The Vault of Dreamers (24 page)

*   *   *

I’m slicing off the tail of a tabby cat with a hand-sized guillotine, slowly and mercilessly,
while the cat screams and tries to scrape itself away from the blade. I can see the
fur of its tail, the angled blade catching and cutting into the blood. I can hear
the helpless screaming as the cat scrabbles its feet, trying to run. I feel the pressure
of my hand bearing down, and at the same time, I’m straining to get away from the
cat’s pain, but above all, I am the torturer, and my shame is exquisite.

I woke in a sweat and bolted up in bed, banging into the lid of my sleep shell. I
gasped for air and shakily pushed at the lid to slide it back. This time, the lid
opened, but my fear was still as real as the dorm room at Forge. It was as real as
the early morning light falling in the windows.

Don’t hate me, Rosie
, said a soft inner voice.

I held perfectly still.

I’d just heard a voice in my head. But that wasn’t possible.

I set my fingers lightly on my knees and stared at my quilt. From the other end of
the room came the airy drone of a blow dryer.

Close your eyes
, said the voice.

No
, I said back, speaking in my mind
. Who are you? Get out of my head.

Whoever it was slid a little closer, a real presence in my mind, just beyond my sight.
She stirred softly, like a single leaf turning over.

It’s easier if you close your eyes
,
she said.

“Stop,” I said aloud.

She rustled and slipped away, leaving me sweating and shaken. My mind was splintering
apart. That realization was even more terrifying than the thought that Dr. Ash and
the dean had rifled through my brain last night. Seeding. Mining. Whatever they did
to me, was this voice a side effect?

I leaned close to inspect the edges of my sleep shell. Tiny vents rimmed the upper
lip, and while I’d always figured that they were used for ventilation, now I saw that
they could be used just as easily to fill my sleep shell with gas. The dean didn’t
even need to bother with sleeping pills when he could drug us with gas whenever he
wanted.

How he could he get away with it, I didn’t know. I ran my hands quickly around the
edges of my mattress and found my walkie-ham in the crevice. They’d left it for me,
inexplicably. Unless they still didn’t know about it. Faking nonchalance, I hid it
again in my backpack.

I needed to think clearly and figure out a plan, but as I cleaned up and dressed,
I couldn’t settle. I dropped my toothbrush, twice. The torture of the cat still grated
in me like a warning. I had too much I didn’t understand. The crazier the things were
that I was discovering, the more impossible it was going to be to convince anyone
that they were true. My parents would be the most incredulous of all.

“Get a grip,” I said to my scraggly self in the mirror.

Half a dozen other girls in the bathroom passed behind and around me like butterflies,
completely unaware that a black hole had opened to consume their planet. Paige had
a hefty, I
♥
TEXAS cosmetic bag on the ledge over the sinks. She leaned close to the mirror, her
mouth slack, as she painstakingly outlined her eyes in black.

My gaze caught hers briefly in the glass.

“Lighten up,” she said, and she kept working her liner. “You’re on
The Forge Show
.”

She was right. Until I decided what to do, I couldn’t show how distraught I was inside.
I spat in the sink and rinsed my mouth. “Right,” I said.

I took a few clothes down to the laundry, and in the process, I managed to bring my
things from the dryer back up to my wardrobe. I was relieved to see my video camera
was fine. The footage of the hidden door was intact, but since all it proved was that
I’d been in the dean’s tower when I wasn’t supposed to be there, I deleted it.

When I went over to the dining hall for breakfast, Linus was back in the kitchen measuring
coffee into a machine. It took a second to remember that the last time the viewers
had seen us together, at the lookout tower the day before, we’d been kissing and happy.
My heart shrank at the prospect of trying to act like nothing was wrong between us.

I joined the line and moved my tray down the counter. Across the distance, Linus met
my gaze coolly. I knew, instantly, that something bad had come from me stealing his
swipe key. He snapped the coffeemaker lid closed, and a few minutes later, as I finished
filling my tray, he strode over, wiping his hands on a towel.

His mouth smiled, but his eyes were hard. “Hey, Sinclair,” he said. “Wise choice on
the cinnamon bun.”

I hadn’t even noticed picking it out. He made no move to close in for a hug or kiss,
and I was alarmed that he was going to give something away. Other students flowed
around us as if we were two inconvenient rocks in a stream.

“How was your night?” I asked, smiling with an effort.

“Funny you should ask,” he said. “I wrote you a poem in my spare time, actually. I
had nothing better to do.”

Ouch.

“Really?” I said. “I didn’t know you were a poet.”

“Neither did I,” he said.

“Nobody’s ever written me a poem before,” I said. “Thanks.”

“It’s not a sonnet or anything,” he said. “Then again, it’s honest. I know how you
appreciate honesty.” He dug a small, folded piece of paper out of his pocket. “Don’t
read it until you’re alone.”

“Linus,” I began. I didn’t know how to apologize in front of the cameras.

“Yes?”

I shifted my tray to balance it on one arm so I could take his poem and slide it in
my pocket. “Does your poem rhyme?” I asked.

“Should it?” he asked.

I gripped my tray with both hands again. “Not if it’s in free verse.”

“I guess you’d know more about that than I would,” he said. “You’ve had more schooling.”

This was only getting worse. “Listen, do you want to do something later?” I asked.

“Sure. When?”

“I’ll come find you after my practicum,” I said. “Do you have a break then?”

“I’m helping Otis this afternoon,” he said.

I couldn’t tell if he was telling the truth, or if he just didn’t want to see me.
“Maybe later, then?” I said.

“Linus! Are you working here or what?” Chef Ted called.

“Sure,” Linus said to me. “See you.” He leaned deliberately across my tray and kissed
me, hard.

The kiss felt like a favor, a sham to appease the cameras. It was worse than a punch
in the gut.

*   *   *

As soon as I could, I ducked into the girls’ room and hid in a stall.

Linus’s poem was not a poem.

Rosie, I know you took my swipe key. Berg asked me if I gave it to you so we could
meet up last night and I told him yes. But then he said you swiped out of the dean’s
tower and I didn’t know what to say. The
dean’s tower? WHAT
?!

You stole from me. I tried to lie for you and it didn’t work. Berg told Otis and now
Otis is furious. He doesn’t want me to have anything to do with you. Berg’s letting
me keep my job, but he’s watching us both.

What do you think you’re doing? Why didn’t you call me? It’s not like you were
sleeping
. Do you even
have
your walky-ham anymore?

Don’t bother trying to use the swipe key again. It’s been deactivated.

I don’t know what’s going on, but if you’re not going to trust me or talk to me, what’s
the point? Find some excuse to break up with me on camera if you want. I don’t care
what it is. I’ll go along.

I clutched his note to my chest and squeezed my eyes tight.
What’s the point?
That killed me. I opened my eyes to read it again, and I could see his anger and
disappointment in every sentence. And yet despite everything, he still offered to
have a break-up scene with me on camera so our night relationship wouldn’t have to
come out. He was still protecting me.

I ripped the letter in pieces and flushed them down the toilet.

Somehow, even though I felt both like howling in agony and snarling in my cage, when
I walked out of the bathroom stall, I was going to have to pretend I’d just read a
love poem. I let out a strangled laugh and blinked hard up at the ceiling.

No. I could do this. I just had to compartmentalize mentally. As long as I didn’t
have to see him, I would be okay. Forget that he’d be able to watch my feed.

I made myself a promise. It helped me calm down. I would call him that night, no matter
what. He had to answer. He had to listen. I would apologize and explain and somehow
make him realize that there was, actually, a point.

Until then, I couldn’t think of Linus at all.

*   *   *

In Media Convergence, I sat down beside Janice and asked if I could use her phone.

“Sure. What for?” she asked, pulling it out of her bag. “You texting Linus?”

I didn’t even have his number.

“I might,” I lied.

“I heard he’s in trouble,” Janice said.

“What do you mean? Who said that?”

“That’s just what I heard. Is it true? Like he might get fired?”

“No,” I said. “Everything’s fine.”

She nodded at the phone. “Tell me if you find out anything.”

I curled up on one of the couches and put my feet on the coffee table. The Forge cameras
would see me using her phone, but they couldn’t pick up what I was looking for as
long as I kept the little screen close. I slumped down, propped my chin in my hand,
tuned out the noise of Ping-Pong, and peered down at the screen.

I had little to go on from Dean Berg, but Huma had mentioned Iceland. I tried searching
for info on Huma at a hospital or clinic in Iceland. Nothing came up. I tried dream
mining and seeding, but there was nothing that looked legit. A couple detours on dreaming
brought me to a site about dolphins. They had two brains, apparently, one that stayed
awake while the other slept, and this helped protect them from predators.

I wished I had one of those dolphin brains. Half of me would always be awake, vigilantly
watching.

I tried to think what else I knew about Huma. She was rich, obviously. She had a husband
and kids. She sounded like she and Dean Berg went back a long time, and she had an
interest in the school. I checked the donors who gave to the Forge School, and by
scanning the annual reports, I discovered a Humaline Fallon who gave in the Guardian’s
Circle, the highest class of donors.

I had a name.

21

CHIMERA

A PING-PONG BALL
came rolling over by my feet, and Henrik followed.

“Want to come play?” he asked.

“No, I’m good.” I reached down for the ball and tossed it back to him. I glanced toward
the green table and saw his opponent was Janice. Mr. DeCoster, as usual, had his feet
up in the corner, and most of the other students were at the computers. Burnham was
gnawing at the end of a pencil as he stared at his screen.

I hunched over Janice’s phone again.

With a full name to go on, it wasn’t hard for me to trace Humaline Fallon to a site
for the Chimera Centre, a small hospital and rehabilitation clinic on a private island
south of Reykjavik. Dr. Humaline Fallon was part of a team running clinical trials
for a new kind of brain surgery.

I scrolled down through the tiny print. In cautiously optimistic terms, the site introduced
a breakthrough, experimental surgery for coma patients and others with severe brain
trauma. The hospital was very selective about which patients it took on. They specialized
in cases that looked hopeless, but where the patients were younger than thirty and
where the accident that had damaged the patient had occurred less than a year previously.

It didn’t look like a scam, but it didn’t look exactly credible to me, either, especially
when it said they sometimes saw results in as soon as forty-eight hours after surgery.
That statement alone made me suspect they were feeding on the hopes of coma patients’
families. But video footage also showed a towheaded kid with dark-rimmed eyes in a
hospital bed. A mini Patriots football was propped next to his elbow. He turned his
face slowly to gaze at an older woman, and when he reached a feeble hand toward her,
she beamed and cried.

It choked me up.

“What’s Linus say?” Janice asked, plopping down beside me on the couch.

“Nothing,” I said. I hoped he wasn’t watching and thinking I was trying to reach him.
“Do you need this back?”

“No, that’s okay. You want a turn?” she asked, offering her Ping-Pong paddle.

“Not really.”

“Good, because I’m on a winning streak,” she said and headed back.

I went back to the Chimera site. In another video, a colorful image of a brain swiveled
before a black background. Different sections lit up while an authoritative bass voice
chimed in: “Each patient brings a unique case, with its own special challenges. In
Kevin’s case, his injury occurred deep in the brain stem, impeding motor, memory,
and linguistic capabilities. To begin his recovery, Dr. Fallon guides an optical tweezers
to certain precise points in Kevin’s brain, where the worst damage is located. The
laser light at the end of the optical tweezers is tiny, and the doctor can move it
so slowly and carefully it doesn’t cut anything unless she wants it to. It’s delicate
in the extreme. Sealing off the so-called dead edges or vulnerable fog can take up
to twenty hours. In Kevin’s case, it was fourteen.”

The shot moved in closer, reminding me of the virtual surgery I’d watched in Dean
Berg’s office the night before. The voice continued, and colorful computer graphics
illustrated his words.

“With nanobots, Dr. Fallon delivers tiny nuggets of regenerative stem cell patch to
the most promising places. Then she captures the wave pattern of the surrounding synapses,
and sends that same wave pattern into the new nuggets. Before long, the new patches
start learning, so to speak, from the circuits around them. They essentially regrow
the tiny circuits of the brain.”