Mister Impossible by Maggie Stiefvater

Author:Maggie Stiefvater [Stiefvater, Maggie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Published: 2021-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Ronan Lynch still remembered the best dream he’d ever had. It was an old dream now, two years old. Maybe a little less. In the divide of before his father’s death and after, it was After. It was also After his mother’s death. It was Before Harvard. Before Bryde.

By the time this one showed up, Ronan had a pretty long list of good dreams. Most of them were from Before, and most of them, like many good dreams, were wish fulfillment. There were the usual valuable-possession dreams: opening a bedroom door to discover that the mattress had been replaced by a very expensive trendy sound system. There were dreams of impossible abilities: flying, speeding, long jumps, one-two punches that knocked intruders clear into next year. Sex dreams ranked well, depending on the players involved (they could just as easily slide into nightmare territory). Places of unreal beauty often made the list—rocky green islands, clear blue lakes, flower-busy fields.

And of course there were the ones where he had his family back.

“What would you do if you accidentally brought your mother back?” Adam had asked one evening before he’d left for Harvard. “If you woke up with another Aurora, would you keep her?”

“I’m not in the mood for word problems,” Ronan had replied.

“You’ve thought about it, surely.”

Of course he had. The ethics of replacing his father were clear enough—copying a real person was no bueno—but Aurora had already been a dream, which made the waters murkier. He wouldn’t have been content with a dreamt copy, but Matthew might be. Could he end Matthew’s grieving with another mother? Spare Declan the effort of raising Matthew by providing another mother? Did it do a disservice to his real mother’s memory, even if she was already a dream? What if he did it wrong? What if he brought back a copy identical except for one fatal flaw? An Aurora with a disinterest in loving Matthew. An Aurora who didn’t age. An Aurora who aged too fast. An Aurora with a desire to eat human flesh. What then, what then?

“I hadn’t,” Ronan lied. He didn’t lie, especially to Adam, but he wanted the conversation to be over.

“What if you brought another me back? What would you do with the extra Adam?” Adam asked, curious. Unbothered. He wasn’t squeamish and, in any case, it was just a thought exercise to him. His dreams weren’t going to cough up another Ronan.

But Ronan’s dreams might. He’d lost sleep over this question, wondering if he truly had it in him to kill an unwanted dreamt human. He’d learned to kill in his dreams, of course. The second he realized he didn’t have enough control to prevent unwanted manifestation, he took down everyone in sight, and he’d accordingly woken with his share of corpses. But killing a dream after he’d woken? Killing them once they were real? That felt like a dangerous line to cross.

“It’s not going to happen,” Ronan had said, “so it doesn’t matter.”

“I think you ought to assume it’s going to happen at some point and make a plan,” Adam said.

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