She knew about Bryde. She knew because the dream had presented the knowledge to her without remark, as dreams sometimes do. The knowledge was this: Bryde was a dream. Bryde was Ronan’s dream.

“How are you doing that to him?” Ronan asked.

Hennessy narrowed her eyes at the horizon, where smoke billowed. “I heard him tell that Moderator a clever thing at the rose garden—did you hear him? He said he didn’t play mind games. He just turned the sound down on the stuff that didn’t matter. Why didn’t he teach us that shit? That’s shit I can use. I’m using it now! He gave us such a hard time about what was real and what was a dream, but he was talking about himself, too, wasn’t he? He doesn’t know what he really is any more than we do. What’s real now, Bryde? What do you feel?”

Bryde didn’t attend. He was still moving through the memory.

“Of course he has a stake in all this,” Hennessy said. “He told you he wanted to keep Matthew awake without you? He meant he wanted to stay awake. Fucking oedipal, man.”

“Shut up,” Ronan said. “What’s your big plan here? Shut down the ley lines to keep away the Lace?”

Hennessy popped finger guns at him.

Then she reached into her pocket and pulled out a silver orb. It was possible to tell, in the way of dreams, that even though it looked a lot like Bryde’s silver orb, it was not at all the same. It pulsed its intentions through the dream.

Its intention was this: Stop the ley line.

“So what now?” Hennessy asked. “We, like, battle forever? Is that going to be how it is? I try to make this thing that will shut down the line and you change the dream so I can’t remember what I was doing and round and round and round?”

The two Zeds eyed each other. The dream pulsed with unspoken feelings, but none of them were malice. Really, there were just two. One dreamer was feeling I need this to stop everything and the other dreamer was feeling I need this to start something.

And the other Zed, the Zed who was also a dream, kept going through the motions. He was walking toward an Airstream trailer that had just appeared in time for him to walk to it. Hennessy was somehow re-creating the memory perfectly for him, everything taken in with her artist’s eye and thrown back at him. She was very powerful when she was doing that.