Mister Impossible

lived beneath the skin.
He liked being asked by a dreamer to think about her in the context of his dreams.
Finally, Bryde took the snake from Hennessy and released her carefully back into the underbrush. He said, somewhat bitterly, “This is a museum to the waking; what would the artifacts of a world of dreamers look like? This is a civilization so sure of its own inadequacy and entitlement that it forever tries to drown out the din of other species with its own miserable white noise of failed ambition and masturbatory anxiety. A few voices cry out against it—what if those voices were the majority? What a world. Now: masks.”
Ronan withdrew his mask from his jacket. The two simple, silken masks had been one of the first things they’d dreamt with Bryde—masks that made the wearer go instantly to sleep. Bryde vastly preferred them to the dreamt sleeping pills Ronan had used before they met.
Don’t eat dreams, Bryde had chastised him. At best they’ll starve you and at worst they’ll control you. Dreams are like words, they’re like thoughts. They always mean more than one thing. Are you sure those pills only made you sleep?
Ronan’s hands felt hot; his heart was beginning to pound. It had only taken a few weeks for the masks to generate a Pavlovian response in him.
Bryde swept his gaze over the ruined space. “Let’s find a safe place to dream.”
To dream. To dream: urgently, purposefully. To dream: with other dreamers.
That enormous, warm feeling was charging up inside Ronan again, big enough now that he could tell what it was:
Belonging.

Hennessy dreamt of the Lace.
It was always the same dream.
It was dark. She was meaningless in this dream. Not a cog in a machine, not a blade of grass in a field. Possibly a speck of dust in the baleful eye of a loping beast, blinked away. But nothing more.
Slowly, the dream illuminated, and the light revealed a thing that had been there all along. A thing? An entity. A situation. Its edges were jagged and geometric, intricate and ragged, a snowflake beneath a microscope. It was enormous. Enormous not like a storm or a planet, but enormous like grief or hatred.
This was the Lace.
It was not really a thing one saw. It was a thing one felt.
When Hennessy had first dreamt Jordan into being, Jordan slept curled up behind her, her presence at once comforting and off-putting. Comforting because she was warm, familiar, entirely the same as Hennessy. But also off-putting because Hennessy, used to sleeping alone for ten years, would startle awake as Jordan’s breath just barely moved the hairs on the back of her neck. It’s impossible to prepare for the creeping strangeness of having dreamt a copy into being. Hennessy didn’t know what she owed Jordan beyond a body here in the waking realm. She didn’t know whether she and Jordan were going to be best friends or rivals. She didn’t know if Jordan might try to usurp Hennessy’s life. She didn’t know what to do if Jordan rejected it and struck off on her own. She didn’t know what to do if Jordan embraced it and stayed with Hennessy forever and ever and ever. It was possible she might not be alone ever again, but she didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad thing.
That feeling?
That was the Lace.
After Hennessy had first dreamt June, the second copy, she had padded down the hallway of her father’s new suburban hole in the middle of the night, dragging her fingers across the wall because her mother had told her leaving oil on flat surfaces was a form of rebellion. Then suddenly she saw herself looming at the end of the hall. Impossible, she thought. I left Jordan in the room, and then she remembered June existed. But this was no comfort, because there should have never been another one after Jordan, and what if June wasn’t a direct copy but rather a monster with Hennessy’s face, and what if there was going to be another copy after her, and another one, and then Hennessy began to scream and scream and scream, and June started to scream and scream and scream, until Hennessy’s father shouted from his room what in Heaven’s name, if she had a problem, come into the master and explain it to him, or quit raising the roof and let everyone sleep, for God’s sake.
That feeling?
That was the Lace.
Sometimes, when Hennessy’s mother, J. H. Hennessy, had still been alive, she’d put a mink brush in her daughter’s hand and instruct her on how to move it over a canvas she’d already started work on. Hennessy would be full of the pride and terror that came from knowing she was making marks on a painting meant for high rollers and fancy shows. For minutes or hours, she and her mother would work in soundless partnership on the canvas, until it was difficult to tell which one of them had made which mark. Then her father, Bill Dower, would come home, and as soon as the door closed behind him, Jay would snap at Hennessy and snatch her brush back with enough force to tip palettes and spatter canvases. Mother, gone. Wife, arrived. Jay was two different people, and the changeover was dramatic. Hennessy, too, changed over, from heart-in-mouth joy to confused shame in a moment.
That feeling?
That was the Lace.
Hennessy had spent a decade torn between loving and resenting her clones, fearing they would leave her, wishing they would stop needing her, and then Jordan had told her they’d all been shot in the fucking face by Moderators and she’d never see them again, so it became a moot point.
That feeling?
That was the Lace.
Huge, unavoidable, inevitable.
Exhausting.
“Hennessy,” said Bryde.
Just like that, the Lace was gone.
When Bryde arrived in her dream, the Lace always vanished. It was afraid of him. A neat trick. Hennessy wanted to know why.
“That’s not important,” Bryde said. “What