I WAKE THE NEXT DAY feeling slow and stiff, and as I hear voices from the other room and realize I’m the last one up, I feel the chagrin of laziness and missing out. Blankets and pillows are strewn about the living room floor as if no one wanted to disturb me by cleaning up. I step over to Lavinia’s bedroom and peek in the doorway.
On the bed with his back to the headboard, Burnham is typing away on Lavinia’s laptop. Lavinia sits beside him, looking on and holding a bag of lemon drops. The screen reflects on their two pairs of glasses. Linus, in one of the beach chairs, is poking at his phone. Dubbs lounges on the blue rug in a patch of sunshine, stroking Tiny and experimenting with what makes the cat flick her ears.
“Why has Arself come to life now?” Lavinia says. She’s in a periwinkle outfit today, with golden ballet flats. “That’s what I don’t understand. If she can get into Rosie, can she get into other people, too? Maybe she already has, and we just don’t know about it.”
“That’s unlikely. Rosie said Arself essentially infected her while she was being mined,” Linus says without looking up.
“I don’t understand what Arself is,” Dubbs says from the floor. “How can a computer infect someone?”
“She’s a different kind of computer,” Burnham says. “Quantum computers are incredibly fast, and Arself has a biomedical interface that connects her circuits to living tissue in the dreamers. She’s a hybrid organism.” He smiles toward Dubbs, whose doubtful expression makes it clear she isn’t following him. “Think of people who have fake arms that are controlled by their minds. Arself’s a little like that, only backward, like an arm that can think.”
Dubbs looks at her own hand, turning it in the sunlight over the cat. “I wouldn’t like that,” she says.
I smile at her. “No, you wouldn’t.”
Linus lifts his head to meet my gaze. Wordlessly, he smiles at me, and my heart tumbles over.
“Rosie!” Dubbs says. “Come sit here. By me.”
I ease down onto the rug beside her. “Did you eat breakfast?”
“Yes. Bagels.”
I pull my ankles in, sitting pretzel style, and feel the warmth of the sunlight coming in the window.
“Are you calling somebody?” I ask Linus.
“No. Just answering a text from my boss,” he says.
I hadn’t even thought about his job. “Are you missing work?” I ask.
“No. We’re good. We wrapped up our last story earlier this week. Now we’re negotiating for next season. I can check in later.” He puts his phone away.
It sounds important to me, and I feel a bit guilty about keeping him away from Found Missing.
He smiles, shaking his head at me. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Speaking of smart arms,” Lavinia says. “When I was a kid, I remember when researchers connected one rat to another, brain to brain, and the rats could share information on how to get through a maze. That was a big breakthrough. Back then, the most common A.I. was Siri on our phones. Then the Google brain folks had a translator that taught itself how to translate better. Things really took off after that.”
“It’s the biomedical interface that makes the difference,” Burnham says. “The dreamers have a lot of computational power down there. Converted to data storage or digital processing, it has to be massive.”
“What data would they store?” I ask.
“Could be anything,” Burnham says. “Dreams themselves take up loads of computer memory. Remember those strange files we found when we hacked into Berg’s computer system at Forge?”
“Yes,” I say.
Lavinia pops a lemon drop in her mouth. “Of course. I don’t know why this didn’t occur to me earlier. The Forge Show needs a ton of computer processing to keep track of all its viewers and tally up the blip ranks. They’re changing every minute. That takes a lot of power. Berg could be using the dreamers for that processing.”
“But Forge is miles away,” I say.
“Distance isn’t an issue,” Burnham says. “The data’s collected from around the world, in every time zone. It’s sent to a central quantum computer, analyzed, and exported again in microseconds. No big deal.”
“I knew I liked you,” Lavinia says to Burnham.
“We don’t know this is happening at Grisly, though. We have no evidence that the dreamers are tallying the blip ranks for Forge,” Linus says.
Lavinia clicks her lemon drop around her teeth. “We don’t know they aren’t, either,” she says. “If you ask me, it’s just the sort of thing Berg would set up.”
“Arself said something about studying the Forge viewers,” I say.
“How is she this morning, anyway?” Linus asks.
“She’s quiet,” I say, listening.
“She wears you out,” Linus says.
I nod. “A little.”
“Was I connected to the dreamers?” Dubbs says.
I slide my hand over her sunny, warm hair. “Do you feel weird or hear any voices in your head?” I ask.
She tilts her head as if listening. “No,” she says.
“That’s good. The doctors said they were only going to observe you,” I say. “I think you’re fine.”
She plucks her shirt out so she can look down inside, and I know she’s checking that the bandage is still over her port. “When are we going back to Grisly?” she asks.
I glance urgently toward Lavinia, who nods.
“Actually, you’re staying here with me,” Lavinia says to Dubbs. “I need your help to keep everybody coordinated. We’re command central.”
“Rosie said I could go with her,” Dubbs said.
“I said I wouldn’t leave you here alone,” I remind her. “I think you’ll be safest staying with Lavinia. That’s what Ma would want.”
Dubbs frowns, and I expect her to keep arguing. Instead, she keeps petting the cat.
“Okay,” she says.
Burnham makes another distinctive tap on the laptop. “I have this ready,” he says. “Linus, can you get the blanket?”
Linus hangs a dark blanket over the window while Lavinia sets her puck in the middle of the bed again. The 3-D map of Grisly projects up again, this time with the seven possible places that Arself helped me find already marked in red. My eye instantly locates the ones that are closest to the Main Drag because that’s where I assume Dubbs was when she looked out of the kidnappers’ truck. Unfortunately, there’s no highlighted room directly along the Main Drag. The closest is the Lost and Found, near the entrance of the park, and then I realize there are little rows of shops in other parts of the park, too.
“Does anything look familiar?” I ask Dubbs.
“No,” she says.
Lavinia takes a pencil and points the eraser toward a low building at the edge of the Backwoods Forest, at the far end of the park.
“Deliveries arrive here,” she says. “There are ramps here and here, so trucks could back up and unload, but there’s also a service road that goes underneath here for deliveries directly to the production level. Level Negative One, we called it,” she explains to the others. “That’s where they brought in the flatbeds for the floats, too.” She glides her pencil down a ramp and taps another space, which is near a red room. “There’s an underground parking lot here.”
“I think we need to focus our search on the surface,” I say.
“Have some patience,” Lavinia says.
“I’m just saying. We know from Dubbs that Ma and Larry were taken from the truck on the surface, near a row of shops,” I say.
“They still could have been carried downstairs from there,” Lavinia says.
We look carefully at all the red places, weighing their likelihood of holding Ma and Larry, and I start writing a list. Two on Negative One in storage and the press/archives room seem very unlikely to me. The rest are all aboveground, in the park itself: the first is a turret room in the keep overlooking the moat; the second is a VIP passageway behind the Glue Factory, the roller coaster in Bubbles’ Clown World; the third is a gift shop in the Backwoods Forest; the fourth is a garbage area behind a juice stand in Zombieville; and the fifth is the Lost and Found.
Lavinia points her eraser into the Lost and Found. “This was for lost kids. Even with phones, kids still got separated from their families at the park. We could always find them by backtracking through the security footage, though. More often than not, the kid crawled into a quiet place and fell asleep. They were just overstimulated.”
“I thought the park was mainly for teens and grown-ups,” Linus says.
“All ages,” Lavinia says. “The park didn’t have any age restrictions, just weight and height requirements for the rides. We left it up to families to decide what they thought was appropriate.”
I review my list of possibilities and try putting them in order for the shortest route between all of them, leaving the ones underground for last.
1. Backwoods Forest Gift Shop
2. Keep of Ages
3. Zombieland Juice Garbage
4. Lost and Found
5. VIP behind the Glue Factory
6. Storage Room #7
7. Archives/Press
I think of Berg and slowly add another number.
8. The Vault of Dreamers
“I hate to mention this, but it’s also possible that Ma and Larry are in the vault,” I say. “It could be that Whistler lied, or it could be they’ve been moved there.” I push my hair back from my face. “We need to find a way down there. Another way, not down through the moat.”
“There’s no route to the vault on the maps,” Burnham says.
“Are you sure?” I ask. “There must be a staircase or an elevator.”
“Passages to the vault weren’t part of the original plans. They must have been put in later,” Lavinia says.
Do you know anything? I ask Arself.
She doesn’t answer. Exasperating.
“We’ll leave the vault for last, then, if they aren’t anywhere else,” Linus says.
Dubbs leans against me to look over my shoulder. I keep hoping she’ll recognize something, but she doesn’t speak up.
“It’s a lot of places to search,” Burnham says. “I like the redundancy in the name Backwoods Forest.”
“The Grislys had a sense of humor,” Lavinia says.
“What’ll you do if you get caught?” Dubbs asks me, her eyes large.
I give her a little hugging squeeze. “That’s where you and Lavinia come in. If we don’t come back out, you call the police.”
“But what if it’s too late?” Dubbs says.
A new notch of fear troubles me, but I manage a laugh. “When did you get to be such a pessimist? We’ll be fine. We’ll be out with Ma and Larry in no time. You’ll see.”