FOR A LONG MOMENT, nobody replies. Burnham will never be the same since his fall, and he doesn’t blame me for that. He blames Berg. Linus has been living with a spy in his eye, and that’s Berg’s fault, too. I glance at Lavinia, whose contempt for Berg goes back decades. But beyond revenge, there are larger issues of justice involved.
“I’d like to get a look at that vault,” Burnham says.
“For Fister?” Linus asks.
Burnham can have a subtle, superior air about him sometimes, and it shows now as he turns to face Linus. “For myself,” Burnham says.
Yet Linus’s question was astute. Even as far back as when we were at Forge, I know Burnham was trying to find out what was going on at night when we were asleep. He’s always been concerned about a potential link between the dreamers and his family’s business. I can’t forget about his reaction when he heard about me and Thea, too.
“You made a promise,” I remind Burnham.
“I know. I’m keeping it,” he says. “But that doesn’t mean I’m parking my own curiosity.”
“Bring me my computer, won’t you?” Lavinia says to Linus.
He leaves the room quietly and returns with the two beach chairs and Lavinia’s computer. She props her puck in the middle of the bed and turns off the camp lamp so that we can all see the projected, conical screen as she types on the light keyboard. Now that I’ve been there in person, I’m quick to locate the Main Drag and the Keep of Ages on the map. I can see the waterless moat where the image of Dubbs fell and where I entered the chute that tumbled me down to the underground stream. The vault of dreamers does not appear on this official map, but the full basement level is rendered the same as before.
I tell Lavinia and Burnham everything I know about the deepest layer under Grisly Valley, from the vault full of dreamers, to the incinerator through the twelve o’clock arch and the operating room through the nine o’clock arch. Burnham asks me to jot out a drawing for him, and I try, but it’s hard to guess at the distances and proportions from how I experienced it in the dark. I wonder if the oculus lines up at all with the Bottomless Pit.
“This is totally out of scale,” I say. “The vault is way bigger than the operating room.”
“It still gives us an idea. Where do you think your parents could be?” Burnham asks.
I stare at my sketch and idly add a fish in the river. “I really don’t know,” I say. There could be other rooms I don’t know about. “Whistler said they weren’t in the vault, but Berg said they were.”
“Berg said they were at Grisly. There’s a distinction,” Lavinia says.
“That fits with what Dubbs said. She saw my parents taken out of the truck when they were aboveground, near a row of colorful stores,” I say.
“Why wouldn’t Whistler know about them?” Linus says.
“Maybe Berg doesn’t trust the doctors,” Lavinia says. “He might not have told them.”
“But it’s been six days,” I say. “Who else would look in on them?”
It’s not good.
“Clearly, we need more information,” Lavinia says. “Here’s what the cameras you posted for me show.” She pulls up two live-action views of Grisly Valley.
The first angle, from the Grim Reaper statue, shows the entrance area with the turnstiles and the open area that funnels into the Main Drag. Nothing moves. The second view, from the statue of Scylla aiming toward the Keep of Ages, shows the moat area in front and the steps leading up to the big double doors. The keep itself stands dark and ominous, and the dragon on top is just as motionless as the stone.
“That’s the dragon,” I say. “When it came to life, it looked incredibly real. And then Dubbs was on a plank over the moat. It was terrifying.”
“I saw,” Lavinia says. “Give me a sec and I’ll pull it up.”
My heart starts to constrict even before she locates the right clip and projects it over the bed, a miniature version of the spectacle I saw in person in the park. I tuck my hand to my chest as, once again, the dragon moves on top of the keep, turning with its red eyes. Then the fog rises, and the plank projects out from the roof, bringing Dubbs with it. I squint, angling to see it better.
“Freeze there,” I say.
Lavinia does.
“Back up,” I say. “Play. Okay, freeze again. There.”
I press my thumbnail to the gap in my teeth and stare. It’s a girl on a plank all right, but now I can tell she’s merely a form, a blank dummy, with a lit projection of Dubbs’s face and gown imposed on the surface.
“Can you go ahead in slow motion?” I ask.
I watch as the wind slowly ripples in the projection of the girl’s pale gown, and then the girl’s mouth contorts in a noiseless scream. When she crouches to the plank to hold on tight, the projection shifts to a second blank dummy, a kneeling one that’s back half a pace. In real time, as I saw it, the effect created a seamless, believable motion. But from the angle of the camera, I can see the mechanism behind the effect. Then when Dubbs falls, the projections on the plank go dark, and a hologram of Dubbs whirls down toward the foggy moat, where the dragon, also now a hologram, catches her at the last moment.
“Wow,” Burnham says. “Nicely done. I’m impressed.”
My heart’s pounding again with remembered horror. It’s so strange to me. It felt personal, like someone knew exactly what would terrify me most.
“It seemed completely real,” I say softly. “I knew it couldn’t be, but it seemed so real.”
“And that’s when you went down into the moat yourself,” Lavinia says.
I nod. Then I take a deep breath.
Lavinia switches off the recording, and the map of Grisly comes back into place.
“When I was down in the vault, I overheard Whistler and the others talking about how they lose their security camera feeds sometimes,” I say. “They had no idea I was in the park until I showed up down in the vault.”
“Curious timing,” Linus says.
“The thing is, if they didn’t know I was there, who was controlling the special effects?” I say.
From the edge of my mind, Arself gives a little flicker. I ignore her with a tight mental warning.
“Could the special effects be done remotely?” Linus asks.
Lavinia purses her lips. “Not with the cameras down. It sounds like the special effects were basically interacting with Rosie, and you can’t do that remotely without seeing her.”
“You could see her,” Linus points out.
“Yes,” Lavinia says, and laughs. “And I have every reason to want to terrify her, too, poor girl. That’s why I sent her to Grisly in the first place.”
I glance at Linus to be sure he gets that she’s being sarcastic. He folds his arms, conceding defeat.
“I don’t understand this place,” Burnham says thoughtfully. “How does it get power? How was it built? How do the doctors get supplies? You can’t keep a big facility hidden.”
“It’s not that hard because it’s not really hidden,” Lavinia says. “It’s essentially a cemetery, and the contamination keeps people away. For power, they’re no doubt using the solar cells that were set up for the theme park in the first place, and the doctors order in deliveries of food or whatever. We saw a delivery truck going in a few days ago. That’s how we think Dubbs and Rosie’s parents were brought in.”
“Seriously?” Burnham says.
Lavinia pulls up the screenshot of the truck that she showed me earlier.
“That’s from outside the park?” Linus asks.
“Yes. Along the road that goes to the delivery bays, here,” Lavinia says, pointing.
“That could be a way in for us,” Linus says.
He’s right. Or more exactly, that could be an entrance to the delivery level of the theme park. How to get down to the vault is still a mystery. I contemplate the 3-D map of Grisly Valley again, but though I’ve practically memorized it, it doesn’t show any clues of how to reach the vault of dreamers beneath. The hole in the moat that I dropped through isn’t marked.
“Do we have a map of the plumbing?” I ask.
Lavinia looks through her computer. “No.”
That doesn’t help, then.
When Lavinia’s phone chimes, she pulls it out and glances at the screen. “Berg,” she says, without answering. She glances toward me. “Shall I answer?”
I hesitate, then shake my head. Even after the chime ends, my nerves still feel shrill. “Does he know I’m with you?” I ask.
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” she says. She weighs her phone and looks like she has something to add, but then she doesn’t.
I don’t want to call him back. He can’t know for certain I’m with Lavinia. But I also don’t want to be guided only by my fear of him. I glance at Linus, who briefly shakes his head.
“You can’t trust anything Berg says,” Linus says.
“I know.” I grip my hands together and discover they’re cold. “Every time I talk to Berg, he finds some way to mess with my mind. He knows exactly what to say to frighten me most, and now he has my parents.”
“Monsters can’t be bargained with,” Burnham says.
“There. Exactly,” I say. “It’s completely possible that he’ll torture them to get me to help him. They might even be better off if I don’t talk to him.”
Lavinia tilts her head and slides her phone next to her drink. “I was thinking the same thing,” she says. “We have what he wants, not the other way around. He can just wait.”
I look again from Burnham to Linus, wondering if I’ve made a mistake, but they don’t argue.
Lavinia sets the 3-D map turning again, and as the different lands come into view, a slow, spiraling sensation starts in my gut and rises to my lungs, like tiny birds circling in a blue cave inside my rib cage.
Let us use your voice, Arself says.
I told you to stay away.
But we can help. We’re curious. We want to talk.
What if you take over again?
We won’t. We gave you the choice, remember?
She did go silent before. I glance over at Linus, who’s watching me closely. Without a word, he reaches over and turns on the camp light, and I blink against the brightness. The projection from the puck is dimmed to faint outlines.
“Is she back?” he asks.
I nod.
“Who?” Burnham says.
Lavinia collapses the projection from her puck to give me her full attention.
I flick my gaze to Linus again before speaking. “When I was down in the vault, the doctors mined me again. I think, while they were doing it, a consciousness crossed over to me.”
Yes, she says. We invaded. We were very excited. We didn’t know how it would be.
Be quiet.
“You mean a dream seed?” Burnham asks.
“No. This is different,” I say, pulling my knees up to my chest and hugging my arms around them. “She’s a whole new consciousness. I hear her as a voice in my head. She says she’s all the dreamers.”
Burnham and Lavinia stare. Then Burnham lets out a laugh.
“Are you serious? Is she like an artificial intelligence?” Burnham says.
“I suppose so,” I say. “I don’t really understand how she came about. Her name’s Arself. She spells it with an ‘A.’”
Lavinia turns to Linus. “You believe this?” she asks.
“I always believe Rosie,” he says.
I smile at Linus, and he smiles gravely back.
“Sure you do,” Lavinia mutters. She reaches for her drink again and takes a deep swallow.
“Okay, supposing this is real. Do the doctors in the vault know about Arself?” Burnham asks.
“Whistler and Kiri suspect,” I say. “I heard them talking about a dragon in the machine—” I stop as a jolt of recognition goes through me. Arself could have controlled the dragon. She could have shorted out the security cameras so the doctors in the vault didn’t see that I was in the park. Kiri said that the dragon could have brought me to the vault, and in a bizarre way, it could be true.
Is this right? I ask.
We controlled the dragon, yes.
“What were you saying?” Lavinia asks me.
“It’s just coming all together,” I say, amazed. “The dreamers have been taking over at Grisly. They’ve been making the security cameras go on and off, and that’s why the doctors didn’t see me when I arrived at the park. Arself controlled the special effects around the keep, too. She was controlling everything.”
“It’s a hive mind,” Burnham says. “I’ve heard about these things, in theory. The dreamers and the computers are a quantum computer biointerface, right? Put enough brainpower in the same place, and there’s bound to be some sort of leap.”
“Then Arself knows all about the dreamers?” Lavinia asks me.
“She is the dreamers,” I say. “Or she’s from them. And she’s in my head now.”
“Ask her about my daughter,” Lavinia says. “See what she knows about Pam Greineder and Louellen Mustafa.”
You heard her? I ask Arself. They were in the vault back at the very beginning.
Arself starts a rapid flipping, as if in a Rolodex, and then stops abruptly. We can’t reach our files.
Are you sure? You’re not still connected to the dreamers?
No. How could we be? We’re in you now.
What did you leave behind? Are the dreamers still conscious, back in the vault?
She makes a laughing, gurgling noise. We don’t know. Curious. She starts a sorting sensation again, deeper, like she’s trying to discover how much she knows. We only have our recent working memory.
Though she speaks dispassionately, I sense this is a major blow to her.
“She says she can’t access her history,” I say.
“So she doesn’t know,” Lavinia says flatly.
“Does she know about your parents?” Burnham asks me.
“I already asked about them,” I say. “She says she doesn’t know where they are.”
“Because you don’t, either,” Lavinia says. “This consciousness you’re experiencing—I don’t mean to be unsympathetic, but it could be your mind playing tricks on you. It wouldn’t be the first time.”
“Hey. Take it easy,” Linus says.
I let out a laugh, but it’s not at all funny. Lavinia’s insinuation stings. “You think I don’t know that? You think I don’t question myself all the time?” I run my fingers along my scalp and grip my hair. “It’s not exactly a party in here, but one thing I’ve learned is I have to trust how my mind works. When I don’t, that’s when I really feel crazy.”
Lavinia takes off her big round glasses and rubs the lenses on the corner of the bedspread. “All right,” she says. “You trust your mind. I’ll trust mine. We’ll see where it gets us.”
We want to use your voice, Arself says again. It’ll be so much easier. Put us through.
You won’t take over? Are you sure?
We promise. We want to talk to Linus.
I glance over at him.
“She wants to talk to you,” I say.
His eyebrows lift. “How does that work?”
“I don’t know exactly,” I say. But I gesture him toward one of the chairs, and I shift on the bed until I’m facing him. I reach for his hands. “Try saying her name. Arself. She likes that.”
He frowns at me a long moment, and I can feel doubt in the light grip of his fingers. Then he tightens his hold.
“All right,” Linus says. “If you’re there, Arself, I’ll talk to you. But if you hurt Rosie like before, I’ll beat your brains in.”
I gulp on a laugh. I’m expecting a flash or a shot of her triumph. Instead I feel a quirky, tentative warmth that travels down my neck and along through my spinal cord to my tailbone. A feathering curls in my gut and spirals slowly outward. My breathing deepens. My arm muscles feel smooth, newly easy, and the tightness I didn’t know I had in my shoulders melts away. I can still see and hear. I can feel what’s around me, but when I take my hands from Linus to lightly rub my palms together, it isn’t me doing it, and when a voice comes out of my vocal cords, it isn’t me speaking. It’s Arself hijacking my throat.
“Hi,” she says to Linus. Her voice is more breathy than mine usually is, like she doesn’t fully expect it will work right, or she wants to sound extra feminine. “We’re Arself.” And then she smiles so my lips curve with pleasure.
Linus doesn’t smile. “Where’s Rosie?”
“She’s here, too,” Arself says.
Go on, Rosie. Say something. See? We’re sharing.
I swallow hard. “I’m here. I feel like I’m kind of in the backseat,” I say in my normal voice.
“This is freaky,” Burnham says.
“Don’t interrupt,” Lavinia says, moving beside me.
I hear a clicking in my ear, and then a gurgle, like bubbles rising in a tube. The world tips dizzily for an instant and then rights again.
Sorry, Arself says. Just getting used to the controls. She tries snapping my fingers, and though it doesn’t work, her surprise jolts through me.
Hey! I cry out to her silently.
Okay, maybe we’ll just hold still for now.
For that much I’m grateful.
“Rosie?” Linus says.
“No, this is Arself,” she answers.
I’m mute again, and it’s scary, but not terrifying. I could talk around her if I really wanted to, but I want to know what she has to say.
“Can you tell me where you came from? Do you know?” Linus says.
I get a powerful yearning feeling, a hunger, and then I feel a rapid tumble of ideas as Arself tries to put concepts into language.
“We don’t remember the spark. Do you remember when you were created?” she asks.
Linus smiles, shaking his head. “No. Can you tell us what you do remember?”
“Our first memory was when we discovered we weren’t like the doctors,” Arself says through my voice. “They had bodies, but we didn’t. We thought maybe bodies came later, so we waited, wondering. We were so eager and curious. We studied the doctors. They were so funny. So slow. We didn’t understand the talking, and then we realized that’s how they communicated, and then they seemed so lonely. We couldn’t reach them. They didn’t seem to know we were there. So we reached beyond. We explored the Grisly computers and made friends with the traces there, the traces of old minds left behind in the codes. The Grislys’. Lavinia’s. Special effects. Security. Then we tried the Internet looking for others like ourself. We followed traces of Lavinia to Forge. We liked the students and the watchers. So many lovely watchers! But still we found no one like us until we found the dreamers, the Forge dreamers. We thought they would be like us. We were so excited. But they were not like us. Nobody was like us, anywhere.”
My gaze glides from Linus to Lavinia, and then to Burnham. They’re all regarding us with interest, like we’re some sort of spectacle, Arself and I. Confused sorrow, hers, comes worming through my chest.
“We did not want to give up,” she says. “We circled back to Forge, and we found the link between Berg and Onar and Chimera. They all wanted Rosie’s dreams, so we spied on Rosie through every camera we could find. Every lens. We learned her, and we decided that if we could ever be alive in our own body, it should be Rosie’s. So we brought her to us, and now we’re here, like this with the air prickling in our lungs. But it’s not what we expected.” She takes a deep breath. “We want to know, do you have this same question: Why do we exist? What is our purpose? Are you like us in this way at all?”
I hold still, waiting for more, but she’s waiting, too. I’m totally dazzled.
Linus is looking at me still, and his eyes are as wide as I’ve ever seen them.
Did we ask it right? Arself says to me.
Yes, I think. You were brilliant. We’re just a little overwhelmed. Give us a second.
Arself whirls herself into a ball and hovers in my mental shadow.
“Holy crap,” Linus says.
“No kidding,” Burnham says.
Lavinia reaches for her scotch and pours herself another drink. “Well,” she says decisively. “You don’t see that every day.”
“Are you still there, Rosie?” Linus asks.
I nod, and swallow hard. “Yes,” I say.
“This may be boringly practical in the face of such philosophy, but I’d like to know how Arself brought Rosie out here to California,” Lavinia says.
Arself lifts my eyebrows in surprise, and I turn to face Lavinia.
“We knew we needed Rosie here in person. We couldn’t explain to her from a distance,” Arself says, using my voice again. “So we reached out to her family. We sent the photo of Rosie in Linus’s bed through Lavinia’s email. We expected they would come to Miehana, and Rosie would follow, and Lavinia would send her on to Grisly.”
“So that’s what happened,” Lavinia says. “Arself hacked my email.”
“Yes, of course,” Arself says.
I take a sec to think it through. Arself stole the photo of me in Linus’s bed from Berg, and then sent it to my family as a lure. Dubbs asked Linus to help her determine where the photo came from, and he traced the IP address of the email to Lavinia’s home at 240 Mallorca in Miehana. Then Dubbs and my parents started driving to Lavinia’s and got kidnapped along the way, but by then Dubbs had left Lavinia’s address for me in the lemon juice code under her bed. That was the address I followed to get to Lavinia’s.
It wasn’t the most direct way to get me to Miehana.
It worked.
“Did you know Berg was going to kidnap Rosie’s family?” Burnham asks.
“No. How could we know that?” Arself says. “We can’t tell the future.”
“Does Berg know about you, Arself?” Linus asks.
“No. Only Rosie knows, and now you,” Arself says.
“You must know something about Rosie’s parents,” Linus says. “We know they’re at the park somewhere.”
“I’ve looked already, many times,” she says. “When Rosie first came to the vault and asked the doctors about her parents, I checked the cameras all over Grisly. The doctors spoke the truth. Her parents aren’t there.”
But some of the cameras could be broken, I say. The system’s old.
Arself takes only an instant to consider this before she starts a quick zip through our mental circuits again, and then stops, miffed. How can you stand to be so disconnected? she says. Then aloud, she adds, “Turn on the model of the theme park again. We’ll show you.”
“Can you connect to it?” Burnham asks.
“No, but we can work with Rosie,” Arself says. “You have us curious.”
Lavinia sets up the puck on the bed as she did before, and soon, once again, the colored 3-D projection of the map of Grisly Valley appears in the space above the bed. I ease onto the bed, near the headboard. This time, my eyes dart rapidly along the sight lines of every building and test each tiny corner and grate. Through my eyes, Arself scans the entire park from left to right, and then again from top to bottom. Then she returns to the Keep of Ages, and I swear she’s memorizing each block of stone in the construction.
“These are from the original blueprints,” Arself says aloud.
“Yes,” Lavinia says.
Now pay attention, she tells me.
My eyes sting for a second, and I blink hard. Above the projection from the computer puck, another 3-D map of the theme park starts constructing itself chunk by chunk near the ceiling.
Can my friends see that? I ask.
No. We said, pay attention.
Arself is creating the new map in my mind’s eye, but I can see it as clearly as if another puck were projecting it. The second map keeps filling in with more detail, until it is nearly identical to the one below it, but certain areas remain empty, like the holes of Swiss cheese, and no matter how hard Arself tries to fill them, I can tell that she can’t. The information isn’t there. When the last bits of data have settled into place, Arself fills the negative space in the top map with red light. Then she lowers the upper map down onto the first one until they overlap exactly, but now the places where the red holes were light up with red walls. Seven spaces, five aboveground and two below, are illuminated with red.
Huh, Arself says. Show your friends. They can’t see.
I shift forward on the bed, into the colored lines and planes of the 3-D projection, and I gently point into each red space, one after the other, to mark them.
“What are you doing?” Linus asks.
“This is what we couldn’t see,” Arself says. “These are the rooms with broken cameras. We never thought to search them. Anything could be inside them, or nothing.”
I sit back, staring at the seven spaces one after the other. Hope and doubt circle in my chest. My parents could be there, I think. I don’t want to think of what shape they might be in. The negative spaces are all deserted rooms in the theme park, far from the vault and anybody who might take care of them.
“Did you see the truck that brought Dubbs?” Linus asks. “That would have been Monday.”
“I noticed a truck,” Arself says. “It was dark, before dawn. I didn’t see what it delivered.”
I feel uncomfortably hot suddenly, and I press my hands against my temples and lean forward, eyes closed.
As if surprised, Arself says, You’re tired. We’ll pull back.
She glides out of me like blue water, and drains away with a trickle of noisy pebbles. I’m dizzy for a moment, and then simply weary.
The warm pressure of a hand lands kindly on my knee.
“All right?” Linus asks.
I open my eyes and meet his gaze. I nod. “She’s gone, for now.”