The Dream Thieves

Gansey pressed on. “And I speak Latin?”

“Dude, you speak Latin in real life. That’s not a good comparison. Yeah, fine, if you’re there. But usually, it’s strangers. Or the signs — the signs are in Latin. And the trees speak it.”

“Like in Cabeswater.”

Yes, like in Cabeswater. In familiar, familiar Cabeswater, although Ronan surely hadn’t been there before this spring. Still, arriving there for the first time had felt like a dream he’d forgotten.

“Coincidence,” Gansey said, because it wasn’t, and because it had to be said. “And when you want something?”

“If I want something, I have to be, like, aware enough to know that I want it. Almost awake. And I have to really want it. And then I have to hold it.” Ronan was about to use the example of the Camaro keys, but thought better of it. “I have to hold it not as a dream, but like it’s real.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I can’t pretend to hold it. I have to really hold it.”

“I still don’t understand.”

Neither did Ronan, but he didn’t know how to say it any better. For a moment he was quiet, thinking, no sound but Chainsaw returning to the floor to pick at the corpse of the envelope.

“Look, it’s like a handshake,” he said finally. “You know when some guy goes in for the shake, and you’ve never met him before, and he puts it out there, and you just know in that moment right before the shake if it’s going to be sweaty or not? It’s like that.”

“So what you’re saying is you can’t explain it.”

“I did explain it.”

“No, you used nouns and verbs together in a pleasing but illogical format.”

“Idid explain it,” Ronan insisted, so ferociously that Chainsaw flapped, certain she was in trouble. “It’s a nightmare, man — it’s when you dream of getting bit and when you wake up your arm hurts. It’s that.”

“Oh,” said Gansey. “Does it hurt?”

Sometimes, when he took something out of a dream, it was such a senseless rush that it left the real world pale and unsaturated for hours after. Sometimes he couldn’t move his hands. Sometimes Gansey found him and thought he was drunk. Sometimes, he really was drunk.

“Does that mean yes? What is this thing, anyway?” Gansey had picked up the wooden box. When he turned one of the wheels, one of the buttons on the other side depressed.

“A puzzle box.”

“What does that mean?”

“Fuck if I know. That’s just what it was called in the dream.”

Gansey eyed Ronan over the top of his wireframes. “Don’t use that voice on me. You have no idea whatsoever?”

“I think it’s supposed to translate things. That’s what it did in the dream.”

Up close, the carvings were letters and words. The buttons were so small and the letters so precise that it was impossible to see how it could’ve been made. Also impossible was how the wheels of characters could have been fixed into the box without there being any seams in the rainbow-striped grain of the wood.

“Latin on that side,” Gansey observed. He turned it. “Greek here. What’s that — Sanskrit, I think. Is this Coptic?”

Ronan said, “Who the hell knows what Coptic looks like?”

“You, apparently. I’m pretty sure that’s what this is. And this side with the wheels is us. Well, our alphabet, anyway, and it’s set to English words. But what is this side? The rest of these are dead languages, but I don’t recognize this one.”

“Look,” Ronan said, pushing to his feet. “You’re overcomplicating this.” Stalking to Gansey, he took the box. He spun a few of the wheels on the English side, and at once buttons on the other sides began to move and shift. Something about their progress was illogical.

“That hurts my head,” Gansey said.

Ronan showed the English side to him. The letters read tree. He flipped it to the Latin side. The letters had shifted to read bratus. Then round to the Greek side. δένδρον.

“So, it’s translated the English into all those other languages. That’s ‘tree’ in all those. I still don’t know what language this is. T’ire? That doesn’t sound like . . .” Gansey broke off, his knowledge of perished linguistic oddities exhausted. “God, I’m tired.”

“So sleep.”

Gansey gave him a look. It was a look that asked how Ronan, of all people, could be so stupid to think that sleep was just a thing that could be so easily acquired.

Ronan said, “So let’s drive to the Barns.”

Gansey gave him another look. It was a look that asked how Ronan, of all people, could be so stupid as to think that Gansey would agree to something so illegal on so little sleep.

Ronan said, “So let’s go get some orange juice.”

Gansey considered. He looked to where his keys sat on the desk beside his mint plant. The clock beside it, a repellently ugly vintage number Gansey had found lying by a bin at the dump, said 3:32.

Gansey said, “Okay.”

They went and got some orange juice.

6

You are an unbelievable phone tramp,” Blue said.

Orla, unoffended, replied, “You’re just jealous that this isn’t your job.”

“I am not.” Sitting on the floor of her mother’s kitchen, Blue

glared up at her older cousin as she tied her shoe. Orla towered over her in a shirt stunning both for its skintight fit and its paisley print. The flare of her bell-bottoms was capacious enough to hide small animals in. She waved the phone above Blue in a hypnotic figure eight.

The phone in question was the psychic hotline that operated out of the second floor of 300 Fox Way. For a dollar a minute, customers received a gentle probing of their archetypes— a slightly more than gentle probing if Orla answered — and a host of tactful suggestions for how to improve their fates. Everyone in the house took turns answering it. Everyone, as Orla was pointing out, but Blue.

Blue’s summer job required absolutely no extrasensory perception. In fact, working at Nino’s would have probably been unbearable if she’d possessed any more than five senses. Blue generally had a policy of not doing things she despised, but she despised working at Nino’s and had yet to quit. Or to get fired, for that matter. Waitressing required patience, a fixed and convincing smile, and the ability to continuously turn the other cheek while keeping diet sodas topped up. Blue possessed only one of these attributes at any given time, and it was never the one she needed. It didn’t help that Nino’s clientele was mostly Aglionby boys, who often thought rudeness was a louder sort of f lirting.

The problem was that it paid well.

“Oh, please,” Orla said. “Everyone knows that’s why you’re so irritable.”

Blue stood up to face her cousin. Apart from her large nose, Orla was beautiful. She had long brown hair crowned with an embroidered headband, a long face pierced by a nose stud, and a long body made longer by platform wedges. Even when standing, Blue — barely five feet tall — only came to Orla’s deeply brown throat.

“I don’t care about being psychic or not.” Which was partially true. Blue didn’t envy Orla’s clairvoyance. She did envy her ability to be different without even trying. Blue had to try. A lot.

Again with the waving of the phone. “Don’t lie to me, Blue. I can read your mind.”

“You ca nnot,” Blue replied tersely, scraping her buttoncovered wallet from the counter. Just because she wasn’t psychic didn’t mean she was clueless on the process. She glanced at the oven clock. Almost late. Practically late. Barely on time. “Unlike some people, my sense of self-worth isn’t tied into my occupation.”

“Ooooooooh,” Orla crowed, galloping down the hall, storklike. She traded her Henrietta accent for a gloriously snotty version of Old South. “Someone’s been hanging out with Richard Campbell Gansey the third too much. ‘My sense of self-worth isn’t tied into my occupation.’ ” This last bit was said with the most exaggerated rendition of Gansey’s accent possible. She sounded like a drunk Robert E. Lee.

Blue reached past Orla for the door. “Is this about me calling you a phone tramp? I don’t take it back. No one needs to hear their future in that voice you do. Mom, make Orla go away. I have to go.”

From her perch in the reading room, Maura looked up. She was a slightly taller version of her daughter, her features amused where Blue’s were keen. “Are you going to Nino’s? Come take a card.”

Despite her lateness, Blue was unable to resist. It’ll only be a moment. Ever since she was small, she’d loved the ritual of a single card reading. Unlike the elaborate Celtic cross tarot spreads her mother usually did for her clients, the single card reading she did for Blue was playful, fond, and brief. It wasn’t so much a clairvoyant experience as a thirty-second bedtime story where Blue was always the hero.

Blue joined her mother, her spiky reflection dimly visible in the table’s dull sheen. Not looking up from her tarot cards, Maura gave Blue’s hand an affectionate shake and flipped over a card at random. “Ah, there you are.”

It was the page of cups, the card Maura always said reminded her of Blue. In this deck, the art was of a fresh-faced young person holding a jewel-studded goblet. The suite of cups represented relationships — love and friendship — and the page stood for new and budding possibilities. This particular bedtime story was one Blue had heard too many times before. She could anticipate exactly what her mother was going to say next: Look at all the potential she holds inside her!

Blue cut her off. “When does the potential start being a real thing?”

“Ah, Blue.”

“Don’t ‘ah, Blue’ me.” Blue released her mother’s hand. “I just want to know when it stops being potential and starts being something more.”

Maura briskly shuffled the card back into her deck. “Do you want the answer you’re going to like, or the real one?”

Blue harrumphed. There was only one answer she ever wanted.

“Maybe you’re already something more. You make other psychics so powerful just by being there. Maybe the potential you bring out in other people is your something more.”

Blue had known her entire life that she was a rarity. And it was nice to be useful. But it wasn’t enough. It was not, her soul thought, something more.

Very coolly, she said, “I’m not going to be a sidekick.”

In the hallway, Orla repeated in Gansey’s Southern nectar: “I’m not gonna be a sidekick. You should stop hanging out with millionaires, then.”

Maura made an ill-tempered tsss between her teeth. “Orla, don’t you have a call to make?”

“It doesn’t matter. I’m going to work,” Blue said, trying to keep Orla’s words from digging in. But it was true that she looked a lot cooler at school than she did surrounded by psychics and rich boys.