He studied her, eyebrows knit. He was trying to understand her, and maybe he could understand part of her, the part of her that was a lot like him. But he’d been good at this for too long. She’d been bad at it for too long. They were beginning to be shaped like it. The space between those two truths was vast and checkered with Lace.

“Hold my beer,” Ronan said.

The electronics store melted away.

They were in a blistering red desert. Before them were two motorcycles in liquid black, their wasp-waisted bodies glistening with a permanent wet sheen, the compound eyes of their headlights pointed down an arrow-straight road. It was both darkly inviting and subtly wrong.

Hennessy glanced at him. “Is that what you think the desert looks like? Have you ever been? That looks like an alien planet.”

“If you think you can do better, let’s see it.”

It was a challenge. Just like Bryde. Change the dream. It had taken Ronan no effort at all.

Closing her eyes, Hennessy remembered the last time she had been through a real desert. Don’t think about the Lace. She could not make her mind put herself in a desert, so she imagined how she would paint it on a canvas. And in that moment, she felt the dream help her. Creativity prickled through her like a burst of adrenaline. Everything suddenly seemed easier to hold in her head all at once.

Hennessy opened her eyes.

The desert had changed. This desert wasn’t red at all; it was white and pink and cream and striated with orange and black and yellow. The sand was knotted and complicated with crisp sagebrush dried by current heat and flat cactus swollen with past luck. The two dreamers stood in a valley. Mesas rose in the distance, pale underwater castles shaped by a sea that had long abandoned this world. The sky overhead was bluer than any sky in the world.

This was a real desert, but a real desert by way of Hennessy. Exaggerated, heightened, made more itself. Made art.

“Fuck,” Ronan breathed, and he didn’t bother to hide his awe.

Maybe, Hennessy thought, there was a world where she could be good at this.

The Lace was nowhere.

And then they were on the bikes and they were tearing through that painted desert.

Ronan conjured a flock of white birds that skimmed fast and low beside them.

Hennessy painted a fork in the road, the asphalt smearing out like a brushstroke.

Ronan whirled music beneath their tires, pounding bass through the desert.

Hennessy transformed the scene from day to night, the purpled sky rich as berries, the sand pink and blue.

Ronan cast both bikes into the air.