Mister Impossible - Maggie Stiefvater (ereader manga TXT) 📗

Tamquam

“And why,” Bryde went on, “are you keeping him out?”

Ronan felt his face go hot, his hands go cold. He hadn’t thought Bryde would notice. “You don’t know him. He can’t put things down. He’s thorough. He cares. The fact he found a way to look for me in dreamspace as soon as we started getting more energy out there just proves it. If I let him meet up with me in dreamspace, he won’t stop researching the Moderators and all of this stuff until he’s solved it. I’m not going to be the one who gets him kicked out of Harvard.”

“For his own good,” Bryde said, but not as if he believed or disbelieved, just as if he was anticipating the rest of Ronan’s sentence. Then he looked away, and as he did, he had that same expression that had made Ronan think he was upset with them. His eyebrows set, eyes tight, mouth tight. Not as effortless as the Bryde they’d met all the weeks ago. In a low voice, he said, almost to himself, “No, I’m not angry at you. You have done everything I’ve hoped. You and Hennessy are much different than I expected. Better than I expected.”

Ronan’s mouth opened and closed. It was such the opposite of what he was expecting to hear that he didn’t have any words at all.

“No, I am not angry at you,” Bryde continued. “I’m tired. I’m proud. I’m confused. I’m sad, because I know things can’t stay like they are now. We are working even now to change things and it will never be like this moment again. It is a ridiculous way to think, to be more interested in the present than the future, and if it were you or Hennessy, I would never permit it. I won’t lose my way. I know that. But I can imagine it. It is me—it is me I am angry with.”

It meant more to Ronan than he thought to hear all these words, even if he didn’t entirely understand them.

“We are nearly to the final step,” Bryde said. “There is only the dam left. Then it will be a different game entirely.”

“Why are we here, then?” Ronan asked, and Bryde’s mouth turned rueful, which made Ronan think he had been expecting Ronan to ask something else, although he couldn’t imagine what that something else might be.

“This is just a reward. This is just so you can see why we’re doing it and sleep a night on a real pillow and bask in the gratitude of one of the many voices who have your names on their lips these days. You’re a hero. Enjoy it.”

A hero. It was an unfamiliar concept. Ronan had been the villain for so long, if he had been anything. The one in trouble, the one written up on the slip, the one being chased, the one being accused. And before that he had been the young dreamer. Secret. Forever. Now he was a hero to a family of young dreamers who would never have to feel alone.

Both Bryde and Ronan jumped as they heard a trilling sound. It was Ronan’s dreamt phone. He’d nearly forgotten he still had it; he hadn’t used it since that first call to Declan.

And it was Declan now. There was no way to identify the caller visually, of course, since the dreamt phone just looked like a tunnel piercing. But nevertheless, something about the ring strongly implied that it was Declan.

It was a jarring interruption. Declan belonged to another world, a different timeline, but with a glance at Bryde, Ronan tapped his finger against his ear to answer it. “Deklo.”

“Good, it worked.”

Ronan said, “How did you do it?”

“I had to get back the car I was in when you called before and find your call in the previous calls in its log. I couldn’t type in that gibberish, of course, that showed up as your number, but I could just ask it to return your call.”

“Wait, what car were you in before?”

Declan didn’t bother answering this. “I want you to come to Mass this weekend.”

It took Ronan a moment to parse the request. It was a quite ordinary one, one Declan had made countless times over the past several years, resulting in Ronan rolling his eyes and leaving very early in the morning in order to make it to eleven o’clock Mass with his brothers on the other side of the state. Now it felt like someone else’s memories. A dream.

It occurred to Ronan that something bad might have happened. “What’s going on? Is Matthew okay?”

“Family meeting,” Declan said, a Declanism that never failed to rankle. Family meeting meant Declan shaking his finger at one of the other Lynch brothers.

“About what?”

“About the future.”

“Are you fucking serious about Mass? That’s in two days.”

“I have faith in you.”

“A lot of people are on our tail.”

“You tell us the church, the location, we’ll be there.”

Bryde was waiting, eyebrow raised.

“My brothers want to see me,” Ronan told him. It was making his pulse jack up for some reason, the thought of it, or the thought of telling Bryde about it. He couldn’t tell which. “This weekend.”

Declan asked, “Who are you talking to? Is that Bryde?”

“We have a date with Ilidorin,” Bryde said in a low voice.

“I have to think about it,” Ronan told the phone. “I’m not close to Boston.”

“What’s important to you?” Declan asked. “I wouldn’t be asking if it wasn’t important.”

Bryde was still looking with his same expectant expression, hand on the doorknob to go to the dreamers they’d come to see.

“I have to go,” Ronan said. “I’ll call you back.”

He hung up.

He thought he grasped what Bryde had just been talking about before the call, because he, too, felt somewhat torn between the possibility of seeing his brothers again for a few minutes, and the knowledge that the dreamers were nearly to the end of the first part of this endeavor and whatever would