Part of Ronan was here in this invisible car racing away from his family, but part of Ronan was also in that memory of being curled in Ilidorin as he nearly lost himself to nightwash for good. Bryde had tried to warn them about the others when he first introduced them to Ilidorin, and Ronan and Hennessy had blown him off. They’d been so offended by his contempt for the dreamt phones, but now Ronan understood it exactly. Only, the truth was worse than what Bryde had warned. It wasn’t simply that Declan and Adam didn’t want to leave their own lives to come fight his battle with him. They actively wanted to stop the battle altogether.

They wanted the world to change just enough to keep Ronan alive. Alive, but not living. That was good enough for them.

It wasn’t good enough for him.

“Ronan, you know what I’m saying’s true,” Adam said. “You know what’s going on here. If you think about it, you have to—”

Ronan hung up on him, too.

He plucked the dreamt phone from his ear, rolled down the window, and threw it out as hard as he could.

Then he leaned his head back against the seat as they drove out of the city with one less dreamer than they’d arrived with.

Chapter 34

Twenty minutes.

Alarm.

Twenty minutes.

Alarm.

Twenty minutes.

Alarm.

Twenty minutes.

Alarm.

That was how Hennessy had been living at the beginning of all this, and that’s how she had been living since she left the house with the young dreamers.

She set the timer on her dreamt phone, and twenty minutes later, when it went off, she set it again. She had to wake up enough between each alarm to make sure she didn’t fall back into a deep sleep. It could not be an eight-hour sleep interrupted dozens of times. It had to be dozens of sleeps for eight hours.

“But that’s not survivable,” Carmen Farooq-Lane said. “Or fair.”

Farooq-Lane was a very put together sort of young woman, so put together it was difficult to discern her true age. When she said it, it seemed obvious. Like it made sense. Like the situation had been stripped of emotion, taken down to the studs, and revealed as unsound. Of course it was not survivable. Of course it was not fair.

“They shouldn’t have made so light of the Lace,” Liliana said in her sweet old-lady voice. “It was never going to be as easy as simply asking it to go away.”