When they woke just a few minutes later, a dead body lay beside Hennessy. Forger in life, forger in sleep. The corpse was identical in every way to the living body already lying in the dirt—she had dreamt a perfect copy of Lock. She was also temporarily paralyzed, as all Zeds were after dreaming something into being, so Ronan heaved her up in a fireman’s hold and carried her back to the hard-to-see car.

After they had gone, Bryde rolled the real Lock onto his side so he could face his copied body, so he could see the perfection of it and be horrified. Bryde crouched between the two Locks, a lithe, nimble Reynard beside Lock’s blunt power.

“This game of yours,” Bryde began, and there was no softness to his voice, “will only end in pain. Take a look. The rules are changing. Do you understand? Do you understand what we could do? Leave my dreamers alone.”

There was no change in the living Lock’s expression. Bryde reached into Lock’s pocket and took out a small parcel. Now Lock’s eyes swam into focus long enough to show real panic, but his fingers could only snatch limply, drugged by Ronan Lynch’s dreamt storm.

“This is mine now,” Bryde whispered, hiding away the parcel. His teeth were a fox’s little snarl. “The trees know your secrets.”

Lock’s mouth opened and closed.

Bryde stood.

He stopped by the Airstream trailer, where the spared Zed was talking with Ronan, and then they all drove away. The car in one direction, the trailer in another, leaving behind a catastrophe of Moderators scattered across the stubbled wheat.

Slowly the dreamt weather dissolved, and the fields returned to their previous, featureless peace.

It was as if the Zeds had never been there at all.

Far back from the others, from the safety of where they’d watched this all unfold, Farooq-Lane turned to Liliana and said, “Those three could end the world.”

Chapter 1

Ronan Lynch still remembered the worst dream he’d ever had. It was an old dream now, two years old. Three? Four? As a kid, time had been slippery, and now, as an adult, or as a whatever-he-was, it was downright slimy. It had happened Before, that was all that mattered. Ronan used to divide his life into the time before his father’s death and the time after it, but now he divided it differently. Now it was Before he’d been good at dreaming. And After.

This was Before.