Mister Impossible, Maggie Stiefvater [uplifting novels txt] 📗

question. Neither said anything for a space. They just listened to the sound of both of them breathing and looking at the painting.

Jordan asked, “If you were me, what would you do next?”

He whispered: “Steal it.”

She laughed with delight, and he memorized the sound.

“It’s a shame you have mixed feelings about crime, Pozzi,” Jordan said, “because I’m pretty sure you were made for it. But don’t you think the Gardner’s been looted enough?”

“So what are you going to do?”

“I think … I think I’m gonna find out how they were made,” Jordan said. “And if I can, I’m gonna try to make one.”

She looked at him. He looked at her.

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.

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.

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?”

Bryde didn’t answer right away. He let the wind buffet him; that was the way to keep from being knocked off the board. To bend, not break. Then he said, “A healthy body can withstand illness. Can live alongside