Since meeting Ronan and Bryde, she’d spent more time than ever before wondering what it was like for other people to dream. She dreamt of the Lace. Always and forever. But most other dreamers had a different dream each night. Although she must have dreamt of something besides the Lace at some point, she could neither remember nor imagine what that was like.

She wondered how Ronan and Bryde found her in dreamspace. They fell asleep, had their own dream, and then—

“Be present,” Bryde said. “Stop wandering. How much power do you feel?”

A fuckload, Hennessy thought. Enough to dream something huge. Enough to bring the Lace out in its entirety.

“Stop calling the Lace,” Bryde said. “I won’t let it come back.”

I wasn’t calling it.

Bryde smiled thinly. Other people revealed themselves when they smiled. Tough folks became teddy bears; sentimental huggers revealed sharp-toothed gossips; shy people showed goofy clowns; class clowns turned out to be bitter depressants. But not Bryde. He was an enigma before and an enigma after.

“Where is your voice? Be present. Now look. I’ve given you a canvas and you’ve left it blank,” Bryde said, gesturing around them. Now that the Lace was gone, the dream held just their conversation, nothing else. “Laziness is the natural child of success. Who, after struggling up the ladder, feels like building another ladder? The view is already good. You’re not trying. Why?”

Hennessy’s voice was still just thought. There’s a word for someone who tries the same thing over and over again expecting a different result.

“Artist?” suggested Bryde. “You didn’t use to mind failure.”

She was annoyed that he was right.

Hennessy had spent her youth studying how pigment behaved, how badger bristles splayed paint versus squirrel versus hog versus kolinsky sable, how complementary colors accentuated each other or canceled each other out, how the human skeleton was constructed beneath the skin, working on every flat surface that presented itself to her. Trying. Failing. She’d also spent an equal amount of time, or more, on training her mind. Perception and imagination were always the weakest link in any artist’s chain. Eyes saw what they wanted to see instead of what was truly there. Shadows became too dark. Angles went crooked. Shapes got elongated, crushed. The brain had to be taught to see without feeling, and then to put feeling back in.

Fail, try again, fail, try again.

She couldn’t remember how she’d ever had the bandwidth to do that for so many hours and days and weeks and years.

“This is better,” Bryde said.

The dream had become a studio.

Hennessy hadn’t consciously thought of putting them in a studio, but dreams were crafty bastards that way. They gave you what you wanted, not what you said you wanted.