The Dream Thieves

They crested the hill.

The field went on and on. Scrubby grass gave way to a wash where a stream must have been, and then continued on through more acres of grass. Hundreds of acres of field.

There were no trees.

The car fell quiet.

Gansey drove a few feet farther before pulling up the parking brake. Every head in the car was turned toward that endless field and the old stream. It was not that there had been trees and now they were gone. There were no stumps or tire tracks. It was as if there had never been trees.

Gansey held out his hand, and immediately, Ronan opened the glove box and got the journal. Slowly, Gansey paged through to where he had neatly written the coordinates for Cabeswater. Blue’s breath caught audibly.

This was all ridiculous. It was like checking the coordinates for Monmouth Manufacturing. They all knew where it was.

“Jane,” Gansey said, handing his phone back to her, “please check the GPS.”

He read the numbers from the page. Then he read them again.

Blue, thumbing through the map on the phone, read them back from the screen. They were the same. They were the coordinates that had brought them here every other time. The coordinates that had brought their Latin professor and Neeve here.

They hadn’t made a wrong turn. They hadn’t overshot the road or parked in the wrong place. This was where they’d found Cabeswater. This was where it had all begun.

Noah finally said it: “It’s gone.”

16

And the Camaro broke down.

Its sense of timing was impeccable. In ordinary circumstances, the car would’ve been full of sound: radio blaring, conversation firing. There would have been no audience for the first subtle sounds of fluid filling the Camaro’s lungs. But now, quieted by the impossible, they all heard the engine seize for a moment. Heard the turned-down radio stutter, like it had lost its train of thought. Heard the air-conditioning blower cough politely into its fist.

They had enough time to lift their heads and look at one another.

Then the engine expired.

Suddenly robbed of power steering, Gansey wrestled the coasting car to the shoulder. He hissed between his teeth, the sound identical to the noise of the tires in the grubby gravel.

Then there was absolute silence.

Instantly, the heat began to press in. The engine ticked like the twitch of a dying man’s foot. Adam rested his forehead on his knees and curled his arms behind his head.

All at once, Ronan snarled, “This car. This f**king car, man. If this was a Plymouth Voyager, it would have been crushed for war crimes a long time ago.”

Adam felt that the Pig’s status perfectly encapsulated how he felt. It was not really dead, just broken. He was held inside the question of what it meant for him if Cabeswater was gone. Why can’t things just be simple?

“Adam?” Gansey asked.

Adam lifted his head. “Alternator. Maybe.”

“I don’t know what that means.” Gansey seemed almost relieved that the Pig had died. Now he finally had something concrete to do. If he couldn’t explore Cabeswater, he could at the very least get them from the side of the road. “Say it in a language I understand.”

“In indiget homo battery,” muttered Ronan.

“He’s right,” Adam said. “If we had a new battery to drop in there, we could make it back home until we looked at it.”

A new battery would cost a hundred bucks, but Gansey wouldn’t even feel the bite.

“Tow t r uck? ”

“State inspections today,” Adam replied. Boyd’s was the only tow company in town, and he only retrieved breakdowns when he wasn’t working in the garage. “It’ll be forever.”

Ronan leapt out of the car and slammed the door. The thing about Ronan Lynch, Adam had discovered, was that he wouldn’t — or couldn’t — express himself with words. So every emotion had to be spelled out in some other way. A fist, a fire, a bottle. Now Cabeswater was missing and the Pig was hobbled and he needed to go have a silent shouting fit with his body. In the back window, Adam saw Ronan pick up a rock from the side of the road and hurl it into the creeper.

“Well, that’s helpful,” Blue said tersely. She slid from the back into the now-empty passenger seat and shouted out, “That’s helpful!”

Adam didn’t quite catch all of Ronan’s growled reply, but he heard at least two of the swear words.

Blue, unimpressed, reached for Gansey’s phone. “Is there a place we can walk to?”

She and Gansey ducked their heads together to examine the screen and mutter about map options. The image of her dark hair and his dusty hair touching seared something inside Adam, but it was just one more sting in a sea of jellyfish.

Ronan returned, leaning in the passenger window. Blue turned the phone to him. “Maybe we could walk to this place.”

“The Deering General Store?” Ronan said, voice scathing. “Look at it. That’s not a place to get a battery. That’s a place to lose your wallet. Or your virginity.”

“Do you have a better idea?” she demanded. “Maybe we can hurl some stuff into the underbrush! Or hit something! That solves everything! Maybe we can be really manly and break things!”

Though she was turned to Ronan, Adam knew these words were meant for him. He laid his face on the back of the driver’s headrest and simmered in shame and indignation. He thought about the way the car had stammered before it died. Using up the last of the battery before it couldn’t go on. Then he thought about how Noah had disappeared in Dollar City while he was talking to Gansey on the phone. And now Cabeswater was gone. Using up the last of the charge.

But that didn’t make sense. He’d activated the ley line. It kept blowing out transistors in town because it was so strong. There shouldn’t be a lack of energy.

“I’m calling Declan,” Gansey said. “And telling him to bring a battery.”

Ronan told Gansey what he thought of this plan, very precisely, with a lot of compound words that even Adam hadn’t heard before. Gansey nodded, but he also dialed Declan’s number.

Afterward, he turned to Ronan, who leaned his cheek hard enough against the top of the window to make a dent in his skin. “Sorry. Everyone else I know’s out of town. You don’t have to talk to him. I’ll do it.”

Ronan punched the top of the Camaro and turned his back to it.

Gansey rounded on Adam, clutching his own headrest and looking behind him. “Why is it gone?”

Adam blinked at his sudden nearness. “I don’t know.”