The thing she’d thought looked like a hamster wheel around her was a tangle of actual wheels. It was just one of many that filled the barn. There were muscular tractor wheels, fragile bicycle wheels, little toy wheels. Man-sized wooden carriage wheels. Child-sized plastic steering wheels. Spokes dangled from rafters. Rims wedged between hay bales. They ramped over mannequins and up against the doors. Every wheel had a single word printed or burned into it: tamquam. It looked like an art installation. A prank. Insanity.

It was breaking Hennessy’s brain.

One part of her mind whispered, This is how it’s always been. The wheels were always here. The other part, however, knew better. This was how it always worked when she saw other dreamers’ dreams manifest. They didn’t just magically appear. Instead, the dream magic edited her memory. Not completely. Just enough to create two realities. One where the dreams had always been there, and one where they hadn’t.

Brain-breaking.

“Ronan.” Bryde’s voice sounded irritated.

A delicate light hissed into existence, revealing Bryde halfway up the towering stack of old hay bales. The dreamers’ exploration of the living history museum had turned up three decent possibilities for dreaming locations: a small diorama re-creating the close sleeping quarters of a submarine, a single four-poster bed in a re-creation of some historical figure’s bedroom, and this, a large re-creation of an old hay barn, so realistic that it seemed likely it had probably already existed on the property pre-museum.

Bryde climbed down the hay bales, complaining as he did. “Aren’t you tired of doing this?”

Because this wasn’t the first time Ronan had trashed a place since they’d begun traveling with Bryde. He’d filled a thru-hiking shelter with bleeding rocks. Destroyed the living room of an abandoned rambler with a very small tornado. Busted out the wall of a cheap, cash-only motel with an invisible car. He’d trashed rooms with dead earthworms and hissing microphones, school textbooks and expired bacon. Every zip code they’d stayed in had been left with Ronan Lynch’s indelible mark.

Hennessy had to admit, a small, rubbishy part of her was glad for all of this. Because as long as Ronan Lynch, the great Ronan Lynch, was fucking up at this level, it made Hennessy’s inability to kick the Lace from her dreams not quite as damning.

“Hennessy, are you awake?” Bryde asked the air.