He could feel the impulse to pour more acid, but he held it back. He watched his raven circle far below them, in and out of the clouds.

His voice, when he spoke, was barely audible against the wind. “I don’t know. I just do.”

It wasn’t a very good answer, but it was the truth.

Hennessy said, “Fine. Whatever. But don’t say I didn’t tell you.”

Ronan’s heart was beating hard again. It was like the rush he got when the masks came out, when he knew they were going to dream, only it was so much bigger than that. They were going to change the world. They were going to change their worlds. There was no going back. Was he doing this? He must be. What had he been made for, if not for this?

Bryde said, “Then we begin where I left off.”

Chapter 18

Jordan couldn’t really fathom what it was to be great at art.

Other people told her she was great at art all the time. They gasped over how quickly she could pencil a likeness. The ease with which she mixed pigments. The confidence of her brushstrokes. And it wasn’t that she didn’t understand why they said it. The canvases she turned out were impressive. Her grasp of technique was notable at her age. Her ability to paint what she saw before her at speed was unusual.

But she was simply aping other people’s greatness.

It wasn’t that she was incapable of greatness. It was possible (probable?) she had the aptitude for it. She had a very good grasp of art theory. She knew how to lead the viewer’s eye around a canvas in just the order she intended. She knew how to subtract and add elements to make the eye linger or flit. She knew which colors warmed a subject closer and which cooled objects into the background. She knew how light glowed on glass, on metal, on grass, on cloth. She knew which of her paints were lean and which were fat, she knew how much turpentine to add to get the stroke she wanted, she knew what value problems varnish would and wouldn’t fix. She knew all the fiddly math and science that made art and emotion work on a good canvas. Jordan had the prerequisites to be a great artist.

But she was not a great artist. She was a great technician.

Being in the presence of paintings like El Jaleo and Jordan in White only drove this home. They weren’t great because they were technically perfect. There was something else. Something more. Whether that something could be named—sweetmetal?—she wasn’t sure. What she was sure of was that pieces like that all had a way of seeing the world that no one else had noticed before.

That was greatness.