With a gentle flick of his wrist, he tossed the orb. He didn’t have many. He said they were “expensive,” and Ronan believed it. Ronan wouldn’t have known the first thing about dreaming them into being—he would have been too afraid to. Because they messed with emotions, and they twisted thoughts, and they erased memories, some more permanently than others. Ronan was uneasy dreaming anything that altered free will; the bewildering security system at the Barns was the furthest he was willing to go. Bryde’s orbs, on the other hand, were like dreaming brain surgery. Such sophistication required more control than Ronan felt he had.

Pwinnnnnnng! The tossed orb hit the teen’s poised cell phone. Both went flying. The phone, toward Bryde’s feet. The orb, under a booth.

Bryde pocketed the fallen cell phone.

“Hey!” said the teen.

“You can’t do that,” remarked the cashier. But he didn’t say anything else because a second later, Bryde’s orb exploded.

A cloud of confusion billowed out from inside it; it began to work on the diners almost immediately. Some gazed at each other in confusion. Some slumped over. The orb wasn’t designed to knock people out, but it was hard to predict how people would react to having their thoughts paused and memories flattened out.

“Your balls really are nifty things,” Hennessy said. “Love to get my hands on them.”

Bryde ignored this. “Time is of the essence.”

But Hennessy pressed on. “Must’ve required a lot of practice. Wonder who you were practicing them on. ’Course, you could’ve been practicing them on us. But we wouldn’t remember, would we?”

He ignored this, too. “Do what you have to do, Ronan.”

Ronan was the one who’d asked them to stop for food, even though he knew it wasn’t really allowed under the unspoken rules of their outlaw lifestyle. Food came from the cabinets and fridges of empty houses, places without cameras, places without people. Crackers and canned goods, deli meat and apples. But his hunger had been growing in the car and now his body was howling that it couldn’t last much longer.

“To the fryer!” cried Hennessy as she vaulted over the counter.

Ronan, however, went straight to the customer who stood motionless at the pickup counter. Not perfectly motionless, not like a statue. But rather like someone who had been walking through a store and just remembered she had forgotten something important back at home.

She didn’t blink or flinch as Ronan took a grease-spotted bag from one of her hands. He dumped the contents on the counter, unwrapped them, and ate them, one after another. A burger. Some fries. An apple pie.

He was still starving.

He took the milkshake from her other hand and drank it, too. Strawberry. Brain freeze. He finished it anyway, slamming the cup down on the counter as if it were a completed shot.

Still starving.