Up, up. Ronan’s calves strained as they headed up the steepening mountain. Here, the snow was thicker, the trees even bigger. The landscape seemed just as dreamy as the desert he’d just left. And as real.

Hennessy, he thought, are we still dreaming?

She didn’t turn her head. So he was awake, or at least he was in his dream alone, with a copy of Hennessy, a copy of Bryde. Reality was harder to define now.

“Do you know where we are?” Bryde asked them. They had reached their destination: a great, vast stump that must have once been a great, vast tree, larger than any of the others still standing. It was dusted with snow like everything else, which somehow made it seem more alive, not less. Ronan was put in mind of the way the snow dusted the backs of his father’s eternally sleeping cattle back at the Barns.

“Still Westva,” Hennessy replied. “Yeah?”

“West by God Virginia,” added Ronan, mimicking his old friend Gansey’s Southern accent before remembering none of these new acquaintances had ever met him. Here in the future, they didn’t know about his past. Maybe that was Adam’s attraction to it.

He felt that prickle of the Lace again.

Bryde said, “Yes. Quite nearly in the middle of the National Radio Quiet Zone. Over ten thousand square miles without radio, Wi-Fi, cell phone signal, or microwave ovens. Home of the largest steerable radio telescope in the world and several defunct alien research programs. One of the quietest night skies east of the Mississippi. Can you feel it?”

Of course not. Not now that he was awake. The ley power always seemed so clear to dreaming Ronan. Waking Ronan, however, couldn’t sense it even a little. In fact, it often felt like waking Ronan loved the things that seemed to actively interfere with it the most. Electricity, engines, motors, gasoline, adrenaline. And then dreaming Ronan—nightwashing Ronan—needed a world free of them. Perhaps this was why it was hard to see a future for himself. Bryde said there weren’t two of him. Bryde didn’t know.

“Can I feel it, or do I like it?” Hennessy asked. “Because those are different answers.”

Bryde gazed up at the massive spruces around them. A crawling white mist ghosted up from the light snowfall now, and the tree trunks were marked with little upside-down Vs of white where the precipitation had stuck to the rugged bark. “What do you hear?”

“Nothing,” said Ronan.

Nothing. Nothing.

There was no sound of distant trucks, no hum of generators, no slam of distant doors. There was just the soft, white silence around these huge trees. Mountain soil was so poor and yet they’d managed to become massive. Ronan wondered how long it had taken them to perform this feat.

Perhaps they grew better in the absence of noise.