Farooq-Lane seemed to guess what she was thinking. “If the end of the world comes, your dreams will die with the rest of us. This way they’ll fall asleep. That doesn’t have to be forever. Death is forever.”

I wish you were dead, she’d told Jordan.

Why do you always do this? Jordan asked.

Hennessy almost wished that Farooq-Lane and Liliana had told her they were going to have to kill her after all. It wasn’t exactly that she wanted to die. She just didn’t want to live with herself.

“You’re forgetting one thing,” she said. “I only ever dream of the Lace. All day every day, it’s the Lace superstore. I can’t dream something to shut down the ley line. I only ever dream of the Lace.”

The music plinked overhead. The beanbag hugged Hennessy. She drank some of her hot chocolate. The reviews Liliana had read on the way over were right. It really was good hot chocolate. It would be a good last meal.

Liliana looked at Farooq-Lane, her expression sympathetic and soft.

Farooq-Lane looked at Hennessy, her expression sympathetic and hard. Then she reached behind her to lay from chaos, in its scabbard, in front of Hennessy and her beanbag.

“Then explain this,” she said.

Chapter 35

Ronan hadn’t meant to dream Matthew.

It had been Christmastime. Short days. Long nights. He always got restless that time of year. Anticipation built in him as the days got smaller, until around the end of December, the feeling eventually burst and left him feeling more ordinary again.

He knew now that it had been a surge of the ley line. But back then, as a child, as a dreamer who was not permitted to give words to the dreaming, he hadn’t known anything but that restlessness. It was a feeling that was only shored up by Declan’s behavior. If Ronan became more alive as they crept toward winter solstice, Declan became less so. His eyes developed bags. His moods got short. The brothers did not fight then like they did when they were older, but the seeds were already sleeping in the cold soil.

That particular winter had been unseasonably warm, and a few days before Christmas, Aurora sent the boys outside to kick a ball around. To Ronan’s delight, the brothers discovered that the dun-colored fields around the farmhouse were lousy with starlings. Hundreds, perhaps thousands. When the birds first saw the brothers emerge from the house, they lifted up in a great swath of dark dots in the sky, like music notes on a page, but they quickly landed again just a few yards farther away.

This was much better than kickball. For quite a while they instead played a game of who can get closer to the flock.