He meant to spare Matthew the security system Ronan had dreamt for the Barns since they left, a peculiar, invisible net of dreams that covered the end of the driveway. It not only made the entrance to the Barns very difficult to see, it also made you feel terrible if you did try to enter. Anyone who stepped into the net immediately began to relive bad memories. Awful memories. Stuff you thought you’d forgotten and stuff you wished you had. Stuff so wretched that people just gave up and went back the way they’d come.

Matthew was sort of drawn to it.

Secretly he frequented the end of the driveway while Declan was occupied in the farmhouse all day on his boring calls on his burner phone, and secretly he would suck in his breath and plunge into the net of bad memories again and again.

He didn’t know why.

“Matthew,” Declan said. He was cuffing his pants. There was a long way around the security system if one picked through the woods in just the right way, but even the right way snagged one’s slacks with brambles. It was a testament to how much Declan wanted to avoid the security system that he’d tromp through the woods instead.

Matthew edged toward the end of the driveway. “I’ll get it.”

“You are being even more ridiculous than usual.”

“BRB,” Matthew said.

“Matthew, for crying out—”

Matthew plunged into the security system.

The memories hit him like they always did, fresh as when they happened. His brain could not separate them from the truth.

This is what he remembered: losing himself. His thoughts slid into muddy dreaming. He climbed his school’s roof. The ground plunged hundreds of feet away. His body was unworried about the height.

This is what he remembered: He was mid-sentence with Jacob on the soccer field, and then he was forgetting what he was saying while he was saying it, and then he was watching Jacob wait and wait and wait for him to remember his train of thought as it never returned.

This is what he remembered: He was being woken by Declan by the banks of the Potomac River and realizing he’d walked there yet again without knowing it, and seeing all the creatures Ronan had dreamt dozing around him and realizing he was like them, he was a dream, he was a dream.

This is what he remembered: He was walking, dreaming, walking, sleeping, obeying a power outside himself.

Matthew.

A voice said his name.

This was the memory that he kept coming back for.

Sometimes, when he lost himself, he thought he heard someone calling to him. Not in a human voice. Not in a dream voice. In a voice-voice, in a language he felt like maybe was his real language.

He didn’t understand any more than that. So he kept coming back again and again.