The dreamers had just destroyed a pulp mill on the other side of town. It had been one of the worst smells Ronan had ever smelled, and that included the odors at the West Virginia Museum of Living History, the trash dump they’d destroyed, and the bodies he’d buried over the years. He wondered how long it would take people to notice it was gone. The mill. The smell. All of it. Would they notice the silhouette was missing from the horizon before the sun went down? Perhaps tomorrow when they arrived to work, only to discover the mill had been replaced with a meadow. Unless tomorrow was a weekend. Ronan had no idea what day of the week it was. Time worked differently now. Weekends felt like a concept that had been important Before.

“What do you feel?” Bryde persisted. “Nothing?”

“This dinosaur,” Ronan said, running his fingers over Chainsaw’s nubbly talons. The raven clutched the peak of the roof beside him and peered off at the disappearing sun, beak parted, as if imagining how good it would’ve tasted. “And the spine of this roof up my—”

Hennessy gasped.

Bryde just had time to grab her arm before she tumbled from the roof. Her fingers clung to him as he dragged her back up.

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—

“Goddamn,” he whispered.

Bryde smiled.

It was an altogether different smile than Ronan had ever seen him wear, his light teeth visible in the deepening dark, his eyes half-closed, head thrown back. Euphoric. Relieved.

“That’s the ley line,” Bryde said.

Ronan felt it uncurl through him, like vines stretching toward the sun. It was the humming possibility of his dreams, the sense of ever-widening options, but he was awake.

With a glorious cry, Chainsaw threw herself from the roof and soared high up into the air. Part of him felt like he might be able to join her.

“Why is it doing that?” Hennessy asked in a small voice. Bryde was still holding her steady on the roof, a hand gripped very firmly around her upper arm.

“It’s a surge,” he said. “It won’t last. If we are lucky, we will feel another. Perhaps a third. The heartbeat of a sick planet coming round.”