Hennessy had one dream. The Lace. Always the Lace. She was a bar with a single beer on tap. She was about to tell them this, but in the past, Jordan had always told Hennessy, “You’re not allowed to shoot down any more of my ideas until you’ve had one of your own.”

So she didn’t shoot it down. She sank down into the beanbag and stared at them instead.

“I don’t believe killing yourself is the answer,” Farooq-Lane said. “You have value, too.”

“Ma’am, we’ve just met,” Hennessy said.

Liliana broke in. “Do you know what it means to be a Visionary, Hennessy? I don’t always look like this. Sometimes I’m a girl. Sometimes I’m a woman. Sometimes I am this, what you see now. Every time I change between these ages, I have a vision of the future, and all the sound that has happened or will happen in the intervening years comes out of me. It destroys everyone close enough to hear it. Over the years, I have met and will meet people who urge me to turn this vision inward. If I do that, I will no longer shift between ages, and I will no longer be a danger to those around me. But eventually, that method will kill me instead.”

“I take it since we’re talking to the old version of you, you picked door number one,” Hennessy said. “Keep exploding?”

“Most Visionaries die very young,” Liliana said. “Too young to change the world. I’m still here not because I think my life is valuable—although I do think that—but because staying alive means I have more visions, and the more visions I have, the more I can save the world from itself. You have value, too, Hennessy, value that comes from staying alive.”

“And if you turn off the ley line,” Farooq-Lane said, “no more Zeds—dreamers—have to die. You’re all only as dangerous then as you would be as normal people. You can only hurt or help as many people as anyone else.”

She’d corrected herself, but Hennessy preferred the first term she’d used. Zed. That’s right. Zero. Nothing. Loser.

“You don’t have to feel this fear and pain all the time. You’re allowed to stop it,” Farooq-Lane said.

“I know you have no love for yourself,” Liliana broke in again, and her voice was so gentle that Hennessy felt absurdly close to tears again. They burned; she hated them. She wanted it to stop. How badly she wanted it to stop. “So you might not make this decision for yourself, because you don’t think you deserve it. You can make it for others. It would be noble to stop it.”

Stopping the ley line meant stopping Jordan in her tracks.