Mister Impossible (The Dreamer Trilogy #2)

“Why does Adam keep trying to find you in the dreams these past few days?”

Tamquam

Declan understood then that Adam Parrish was allowing him not much closer than he’d let those friends in the waffle truck line. This was still just a corner of the situation. A very different corner than he would share with his Harvard buddies, but still. Need-to-know basis. No more. Actual closeness and truth had been reserved for only one person, and Declan’s relationship to that person was the only reason he was being given even this much of a look at Adam’s concerns.

At the end of the sidewalk, the door to the apartment building burst open. Declan stood in it, his jacket half-pulled on, his keys dangling in his hand. She didn’t need to be told that he had been coming to look for her. She could see it in his body language, in his face.

“Jordan,” he said. “You’re—”

She could see another bird falling from the sky, a larger one, at the end of the street. It set off the car alarm when it hit the windshield.

With wonder, she said to Declan, “I’m awake.”

She was very, very awake.

It really was a nice day.

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.

“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.”

He was dating a girl named Ashleigh, after breaking up with a girl named Ashley. Ashleigh was thinking of going to school in DC to be closer to him. Declan was eyeing a less attentive Ashlee to replace her.

The world was changing. It was becoming a place someone like him had been made for.

Nightwash felt a million miles away, like something that could never touch Ronan. He was the night and he was the world and he was as infinite as them both.

Ronan didn’t have time to ask what had happened. It hit him next.

Suddenly, he was electric.

He was free, his thoughts flying into the air. He was trapped, his body fused to something deep in the earth. He was both these things at once. He felt as if he could do anything, anything he had ever possibly wanted to do, anything except untangle himself from that thing he was wound around. This thing, this thing. This entity, this energy, this whatever-it-was, it was what was making him so powerful, so alive.

He understood it, he heard it, he was it—

She kissed him. He kissed her. And this kiss, too, got all wrapped up in the art-making of the portrait sitting on the easel beside them, getting all mixed in with all the other sights and sounds and feelings that had become part of the process.

It was very good.