Don’t eat dreams, Bryde had chastised him. At best they’ll starve you and at worst they’ll control you. Dreams are like words, they’re like thoughts. They always mean more than one thing. Are you sure those pills only made you sleep?

Ronan’s hands felt hot; his heart was beginning to pound. It had only taken a few weeks for the masks to generate a Pavlovian response in him.

Bryde swept his gaze over the ruined space. “Let’s find a safe place to dream.”

To dream. To dream: urgently, purposefully. To dream: with other dreamers.

That enormous, warm feeling was charging up inside Ronan again, big enough now that he could tell what it was:

Belonging.

Chapter 2

Hennessy dreamt of the Lace.

It was always the same dream.

It was dark. She was meaningless in this dream. Not a cog in a machine, not a blade of grass in a field. Possibly a speck of dust in the baleful eye of a loping beast, blinked away. But nothing more.

Slowly, the dream illuminated, and the light revealed a thing that had been there all along. A thing? An entity. A situation. Its edges were jagged and geometric, intricate and ragged, a snowflake beneath a microscope. It was enormous. Enormous not like a storm or a planet, but enormous like grief or hatred.

This was the Lace.

It was not really a thing one saw. It was a thing one felt.

When Hennessy had first dreamt Jordan into being, Jordan slept curled up behind her, her presence at once comforting and off-putting. Comforting because she was warm, familiar, entirely the same as Hennessy. But also off-putting because Hennessy, used to sleeping alone for ten years, would startle awake as Jordan’s breath just barely moved the hairs on the back of her neck. It’s impossible to prepare for the creeping strangeness of having dreamt a copy into being. Hennessy didn’t know what she owed Jordan beyond a body here in the waking realm. She didn’t know whether she and Jordan were going to be best friends or rivals. She didn’t know if Jordan might try to usurp Hennessy’s life. She didn’t know what to do if Jordan rejected it and struck off on her own. She didn’t know what to do if Jordan embraced it and stayed with Hennessy forever and ever and ever. It was possible she might not be alone ever again, but she didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

That feeling?

That was the Lace.