Jordan had taken off with Declan Lynch after mounting only the lamest of protests. She’d been waiting for an excuse to leave Hennessy for so long, and here it was.

Outside, the storm grew closer, the edges of the clouds geometric and dark.

“Stay on task,” Bryde ordered.

The purple paint on the canvas bled into the shape of lush purple lips. Hennessy’s lips. No. Jordan’s. Nearly the same, but different in important ways. Jordan’s lips smiled. Hennessy’s forged smiles from looking at other people’s mouths.

Carefully, Hennessy added a shadow, giving the lips dimension; the inky black was darker and truer than any black paint could be in waking life.

Bryde stood so fast he knocked the chair over. “Yes. Yes, that. This is what dreaming is for. Do not make a vegan copy of a burger. Eat a goddamn vegetable and love it.”

Had Declan kissed Jordan? Probably. Hennessy dipped her thumb in the pale feather pink on the palette, and then she swiped the pigment across the bottom lip. The highlight instantly rendered the mouth wet and full and anticipatory. It was more than real. It was super real. It wasn’t just what lips looked like. It was what they felt like. It was image and memory and sensation all together in the way dreams could be.

“Stop,” Bryde said. “That’s what you’re bringing back. Experience it. Don’t let it change. Ask the ley line to help you. It can—”

He broke off, and his expression went far away.

Hennessy suddenly thought, out of nowhere, wheels.

Wheels?

Bryde shouted, “Ronan Lynch! Stop that!”

She just had time to feel something a little like all the air going out of the room, which was funny, because she hadn’t been thinking about breathing in the dream.

Then everything disappeared.

Chapter 3

Hennessy awoke with a start.

She was moving.

She was not just moving, she was moving fast.

It was like a movie. She saw herself from above, looking down, God gazing down on his creation. A slender Black girl with a fro full of debris tumbled ass over tits over ass again down hundreds of neatly stacked hay bales in an old barn. Her rag doll body was bizarrely caged in something that looked like an enormous wooden hamster wheel.

It was rare that the waking world made less sense than the dreaming one. But the bigger picture didn’t become clear until she careened all the way to the barn floor, breath busting from her paralyzed body.

The bigger picture was this: Wheels! Wheels! Wheels!