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Mór was a tough young hero, unsentimental, unflinching. A year before, she’d chopped her golden hair to chin length so it wouldn’t get in her way, and a month before, she’d done the same to her past.
When she visited it in her dreams, Mór could tell that something sentient lived within the Forest, but she never saw what it was. She only heard it. Or felt it. Whatever it was, it was very interested in her. She was very interested in it.
Because he, too, dreamt of the Forest. It was interested in him, too. (Niall was interested in the Forest, but he was mainly interested in Mór.)
It can be a powerful thing, to know one isn’t alone.
Declan had been training for this his entire life: making exciting things as boring as possible.
Adam Parrish was the person Ronan cared about more than anyone else in the world. If Ronan wasn’t calling him, he wasn’t calling anybody.
“Let me think about it.” (He would rather not think about anything.)(Was Ronan dead?)
Declan pulled into the school drop-off line, where every other car was driven by someone in their forties or fifties, by a parent who hadn’t been beaten to death with a tire iron in their own driveway before their kids reached the age of majority. Declan felt forty or fifty. (WasRonanDeadWasRonanDeadWasRonanDeadWas—)
The dust exhausted him. How quickly everything returned to grime and disarray when Declan wasn’t attending to it. All he needed, he thought, was just a day or two where things didn’t run to ruin without him. An hour or two. A minute or two.
“Spies on a bridge,” murmured Farooq-Lane. “The only adults in the room,” Declan corrected her.
This agitation temporarily lifted the illusion of age, and for a fraction of a second, he looked very much like his brother Ronan.
“Good luck, Mr. Lynch.” “That,” Declan said bitterly, “is the only kind I never have.”
She had a face like a poem and a smile like a punch line.
It was unexpectedly jarring to be seen. Hennessy had not come here to be known. She had not come here for sympathy from a stranger, especially not for a childhood she’d thought only looked appalling from the inside.
There were only two Jordan Hennessys left, and those two weren’t on speaking terms.
“What every child dreams of: a rigged career in the arts.” “A child’s guide to the economy, by Jordan Hennessy,” recited Jo Fisher.
“What is it you think Boudicca does?” Jo Fisher asked. “Do you actually know, or is it some comic book imagining of what we do? We collect talented, powerful people so other talented, powerful people can find them more easily. And we take a small percentage for our trouble. That’s it. We’re really just a bunch of businesspeople trying to make the world run a little more smoothly while paying our mortgages.” “Mortgage! You don’t have a mortgage,” Hennessy shot back. “You have a dead houseplant, a personal massager, and a two-year lease for a place you never sleep in.” Jo Fisher glared. Hennessy
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“Oh. I get it now. You’re the other one.” “What?” “You’re the other girl. The one I talked to before, she’s your twin. Sister. Dependent. Whatever she is. She’s the one with the big dreams. You’re what—the talent? The user?” They knew. They knew.
The secret was out because they had stopped keeping it.
In their final months together, Hennessy had just been trying to survive and have a good time while doing it. Jordan had been walking through galleries and imagining herself there.
Once Bill Dower realized there was nothing for him in his dead wife’s birth city but endless trouble, he relocated his troubled daughter to his childhood home in Pennsylvania (a feat that, for Hennessy and the girls, had involved multiple hotel rooms and a passport mailed across the Atlantic multiple times, Hennessy herself sent first and Jordan sent last, as she was the most trustworthy alone—their secret had always required a lot of paperwork in order to be kept).
So she’d said something mean and run away, but not too far, close enough that she knew the game would be winnable. The game of Hennessy getting Jordan to look right at her and nowhere else for as long as possible.
All the Hennessys were tethered together. The dreams couldn’t leave the dreamer, because they needed to keep her alive so they could stay awake. And the dreamer couldn’t leave the dreams, because without them to look at her, who would reassure her she existed?
She was now freshly shocked by the reality of Hennessy, her double. Jordan. Hennessy. Jordan Hennessy. She has my face, Jordan thought. She has my body. Only after did she realize she used to think I have her face. I have her body.
“Look at you! The picture of health. Bright-eyed. Bushy-tailed. How could the beauties of spring ever compare to a woman in love? Is that why you’re awake?”
Suddenly, Jordan said, “You did this, didn’t you?” “Did what now?” Jordan wasn’t sure how she knew, she just knew. It was the most horrible thing she could think of, so it had to be right. “The ley line, the dreams falling ill, it’s you, somehow, isn’t it? You did it. You killed it, the ley line, so you wouldn’t dream anymore. Didn’t you?”
All those messages Jordan had left on Hennessy’s voicemail over the last few days seemed different now. She thought she’d been ringing to make sure Hennessy was all right, to reassure her that Jordan was awake, but now she thought maybe that wasn’t it at all. Maybe she’d just called to find out if Hennessy had finally killed herself, so that she could stop holding her breath and start to move on. Maybe those weren’t really phone calls at all. Maybe they’d just been flowers at the grave of a friend she used to love a lot.
“For years you’ve been telling me you wish I could have a real life, that I deserved a real life, but every time I get close, you absolutely unravel,” Jordan said. “I want this life. Do you understand that? We’re not the same person anymore! I want a nice studio, swish galleries, fancy whips, a big future. I want Declan. You don’t have to want it. Because it’s all mine, do you understand that? Can you be happy for me? Can you at least respect I’m happy?”
“I don’t need you anymore, Hennessy, but I thought I might want you. I was wrong. You’re ugly and you make everything you touch ugly. It’s over.”
Hennessy’s eyes blazed. “You’ll change your mind.” Just like her. Hennessy always changed her mind. But Jordan wasn’t really anything like Hennessy. Not anymore. For what felt like the first time in her life, she was the one walking away.
Matthew’s arrangements had done nothing but make him look like a Victorian corpse portrait. But he wasn’t a corpse. He was more expensive than a corpse. Declan was unhappily reminded of arranging the not-dead, not-living body of Aurora Lynch in a chair back at the Barns. What a hellish hamster wheel he’d been born on.
Declan wondered how such a short-lived animal—the Lynch family—could have left such an impression on him. The day would come upon him soon when he’d lived longer without it than with it, and yet the memories still owned him thoroughly.
Storytelling was one of Niall’s only fatherly attributes.
“I used it to test your pendant. I could show it to you when we get home, if you want,” Declan said, although he didn’t want to make the offer. A third dream tugging on the sweetmetal. How many could he carry? It. How many could it carry?
In the backseat, a second string of nightwash trickled to match the first. Ronan didn’t stir. The traffic didn’t stir. His self-destruction was the only moving piece.
Everyone has their max capacity, a man had once told Declan. The man was not Declan’s father but rather one of a variety of men Declan had combined into a parental scarecrow in the final years of his teenhood.
Declan was always meeting people more excited about giving him practical skills than Niall Lynch.
He told himself that if he didn’t preserve the sweetmetal, he’d be the only Lynch brother left. He told himself Matthew wouldn’t have handed it over willingly. He told himself he was doing what had to be done. But it felt like now he’d betrayed both his brothers. No more, he thought. But there was always more.
Problems solved in the heat of the moment were rarely actually solved—that was why he had a job.
Look at that poor asshole lying on that packed dirt, look how lovingly tattooed his skin was, each mark a small confirmation that even though it felt like he hated his life and his body, deep down, he wanted to keep it, to redecorate the place to his own liking.
Elation overtook Ronan. Even before he put a name to the face, he was overwhelmed with a single thought: It is going to be okay. The second voice belonged to Adam Parrish.
He’d dreamt that watch for Adam when he left for Harvard. It was the closest he could come to a love letter; the language of affection had never felt right to Ronan. Clumsy. Overblown. False. Ronan speaking the language of another country, vocabulary learned from watching films on YouTube. But the watch—the watch told the time for whatever time zone Ronan was in, and it said exactly what Ronan meant to say. Think of where I am, it said. Think of me.
Declan’s tone turned cool and businesslike. “He was going to move here for you.” The two of them faced each other, a clear divide between them. On one side was the land of adulthood, where Declan lived, his expression weighted with disappointment and judgment. On the other was the nebulous country that contained everything before adulthood, and that was where Adam remained, his eyebrows drawn together uncertainly, once again glancing toward Ronan and away. “Look,” said Adam, “Ronan chose his side. It wasn’t me.”
Declan made a face. “Dreams are their own people. They can make their own choices.” “Too bad Ronan’s not awake to hear you say that,” Adam said. “There was a time it would’ve meant a lot to hear you say it.”
“Thanks for the temporary solution,” Declan said, not bothering to hide the contempt in his voice. His hand closed over the key in a fist. “If you need more help,” Adam said from the doorway, “don’t call me.”
For years, she had defied it, and for years, the Lace had punished her for this defiance. The jagged edges pierced her like hair-fine needles, and she woke with a million tiny holes in her skin, each beading blood. She became see-through. Like the Lace.
“What’s this errand you’re talking about? Is it a real errand, like, work, or is errand just a funny figure of speech, a code word for something more interesting, like going clubbing or stealing a horse?”
“Liliana, are you a dream?” There was no pause between the question and the feeling of Liliana nodding against her. It wasn’t a secret; Farooq-Lane had simply never asked.
You know who else is easy to control? Nathan’s voice said in her head. People who think they’re doing the right thing.
Adam repositioned himself more comfortably, leaning his back between the framing on the opposite wall. His legs mingled with Ronan’s long legs, a chaos of young men. Then he sighed and leaned his head back against the wall, eyes closed. Yes, thought Ronan. Stay.
