Mister Impossible

by Maggie Stiefvater

  “I’m trusting you,” Farooq-Lane told Liliana.

  One sword draw, one second, one death. When it came to it, she could kill someone, she thought. To save the world. She had stood by and helped the Moderators kill many others, after all. She couldn’t erase that, just try to make it matter. One person, one Zed. One sword. She could do it.

  It wasn’t twenty-three people. It was one.

  “It will turn out all right,” Liliana said gently.

  “What happened in the vision?” Farooq-Lane said. “What did I do? Where was it?”

  “It will turn out all right,” Liliana repeated.

  Five minutes after Farooq-Lane got to the James P. Kelleher Rose Garden, the Moderators found her.

  “Did you think we weren’t having you followed, Carmen?” Lock rumbled with disappointment. It was hard to tell if he was disappointed in her working without them or not covering her tracks. He held a take-out coffee from the café she’d met Declan at, and Farooq-Lane couldn’t stop staring at it. She’d been careful. She was sure she’d been careful. “You’re a lot easier to track than a Zed in an invisible car. You know why? You obey the law.”

  “I have a plan here,” Farooq-Lane said. “We want the same thing.”

  Lock cast a heavy glance at Hennessy’s sword. It was hooded safely away in its shoulder scabbard but its identity was clear, the hilt shouting from chaos. “And it’s a plan you think you could execute better cowboy style? I respect what you did here, Carmen, but we can’t risk you taking point on this. We’ll take it from here. The team’s all here. Thanks for the good work.”

  “I made a promise that I’d only take down Bryde,” Farooq-Lane said desperately. “I intend to keep that promise.”

  “You’d risk the world on that?”

  Farooq-Lane repeated, “I intend to keep that promise. Let me do this. Please.”

  “How about this,” Lock offered. “How about you let us help you keep that promise? Like you said. We want the same thing, and you need our eyes anyway.”

  It wasn’t as if she had a choice. There was no time. She was outnumbered.

  We want the same thing. But it was only past Farooq-Lane who truly believed this now. Present Farooq-Lane wasn’t sure. And future Farooq-Lane—unclear.

  “Okay,” Farooq-Lane said.

  She explained the plan. It was a hasty thing, constructed with very few data points. Declan’s address and time. Liliana’s description of her vision. Farooq-Lane’s understanding of what Hennessy’s sword could do if wielded without hesitation.

  The plan was skeletal in its simplicity. At the center of the rose garden was a small fountain, a little over a foot deep. It was as far from large trees as one could hope for in the city; there was no evidence that Bryde could receive information from roses. Carmen Farooq-Lane was going to climb into the fountain, lie down in the nearly frozen water, and breathe sips of air through a straw that reached to the surface. She would wait there in the inhuman temperature until the Moderators texted her that the Zeds had arrived in the garden. And then she would leap from the water with Hennessy’s sword like an avenging angel, killing Bryde with a single moonlit stroke.

  Her phone was only rated for an hour of underwater use, but the cold would kill her before that anyway.

  “Is this how you saw it?” she asked Liliana again.

  “It will be all right, Carmen.”

  It will be all right.

  It did not feel all right as she lay in the bottom of the fountain. She tried to keep her hand from shaking as she held the breathing tube steady in her frigid lips. She focused on a black feather that floated on the surface of the water above her.

  She was waiting to kill. Waiting to kill. Waiting to kill. She had to think of him as not human. As not living. As simply a tree to hew down.

  The trees were on his side, though, which meant the trees had feelings, too. Nothing was simple anymore.

  She was that feather. She was that feather.

  Her phone buzzed against her.

  The Zeds were here.

  Four seconds passed before she could animate her cold body. She plunged from the water, sword already alive with light and swinging.

  The blade missed Bryde by several inches.

  Ronan Lynch’s raven screamed into the air.

  Bryde’s eyes met hers.

  This was wrong. This was already wrong. It had to be immediate, or it wouldn’t work. She couldn’t fight them. Anything beyond the single stroke got messy, and anything messy meant she couldn’t guarantee her promise.

  Ronan had his sunfire sword out in a second, but Bryde snatched it from him.

  “Get out of here!” snapped Bryde. “You know what to do!”

  Farooq-Lane didn’t have time to see if Ronan obeyed, because Bryde fell upon her with vexed to nightmare.

  They fought.

  They fought.

  The rose garden was alight with the weapons’ eerie glow.

  Farooq-Lane’s hands were so frozen that she could barely feel the hilt, but it seemed to her the sword wanted her to succeed. Even as her fingers were too numb to guide it, the blade chose an effective path for itself. However, Bryde’s blade wanted him to succeed, too, and so a battle waged. It did not matter that neither Farooq-Lane nor Bryde were swordsmen. The swords were made to fight, and they would fight, and Farooq-Lane and Bryde would wield them.

  Rosebushes shredded.

  Stone planters cleaved.

  Trellises sprung in all directions like split rib cages.

  But neither the sunfire blade nor the starlit blade took any damage.

  She had been right when she guessed the only match for FROM CHAOS was this other sword.

  She was tangentially aware that outside the vivid light of the blades, Moderators and Zeds fought. Gunfire sounded. The swords’ furious dreamt light both warmed Farooq-Lane’s chilled body and repelled bullets, slicing them as easily as they sliced anything else.

  Bullets!

  She was breaking her promise.

  Declan Lynch had come to her and asked for her help and gotten her word. She’d really believed it when she promised him Ronan would be untouched. The Moderators had been killing Zeds and now they were going to kill her integrity, too.

  This felt more intolerable than anything else to this point. She’d promised.

  “I only want you,” Farooq-Lane shouted to Bryde as the swords met again. “If you really want the others to get away, you’ll give up. We know it’s you. I know it’s you.”

  Bryde said, “You don’t know anything you think you know, Carmen Farooq-Lane.”

  “Don’t play your mind games with me!” she shouted.

  “I don’t play games,” Bryde said. “I just turn down the volume on the shit that doesn’t matter.”

  Suddenly, she was hit from behind.

  The blow hit the middle of her spine so sharply that her knees buckled. There was no arguing with it. She was down on her knees, and then she was down on her face. Gravel bit her lips. She felt the winning sword tumbling from her hand. She felt her vision flicker.

  She felt everything going wrong.

  Gunfire speckled like the sound of castanets behind a dancer. She heard someone shout.

  She had trusted Liliana. It was supposed to be all right.

  Three Zeds bolted from the rose garden.

  They were on foot; they had to be. One of them had smashed their dreamt hoverboard across Farooq-Lane’s back. This was why her spine stung, why she still felt pain shooting up to her neck and her fingertips. This was why Hennessy’s sword burned the dry grass a few inches away from her as she gingerly sat up.

  This was how Bryde had gotten away.

  She could hear shouts, more gunfire, sirens, all moving farther and farther from her. This was wrong. All wrong. The Moderators were driving the Zeds to ground and breaking her promise all in one. Declan Lynch had trusted her. She had trusted Liliana. She’d trusted herself.

  The deepest wound was one she didn
’t even understand. Bryde’s voice said in her head: You don’t know what you think you know.

  Just words. Just words from a Zed. Then why did she want to cry?

  Liliana leaned to help her up.

  “It will be all right,” she said.

  Two of them stood in the rose garden. Farooq-Lane leaned over and replaced Hennessy’s sword in the scabbard. The grass beneath it was a burned ruin. The entire garden was a ruin. These old roses torn up. The gravel path shredded deeply. The fountain tinted an ugly shade with just a bit of someone’s blood.

  Everything was worse off than when they’d gotten there.

  The Moderators had vanished, chasing after the Zeds, but Farooq-Lane knew it didn’t matter. Bryde would get away. The second her first swing had missed him, he was always going to get away. She’d known that.

  “I trusted you,” she said to Liliana.

  Liliana gestured for Farooq-Lane to look behind her.

  One figure returned quietly to the rose garden.

  There was a proud line to the shoulders, to the lifted chin. A coiled power to the walk, which was more like a stalk. The eyes were intense and bright. But the shape of the mouth was at odds with the rest of it. Something about the expression there was miserable. Vulnerable.

  Jordan Hennessy.

  “You have my sword,” she said, stopping among the ruined thorns of the old roses.

  Warily, Farooq-Lane stepped in front of Liliana. She put her hand on the hilt warningly. Her heart was beating fast again; who knew what deadly dreams this Zed might be carrying. “I don’t want to fight. We’re not here for you.”

  “I know. I’m here for you.” Hennessy made a big performance of turning her pockets inside out and showing the interior of her leather jacket. Then she held her hands out on either side of her like a reveal. “I’m giving up. This is what it looks like when I give up.”

  “How do I know this isn’t a trap?” Farooq-Lane asked.

  “Life’s a trap,” Hennessy said in a sort of bleak, funny way.

  Liliana stepped out from behind Farooq-Lane, her face gentle and unsurprised, and Farooq-Lane realized that Liliana had known this was how it was going to happen. She’d seen this in her vision. This moment. Not Farooq-Lane slicing through Bryde. She’d let Farooq-Lane climb into that freezing water, knowing that she would fail to stop Bryde when she sprang out. She’d known it was a ridiculous plan and had let it play through for this moment. Not killing Bryde, but acquiring this Zed, one more Zed than any other plan had ever managed.

  Would it have all worked the same way if Farooq-Lane had been in on it from the beginning?

  Trust was a hard thing.

  “It’s all right,” Liliana told Hennessy. She walked straight up to her as if she wasn’t one of the three most dangerous Zeds in the country, and she clasped one of Hennessy’s hands with such warmth that the Zed stared at her. “We all finally found each other.”

  Match heads flaring. Plastic melting. Paper twisting. Gasoline smoking. Anything can burn if you hit it hard enough to jam oxygen atoms into its core. Ronan’s heart incinerated.

  I’m driving, Bryde had said. You’re unfit.

  He was right.

  As the Boston skyline got smaller in the invisible car’s rearview mirror, Ronan kept blinking as if things would get clear, and they never got clear. Or maybe they were too clear. Every streetlight, every skeleton tree, every billboard etched itself in his vision, every detail perfectly visible so that he couldn’t concentrate on any one part of it. He sat bolt upright in the passenger seat, his leg jiggling. If he were driving, he’d mash that gas pedal down and see how much speed he’d really dreamt into this thing. If he were driving, he’d smash this whole car into something so it could burn too.

  His phone had been ringing continuously for the past ten minutes.

  Furiously, he chucked it onto the dash. It pinged off the windshield and slid across the dash, then slipped down by Bryde’s footwell.

  Only one person had known where they were going to be.

  Only one person.

  Declan.

  Bryde wordlessly leaned to get the little phone without looking, then dropped it in Ronan’s palm.

  How many minutes had Declan waited before betraying Ronan to the Moderators? Maybe he had already done it before he got in touch with Ronan at the Aldana-Leons’. While Ronan was meeting the little dreamers whose lives he’d saved, Declan was making plans with the Mods. Casually bringing Ronan in for them. Knowing Ronan always came when called.

  “Either talk to him or silence it,” Bryde said. “Make a decision.”

  Ronan clipped the phone to his ear and answered it. “What.”

  “Thank God,” Declan said. “Where are you?”

  “Like I will ever tell you that again. You fucking blew it, asshole. New low, even for you. Was it thirty pieces of silver or did you get them to adjust it up for inflation?”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I wish that was true. I wish to God it was. You’re the only one who knew where we were going to be. Fuck! You’re always hustling. Negotiating for the greater part of nothing. You’re like a broker for irrelevance.”

  “Hey now—” Declan started.

  “All you care about is finding something to keep Matthew awake. To keep your life in place. You watch the world screw us over on a large scale over and over, and—all I needed was for you to stay out of the way. I never asked for anything else. Just stay the hell out of the way.”

  “I wasn’t trying to stop you.”

  Ronan looked out the window but now it was the opposite of before; his eyes weren’t taking in anything. He saw the rose garden again and again. Encountering not Matthew walking through the trellis, but a woman flying at them with Hennessy’s stolen sword in hand. “Were you just willing to take the risk they might kill me, too?”

  “I was doing it for you.”

  Ronan laughed. He laughed, and laughed, and laughed. It wasn’t funny. Nothing was funny.

  When he had stopped, Declan said, “I had to get you away from him. The risk was worth it to get you away from him.” When Ronan didn’t reply, he said flatly, “They didn’t get him, did they.”

  Behind the wheel, Bryde’s expression didn’t change. He looked neither angry nor surprised. He knew Declan had betrayed him, but he had not said a word against him. He hadn’t said much at all, since they escaped.

  “You’re still with him,” Declan said. It wasn’t a question. “You’ve left the city.”

  Ronan knew when silence was the meanest thing to deploy and he understood that now was the time.

  He let Declan sit with the truth.

  After nearly a minute, when Ronan wasn’t sure if Declan was really still there but refused to say You still there? Declan finally said, “He’s dangerous, Ronan. They’re not wrong about him. I know you’re not like that. I know you wouldn’t kill people. I know you care about your future. About Matthew. About Adam. About—”

  Ronan hung up on him.

  For several long minutes the car was silent. Ronan’s mind turned over the rose garden again. Not the beginning, this time, but the end. When he and Bryde had run, and Hennessy hadn’t.

  “Are you going to do it or not?” Bryde asked softly. “Make a decision.”

  Ronan wasn’t sure how he knew exactly what he’d been thinking, but he wasn’t wrong. He rubbed his finger on his ear by the phone, thinking, deciding, and then he told the dreamt phone to dial another number.

  It was time.

  “Ronan?” Adam asked, surprised. He had picked up immediately, even though the display name would have just looked like nonsense.

  “Why didn’t you text back?”

  “Text … back? You didn’t call. It’s been weeks.”

  “But why didn’t you text back?”

  There was quiet. Almost quiet. Wherever he was, Adam was moving locations; there was the sound of a door closing. “I was on a motorcycle. Then I was ta
king an exam. Then I was probably, I don’t know, sleeping. I don’t remember. I came to see you, I was making time best I could. It wasn’t that long. I did text back. How could I know that you were going to ditch your phone? Ronan, you didn’t call.”

  His accent was gone. It was like talking to a stranger. Ronan had thought this would feel different. Or maybe he didn’t. He didn’t know. His chest was still burning. Fire roared through him, right to the ends of his hands and toes. “I’m calling now.”

  “I didn’t know what was happening,” Adam said. “I didn’t know what you were doing, if you were even alive. I didn’t know if we were … if it … what …”

  Ronan repeated, “I’m calling now. I need to see you.”

  “You’re here?” Adam said, even more surprised than he had been when he first picked up. “Oh.”

  There was something about that Oh that Ronan didn’t like the shape of. It seemed sad. Not as if Adam was sad when he said it. But more like something about that Oh was going to make Ronan sad. But he plunged ahead anyway. “Can you let us lie low for a few hours while we figure out what’s going on with Hennessy?”

  Adam didn’t reply right away. Then he said, “Who’s ‘us’?”

  “Me and Bryde. They have—they have Hennessy, I think.” Ronan knew this was a lie. Or at least a partial truth. Bryde hadn’t seen it, but Ronan had. He’d seen Hennessy turn around. He’d let her. God, everything was going to shit.

  Adam said, very precisely, “You can come lie low.” Then, in case Ronan hadn’t understood him, he repeated, “You.”

  “How big of a douche do you think I am?”

  “The Lace is afraid of him, Ronan. I am, too. Let him take this heat.”

  And then Ronan understood why the Oh had made him so sad. He’d known it subconsciously before, but now he knew it clearly: Adam had known Declan was betraying the dreamers. He had known the Moderators would be waiting in the rose garden.

  They’d all been in on it.

  Part of Ronan was here in this invisible car racing away from his family, but part of Ronan was also in that memory of being curled in Ilidorin as he nearly lost himself to nightwash for good. Bryde had tried to warn them about the others when he first introduced them to Ilidorin, and Ronan and Hennessy had blown him off. They’d been so offended by his contempt for the dreamt phones, but now Ronan understood it exactly. Only, the truth was worse than what Bryde had warned. It wasn’t simply that Declan and Adam didn’t want to leave their own lives to come fight his battle with him. They actively wanted to stop the battle altogether.