“All right,” Declan said. “So the city woke up. For a while.” He hadn’t told Adam about the sweetmetals, and Paranoid Declan was loath to give away more information, but he asked, carefully, “Why do you think it has anything to do with Ronan? Could it be from a power source an outsider’s bringing in?”

Adam frowned at him, and Declan was nearly certain he knew Declan was withholding information. Adam, as a secretive creature, understood secrets. But Adam just asked, “How much do you know about what Ronan’s been doing?”

Declan shook his head. He knew only that Ronan, Hennessy, and Bryde were interfering with the Moderators’ attempt to kill other dreamers. That had seemed noble. Useful. An acceptable outlet for Ronan’s abilities and rebelliousness. Perhaps he had just wanted it to be. He’d wanted fewer ducklings for once.

Adam said, “There’s no concrete evidence, but Ronan and the others have been implicated in over twenty incidents of industrial espionage.”

Surprise was not the emotion Declan was feeling, so some part of him must have known. Suspected, anyway. This was the other shoe dropping.

“What kind of industrial espionage?”

“I got access to some of the agencies’ documents,” Adam said casually. This, Declan thought, was why those kids in the waffle line couldn’t truly be Adam’s bosom friends. Adam was reading intelligence documents about his boyfriend and they were googling celebrity chefs. “They’ve been taking down power grids. Server farms. Corporate waste sites. That power outage a few weeks ago, the one that affected those tens of thousands in Delmarva? That was them. Transmission line. The price tag is in the billions.”

“Billions,” echoed Declan. It was a lot to take in. “What’s the goal?”

“The Moderators don’t know, or at least they haven’t put it in writing. I think I can guess, though. Overnight, I compared the dates and times of the espionage with the surges, and they match up. They match up exactly. I think Ronan and the others have been working to clear obstacles from the ley lines to make them stronger. Every time they do, that creates a chain reaction that means this line under Boston and Cambridge, this line that was dormant—it surges, too. Has Matthew been having fewer of those strange episodes lately?”

Declan didn’t know. He hadn’t asked. Matthew hadn’t said. Theoretically Declan had been thinking nonstop about a sweetmetal to secure his future, but actually, this was what Declan had been thinking nonstop about: Jordan Hennessy.

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Adam said. “He should be feeling great every time one of these surges happen.”

Declan didn’t see the problem with that, and he said so.

Adam pointed to the beetles. “You don’t see a problem with that?”

“I see something that means eventually Matthew could stay awake on his own, am I right?”