Bryde continued. “The nonhuman world has patterns, too. Look at the veins of a leaf, your hand, a tree, gold through rock, a river headed to sea, lightning. And again, again, not just in the visible, but also the invisible. In airflow, particles, sound waves, ley lines, too, veining across this poor, battered home of ours. Again, again, again. Everything predicts everything else. Everything affects everything else.”

Ronan felt Hennessy shiver. He leaned his skull against her skull, and without pause or snark, she leaned back.

“It doesn’t take much to disrupt the pattern. Look at that river there. Over the years, silt has built up along its banks, which slows it. And as it slows, it becomes less able to move the silt, so it slows further, so there is even more silt, and so it slows even more. As it slows, the river twists harder away from the obstacle, looking for the path of least resistance. Twist, slow, twist, slow, until the curves are so tight that it becomes just a bent lake here and then a small pond there and then finally the water’s driven below ground. This, too, is what happens to the ley lines.”

Ronan could almost imagine it. The glowing energy of the ley line glistening across the landscape below, pulsing beneath the mountains, seeping into the rivers. Everything had felt obvious and connected in his last dream, when he was curled inside Ilidorin, and some of that connectivity lingered.

“Slowly the ley lines get shut down one by one by electricity and roads and trash and noise and noise and noise and noise.” Bryde sucked in a deep breath. “Which is why we dreamers are forced to go from vein to vein as they collapse behind us.”

“So a dreamer’s just a parasite,” Hennessy said. “We’re nothing without them.”

“Is your brain a parasite?” Bryde asked.

“Yes,” she said immediately.

“Your lungs, your kidneys, your hands? Your heart pumps blood through your entire body. Take away the blood and things begin to fail. Does that make the brain lesser than the blood? The left hand a servant to the veins that power it? We need the ley line. The ley line needs us. The world needs us. Eventually, if we all die—and we are dying, some more quickly than others—so the rest will go. Our passing, a symptom of a bigger disease.”

“And if we fix the ley lines?” Ronan asked. “The disease goes away?”