Declan hadn’t been so worried about Ronan’s ability when Ronan was hidden safely away until needed.

Bryde said, “We don’t have much time.”

Ronan didn’t know if he could stay focused with his thoughts as they were now. He wasn’t thinking about the future. He was thinking about the past.

Bryde said, “I’ll do my best to focus the dream. It will be different after this. Last push.”

They dreamt.

In the dream, they were at the dam. Because it was Bryde’s dream, it was vividly rendered. Ronan could see it, smell it, feel the unseasonably warm breeze on his skin. They were walking. He could feel it as if he were awake. The bite of his boot on the zigzagging walkway the two of them followed. The echo of their steps off the back of the low concrete visitors’ center, which they passed. The tickle of gnats swarming from the overgrown dry brush. The buzz of a stink bug woken by the heat.

Ronan would have been hard pressed to identify how it was any different from waking life.

“What do you feel?” Bryde asked.

“Don’t ask me that while we’re dreaming,” Ronan said. “It fucks me up.”

They had come to a viewing area at the end of the walkway. Wordlessly, they leaned on the railing to look at the vast white dam. The scale of it was difficult to hold. On one side was the glittering blue water of the artificial lake, and on the other, hundreds of feet below, held back by the curved dam, was more glittering water, the choked Roanoke River. All about were mountains. The lake looked odd somehow, the water strange as it climbed the slopes, although Ronan couldn’t understand why.

“They’re drowned,” Bryde said. “These mountains were never meant to have water up to their chins; picture this as a river valley instead. The dam did this. There are towns beneath that lake, if you can imagine. Beautiful, isn’t it? Like a cemetery. How would you destroy it?”

For quite a long time the two of them stood there as Ronan studied the dam and thought of what the smallest, easiest dream would be to destroy it. Before he’d fallen asleep, he’d been imagining something strong enough to bust through the dam itself, but that now seemed unacceptable. This was more water than he had pictured. All of these gallons would have to go somewhere, and who knew how many houses and roads had been built downstream of this now.

He didn’t want to kill anyone.

So it would have to be something gradual. Something with a bit of warning. Not a lot. Just enough to let people get out of the way. Not slow enough for them to stop it. Inexorable, unfixable.