Declan could feel all his previous goals wandering even further away from him, all of them seeming silly and arbitrary now, the childhood dreams of a kid looking for stability, wishing upon a star that later turned out to be a satellite.

“Say you’ll stay in Boston,” she said.

You have to know what you want, or you’ll never get it.

“I’ll stay in Boston,” he said.

Chapter 17

Ronan thought: This is what I was made for, probably.

The three dreamers sat shoulder to shoulder, looking down at the Pennsylvanian landscape below, the wind buffeting them hard. Mountain ridges and valleys looked like fingers had pinched the landscape in places and thumbprinted it in others. A broad river moved northwest to southeast. A smaller river came in from west to east, curled back on itself in rippling serpentine that reminded him of the black snake they’d found at the museum. Farms were cut into rectangles that butted up against wild dark forests. Roads were fine white hairs across it all, like parasitic worms in a dish. From this height, humans were invisible.

“What do you feel?” Bryde asked.

Free. Trapped. Alive. Guilty. Powerful. Powerless. Ronan felt everything but the ley line.

Hennessy sighed.

Bryde said, “Saving the ley lines is about seeing the pattern. It’s hard to see the pattern when you’re in it, but humans do the same things again and again; they are not that complicated. In a pair, they are individuals. Unique. Unlike. If you have half a dozen, two or three will remind you of each other. By the time you have one hundred, two hundred, you see types repeated again and again. Place two types together; they react a certain way. Place them with a different type; they react a different but equally predictable way. Humans form into groups along the same lines again and again; they fracture into smaller groups along other predictable lines again and again. One hundred and fifty, Dunbar’s number. That is how many connections humans can support before things begin to fall apart and remake. Again, again. Humans dance as elegantly as clockwork stars move across the sky, but they do not see it because they are the stars.”

They were very far up. Thousands of meters, feet dangling, pressed together on the dreamt hoverboard, cheeks burning with cold, lungs burning with the thinness of the air. The wind moved them this way and that; they were only in danger of falling if they completely resisted the flow. They were not in a dream but it felt like a dream, and for the first time, Ronan felt a little like he understood how Bryde could say there were not two of him.