“I don’t have a good feeling about this,” the woman with the sword said.

“It will be all right,” the old woman replied, brushing her fingers over the dreamer’s forehead again, but her hand was trembling a little.

The people who loved the dreaming Zeds were also unable to enjoy the warm afternoon.

Adam Parrish, who loved Ronan, sat on the floor of his dorm room alone, a single candle lit, his tarot cards stacked face up beside it. He stared into the flame, throwing his mind out into the dreamspace. He was trying to reach Ronan Lynch, but it was like a phone that kept ringing and ringing. This was a dangerous game, but he kept trying. He let his mind wander a little farther from his body each time.

Ronan! Ronan! But instead he kept catching glimpses of Bryde. Everything felt hot. He could smell smoke. He was smoke, drifting, drifting.

Oh, Ronan, what have you done, he thought miserably. What are you doing?

Matthew Lynch, who also loved Ronan, had gone walking. Not wandering like a dream, but walking like an ordinary teen, with purpose. While Declan was occupied with secretive errands, Matthew had set up an appointment with a local school for a tour. He was going to finish high school. He’d decided. He didn’t know what he was going to do afterward, but until then, he was going to take Jordan’s advice and start treating himself as real until Declan did, too. It was a very stuffy school office, though, and he could see the day through the tiny window next to him. It was hard not to wish he was out there instead.

He found himself quite suddenly thinking about fire. He wasn’t sure why. He touched his cheek. It was hot. The school hadn’t adjusted their heating for this unseasonable day.

Declan Lynch, who also loved Ronan, was cornered in his own apartment by a handful of extremely pissed-off Moderators. They had just lost three Zeds at a rose garden and had no Visionary to provide further leads. They had not immediately decided how they were going to use Declan to get their hands on Ronan, but they had decided they would grab him first and then figure out the finer points later. He was all they had.

“I’m no good as leverage,” Declan told them. He thought about the gun he’d taped to the bottom of the kitchen table. It was four feet away, but might as well have been four hundred. Even if he could somehow get it, what was one gun against a room full of them? “As far as he’s concerned, he thinks I just tried to get him killed.”