“It’s not going to happen,” Ronan repeated.

But the threat had lodged inside him, and now dreams had to be unpopulated to land on the very good dream list. He could risk no more Matthews. No Auroras. Not even any little Opals, who was slightly more creature than human. It was too weighty.

So, the best dream. This was what happened in the best dream. Ronan was in a car. It was a beautiful car. Beautiful in appearance—long, gleaming hood, glistening black wheels, glaring headlights with teeth-bared matte grill—and also in sound—engine heaving with power, exhaust growling with urgency. Every detail Ronan could see was art. Metal and wood, bone and vines. It was one of those dream objects that didn’t entirely make sense according to waking-world rules.

The car was already in motion when the dream began. Ronan was driving it. He could see himself in the rearview mirror. He was older, this Ronan in the mirror, his jaw was more squared and stubbled. He wore something leather and cool.

He didn’t know where he was coming from; the dream wasn’t interested in that. The dream was interested in where the car was going, and this was where the car was going: through a chain-link fence. Across cardboard boxes and plastic containers and toys. Over another little car in the middle of the asphalt, tires disintegrating the other car’s rear window as it went. It drove through a sign for a mattress store. Flattened an inflatable snowman in front of another store. Clipped a billboard, sending it all crashing down behind it.

It took out bus stops and traffic lights, road signs and mailboxes.

There were no people in this dream, so there was no screaming. No one to hurt. No one to bring back by accident. There was just the howl of the engine, the thump of the bumper, the grinding apocalypse beneath the tires. Music thumped from the car’s beautiful carved speakers. The whole dream could hear it.

Finally, Ronan found himself speeding directly toward an identical car with an identical Ronan in it. It took him a moment to realize it wasn’t actually another car; it was the mirrored front of a club. The music from inside drowned out every other sound. It was the sort of music Ronan heard all the time when he was at Aglionby, the stuff that made him feel as if he truly were nothing like other people, not because he was gay or because his father had been murdered or because he could take things out of his dreams, but because he couldn’t bring himself to sing along to the shit other students sang along to. Funny how a handful of people loving a song you couldn’t stand could make you feel inhuman.

In this dream, the best dream, Ronan and the dreamt car smashed right through the club’s window.