What a pair! Both of them were failing badly. Sherry was going to return with her daughter and find them drunkenly draped across her furniture, completely out of their heads. It would be a bad situation with any client. But it seemed worse if it was a client that had even a passing knowledge of sweetmetals and the people who needed them.

Wait a tick, Jordan thought. The sweetmetal. Of course.

She pushed out of a chair (when had she gotten into a chair?) and tried to have a listen. A feel. A sense. If there was a sweetmetal in this house, it would give them back their thoughts until the ley line got itself back together, hopefully. She caught a whiff, she thought.

“Come on,” she told Matthew, grabbing his arm to tug him deeper into the condo. “Focus, if you can. Come on!”

Together, they investigated the condo as quickly and quietly as they could. Here was the library again; they’d gotten turned around. Here a nursery. A bathroom, a closet, a study. Mirrors, art, books. It was hard to remember what they’d already seen. Hard to remember what they were looking at, even as they were looking at it.

Oh, thank God, there it was.

She felt the sweetmetal as soon as she passed the doorway. Stepping inside the room was like stepping into reality itself.

It was an enormous master suite, and the sweetmetal, wherever it was in the room, worked well enough to provide dramatic clarity. It made every detail sharp: every stitch on the duvet, every curl in the carved posters of the bed, every velvet ripple of the curtain.

Both Jordan and Matthew heaved huge sighs of relief as they collapsed on either end of a fainting couch in the master sitting area. Slowly, the two of them rebooted.

She could see this slow-motion return to herself reflected on Declan’s little brother’s face. That confusion turning to relief turning to frustration and then finally turning to normality. It reminded her, sadly, of the girls. They had all done this together, too, when Hennessy waited too long to dream, or when the ley line sagged. Which was happening now? It was hard to say. Hennessy hadn’t managed to get in touch with Jordan yet.

“I didn’t know that’s what was happening to me,” Matthew said. “Before I found out. I didn’t know it was because I was a dream. I’ve never seen anything else do it before. Anything human, I mean. Oh, I didn’t mean to be mean, I didn’t—”

“I know what you meant. Not one of Ronan’s things. A person. I never saw an animal do it before his bird, either, so we’re the same, you and I.”