Mister Impossible

  For Melissa

  I’m the earth, I’m the water you walk on

  I’m the sun and the moon and the stars

  Phantogram, “Mister Impossible”

  Flower-guided it was

  That they came as they ran

  On something that lay

  In the shape of a man.

  Robert Frost, “Spoils of the Dead”

  Oh, the thinks you can think up

  if only you try!

  Dr. Seuss, Oh, the Thinks You Can Think!

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Maggie Stiefvater

  Copyright

  When they came to kill the Zed, it was a nice day.

  It was Illinois, probably, or one of those states that start with an I. Indiana. Iowa. wIsconsin. Fields, but not the postcard kind. No picturesque barns. No aesthetically rusted farm equipment. Just stubbled field. The sky was very blue. The rubbled end-of-season wheat fields were very bright and pale. Everything was very clear. It was like an ocean vacation, without the ocean. Bisecting the landscape was a highway: very flat, very straight, gray-white with salt.

  A single vehicle was visible, a semi truck with a clean red cab and a trailer that read LIVING SOLUTIONS • ATLANTA • NEW YORK • NASHVILLE. These words were accompanied by a black-and-white line drawing of an Edwardian chair, but there were no chairs inside the truck. They were inside it. The Moderators. The home team, the winning team, the ones who were working hard every day to keep the end of the world at bay. Or at least that was what the writing on the tin promised: an assemblage of reasonable adults gathered together to stop a supernatural menace most people were unaware existed—Zeds.

  Zed, as in z, as in zzzzz, as in sleep, which was when Zeds became weapons. Zed, as in zero, as in how much of the world would be left if the Moderators didn’t step in.

  Not many noble callings left in the world, but surely this was one.

  Bellos drove the furniture truck, even though he had freshly lost his arm. Ramsay rode in the passenger seat. He was picking his nose and wiping it on the door in an aggressive way, daring Bellos to say something. Bellos did not. He had other things to think about, like missing his arm. He also thought about the creatures that had torn it off in Declan Lynch’s townhome not too long before. Those hounds! Inky black hounds with eyes and mouths of baleful fire, the stuff of myth. What had come first? Had Zeds dreamt the monsters who became the thing of legend? Or had legends inspired the Zeds to make the imaginary reality?

  Somewhere, he was thinking, those monsters still existed. Solid and gas, living and deathless. They followed entirely different rules than humanity, so humanity couldn’t defeat them.

  This was why the Zeds had to die. They were breaking everything.

  Bellos and Ramsay were not alone on this trip. Normally they would’ve been, but everyone was spooked. They’d never had a Zed get away before. They’d never had two Zeds get away before. They’d never had six Zeds get away and not been able to figure out what the problem was. It was hard not to blame it on the first three who’d gotten away, the ones on the banks of the Potomac.

  It was time for the big guns. The back of the furniture truck brimmed with more Moderators.

  It really was a nice day.

  Somewhere up ahead was the Zed’s trailer. A supernatural vision had established the general look of where they might find the Zed, and local law enforcement had helped them narrow it down even further. If all was going according to plan, the Airstream was a few dozen yards off the highway up ahead. If all continued going according to plan, in twenty-five minutes, any large chunks of the Airstream still remaining, plus the Zed’s body, would be loaded in the back of the furniture truck. And if the plan truly loved them in a meaningful and lasting way, their Visionary would then stop being tormented by all-consuming visions of an end of the world brought about by Zeds.

  “Approaching the target,” Bellos said into his handheld radio.

  From inside the back of the truck, Lock, their superior, rumbled in his deep voice, “Keep your eyes about you.”

  “Copy,” said Ramsay, although he could have just said “okay.”

  Lock’s voice came over the radio again. “Carmen, are you still there?”

  The radio crackled, and a clear, professional voice said, “Two miles back. Would you like us closer?”

  This voice belonged to Carmen Farooq-Lane, another Moderator. She sat behind the wheel of a bullet-ridden rental car, impeccably dressed in a pale linen suit, her dark hair pulled back into a soft updo, her wrists adorned with slender gold threads, her lashes long and curled. In a former life, before her brother had turned out to be both a Zed and a serial killer, Farooq-Lane had been a young executive at a financial management company. That life had been shot dead, just like her serial killer Zed brother, Nathan, but the apocalypse wasn’t going to find her looking as if she had given up.

  “Just don’t go far,” Lock said. “Unless you need to.”

  He didn’t mean unless you need to, though. He meant unless Liliana needs to. Liliana, like all Visionaries, became a living bomb during her visions. She also changed ages within her timeline during these visions. This latter fact was really more of a novelty item. No one died because Liliana the girl became Liliana the old woman, or vice versa. No, people died because while she was having visions, the insides of their bodies exploded. The other Visionaries had learned to turn this energy inward so they didn’t kill bystanders—albeit with the drawback that this method eventually killed the Visionaries instead.

  Liliana had not yet learned.

  Or it was possible she didn’t want to.

  “All right, folks,” Lock said over the radio as they closed in. “Focus. We’ve done this before. No mistakes this time.”

  Westerly Reed Hager. Farooq-Lane had seen the Zed’s photo, had read her file. It was all fives and tens. Fifty-five years old. Five foot ten. Ten addresses on file for the last five years. Five sisters, ten brothers, most of them off the record, off the grid, off the planet. An expanded view of a hippie pedigree. She lived in an Airstream trailer she’d owned for five years, pulled by a dark blue Chevy pickup truck she’d owned for ten. She had ten misdemeanors to her name, five for bad checks, five for criminal mischief.

  Farooq-Lane didn’t think Westerly Reed Hager was likely to end the world.

  “Carmen,” said Liliana. She sat in the passenger seat of the bullet-ridden rental car, currently an old woman. Everything about her was held with an easy control, her knobby old hands folded neatly as book pages in her lap. “I would hang back.”

  The rental car’s radio switched on by itself. It
began to play opera. This was a thing it did now, just like killing Zeds was a thing Farooq-Lane did now. If Farooq-Lane thought about it, the apocalypse had already happened, just inside her.

  Farooq-Lane looked at Liliana. Then she looked at the empty road ahead.

  She hung back.

  The plan began to break.

  One moment, the Moderators were alone in the nice day, the empty fields. And then it wasn’t just them. Somehow there was another car on the road ahead of them. It didn’t just pop into being, it just seemed to have always been there, and they’d not noticed it until then.

  Bellos whispered, to no one in particular, “I’m already forgetting I’m seeing it.”

  He was looking right at the strange car, but he wasn’t seeing it. He was looking, not seeing, looking, not seeing. He kept telling himself there’s a car, there’s a car, there’s a car, and nearly forgetting the truth of it every time. His mind was breaking.

  The car slowed so the furniture truck was right on its ass.

  A person appeared. A young woman. Dark skin, huge white smile. She was standing up through the strange car’s sunroof.

  It was one of the three Zeds who’d gotten away on the banks of the Potomac. Jordan Hennessy.

  “Oh, shit!” Bellos swiped for the radio before he realized that the arm he’d swiped with wasn’t there anymore.

  Ramsay grabbed the radio instead, smashed the button on the side. “There’s a Zed. It’s—”

  Hennessy gave them the finger before throwing something at their windshield.

  The two men in the truck’s cab had just enough time to see that the projectile was a small, silvery orb before it exploded across the windshield. A metallic cloud burst around the truck.

  The cloud was getting inside the cab. The radio was talking, Lock was talking. None of it seemed important. All that was important was looking at the cloud, watching the little glimmering motes hovering in the air, feeling each sparkly moment invade their nostrils, coat their sinuses, live in their minds. They were the cloud.

  The truck hurtled off the highway, just missing the Airstream trailer. It churned several dozen yards into the dead wheat before coming to a lumpy halt.

  “What’s going on?” shouted the radio.

  No one answered.

  Now the back of the truck was opening. The other Moderators were coming out, guns bristling.

  To this point, guns had always won. Well, aside from the last time. And the time before that. And the one before that. And before that. But before that, it had been Moderators 200, Zeds 0, or whatever. The point was that, statistically, the guns would work.

  “Stay sharp,” Lock said.

  A few yards away, between the truck and the Airstream, a car door opened.

  This shocked the emerging Moderators, who, like Bellos and Ramsay, found it difficult to remember seeing the strange car.

  A young man stepped out. He had dark, buzzed hair and pale, chilly skin. His eyes were as blue as the sky above, though more suggestive of bad weather.

  The young man was taking something from his jacket, a little glass bottle with a dropper top. He was uncapping it.

  He was another one of them. Ronan Lynch.

  “Oh, shit,” said a Moderator named Nikolenko.

  Ronan Lynch squeezed drops of liquid onto the flattened wheat, and every drop released wind, fury, leaves. It was an East Coast winter squall contained in a bottle.

  Impossible, dreamt, mind-bending.

  It churned Moderators from their feet and sent bullets wide. It pummeled their bodies and thoughts. It was not just weather but also the feel of weather, the dread of it, the damp, pressed-down sloth of a socked-in late-year storm, and they couldn’t rise as it soaked them.

  From the open door of the Airstream, Westerly Reed Hager watched Ronan walk among the stunned Moderators, kicking the guns from their hands, his clouds shifting and ebbing around him. The irascible storm from the eyedropper didn’t bother him; he was just another piece of it.

  Hennessy also stalked among the not-quite-awake, not-quite-asleep bodies. Kneeling swiftly, she picked up one of the abandoned guns.

  Then, just as quick, she put the weapon to its fallen owner’s temple.

  The Moderator didn’t react; he was dazzled by dreams. She put it to his cheek instead. Pressed the barrel into his skin hard enough to pull his mouth up in a weird smile. The man’s eyes were misted, confused.

  Ronan looked at the gun, and then he looked at Hennessy. It seemed obvious she was about to blow the man’s brains out.

  It was unclear whether or not the man was one of the Moderators who had killed her entire family. It was clear, however, that this nuance didn’t matter to her.

  “Hennessy.”

  This voice came from the third Zed who’d arrived in the strange car. He was a dapper blond with close-set, hawkish eyes and an expression that suggested he knew what the world was thinking and didn’t care for it.

  Bryde.

  “Hennessy,” he said again.

  The gun seemed to get larger in her hand the longer it was pressed to the man’s head. This was no dream magic. This was just the magic of violence. It was a sustainable form of energy, violence. It powered itself.

  Hennessy’s hand shook with fury. “I get to do this. I already paid the admission for this ride.”

  “Hennessy,” Bryde said a third time.

  Hennessy’s words were flippant, although her voice was electric. “You’re not my real dad.”

  “There are better ways to do that. Ways to make it matter more. Do you think I don’t know what you want?”

  A ripple of tension.

  Then Hennessy put the gun down.

  “Let’s finish this,” Bryde said.

  The Moderators watched them, dazed, motionless, ill with longing and dread, as the Zeds made their way to Lock. Bryde nodded a confirmation to Ronan and Hennessy. The two of them crouched before slipping on small black fabric sleeping masks.

  For the briefest of moments they were blind bandits, and then, a second later, they both slumped to the ground in fast sleep.

  The Zed in the Airstream trailer, watching with wide, shocked eyes, shouted, “Who are you?”

  Bryde put his fingers to his lips.

  Hennessy and Ronan dreamt.

  When they woke just a few minutes later, a dead body lay beside Hennessy. Forger in life, forger in sleep. The corpse was identical in every way to the living body already lying in the dirt—she had dreamt a perfect copy of Lock. She was also temporarily paralyzed, as all Zeds were after dreaming something into being, so Ronan heaved her up in a fireman’s hold and carried her back to the hard-to-see car.

  After they had gone, Bryde rolled the real Lock onto his side so he could face his copied body, so he could see the perfection of it and be horrified. Bryde crouched between the two Locks, a lithe, nimble Reynard beside Lock’s blunt power.

  “This game of yours,” Bryde began, and there was no softness to his voice, “will only end in pain. Take a look. The rules are changing. Do you understand? Do you understand what we could do? Leave my dreamers alone.”

  There was no change in the living Lock’s expression. Bryde reached into Lock’s pocket and took out a small parcel. Now Lock’s eyes swam into focus long enough to show real panic, but his fingers could only snatch limply, drugged by Ronan Lynch’s dreamt storm.

  “This is mine now,” Bryde whispered, hiding away the parcel. His teeth were a fox’s little snarl. “The trees know your secrets.”

  Lock’s mouth opened and closed.

  Bryde stood.

  He stopped by the Airstream trailer, where the spared Zed was talking with Ronan, and then they all drove away. The car in one direction, the trailer in another, leaving behind a catastrophe of Moderators scattered across the stubbled wheat.

  Slowly the dreamt weather dissolved, and the fields returned to their previous, featureless peace.

  It was as if the Zeds had never been there at all.

>   Far back from the others, from the safety of where they’d watched this all unfold, Farooq-Lane turned to Liliana and said, “Those three could end the world.”

  Ronan Lynch still remembered the worst dream he’d ever had. It was an old dream now, two years old. Three? Four? As a kid, time had been slippery, and now, as an adult, or as a whatever-he-was, it was downright slimy. It had happened Before, that was all that mattered. Ronan used to divide his life into the time before his father’s death and the time after it, but now he divided it differently. Now it was Before he’d been good at dreaming. And After.

  This was Before.

  When the worst dream showed up, Ronan already had a vibrant catalog of memorable nightmares. What sort did you want? Perhaps the classic monster mash: talons, fangs, shaggy feathers dripping with rain. Public humiliation: in a movie theater trying to hide a runny nose, wiping endless snot on a ratty sleeve. Body horror? Scissors slipping and snipping right into an arm, the bone and tendons sliding free. Mind-fuckery was a perennial choice: entering a familiar room and being struck with a sense of hideous and unshakable wrongness that dug and dug and dug inside him until he awoke shaking and covered in sweat.

  He had them all.

  “Nightmares are lessons,” his mother Aurora had told him once. “They feel wrong because you know what’s right.”

  “Nightmares are bitches,” his father, Niall, had told him once. “Let them smile at you, boy, but do not get their numbers.”

  “Nightmares are chemical,” his boyfriend, Adam, had told him once. “Inappropriate adrenaline response to stimulus, possibly related to trauma.”

  “Talk dirty to me,” Ronan had replied.

  Here’s what nightmares were: real. At least for him. Everyone else woke up with cold sweats and a racing heart, but if Ronan wasn’t careful, he woke up with everything he’d been dreaming of. It used to happen a lot.

  And it was starting to happen a lot again.

  He was starting to think maybe Before and After weren’t as clearly defined as he’d thought.

  This was what happened in the worst dream: Ronan turned on a light and saw a mirror. He was in the mirror. The Ronan in the mirror said to him: Ronan!

  He woke with a start in his old bedroom at the Barns. Spine, sweaty. Hands, tingling. Heart, kick-kick-kicking at his ribs. Usual nightmare postgame. The moon wasn’t visible but he felt her looking in, casting shadows behind rigid desk legs and above the stretching wings of the ceiling fan. The house was silent, the rest of the family asleep. He got up and filled a glass with water from the tap in the bathroom. He drank it, filled another one.