Mister Impossible

by Maggie Stiefvater

  In the dream, they were at the dam. Because it was Bryde’s dream, it was vividly rendered. Ronan could see it, smell it, feel the unseasonably warm breeze on his skin. They were walking. He could feel it as if he were awake. The bite of his boot on the zigzagging walkway the two of them followed. The echo of their steps off the back of the low concrete visitors’ center, which they passed. The tickle of gnats swarming from the overgrown dry brush. The buzz of a stink bug woken by the heat.

  Ronan would have been hard pressed to identify how it was any different from waking life.

  “What do you feel?” Bryde asked.

  “Don’t ask me that while we’re dreaming,” Ronan said. “It fucks me up.”

  They had come to a viewing area at the end of the walkway. Wordlessly, they leaned on the railing to look at the vast white dam. The scale of it was difficult to hold. On one side was the glittering blue water of the artificial lake, and on the other, hundreds of feet below, held back by the curved dam, was more glittering water, the choked Roanoke River. All about were mountains. The lake looked odd somehow, the water strange as it climbed the slopes, although Ronan couldn’t understand why.

  “They’re drowned,” Bryde said. “These mountains were never meant to have water up to their chins; picture this as a river valley instead. The dam did this. There are towns beneath that lake, if you can imagine. Beautiful, isn’t it? Like a cemetery. How would you destroy it?”

  For quite a long time the two of them stood there as Ronan studied the dam and thought of what the smallest, easiest dream would be to destroy it. Before he’d fallen asleep, he’d been imagining something strong enough to bust through the dam itself, but that now seemed unacceptable. This was more water than he had pictured. All of these gallons would have to go somewhere, and who knew how many houses and roads had been built downstream of this now.

  He didn’t want to kill anyone.

  So it would have to be something gradual. Something with a bit of warning. Not a lot. Just enough to let people get out of the way. Not slow enough for them to stop it. Inexorable, unfixable.

  His heart was beating hard in his chest. Just a few days ago he’d been contemplating how he felt about destroying a trash dump, and here he was figuring out how to take down a project that surely had cost billions of dollars and taken years to build. The electricity it generated was used to power all the vacation homes he could see dotting the mountains. Probably. Ronan didn’t know a lot about how electricity worked.

  He thought about how wonderful it was to dream in Lindenmere, where the ley line was good, where Lindenmere was focusing him, where everything was as he liked it. He imagined what it would be like to make that even better. He thought about the little Aldana-Leon dreamers. He thought about Rhiannon Martin’s mirrors. He thought about Matthew. He thought about himself, what it would be like to live without fearing he would manifest rooms of murder crabs or bleed to death from nightwash.

  He also thought about how Declan was worried that this was something he couldn’t come back from.

  “It is frightening how fast the world sickens,” Bryde said. “Decades ago it seemed like we had years. Years ago it seemed like we had months. Months ago it seemed like days. And now every day, every minute, every second, it is harder to be a dreamer. It’s so noisy. Even here in these mountains, it is so noisy. How they shout at us all, even in our sleep. Soon there will be no place for the quiet things, the things that undo themselves when they have to shout. Soon there will be no place for secrets, the secrets that lose their mystery when they are uncovered. Soon there will be no place for the strange, no place for the unknown, because everything will be cataloged and paved and plugged in.”

  Ronan thought about Adam’s gloves set upon his shoes in the mudroom.

  He thought about wanting to feel like he had been made for something more than dying.

  “I know you are two things,” Bryde said. “I know you are of both worlds. That will never change.”

  “What if it’s too much?” Ronan asked. “I don’t know if I want to do it.”

  “You do.”

  “You can’t just say I do. You don’t know what I’m feeling.”

  Bryde’s voice was very, very soft. “I know you’ve already made this decision. You made it long ago.”

  “On a hoverboard floating in the air? After Rhiannon Martin was killed?”

  “Further back than that.”

  “When we decided to go with you?”

  “Further back than that.”

  “No,” said Ronan.

  “Yes.”

  All of Ronan’s frustration burst out of him, so strongly that the dream shivered with it. The air shimmered. The lake simmered. He was tired of the lessons. The games. The riddles. For some reason, he suddenly remembered the long-ago Christmas starlings bursting around him as Declan watched. That agony again of wanting to fly and being unable to explain it to anyone else.

  He was suddenly either very afraid, or very furious. He snarled, “You can’t know when I made the decision!”

  “I can,” Bryde said softly. “Because I know when you dreamt me.”

  What is real?

  You make reality.

  Just like that, Ronan was in the worst dream again. The dam was gone. The lake was gone. The warmth and clarity of Bryde’s dream was gone, replaced with Ronan’s old nightmare. He was standing in the bathroom of the Barns and there was a Ronan in the mirror. Behind him, Ronan could see the reflection of Bryde standing in the doorway.

  “No,” he said.

  Bryde said, “I only came because you asked me.”

  “No.”

  “Don’t say no. You know. You knew.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “You knew,” Bryde insisted. “Deep down, you had to know. You had to ask for it, or it wouldn’t have happened.”

  The dream changed. It was Lindenmere now. They were surrounded by Ronan’s massive trees, standing in the clearing where he had heard Bryde’s voice with Hennessy that day. The dream was impossible to separate from reality. The details were perfect. Every lacy fern. Every growing patch of lichen. Every mote of dust and insect gleaming in the air.

  “No,” Ronan said again. “They knew your name. They knew the rumors.”

  “You dreamt the rumors.”

  “No. I can’t do that. Only you can do that sort of stuff. The orbs—”

  “You dreamt it into me.”

  The forest was alive with sound. Distant wings. Claws. Talons. Mandibles. Even after all these lessons, Ronan was no less likely to corrupt a dream than when he’d brought the murder crabs out at Adam’s dorm, when push came to shove. “Why are you doing this?”

  “Why did you keep Adam out of your dreams?” Bryde asked. “You were sure he would know. You wanted to pretend.”

  He frowned, just a little, and Ronan could feel that he was mentally driving the encroaching claws and talons out of the dream. Effortless. Controlled where Ronan was not.

  “I didn’t want anything,” Ronan said. That was a lie. The dream threw it back at him. He thought he might throw up. “You knew about Hennessy. I didn’t know about Hennessy.”

  “I know what Lindenmere knows,” Bryde said quietly. “I am both of you.”

  Oh, God. Now Ronan was playing it all back in his head. He was going over everything Bryde had taught him. He was trying to recall the first time he’d seen Bryde. The first time he’d heard Bryde. He was trying to remember how he’d decided the game of finding him was worth playing. The promise of another dreamer had been so tantalizing. The promise of another dreamer who’d actually known what he was doing had been even more tantalizing. He could have generated that in a dream, just like those talons and claws. He’d wanted a teacher. He got a teacher.

  No.

  Ronan tried to think if Bryde had ever told him anything that Ronan himself didn’t already know, that Lindenmere, as a forest situated on the ley line, able to see other events along the ley line, wouldn’t have know
n.

  Oh, God. Bryde getting his information from the trees. Bryde often knowing what Ronan was thinking before he spoke. Ronan looking at Bryde and thinking he looked familiar, or something, and shying away from what he actually already knew. The rabbit hole kept leading down. He couldn’t find bottom. He was still falling.

  The dream was now an Irish shoreline. An ancient hawk flew over the black ocean. Ronan could taste the salt in his mouth. Cold shot through him, a damp cold that made it all the way to his bones. It didn’t feel like a dream. It felt like reality. It felt exactly like reality. Ronan could no longer tell the difference between them.

  Bryde said, “You wanted me.”

  “I wanted someone real.”

  Reality doesn’t mean anything to someone like you. Bryde didn’t have to say it. Ronan already knew it. He knew everything Bryde knew, deep down.

  “It’s harder than I thought,” Bryde said. “Being out here. I thought it would be simpler. I thought I knew what I wanted. But it’s so much louder. It’s so, so much louder. I get … confused.”

  Ronan’s heart was breaking.

  “Your quest,” Ronan said.

  “Your quest,” said Bryde.

  Ronan closed his eyes. “You’re just a dream.”

  Bryde shook his head. “We already know what you think about that, because I told you. What do you feel, Ronan Lynch?”

  Betrayed. Alone. Furious. He felt like he had nightwash even though he didn’t. He felt like he couldn’t stand to look at Bryde for one more second. He felt like he couldn’t stand to be in his own head one more second. He felt like he couldn’t tell if he had ever woken up from that worst dream.

  The black ocean boiled and then burned. Ronan’s mind boiled and then burned. Everything could burn if you hit it hard enough.

  “Nothing,” Ronan said. “I can’t feel anything.”

  The grass was also burning now. The flaming waves had lapped the pebbly shore, which caught fire, and then the ascending cliff face had caught fire, and then the strange flames had wicked over the edge and caught the dirt and then the grass. The fire whispered to itself as it did its work. Its language was secret, but Ronan got the gist. It was starving.

  Bryde said, “Right now, Hennessy is trying to dream something to shut down the ley line for good. Can you feel her? We can go stop her, or I can go stop her, or you can try to stop me and let the ley line be shut down and kill all of this. Either way. You have to make a decision. Is this my quest, is it your quest, or is it nothing? For once in your life, stop lying. Stop hiding behind me. Ronan Lynch, what do you want?”

  In the dream, sweet Aurora’s voice came through gently. She was telling Ronan he had to bury it.

  He took a deep, shuddering breath. The fire was burning everything except for them.

  “I want to change the world.”

  When the ley line disappeared, it was a very nice day.

  All of New England was experiencing an unseasonably warm afternoon, but it was a good kind of unseasonably warm. Not warm enough to make all the conversations center around anything unpleasant like climate change and the growing price of avocados. But warm enough that residents could shed their coats and gloves and get some of the ol’ steps in, take the kid for a walk, knock the spiders off the badminton set in the garage.

  Days like this, they said, remind you what it’s all about.

  Three Zeds were dreaming busily on this unseasonably warm afternoon and thus not able to enjoy it. Two of them, Bryde and Ronan Lynch, slept just a few yards away from a car that was very difficult to see. They had not been dreaming long, but already dried oak leaves had flickered from the woods around them and lit upon their clothes. There is a certain wrongness to seeing leaves settled on a body. It is not the same as leaves drifting over a rooftop or a fallen log. It makes one anxious to see it. It is wrong. Opposite.

  The third dreamer, Hennessy, dreamt on an oversized beanbag in a small room in a tea shop. Two women watched her closely. One of the women, a woman so old that numbers no longer felt relevant to describe her age, gently brushed her fingers across Hennessy’s forehead as she slept. The other woman stood watchfully at the door, her hands on a dreamt sword with the words from chaos etched on the hilt. She was ready to swing it at once should Hennessy wake with a nightmare instead of a dream to save them all.

  “I don’t have a good feeling about this,” the woman with the sword said.

  “It will be all right,” the old woman replied, brushing her fingers over the dreamer’s forehead again, but her hand was trembling a little.

  The people who loved the dreaming Zeds were also unable to enjoy the warm afternoon.

  Adam Parrish, who loved Ronan, sat on the floor of his dorm room alone, a single candle lit, his tarot cards stacked face up beside it. He stared into the flame, throwing his mind out into the dreamspace. He was trying to reach Ronan Lynch, but it was like a phone that kept ringing and ringing. This was a dangerous game, but he kept trying. He let his mind wander a little farther from his body each time.

  Ronan! Ronan! But instead he kept catching glimpses of Bryde. Everything felt hot. He could smell smoke. He was smoke, drifting, drifting.

  Oh, Ronan, what have you done, he thought miserably. What are you doing?

  Matthew Lynch, who also loved Ronan, had gone walking. Not wandering like a dream, but walking like an ordinary teen, with purpose. While Declan was occupied with secretive errands, Matthew had set up an appointment with a local school for a tour. He was going to finish high school. He’d decided. He didn’t know what he was going to do afterward, but until then, he was going to take Jordan’s advice and start treating himself as real until Declan did, too. It was a very stuffy school office, though, and he could see the day through the tiny window next to him. It was hard not to wish he was out there instead.

  He found himself quite suddenly thinking about fire. He wasn’t sure why. He touched his cheek. It was hot. The school hadn’t adjusted their heating for this unseasonable day.

  Declan Lynch, who also loved Ronan, was cornered in his own apartment by a handful of extremely pissed-off Moderators. They had just lost three Zeds at a rose garden and had no Visionary to provide further leads. They had not immediately decided how they were going to use Declan to get their hands on Ronan, but they had decided they would grab him first and then figure out the finer points later. He was all they had.

  “I’m no good as leverage,” Declan told them. He thought about the gun he’d taped to the bottom of the kitchen table. It was four feet away, but might as well have been four hundred. Even if he could somehow get it, what was one gun against a room full of them? “As far as he’s concerned, he thinks I just tried to get him killed.”

  He couldn’t help but think about how Bryde’s little dreamt orb would have let him walk out untouched. How Ronan’s sundogs spilled from the bottle would have emptied this apartment instantly. Such power. Such power for just a very few people to hold.

  Oh, Ronan, he thought, suddenly angry that his brother could never see the bigger picture, the long game. What are you going to do now?

  Jordan, who loved Hennessy, was walking from her studio to Declan’s apartment, head down, eyebrows furrowed, reading a news story on her phone. It was about a massive Boston street race that had sent seven drivers to area hospitals in critical condition. The chief of police had given a statement urging drivers to remember that life was not a video game or a movie franchise; actions like this had real consequences. She wondered if the play against Bryde had worked; Declan wasn’t picking up his phone.

  I wish you were dead, Hennessy had told her.

  Jordan’s cheeks felt hot as she walked. Fiery. Her chest ached and burned. She didn’t know why Hennessy had to be like this. If they were still living together, they would have talked it out by now. Hennessy would have calmed down, gotten sad instead of mad, and eventually just gone limp, giving up. They would have once more reached equilibrium. Well, not they. Jordan was rarely the emergency
. Hennessy was the emergency.

  Hennessy, thought Jordan, why didn’t you give me all your memories?

  None of them guessed the fate of the afternoon was currently playing out inside the minds of the dreaming Zeds.

  The Zeds moved inside a shared dream that jerked from one thing to another.

  First it was the Lace, jagged and hateful.

  Then it was the Smith Mountain Dam with a slow, sentient fire picking away at its base.

  Then it was the Game, with each Zed in a different car jockeying for control of both the race and the dream.

  It was a studio, it was a farm, it was a parking lot dumpster with opera singing sweetly, it was a teen girl in a gallery looking for Hennessy, it was a fire dragon exploding over a car, it was a bullet in a woman’s head, it was Bryde crouched next to Lock’s body in a featureless field.

  “This game of yours,” Bryde said to Lock’s body, “this game of yours will only end in pain. Take a look. The rules are changing. Do you understand? Do you understand what we could do? Leave my dreamers alone.”

  “Bryde,” Ronan said, but Bryde didn’t attend.

  “Thanks for the focus. I couldn’t do that without you here,” Hennessy said. She stood by the invisible car, watching Bryde plow through his lines from the memory. “God! Remember when you told me to kill my clones? And then we basically ran away with yours?”

  She knew about Bryde. She knew because the dream had presented the knowledge to her without remark, as dreams sometimes do. The knowledge was this: Bryde was a dream. Bryde was Ronan’s dream.

  “How are you doing that to him?” Ronan asked.

  Hennessy narrowed her eyes at the horizon, where smoke billowed. “I heard him tell that Moderator a clever thing at the rose garden—did you hear him? He said he didn’t play mind games. He just turned the sound down on the stuff that didn’t matter. Why didn’t he teach us that shit? That’s shit I can use. I’m using it now! He gave us such a hard time about what was real and what was a dream, but he was talking about himself, too, wasn’t he? He doesn’t know what he really is any more than we do. What’s real now, Bryde? What do you feel?”