Bryde tapped Ronan’s jaw with a single finger. “Protector and guardian—that is what you are supposed to be. King and shepherd both. But look at you, sick in your avoidant gluttony. There are not two of you. Your waking self cannot ignore what your dreaming self needs, because they are the same. Now you tell me. What is it you’re really feeling?”

He pointed at Ronan’s ear.

Very slowly, Ronan reached up to his ear and pressed a finger into it. When he withdrew it, his fingertip was slicked with a dark ooze.

Nightwash.

He was not starving for food. He was starving for the ley line. He was starving for dreaming.

“Why is it always me?” he asked.

Bryde said, “I just told you.”

The nightwash came to Ronan far more often than it came to Hennessy. It came when he waited too long between taking something from his dreams, as if to punish him for not doing what he had been built to do. But it also came to him when he was too far from the ley line, as if to punish him for trying to live a life that was built for someone else. Once the ooze started, he had less and less time before he began to feel ill, and presumably, less and less time before it eventually would kill him.

“I’m getting worse,” he muttered.

“Yes,” Bryde said.

“Why even bother with me, then?”

“Because it is not just you. This mountain city used to be alive with ley energy. Did you see the river we drove beside for dozens of miles, the river this city straddles? It should be flowing with energy. This should be a mountain town of dreamers. But it fades, like the entire world fades. It breathes more and more slowly, and no one is listening to mark the end of its pulse. Few, I suppose. Few are listening.”

Hennessy asked, “Hold up. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of kicking ass, taking names, so on, so forth, but if we’re all going to bite it eventually because the world’s dying, why save anyone from the Mods? Is it sport to you?”

“It’s not sport to me.” Bryde kept standing over Ronan. “What do you feel?”

“I can’t do that,” Ronan said. “I’ll never be able to do that. Not while I’m awake.”

“Don’t tell me my business. Not while you’re bleeding black. I have been at this for so much longer than you.” Bryde looked out the big glass windows at the trees at the edge of the parking lot, his eyes narrowed, his profile prickling that thing inside Ronan, that feeling of serendipity, of knowing, not-knowing, knowing, not-knowing, and then Bryde asked, “Do you two want to know what I was doing before you?”

Hennessy and Ronan exchanged a look.