Mister Impossible (Dreamer Trilogy #2)(8)

That feeling?

That was the Lace.

Sometimes, when Hennessy’s mother, J. H. Hennessy, had still been alive, she’d put a mink brush in her daughter’s hand and instruct her on how to move it over a canvas she’d already started work on. Hennessy would be full of the pride and terror that came from knowing she was making marks on a painting meant for high rollers and fancy shows. For minutes or hours, she and her mother would work in soundless partnership on the canvas, until it was difficult to tell which one of them had made which mark. Then her father, Bill Dower, would come home, and as soon as the door closed behind him, Jay would snap at Hennessy and snatch her brush back with enough force to tip palettes and spatter canvases. Mother, gone. Wife, arrived. Jay was two different people, and the changeover was dramatic. Hennessy, too, changed over, from heart-in-mouth joy to confused shame in a moment.

That feeling?

That was the Lace.

Hennessy had spent a decade torn between loving and resenting her clones, fearing they would leave her, wishing they would stop needing her, and then Jordan had told her they’d all been shot in the fucking face by Moderators and she’d never see them again, so it became a moot point.

That feeling?

That was the Lace.

Huge, unavoidable, inevitable.

Exhausting.

“Hennessy,” said Bryde.

Just like that, the Lace was gone.

When Bryde arrived in her dream, the Lace always vanished. It was afraid of him. A neat trick. Hennessy wanted to know why.

“That’s not important,” Bryde said. “What do you feel?”

Since meeting Ronan and Bryde, she’d spent more time than ever before wondering what it was like for other people to dream. She dreamt of the Lace. Always and forever. But most other dreamers had a different dream each night. Although she must have dreamt of something besides the Lace at some point, she could neither remember nor imagine what that was like.

She wondered how Ronan and Bryde found her in dreamspace. They fell asleep, had their own dream, and then— “Be present,” Bryde said. “Stop wandering. How much power do you feel?”

A fuckload, Hennessy thought. Enough to dream something huge. Enough to bring the Lace out in its entirety.

“Stop calling the Lace,” Bryde said. “I won’t let it come back.”

I wasn’t calling it.

Bryde smiled thinly. Other people revealed themselves when they smiled. Tough folks became teddy bears; sentimental huggers revealed sharp-toothed gossips; shy people showed goofy clowns; class clowns turned out to be bitter depressants. But not Bryde. He was an enigma before and an enigma after.

“Where is your voice? Be present. Now look. I’ve given you a canvas and you’ve left it blank,” Bryde said, gesturing around them. Now that the Lace was gone, the dream held just their conversation, nothing else. “Laziness is the natural child of success. Who, after struggling up the ladder, feels like building another ladder? The view is already good. You’re not trying. Why?”

Hennessy’s voice was still just thought. There’s a word for someone who tries the same thing over and over again expecting a different result.

“Artist?” suggested Bryde. “You didn’t use to mind failure.”

She was annoyed that he was right.

Hennessy had spent her youth studying how pigment behaved, how badger bristles splayed paint versus squirrel versus hog versus kolinsky sable, how complementary colors accentuated each other or canceled each other out, how the human skeleton was constructed beneath the skin, working on every flat surface that presented itself to her. Trying. Failing. She’d also spent an equal amount of time, or more, on training her mind. Perception and imagination were always the weakest link in any artist’s chain. Eyes saw what they wanted to see instead of what was truly there. Shadows became too dark. Angles went crooked. Shapes got elongated, crushed. The brain had to be taught to see without feeling, and then to put feeling back in.

Fail, try again, fail, try again.

She couldn’t remember how she’d ever had the bandwidth to do that for so many hours and days and weeks and years.

“This is better,” Bryde said.

The dream had become a studio.

Hennessy hadn’t consciously thought of putting them in a studio, but dreams were crafty bastards that way. They gave you what you wanted, not what you said you wanted.

The studio was as good as reality. It smelled wonderful and productive, earthy and chemical. Multiple easels displayed canvases in all sizes. Paint glistened on palettes. Brushes stood on handles like bristled bouquets. Drop cloths covered the old wood floor. Bryde sat in a chair next to a wall of windows, his legs crossed casually, arm across the back of the chair. Jordan would have said he’d make a good portrait subject. The view beyond him was a city of historical buildings and close-set trees and invading highways. A distant storm mounted, the clouds tattered and checkered.

The dream was trying hard, in the way that dreams do, to imply that Hennessy had been to this studio before, although she knew she hadn’t.

It’s Jordan’s studio, the dream said. If you don’t recognize it, it’s only because it’s been too long since you’ve seen her. Why don’t you keep up with her like you used to?

Hennessy disagreed. “She doesn’t keep up with me.”

“There you are. Found your voice,” Bryde said. “You are not two things. You are not Hennessy, asleep, and Hennessy, awake. You are more than the sum of your feelings, your id. You are also the things you have learned to do about them. Dreaming, waking. They’re the same thing for you; when will you believe it? Put something on that canvas. The ley line is listening. Ask it for what you want.”