Call Down the Hawk Page 5

  “Are you still in the terminal?” Lock asked.

  “Just about to board,” Farooq-Lane said.

  “Going home.”

  Farooq-Lane didn’t answer this one.

  “Look,” he rumbled, “I’ll cut right to it. I know you’ve done what we asked, I know you’re finished, but you’re good at this like no one else is.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “Not the breaking-things part. The finding-things part. People like you. That’s important. We need you. Do you think you could help us with one more?”

  One more. Was it really one more? Did it matter? It was as if some part of her had been hoping or anticipating that he would ask, because she heard herself say yes before she even really considered. That heart-head dissonance again. She wanted to be done, but she just couldn’t be until the world was safe.

  “I was hoping you might say that,” Lock said. “Nikolenko is there with a package for you and new flight information. Meet her at the Costa.”

  As her gate information appeared on the board, Farooq-Lane left it behind and navigated through the throngs of people until she found Nikolenko, a short, stone-faced woman with short, stone-colored hair. Nikolenko waited beside an angular young man in a T-shirt, suit coat, and tiny round glasses. He was extraordinarily tall and extraordinarily hunched. Elbows, knees, and Adam’s apple were all prominent. His shoulder-length blond hair was tucked behind his ears. He looked a little like a young undertaker or, with those skeletal features, like one of the cadavers.

  Nikolenko handed him some money. “Go get a coffee.”

  He looked at it as if he did not want a coffee, but people did what Nikolenko said, so off he shuffled.

  Nikolenko handed Farooq-Lane an envelope. “That’s your ticket and the address of where you’re staying.”

  “Lock said there’d be a package?”

  “He’s the package,” Nikolenko said, jerking her chin to where the kid stood in line.

  Farooq-Lane didn’t understand.

  “He’s the Visionary,” Nikolenko said. “He’s going with you.”

  Oh.

  The Visionary was why they knew the world was going to end. The Visionaries. This kid was only the most recent of them, the second Visionary the Moderators had worked with since Farooq-Lane had started up with them. She didn’t know how many there had been before. Each of the Visionaries experienced intensely vivid and detailed premonitions, specifically focused on Zeds and other Visionaries.

  Also, specifically focused on the end of the world.

  Each of the Visionaries spoke of an apocalypse brought about in the same way, with starving, unquenchable fire. Dreamed unquenchable fire. Farooq-Lane didn’t know exactly how long the Moderators had been looking for the Zed who would dream this fire into being, but she knew that at some point an intergovernmental entity had been quietly formed. Moderators came from all corners of the world. Some of them were convinced by one of the Visionary’s predictions. Some of them were convinced by knowing a Zed and what they could do firsthand. And one of them was convinced by a need to prove to the other Moderators that she wasn’t complicit in her brother’s crimes.

  Nathan had been their best lead so far. They already knew he wanted to see the world burn.

  But his death hadn’t stopped the Visionary’s fiery prophecies.

  Farooq-Lane eyed the Visionary as he counted out money at the cashier. “Just flying on an ordinary plane?” she asked Nikolenko. “Is that safe?”

  “He’s been in control for months.”

  Farooq-Lane couldn’t identify the feeling inside herself, but it wasn’t one of the good ones.

  “I didn’t know I was going to have to take care of a teenager,” Farooq-Lane said. She hadn’t even known the Visionary was a teenager; she’d only ever seen descriptions of his visions. Farooq-Lane wasn’t very maternal. Life was messy until you were in your twenties, she felt, and she preferred to forget all her previous ages.

  “He’s not difficult to handle,” Nikolenko assured her. “He just does what you tell him.”

  That didn’t make it any better. “Why is he coming with me? I did fine with the descriptions before.”

  “He’s close to done. He’s getting fragmented. It’ll be easier for you to talk the visions out with him.”

  Close to done? Farooq-Lane didn’t know much about the life spans of the Visionaries, but she knew the end was nothing you wanted to be around for. “I—”

  “Look, princess,” Nikolenko interrupted, “you have the easiest assignment here. Take Lurch there and find the Zed he’s seeing. Be on the lookout for another Visionary to replace him. Call us when you find something. Then the grown-ups will fly in and take care of it so you don’t have to get your shoes dirty again.”

  Farooq-Lane would not be made to feel bad for being a reluctant killer. She and Nikolenko glared at each other until the Visionary returned with a coffee.

  “I won’t drink this,” he told Nikolenko. He had an accent. German, maybe. “Do you want it?”

  Without hesitation, Nikolenko took it from his hand and dropped it into the trash can beside her, one smooth motion. “Problem solved. Check in with Lock when you get there, Farooq-Lane.”

  Without another word, she departed. The Visionary eyed the trash can where the coffee had just met its end, and then he eyed Farooq-Lane.

  Farooq-Lane held out a hand and introduced herself to her new charge. “Carmen Farooq-Lane.”

  He shook her hand, then repeated her name carefully before introducing himself to his new keeper. “Parsifal Bauer.”

  When she opened the envelope, two tickets for them slid out right into her hands, eager to be out of confinement. “I guess we’re going to be spending a lot of time together in … Washington, DC.”

  As good a place to save the world as any.

  The voice was back.

  You’re wondering if this is real.

  You want proof this is an actual encounter and not just a bit of subconscious mindfuckery.

  What is real? Listen: You fall asleep, dream of feathers, and wake with a raven in your hands, and you’re still asking, What is real?

  Ronan was dreaming of Bryde’s voice, but he was also dreaming of Lindenmere.

  Lindenmere, Lindenmere.

  It was a name out of a poem that had never existed. It didn’t sound dangerous.

  Lindenmere, Lindenmere. It was a forest, or rather, it was a thing that was forest-shaped for now. Ronan had an idea that it had existed somewhere else for a very long time, and only now whispered its way into the world this time in the shape of a forest. It knew him, and he knew it, insofar that they could be known, both of them full of mysteries, even to themselves.

  He was in love with it, and it with him.

  As he walked between Lindenmere’s trees, he heard Bryde’s voice from somewhere beyond them. Perhaps Bryde was one of these massive gnarled oak trees. Perhaps he was one of the small specks flying overhead. Perhaps he was the flowers that curled around the brambles. Perhaps he was only Ronan’s subconscious.

  “Lindenmere,” Ronan said out loud. “What is Bryde? Is he real?”

  The leaves in the trees murmured. They put together words: You know.

  And beyond them, Bryde’s voice continued.

  You are bigger than that, bigger than what is real. You have been raised among wolves and now you’ve forgotten you have thumbs. Real was a word invented for other people. Scrub it from your vocabulary. I don’t want to hear you say it again. If you dream a fiction and wake with that fiction in your hands, it becomes fact.

  Do you understand? For you, reality is not an external condition. For you, reality is a decision.

  Still you long for what reality means to everyone else, even if it makes your world smaller. Maybe because it makes your world smaller.

  Ronan climbed a mossy incline. The light here was shimmery, lush, golden, tangible. He skimmed his fingers through it and it clung to his skin, both feeling and sight
. He repeated, “I wouldn’t have asked if I did.”

  The trees murmured again. Dreamer.

  Another dreamer? Here? A tiny cloud of luminous gnats parted around Ronan as he walked, scanning the feral undergrowth for signs of another human. He knew it was possible for a dreamer to meet him in dreamspace, but only one ever had, and that other dreamer had known Ronan in the waking world before he’d tried to find him in this otherworld.

  Plus, he was dead now.

  No one else knew Ronan was a dreamer.

  Or they shouldn’t.

  “I don’t believe you,” he said out loud. “I have trust issues.”

  There’s a game children play with chalk and asphalt. Snail—that’s what it’s called. Chalk a spiral on the ground, a snail’s shell, and section it into ever-shrinking squares. Toss a pebble; wherever it lands, that box is off-limits. Now jump on one foot in a tightening spiral, careful not to land in the box with the pebble. You see how the game gets harder the more pebbles are thrown. The tighter the spiral twists. The goal is to get to the middle without falling over.

  That’s the game we’re going to play, you and I.

  “Maybe I don’t want to play a game,” Ronan said. His dreamy walking, which covered at the same time much ground and little, took him to a clearing bisected by a deep black stream. A floating plank served as a bridge, and parked on top of it was a vintage-looking motorbike that thrummed with life, the exhaust visible in a delicate shuddering breath behind it.

  Adam was always talking about how he would trade his car for a motorcycle if he could. He’d like this bike, Ronan thought. It reminded him a little bit of Adam, in fact. Elegant and rough and ready at once.

  When Ronan stepped up onto the hovering board-bridge, it quivered, but held. Below, the stream was an emotional truth rather than a physical one, the water present but not yet wet, not unless he turned his attention to it: This was the way of dreams.

  He laid a hand on the cool leather seat of the bike. It already had Adam’s name stitched on the edge of it. Ronan ran his fingers along the dimpled constellation of embroidery. It felt real.

  Every box will be a task.

  I will be in the center at the end of it all.

  First box—

  “I don’t know if you’re real or a figment of my imagination,” Ronan said. “But I’m trying to work here.”

  Let’s deal with that, first. An object lesson in real or not. I’m doing sums in my head, you want me to demonstrate my work on the margin. Fine.

  First box: What is real.

  First box: Ask your brother about the Fairy Market.

  First box: They’ll be whispering my name.

  Proof? It will have to do. You make reality.

  Ronan rolled the motorcycle to shore. Behind him, the floating bridge bobbed up several inches, relieved of the weight of the bike. As it did, he suddenly discovered that the stream below it was filled not with black water, but with animals.

  They seethed.

  “Shit,” Ronan said.

  Jump, skip, throw a pebble, next turn.

  See you on the other side.

  He woke up.

  It was morning.

  Ronan could hear all sorts of morning sounds. An electric shaver humming across the hall, music nattering away in another room, feet slap-shuffling up and down aged stairs. Outside he heard asthmatic leaf blowers, percussive car doors, garrulous students, grumbling delivery trucks, petulant horns.

  He’d spent the night in Cambridge.

  Ronan looked at himself from above.

  It was as if he were an angel haunting his own body. A spirit. Ghost of Christmas Past. Whatever it was that floated above you and watched you sleep. Ronan Lynch’s thoughts gazed down upon Ronan Lynch’s body.

  He saw a young man in the narrow dorm bed below, motionless but nonetheless looking as if he spoiled for a fight. Between his brows, two knitted lines formed the universal symbol for I’ll fuck you up. His eyes were open, looking at nothing. Adam was slotted between him and the wall, mouth parted with abandon, hair wild against the pillow.

  They were completely covered with monsters.

  Their bodies were weighted with peculiar creatures that looked sort of like horseshoe crabs at first blush. A closer look revealed that instead of hard shells, they had dramatic masks, with little mouths snapping open and shut hungrily on their backs. Perfectly shaped cow teeth filled each mouth.

  The crabs looked nightmarish and wrong, because they were nightmarish and wrong. They were a species that hadn’t existed until Ronan woke up. They were a species that only existed because Ronan had woken up.

  This was what it meant to be Ronan Lynch.

  Dream to reality.

  They seethed and milled slowly, pulling the sheets into swirly patterns with their small, rigid legs.

  Adam didn’t move because his hearing ear was buried in the pillow and his perpetually exhausted body was lost to sleep.

  Ronan couldn’t move. He was always paralyzed for a few minutes after he successfully brought something back from a dream. It was as if he swapped those minutes of wakeful capability in his dreams for a few minutes of somnolent uselessness. There was no way to speed it up, either, no matter how threatening the circumstances were when he woke. He could only float like this, outside his body, watching the dreams do whatever they wanted to do without his interference.

  Adam, he thought, but couldn’t say it.

  Sclack, sclack. The crabs’ monstrous little mouths sounded wet as they opened and closed, just as they had when he saw them beneath the bridge in his dream. Dream things didn’t change their stripes in the waking world. If they disobeyed the laws of physics in the dream, like a piece of wood that hovered just above the ground, they continued to disobey them when brought into real life. If they were an abstract concept made flesh in the dream, like a song that could somehow be scooped up in your hands, the peculiar, brain-bending quality of the thing persisted into waking.

  If they were murder crabs that wanted to eat you in the dream, they kept on wanting to eat you in waking life.

  Sclack, sclack.

  Ronan attempted to wiggle his toes. Nothing. All he could do was float over his own body and wait. Fortunately, the crabs’ mask-mouths were on their backs, so for the moment, Ronan and Adam were safe.

  For the moment.

  Adam.

  He willed Adam to wake.

  A few crabs fell from the bed with a clatter, their little legs tapping away on the floorboards. It was an off-putting sound that perfectly matched their appearance. Sclack, sclack, skitter, skitter.

  Shit, and now Ronan saw that he had not brought back only the crabs. The floating bridge had come back as well, hovering right beside the bed like a rustic skateboard. And the pretty little motorcycle sat in the middle of the room between the two dorm beds. It was running, just as it had been in the dream, a little intense puff of exhaust twirling behind it.

  He’d brought every single damn thing in sight.

  How had he fucked up so badly?

  Sclack, sclack.

  That other dreamer—Bryde—had put him off his game.

  The other dreamer. Other dreamer. Ronan had nearly forgotten. It seemed impossible to forget something of such magnitude, but that was the way of dreams, wasn’t it? Even the best and worst of them could dissipate from memory immediately. Now it flooded back to him.

  Ronan needed another dreamer like he needed a shit-ton of murder crabs in his bed.

  The only mercy was that the other dorm bed was still empty. Ronan didn’t know if Adam had arranged for his roommate to be gone overnight or if it was a fortunate coincidence, but he was grateful. Now he just needed to be able to move.

  One of the murder crabs scuttled up Adam’s body toward his deaf ear.

  Wake up, Adam, wake up.

  Ronan had the hideous thought that they’d already killed Adam and that was why he didn’t rise, because he was already dead and cooling, murdered by Ronan’s dreams wh
ile he floated helplessly overhead—

  One of the murder crabs scuttled onto Ronan’s face, each crisp leg an unpleasant pressure point. Quite suddenly, he saw it from his physical body instead of from above, so control was returning to his body. There was a barcode on the crab’s belly, and in small letters above it TCP MIXED NUTS 1101, and below that, a set of blinking blue eyes with really full eyelashes. The 1101 was for his birthday, which was nigh, the big old one-nine, but God knew why the rest was there. Ronan Lynch’s subconscious was a jungle.

  Another crab collided into the first, flipping one of the terrors onto its back. Mouth side down. It went for his eye.

  Fuckity fuck.

  For a brief moment, he could imagine the next few minutes laid out: the crab snapping through his eye, his mouth unable to shout or even whimper, him silently losing half his sight as Adam lay beside him, sleeping or dead.

  But then he could move, he could move, his whole body was his again.

  Kicking off the blankets, he tipped as many of the crabs as he could off him and Adam. The little horrors rolled and skittled off the bed, some of them landing on the hovering board beside it. The force of the movement sent the board rocketing across the room, a floating crab taxi, before it hit the wall and dislodged them all.

  “Oh God,” Adam said.

  He had been sleeping, not dead, and now his face reflected the truth: that he’d woken to a hell-room of crustacean roommates.

  “God, Ronan, God! What did you do?”

  “I’m fixing it.” Ronan slid out of bed.

  Slam.

  As Ronan cast for a weapon, he saw that Adam had smashed one against the wall with a biology text. Its insides shot out—yellow glop like the inside of a squashed caterpillar.

  This worked the rest of the creatures to frenzy.

  “Fix it faster,” Adam said.

  The hoverboard bobbed close; Ronan leapt on it. The momentum sent him rocketing to the corner of the dorm room, slamming up against the wall, but he kept his balance. Giving the wall a shove, he shot to the other corner instead, where a flag was leaned. He lifted it high, wielding it like a gallant Irish hero of old.