterested in her banter than he had been at the beginning of all this. With a growl, Ronan shouldered his bag and the scabbard with vexed to nightmare and followed after. By the time Hennessy climbed the two steps to the front door to join them, they could already hear footsteps from inside the house, lots of them.

  Ronan and Hennessy exchanged a look behind Bryde’s back. She looked as bemused as he did.

  Then the door opened and a short woman with light brown skin and dark brown hair clipped back from her face stood there. Even though her appearance had little in common with Hennessy’s, she nonetheless reminded Ronan of what Hennessy had looked like when he first met her: exhausted and frightened. Just like Hennessy, she hid the exhaustion and fright away beneath a very different expression, but it still leaked out around the eyes, the tight smile. When she saw them, a little bit of the exhaustion and fright went away, replaced with curiosity and wariness.

  Good, thought Ronan. That was the correct response to the three of them showing up on one’s doorway.

  She looked Bryde up and down and then she looked over her shoulder. “Is this him?”

  Behind her, several voices rose in a chorus of youthful excitement.

  “He’s here!”

  “Is it him?”

  “I said he was here? I said that already.”

  “It’s Bryde!”

  “What about Jordan Hennessy?”

  “Yes! I see her! I see her!”

  “And Ronan Lynch?”

  “He’s tall and bald! He has the sword!”

  The children had rushed up behind their mother like a wave blustering to shore, stopping just short of breaking out onto the porch. Five happy faces in five different heights. They hissed and poked at each other and pointed at Hennessy and Ronan standing behind Bryde.

  Ronan and Hennessy exchanged another look.

  This was not what Ronan would have considered the correct response to the three of them showing up on one’s doorway.

  But he kind of liked it.

  “You might as well come in so they can paw at you,” said the woman. “Not that you’re here for me, but I’m—”

  “Angelica,” Bryde said as he stepped past her into the cramped hallway. “Angelica Aldana-Leon. Yes. I know. They told me.” As her mouth dropped open, he lifted a closed fist and said to the five children, “Presents, but not until you tell me what they are.”

  “Are they the seeds?”

  “Are you real?”

  “He said not to ask that!”

  Bryde opened his closed hand and let a single seed drop from it into each of their palms. “Now, how do you make them grow?”

  They conferred like it was a game show. Then one whispered the answer to the other, and together they clapped the seeds in their hands. Each immediately exploded into a bright blue lily, and just then, Ronan realized, stupidly, that they were all dreamers, each of these children, and Bryde must have come to them in their dreams, too, and shown them these dreamt seeds he was going to give them.

  Ronan searched inside himself for the same jealousy he’d first felt over Rhiannon, but that wasn’t what he felt at all.

  “The children told me that it’s you who have stopped the …” Angelica asked them, making a gesture to her eyes and nose. The nightwash.

  “The slop!” shouted one of the boys.

  “Thank you. Thank you so much. I don’t know how to thank you for what you’re doin
g, so just, thank you, you have saved them,” Angelica said, with feeling.

  “You’re welcome,” Bryde said. “I don’t know how long it will hold, but we will keep working.”

  Ronan stared at the kids, who stared back up at him. Now he understood why Angelica looked frightened and exhausted. Dreamers. Little dreamers, like he had been once, but growing up in a world where a lack of ley energy was killing them. He wondered how many dreamers had died of the nightwash without knowing anyone else like them existed, or knowing that they could save themselves by moving to a place with more energy.

  This was why they were doing what they were doing.

  He looked down. One of the kids had his hand and was shaking it, trying to get him to follow. Another was giggling furiously as Chainsaw sat on her shoulder, working hard to be extraordinarily gentle with her talons.

  Same, Chainsaw, he thought.

  A third hugged his leg, and without thinking, he draped a hand over her head, his unconscious remembering both Matthew and Opal. He had forgotten what it was like to hug and be hugged during these last few weeks. It felt like ages since these small comforts.

  Angelica said something in brisk Spanish and the children began to argue noisily among themselves. In English, she told them, “The children will show you where you can put your things. I’m sorry, it is bunk beds for you two boys. We don’t have much room.”

  “That’s all right,” Bryde said. “It will be nice to have a shower and a meal for a night.”

  Hennessy was whisked away and Bryde and Ronan left in a bedroom with the promised bunk beds. There was nothing fancy about the beds—they were just raw wood screwed together with a can-do attitude and mismatched blankets—but the entire situation was homier than any place they had stayed since leaving.

  Bryde didn’t seem to care. No sooner had he silently set his bag on the lower bunk than he turned to go.

  “Wait a second,” Ronan said. “Wait a damn second.”

  Bryde paused and Ronan nearly lost his nerve. He hadn’t expected Bryde to listen.