A suddenly visible car raced toward her, flattening the grass, its rear door hanging open. Through the open door, Farooq-Lane saw that Bryde was driving. Ronan Lynch’s body was prone across the backseat. Not particularly vital-looking.

Jordan Hennessy threw herself through the open door into the car.

“Someone stop it!” shouted someone. Maybe Lock.

Hennessy locked eyes with Farooq-Lane just before she slammed the door shut.

The car vanished as if it had never been there.

Zero: Zed. 0.

No more, thought Farooq-Lane. No more.

Chapter 14

Matthew thought something might have happened to Ronan.

He and Declan had just trespassed into a Harvard dorm building. Matthew didn’t realize at first that they were trespassing. He hadn’t paid much attention to how Declan approached the old brick dorm twice. First, just walking by, seeming to give the propped-open door no more or less interest than anything else in the cool midnight-blue-and-gold Cambridge evening. Second, after shedding his suit coat in the car and running his fingers through his curls until they were boyish and messy, returning to push through the door into the warm red-and-brown interior.

Inside, a haphazard line of college students led up a flight of stairs. Declan flippantly patted the shoulder of the closest with the back of his hand. “Hey. This the line for—?”

Matthew was startled to hear his brother’s voice. Instead of his usual sales-speak monotone, he sounded like one of the guys. He’d even changed how he stood. Previously alert and suspicious, he was now casual and inattentive, gaze pulled to a knot of pretty girls in the hall, then to his phone, then back to the student in line.

“The card thing, yeah,” the student replied. “It’s going fast.”

Declan joined the line and began to type away on his phone in his peculiar way, thumb and forefinger. He did not explain himself to Matthew. Perhaps he didn’t think he needed to. Perhaps a normal person would have guessed what they were doing there. Had Ronan dreamt Matthew to be an idiot? Ever since he’d found out he was dreamt, he’d been trying to think about things more like a real person, more like a grown-up, but it made his head hurt.

“Don’t pick your nails,” Declan murmured without looking up from his phone.

Matthew stopped picking his nails. They climbed a few stairs at a time. The student was right; the line went fast. Some of the students coming down the stairs were crying. There were no other clues to where the line might be headed.

It was when they were nearly to the top of the stairs that Matthew began to feel a little weird.