This shocked the emerging Moderators, who, like Bellos and Ramsay, found it difficult to remember seeing the strange car.
A young man stepped out. He had dark, buzzed hair and pale, chilly skin. His eyes were as blue as the sky above, though more suggestive of bad weather.
The young man was taking something from his jacket, a little glass bottle with a dropper top. He was uncapping it.
He was another one of them. Ronan Lynch.
“Oh, shit,” said a Moderator named Nikolenko.
Ronan Lynch squeezed drops of liquid onto the flattened wheat, and every drop released wind, fury, leaves. It was an East Coast winter squall contained in a bottle.
Impossible, dreamt, mind-bending.
It churned Moderators from their feet and sent bullets wide. It pummeled their bodies and thoughts. It was not just weather but also the feel of weather, the dread of it, the damp, pressed-down sloth of a socked-in late-year storm, and they couldn’t rise as it soaked them.
From the open door of the Airstream, Westerly Reed Hager watched Ronan walk among the stunned Moderators, kicking the guns from their hands, his clouds shifting and ebbing around him. The irascible storm from the eyedropper didn’t bother him; he was just another piece of it.
Hennessy also stalked among the not-quite-awake, not-quite-asleep bodies. Kneeling swiftly, she picked up one of the abandoned guns.
Then, just as quick, she put the weapon to its fallen owner’s temple.
The Moderator didn’t react; he was dazzled by dreams. She put it to his cheek instead. Pressed the barrel into his skin hard enough to pull his mouth up in a weird smile. The man’s eyes were misted, confused.
Ronan looked at the gun, and then he looked at Hennessy. It seemed obvious she was about to blow the man’s brains out.
It was unclear whether or not the man was one of the Moderators who had killed her entire family. It was clear, however, that this nuance didn’t matter to her.
“Hennessy.”
This voice came from the third Zed who’d arrived in the strange car. He was a dapper blond with close-set, hawkish eyes and an expression that suggested he knew what the world was thinking and didn’t care for it.
Bryde.
“Hennessy,” he said again.
The gun seemed to get larger in her hand the longer it was pressed to the man’s head. This was no dream magic. This was just the magic of violence. It was a sustainable form of energy, violence. It powered itself.
Hennessy’s hand shook with fury. “I get to do this. I already paid the admission for this ride.”
“Hennessy,” Bryde said a third time.
Hennessy’s words were flippant, although her voice was electric. “You’re not my real dad.”
“There are better ways to do that. Ways to make it matter more. Do you think I don’t know what you want?”
A ripple of tension.
Then Hennessy put the gun down.
“Let’s finish this,” Bryde said.
The Moderators watched them, dazed, motionless, ill with longing and dread, as the Zeds made their way to Lock. Bryde nodded a confirmation to Ronan and Hennessy. The two of them crouched before slipping on small black fabric sleeping masks.
For the briefest of moments they were blind bandits, and then, a second later, they both slumped to the ground in fast sleep.
The Zed in the Airstream trailer, watching with wide, shocked eyes, shouted, “Who are you?”
Bryde put his fingers to his lips.
Hennessy and Ronan dreamt.
When they woke just a few minutes later, a dead body lay beside Hennessy. Forger in life, forger in sleep. The corpse was identical in every way to the living body already lying in the dirt—she had dreamt a perfect copy of Lock. She was also temporarily paralyzed, as all Zeds were after dreaming something into being, so Ronan heaved her up in a fireman’s hold and carried her back to the hard-to-see car.
After they had gone, Bryde rolled the real Lock onto his side so he could face his copied body, so he could see the perfection of it and be horrified. Bryde crouched between the two Locks, a lithe, nimble Reynard beside Lock’s blunt power.
“This game of yours,” Bryde began, and there was no softness to his voice, “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.”
There was no change in the living Lock’s expression. Bryde reached into Lock’s pocket and took out a small parcel. Now Lock’s eyes swam into focus long enough to show real panic, but his fingers could only snatch limply, drugged by Ronan Lynch’s