Mister Impossible

by Maggie Stiefvater

  They wanted the world to change just enough to keep Ronan alive. Alive, but not living. That was good enough for them.

  It wasn’t good enough for him.

  “Ronan, you know what I’m saying’s true,” Adam said. “You know what’s going on here. If you think about it, you have to—”

  Ronan hung up on him, too.

  He plucked the dreamt phone from his ear, rolled down the window, and threw it out as hard as he could.

  Then he leaned his head back against the seat as they drove out of the city with one less dreamer than they’d arrived with.

  Twenty minutes.

  Alarm.

  Twenty minutes.

  Alarm.

  Twenty minutes.

  Alarm.

  Twenty minutes.

  Alarm.

  That was how Hennessy had been living at the beginning of all this, and that’s how she had been living since she left the house with the young dreamers.

  She set the timer on her dreamt phone, and twenty minutes later, when it went off, she set it again. She had to wake up enough between each alarm to make sure she didn’t fall back into a deep sleep. It could not be an eight-hour sleep interrupted dozens of times. It had to be dozens of sleeps for eight hours.

  “But that’s not survivable,” Carmen Farooq-Lane said. “Or fair.”

  Farooq-Lane was a very put together sort of young woman, so put together it was difficult to discern her true age. When she said it, it seemed obvious. Like it made sense. Like the situation had been stripped of emotion, taken down to the studs, and revealed as unsound. Of course it was not survivable. Of course it was not fair.

  “They shouldn’t have made so light of the Lace,” Liliana said in her sweet old-lady voice. “It was never going to be as easy as simply asking it to go away.”

  Liliana the Visionary was a very put together sort of old woman, so put together it was difficult to discern her true age, too. When she said it, it also seemed obvious, although Hennessy found this statement more difficult to accept. Ronan and Bryde had tried so hard to get Hennessy to just shunt the Lace out of her dreams, and they’d told her so many times she was simply clinging to it. Whatever else the Lace was, it was also her fault. And they’d seen it, so surely they knew.

  But that wasn’t what Farooq-Lane and Liliana seemed to believe.

  The three women were on the second floor of a convoluted, historical teahouse, in a small room filled with overstuffed chairs, beanbags, end tables, and travel books. Plinking music played overhead. They had it to themselves. It was very intimate and safe-feeling, which was the opposite of everything Hennessy had been doing for the past few weeks. Past few years. Farooq-Lane had driven them there as Liliana, in the passenger seat, used Farooq-Lane’s phone to search for an appropriate place to talk. It was a very different experience from Hennessy’s previous travel. When looking for good places to crash and discuss plans, Bryde and Ronan would not have filtered their searches for “warm ambiance” and “free parking.” It was clear from watching Farooq-Lane and Liliana that they had traveled together a lot and that they were both comfort-loving creatures.

  It was also clear they had crushes on each other.

  “This is all very life-affirming,” Hennessy told them from her place in a beanbag, “enriching, and all that, but what of it? So if it’s not fair, and it’s not easy, it’s still there. There’s still this thing hanging over me every time I dream, and if Ronan and Bryde have their way, I won’t be able to stop it.”

  Liliana murmured something into Farooq-Lane’s ear, which made Farooq-Lane’s beautiful face go consternated. They both looked at Hennessy.

  “So I understand completely if you decide to kill me,” Hennessy said, talking fast. “I’ve been thinking about it a lot. On previous episodes, it would’ve been a very selfish decision, on account of my ladies and how they relied on me for their existence, but on this current run, everyone else dead, mostly, fate of the world in hands, well—” She spread her hands, or at least the best she could, considering she had a hot chocolate in one of them. “It’s the selfless thing to do, really.”

  “We have a different idea,” Farooq-Lane said.

  Hennessy narrowed her eyes. “Do you mean you both had this idea, or she has an idea, and whispered it to you just now?”

  Liliana smiled sweetly. “I told you she was clever.”

  Farooq-Lane’s businesslike expression didn’t change. “Can you dream something to suppress the ley line?”

  Hennessy had one dream. The Lace. Always the Lace. She was a bar with a single beer on tap. She was about to tell them this, but in the past, Jordan had always told Hennessy, “You’re not allowed to shoot down any more of my ideas until you’ve had one of your own.”

  So she didn’t shoot it down. She sank down into the beanbag and stared at them instead.

  “I don’t believe killing yourself is the answer,” Farooq-Lane said. “You have value, too.”

  “Ma’am, we’ve just met,” Hennessy said.

  Liliana broke in. “Do you know what it means to be a Visionary, Hennessy? I don’t always look like this. Sometimes I’m a girl. Sometimes I’m a woman. Sometimes I am this, what you see now. Every time I change between these ages, I have a vision of the future, and all the sound that has happened or will happen in the intervening years comes out of me. It destroys everyone close enough to hear it. Over the years, I have met and will meet people who urge me to turn this vision inward. If I do that, I will no longer shift between ages, and I will no longer be a danger to those around me. But eventually, that method will kill me instead.”

  “I take it since we’re talking to the old version of you, you picked door number one,” Hennessy said. “Keep exploding?”

  “Most Visionaries die very young,” Liliana said. “Too young to change the world. I’m still here not because I think my life is valuable—although I do think that—but because staying alive means I have more visions, and the more visions I have, the more I can save the world from itself. You have value, too, Hennessy, value that comes from staying alive.”

  “And if you turn off the ley line,” Farooq-Lane said, “no more Zeds—dreamers—have to die. You’re all only as dangerous then as you would be as normal people. You can only hurt or help as many people as anyone else.”

  She’d corrected herself, but Hennessy preferred the first term she’d used. Zed. That’s right. Zero. Nothing. Loser.

  “You don’t have to feel this fear and pain all the time. You’re allowed to stop it,” Farooq-Lane said.

  “I know you have no love for yourself,” Liliana broke in again, and her voice was so gentle that Hennessy felt absurdly close to tears again. They burned; she hated them. She wanted it to stop. How badly she wanted it to stop. “So you might not make this decision for yourself, because you don’t think you deserve it. You can make it for others. It would be noble to stop it.”

  Stopping the ley line meant stopping Jordan in her tracks.

  Farooq-Lane seemed to guess what she was thinking. “If the end of the world comes, your dreams will die with the rest of us. This way they’ll fall asleep. That doesn’t have to be forever. Death is forever.”

  I wish you were dead, she’d told Jordan.

  Why do you always do this? Jordan asked.

  Hennessy almost wished that Farooq-Lane and Liliana had told her they were going to have to kill her after all. It wasn’t exactly that she wanted to die. She just didn’t want to live with herself.

  “You’re forgetting one thing,” she said. “I only ever dream of the Lace. All day every day, it’s the Lace superstore. I can’t dream something to shut down the ley line. I only ever dream of the Lace.”

  The music plinked overhead. The beanbag hugged Hennessy. She drank some of her hot chocolate. The reviews Liliana had read on the way over were right. It really was good hot chocolate. It would be a good last meal.

  Liliana looked at Farooq-Lane, her expression sympathetic and soft.


  Farooq-Lane looked at Hennessy, her expression sympathetic and hard. Then she reached behind her to lay from chaos, in its scabbard, in front of Hennessy and her beanbag.

  “Then explain this,” she said.

  Ronan hadn’t meant to dream Matthew.

  It had been Christmastime. Short days. Long nights. He always got restless that time of year. Anticipation built in him as the days got smaller, until around the end of December, the feeling eventually burst and left him feeling more ordinary again.

  He knew now that it had been a surge of the ley line. But back then, as a child, as a dreamer who was not permitted to give words to the dreaming, he hadn’t known anything but that restlessness. It was a feeling that was only shored up by Declan’s behavior. If Ronan became more alive as they crept toward winter solstice, Declan became less so. His eyes developed bags. His moods got short. The brothers did not fight then like they did when they were older, but the seeds were already sleeping in the cold soil.

  That particular winter had been unseasonably warm, and a few days before Christmas, Aurora sent the boys outside to kick a ball around. To Ronan’s delight, the brothers discovered that the dun-colored fields around the farmhouse were lousy with starlings. Hundreds, perhaps thousands. When the birds first saw the brothers emerge from the house, they lifted up in a great swath of dark dots in the sky, like music notes on a page, but they quickly landed again just a few yards farther away.

  This was much better than kickball. For quite a while they instead played a game of who can get closer to the flock.

  Ronan won. This was partially because he was shorter than Declan and thus more clandestine, but it was also because he wanted it more. He was fascinated by this flock of flyers, this many-headed entity that was not tied to the ground. The birds were individuals, but when they lifted off, it was together, in something even more magnificent than they could ever be on their own. Ronan didn’t have words for how they made him feel, but he loved them. He wished he knew how to explain it to Declan.

  “I’d like a bird army,” he said.

  Declan’s lip curled. “I don’t think that would be very interesting.”

  “You’re never into anything. You’re the most boring person I know.”

  Declan retrieved the ball. The game was clearly over.

  Without warning, Ronan ran directly into the flock. There was a brief moment of stillness and then they all took off at once, surrounding him.

  It was so much like a dream. Wings upon wings upon wings. Too many birds to count. Too many voices to pick out individual sounds. He raised his arms. Ground and air seethed with birds, hiding both so thoroughly that it didn’t seem entirely impossible that he had left the ground with them.

  Imagine flying, he thought. Imagine flying while awake. Imagine dreaming while awake—

  Then the birds had gone and he was just a boy standing on the ground. He was not flying. Being awake was nothing like dreaming. His older brother was a few feet away, the ball tucked under his arm, looking at him with an expression of vague irritation.

  Ronan had never known such agony, and he didn’t even have words for it.

  A few nights later, on the shortest night of the year, Ronan dreamt of the birds, only now they were ravens, not starlings, and there were fewer of them. They were gathered in the field in a purposeful way, studying something in the grass. They were muttering to themselves: make way, make way, make way.

  When Ronan approached to investigate, they scattered. In the grass where they’d been, he found a blond-headed baby.

  In the dream, Ronan knew without being told that this was a new brother.

  The baby smiled at Ronan. His hands were already outstretched for Ronan to pick him up. He was so, so happy to see him.

  Ronan knew without being told that this brother would always be happy to see him.

  “Hello,” he told the baby.

  The baby laughed.

  Ronan laughed, too, and the awful feeling that had been inside him since that game of kickball dissipated. He scooped this new brother out of the grass.

  And then he woke up. When he did, Matthew Lynch was still there, squalling and brand-new, in the hallway outside his closed bedroom door.

  But the thing was—Ronan hadn’t known. He hadn’t known Matthew was dreamt. That Matthew was his dream. He couldn’t remember how he’d explained it to himself at the time, but it must have been good and thorough, because all he remembered of that time was his delight at having a new baby brother. He hadn’t remembered the circumstances around it until Declan had cornered him during a particularly destructive time in high school and given him the story. Niall Lynch had given Ronan stories, too, but they were always rewards. This was a punishment. A warning.

  “You dreamt Matthew,” Declan said. “Don’t you get it? If you get yourself killed, you’re ending his life, too.”

  “I don’t think I did,” Ronan said, but he knew he had. He’d just been pushing the memory away as hard as he could. It had been made easier by the fact that Matthew hadn’t appeared right next to Ronan when he woke. Instead, like Ronan’s dreamt forest, he’d appeared some distance away.

  It had also been made easier because Ronan didn’t have words, back then, to talk about what had happened. He wasn’t allowed to.

  “I was there,” Declan said. “I know what happened. Saying it didn’t happen doesn’t make it real. You’ve got to keep this under control. His life relies on you.”

  Ronan had lived with that weight since then.

  No more, he thought now. The ley lines would be powerful again. Matthew would have a life of his own.

  “This will have to do,” Bryde said.

  They’d been charging away from Boston for a few hours when Bryde pulled over abruptly. There was nothing remarkable about the stopping place. It was simply a one-track gravel road that led into a wooded picnic area with a rotting bench.

  Ronan stared around at their surroundings again, trying to decide if, in his misery over Declan, Adam, and Hennessy, he had badly misjudged how far they’d traveled. He could see a lake glistening through the dense trees. Everything continued to look very New England to him. “We’re still in Massachusetts, aren’t we?”

  “Connecticut,” Bryde said. “But yes, you’re right. But something is happening. We need to free Ilidorin’s line now or we might not be able to. That’s what the trees are telling me. This is the best place I’ve felt so far for the energy. I’d like more, but I don’t think we can wait any longer to dream something for the dam. We won’t make it all the way there.”

  “Before what?” Ronan asked.

  But Bryde just threw open the car door. Crisp cool air flooded in. It was a lovely day. It was the sort of day that caused people to put coats on dogs and take long scenic walks. It was the sort of day it had been when Ronan had last visited Adam at Harvard. It was the sort of day that Ronan would have used to repair fences and siding if he had been back at the Barns.

  It was also the sort of day for Ronan and Bryde to sit in the dried leaves behind the car, leaning up against it, unfolding their dream masks. Chainsaw flapped up to a tree above them and waited.

  “What do you feel?” Bryde asked.

  Strange. It felt strange to do this without Hennessy. After this, Ronan vowed, he’d go back for her. He’d fix this. He’d fix her.

  But that wasn’t the kind of feeling Bryde meant. Ronan put his hands onto the ground to feel the ley line, but that made him think too much about how Adam sometimes did that when he was scrying. He draped them over his knees instead as he listened.

  The ley line was there. Not overwhelming, but present. Sufficient. He could feel its low, slow pulse trying to sync with his heartbeat, or vice versa. “It’s all right. I’ve never been to the dam. How are we supposed to know how to destroy it?”

  “I know what it’s like. I’ll show you in the dream.”

  “And you want us to dream something here to destroy it way down there?” But Ronan answered his own que
stion. “It has to be something that can travel.”

  “Yes,” Bryde agreed. “Like the dolphins for the transmission line. Like the sundogs you sent to save your brothers.”

  His voice had no bitterness. Declan had tried to get them killed, but he didn’t spit the word brothers at Ronan. Instead, his voice, if anything, became softer on that word. Soft on brothers. Hard on sundogs. The entire sundogs episode felt like a very long time ago. Ronan and Hennessy had been in Lindenmere, Ronan’s dreamt forest, trying to banish the Lace from Hennessy’s mind with the help of Bryde, who had been just a voice to them at that point. Bryde had disappeared in a hurry as the Moderators began to move in on other dreamers, and Ronan had received that fraught call from Declan that Matthew was in danger. Ronan still remembered the absolute terror he’d felt as he begged his forest to use the power of the ley line to produce the sundogs. He remembered how he’d sped across the state toward Declan and Matthew, the exact opposite of what he was doing now. And he remembered clearly arriving to find his dreamt sundogs had done what he’d asked. Saved his brothers’ lives.

  The exact opposite of what Declan had just tried to do.

  Declan hadn’t been so worried about Ronan’s ability when Ronan was hidden safely away until needed.

  Bryde said, “We don’t have much time.”

  Ronan didn’t know if he could stay focused with his thoughts as they were now. He wasn’t thinking about the future. He was thinking about the past.

  Bryde said, “I’ll do my best to focus the dream. It will be different after this. Last push.”

  They dreamt.