The Dream Thieves (39 page)

“Sure you can,” Kavinsky said. He cocked a finger at him. “Give him that pen. Write him a little note with it. In fucking George Washington letters, ‘Dear Dick, drive
this
, ex-oh-ex-oh. Ronan Lynch.’”

Ronan wasn’t sure if it was Kavinsky using his real name or the refreshed memory of the ruined Pig that did it, but he dropped his hand from the door. “Leave Gansey out of this.”

Kavinsky made a
whoo
shape with his mouth. “Gladly, Lynch. Here’s the deal. You get your stuff from the same place every time, right?”

The forest.
“Mostly.”

“Go back there. Don’t go anywhere else. Why would you want to go anywhere else? You wanna go where your shit’s at. That’s where you go. You’re thinking of what you want before you go to sleep, right? You know it’s gonna be there, in that place. Don’t let it know you’re there. It’ll change on you if you do. You’ve gotta be in and out, Lynch.”

“In and out,” Ronan repeated. It didn’t sound like a dream he’d ever had.

“Like a motherfucking thief.”

Kavinsky revealed another two green pills in his hand. One he kept for himself. The other he offered to Ronan.

“See you on the other side?”

Fall asleep. Yes, you fall asleep. You are awake and then you close your eyes and thoughts press in and lucidity invades but then, eventually, you teeter on the edge of slumber and fall.

Ronan did not fall asleep. He swallowed the green pill and he was thrown into sleep. Hurled into it. Dashed, wrecked, destroyed into sleep. He rolled onto that shore a crushed version of himself, his legs gone beneath him. The trees leaned over him. The air grinned. Thief?
He
had been robbed.

In

Out

There was the object he had planned to take. Was it? He couldn’t tell what it was. The trees wrapped their branches around it. Orphan Girl tugged and tugged.

In

Out

Kavinsky’s voice, very clear: “Dying’s a boring side effect.”

Ronan snatched the metal of the thing. Inside him, a ventricle jerked restlessly. Blood poured into the empty atria of his heart.

“GET OUT!”
screamed Orphan Girl.

His eyelids flashed open.

“Welcome back to the land of the living, sailor.” Kavinsky leaned over him. “Remember: You take the pill, or it’ll take you.”

Ronan couldn’t move. Kavinsky gave his chest a supportive thump of the fist.

“You’re all right,” he said amiably. He poured some beer into Ronan’s unprotesting lips and finished it himself. The sun looked strange outside the windshield, like time had passed, or the car had moved. “What the hell do you even have there?”

Ronan’s arms regained sensation. He held a metal cage with a tiny glass Camaro in it. It bore no resemblance to the boom box he’d planned to take out. It bore only a slightly better resemblance to the actual Camaro. Inside the glass car was an anonymous driver, his facial expression vaguely shocked.

“Dear Dick,” Kavinsky said. “Drive
this
!”

This time, Ronan laughed. Kavinsky showed him his own prize: a silver gun with the words
DREAM KILLER
engraved on the muzzle.

“You didn’t sneak in, did you?” he said accusingly. “Sneak in, sneak out. Get your stuff, get out. Before the place notices.”

“Fucking pill,” Ronan said.

“It’s a wonder drug. My mom loves the hell out of these, man. When she starts breaking shit in the house, I grind one of these for her. Put it in her smoothie. You can make a joke there, man. It’s easy. Go on. I left it wide open for you.”

“What is your place?”

Kavinsky set two more green pills on the dash; they danced and jittered along to the beat of the speakers. The song slyly told Ronan:
Kavinsky handed him a beer.

“My secret place? You want into my secret place?” Kavinsky howled a laugh. “I knew it.”

“Fine. Don’t tell me. You put pills in your mom’s drink?”

“Only when she steals my stuff. She wasn’t such a bitch back in Jersey.”

Ronan didn’t know much about Kavinsky’s home life, other than the legend everyone knew: His father, rich and powerful and Bulgarian, lived in Jersey where he was possibly a mobster. His mother, tanned and fit and made of non-factory-standard parts, lived in the suburban mansion with Kavinsky. This was the story Kavinsky told. That was the legend. The
rumor
was his mother’s nasal septum had been eaten away by cocaine and his father’s patriarchal instinct had died when Kavinsky tried to kill him.

With Kavinsky, it had always been hard to say what was real. Now, looking at him holding a fraudulently perfect chrome firearm, it was even harder.

“Is it true you tried to kill your father?” Ronan asked. He looked right at Kavinsky when he said it. His unflinching gaze was his second finest weapon, after his silence.

Kavinsky didn’t look away. “I never
try
to do anything, man. I do what I mean to.”

“Rumor has it that’s why you’re here and not Jersey.”

“He tried to kill
me
,” Kavinsky replied. His eyes glittered. He had no irises. Just black and white. The line of his smile was ugly and lascivious. “And he doesn’t always do what he means to. And anyway, I’m harder to kill than that. You kill your old man?”

“No,” Ronan said. “This killed him.”

“Like father, like son,” Kavinsky noted. “You ready to go again?”

Ronan was.

Pills on tongue. Chase it with beer.

This time, he saw the ground coming. Like being spat from the air. He had time to hold his thought, hold his breath, curl his body. He rolled into the dream. Fast. Tossed from a moving vehicle.

Soundlessly, he rolled into the trees.

They watched each other. A strange bird screamed. Orphan Girl was nowhere to be seen.

Ronan ducked low. He was quiet as rain under a root. He thought:

bomb

And there it was, a Molotov cocktail, not very different from the one he’d thrown into the Mitsubishi. Three rocks jutted from the damp forest floor, only the tips visible, eroded teeth, mossy gums. The bottle was tipped between them.

Ronan crept forward. Closed his fingers around the dew-covered neck of the bottle.

Te vidimus, Greywaren
, whispered one of the trees.

(We see you, Greywaren.)

He clenched his hand around the bomb. He felt the dream shifting, shifting —

He exploded awake.

Kavinsky was already back, doing a line of coke off the dash. The light outside was dull and dead, past twilight. His neck and chin were lit like a garden feature by the dash lights below. He wiped his nose. His already keen expression sharpened when he saw Ronan’s dream object.

Ronan was paralyzed as usual, but he could see perfectly well what he’d just produced: a Molotov cocktail identical to those at the substance party — a T-shirt twisted and stuffed into a beer bottle full of gasoline. It looked just as it had in the dream.

Only now it was burning.

The flame, beautiful and voracious, had chewed well down into the glass. The gasoline was slicked up the side, reaching for demolition.

With a wild laugh, Kavinsky hit the window button with his elbow and seized the bomb. He hurled it into the dusk. The bottle only made it two yards before it exploded, shivering glass against the side of the Mitsubishi and in through the open window. The smell was terrific, an aerial battle, and the sound sucked all of the hearing out of Ronan’s ears.

Hanging his arm out the window and looking profoundly unconcerned, Kavinsky shook glass shards off his skin and into the grass. Two seconds later, and he wouldn’t have had any arms to worry about. Ronan wouldn’t have had a face.

“Hey,” Ronan said. “Don’t touch my stuff.”

Kavinsky turned his heavy-lidded eyes to Ronan, eyebrows raised. “Check it.”

He lifted his dream thing: a framed diploma. Joseph Kavinsky, graduated from Aglionby Academy with honors. Ronan hadn’t seen one to know if the creamy paper was correct, or if the wording was accurate. But he recognized the spattered signature from Aglionby correspondence. President Bell’s artistic scrawl was unmistakable.

It was badly against Ronan’s code to be impressed, much less show it, but the accuracy and detail was striking.

“You’re too emotional, Lynch,” Kavinsky said. “It’s okay. I get it. If you had balls, it’d be different.” He tapped his temple. “This is a Walmart. Just go to electronics, swipe some TVs, get out of there. Don’t wallow around in there. This would help.”

He gestured to the powder still dusting the dash. Barely there. A fine memory of powder. Ronan shook his head. He could feel Gansey’s eyes on him.

“Suit yourself.” Kavinsky retrieved another six-pack from the backseat. “Ready to go?”

And they dreamt. They dreamt and dreamt, and the stars wheeled overhead and away and the moon hid in the trees and the sun moved around the car. The car filled with impossible gadgets and stinging plants, singing stones and lacy bras. As the noon boiled down, they climbed out and stripped their sweaty shirts and dreamt in the heat instead. Things too big to be contained in a car. Again and again Ronan punched into the forest in his fraying dreams, snuck between the trees, stole something. He was beginning to understand what Kavinsky meant. The dream was a byproduct in all of this; sleep was irrelevant. The trees were just obstacles, a sort of faulty alarm system. Once he short-circuited that, he could take things from his mind without worrying about the dream itself corrupting them.

The light stretched long and thin, nearly to breaking, and then there was night with its tantalizing reflections off one hundred white cars. Ronan didn’t know if it had been days or if this was the same night as before. How long ago had he wrecked the Pig? When was his last nightmare?

Then it was a morning. He didn’t know if they’d already done a morning, or if this was a brand-new one. The grass was wet and the Mitsubishis’ hoods were beaded sweatily, but it was hard to tell if it had rained or if it was merely dew.

Ronan sat against the rear fender of one of the Mitsubishis, the smooth surface cool against his bare back, and wolfed Twizzlers. They felt as if they floated in alcohol inside him. Kavinsky was inspecting Ronan’s latest piece of work — a chain saw. After he’d satisfied himself it worked by mutilating some of the tires on the other Mitsubishis, he rejoined Ronan and accepted a single Twizzler. He was too high for food to be very interesting as anything besides a concept.

“Well?” Ronan asked.

Chainsawing had blasted little flecks of rubber across Kavinsky’s face and bare chest. He said, “Now you dream the Camaro.”

N
ow it seemed simple.

Pill. Beer. Dream.

A Camaro sat among the trees of the dream forest: no more difficult to imagine than any of the other dream objects Ronan had pursued. Just larger.

In

Out

Silently, he put his hand on the door handle. The leaves of the trees shivered above; a bird sobbed distantly.

Orphan Girl watched from the other side of the car. She shook her head. He put his finger to his lips.

Awake.

He opened his eyes on the morning sky, and there it was. A glory-red Camaro. Not perfect, but perfectly imperfect, smudged and scuffed as the Pig. Down to the scratch on the door where Gansey had backed it into an azalea bush.

The first sensation wasn’t joy but relief. He had not ruined things — he had the Pig back, he could return to Monmouth without begging. And then the joy hit. It was worse than Kavinsky’s green pills. He was hurled into the emotion. It pummeled and thrilled him. He’d been so proud of the puzzle box, of the sunglasses, the keys. How stupid he’d been then, like a kid in love with his crayon drawings.

This was a car. An entire car. It hadn’t been there, and now it was.

An entire world.

Now it would be all right. Everything would be all right.

From the front of the car, Kavinsky sounded unimpressed. He’d lifted the hood. “I thought you said you fucking knew this car, man.”

After Ronan’s limbs had feeling in them again, he joined Kavinsky by the open hood. The defect was immediately apparent. There was no engine. Ronan could see all the way to the stubbled grass. It would probably run, of course. If it worked in the dream, it worked in real life. But that was no comfort.