Just the kind of place Bryde usually brought them. In the weeks since they’d fled from the Moderators on the bank of the Potomac, Bryde had directed them to collapsed houses, empty vacation rentals, shuttered antique stores, vacant airport hangars, disused hiking shelters. Ronan couldn’t tell if Bryde’s preference for the decrepit was grounded in secrecy or aesthetic. It felt like secret didn’t have to be synonymous with abandoned, but Bryde nevertheless brought them to places that few human hands had touched in recent memory. These lodgings always lacked creature comforts, but Ronan couldn’t complain. The three of them were alive, weren’t they? Three dreamers, wanted by the law, still standing, bristling with piss and vinegar as they climbed out of their dreamt car.

Bryde said, “Listen. What do you hear?”

He said this every time they got someplace new.

Ronan heard the dry hiss of the wind through trapped leaves. The distant roar of trucks on the highway. The murmur of an unseen airplane. A dog barking. Some kind of buzzing generator far away. The soft whoosh of Chainsaw’s wings. Watching the black-feathered bird rise above the three of them in this strange warm place filled him with a feeling he couldn’t describe, one he’d been feeling more and more since they’d fled. It was like a fullness. A presence, a realness. Before, he had been hollow, drained. No, draining. Becoming empty. And now there was something inside him again.

Listen, Bryde said, and Ronan listened. What did he hear? His pulse in his ears. The stir of his blood. The movement of his soul. The hum of the thing that was filling him.

It couldn’t be happiness, he thought, because he was far from his brothers and from Adam. He worried about them, and surely he couldn’t be happy if he was worried.

But it felt a lot like happiness.

“When the last human dies, there will still manage to be a plane whining over the empty forest,” Bryde said.

Although he was complaining, his voice remained measured. He was, in most ways, the polar opposite of his mercurial pupils. Nothing startled him nor sent him flying off the handle. He did not laugh hysterically or burst into rageful tears. He did not swagger or self-abase, indulge or self-abnegate. He simply was. Everything about his posture announced him not as an apex predator, but rather as something powerful enough that he could opt out of the predator-prey scenario entirely. All of this without a tousled lock of tawny hair out of place.

He’s sort of a dandy, Hennessy had said to Ronan privately, on the first day. Like, a super-dandy. He beat all the other dandies and now he’s the boss-dandy, the one you have to defeat to get that button-down shirt of his.