“Good point. If you’re spooning, you could probably stack four or five people back there. Two more in the trunk.”

“Dreamers!” Bryde said, silencing them.

He stood at the double doors at the end of the mannequin-filled hall, his hands upon the door handles. All that was truly visible of him in the darkness was that tawny tousle of hair, his pale neck, and the light stripe down each of his gray jacket’s sleeves. It made him look a bit like a stick figure or a skeleton, the bare minimum required to appear human.

As he pushed open the doors, warm light poured into the hallway.

The space on the other side was as large as a gymnasium. The roof had collapsed long ago. The golden evening found its way down through the jagged hole as a striving tree covered with creeper found its way up through it. The dust dazzled in the light. Everything smelled like real life, not one of five hundred scents piped in.

“Yes,” Bryde said, as if answering a question.

It was like a cathedral to ruination. Pigeons burst up from the shadows with a puff of sound. Ronan fell back in surprise; Hennessy threw a reflexive hand over her head. Bryde didn’t flinch, watching them vanish through the roof. Chainsaw threw herself after them with a joyful ark, ark, ark, sounding enormous and menacing.

“Balls,” Ronan hissed, annoyed to have been startled.

“Tits,” added Hennessy.

As they stepped farther in, another batch of birds burst from a pollen-coated carriage, knocking a mannequin onto its face.

“See how it’s become a museum to something entirely different,” Bryde said. “Look how honest it is now.”

Because of all the leaf litter and undergrowth, it was difficult to say what the exhibit had originally been, although an ivy-covered vintage firetruck a few yards away from the carriage suggested a street scene. Bryde loved the memory of human effort.

“How many years did it take for this to happen?” Bryde asked aloud. He laid his palm flat against the trunk of the big tree and gazed up through the split roof. “How many years did this have to be untouched before a tree could grow again? How many more years will it take before this place disappears entirely? Will it ever? Or will a post-museum forever be a museum to humans? When we dream something, how long will it last? This is why we do not dream something absolute, something infinite; we are not so egotistical as to assume it will always be wanted or needed. We have to think of what will become of our dreams after we are gone. Our legacy.”

Ronan’s legacy was a destroyed Harvard dorm room, an invisible car, and a sword with the words vexed to nightmare etched on the hilt.

Everything else he’d dreamt would fall asleep the moment he died.

Hennessy froze.