HEAVY AND LIMP, I’m unable to resist as Berg picks me up, but I muster the last of my strength and swipe my fingernails at his face.
He reels back. “Stop that,” he says, and crushes my arm down.
I wince at the pain, but I’m pleased to see a narrow stripe of blood rising on his left cheek, marring his ruddy complexion. He carries me in his arms like a giant baby, and I manage to turn my face away from his chest. This is exactly what I didn’t want to have happen. Why was I so stupid?
Berg stalks toward the nine o’clock arch, and with my last glimpse of the vault of dreamers, I notice that more of the lights have turned red. When Berg carries me around the corner into the operating room, I see Linus stretched out on one of the operating tables. His eyes are closed and he’s not moving. My heart sinks. Berg lowers me onto the neighboring table and ties my wrists down, but not before I see the three other doctors busy with prep. Anna, beside Linus, is putting on surgical gloves. Jules taps the computer. Kiri closes an incubator at the back of the room with a soft thud and turns toward us. The only one missing is Whistler.
“Tell Ian we found her,” Berg says. “He can come down and join us.”
“He’s having fun with the special effects,” Jules says.
“He’ll want to see her. Tell him to come down,” Berg says.
Jules reaches for a phone and speaks quietly into it.
“You need to let me go,” I say. “Linus, too. You can’t keep us down here.” I turn to Kiri. “Shouldn’t you be helping the other dreamers? Are you just going to let them all die out there?”
“It’s too late for them,” Kiri says softly. “We’ll get others.”
“Knock her out,” Anna says. “Let’s be done with it.”
“No. I want you to see what I can do,” Berg says. “She’s better conscious, and since this is going to be the last time, we have to make it count.”
Fear runs through me. “Don’t listen to him,” I say. “He’s a monster. You don’t have to do what he says. Let me go!”
“Work yourself up,” Berg says. “Go on.”
I grit my teeth and pull against my restraints. “He’s going to ruin all of this for the rest of you,” I say to Anna and Kiri. “All of your work. The police are going to come.”
“The police don’t care,” Anna says.
“Anna? The helmet, please,” Berg says.
I wrench my head to the side, but Berg firmly tips my head up and Anna settles a helmet around my skull. It’s the same kind of helmet Berg has used on me before, and my stomach rolls with nausea. The rubber nubs are settled into my ears, and I hear the winch as he tightens the padding. Each small, fidgety adjustment heightens my panic.
You have to me help me! I say to Arself.
She doesn’t reply.
Berg turns to his computer console and touches the keypad. A dozen different prongs extend in from the helmet until they touch my scalp and prickle into my skin. I don’t remember them from before, and they hurt. The glare of white lights from above makes me squint.
“Too tight?” Anna asks.
“No, that’s just right,” Berg says. Then he turns to me. “I want you to think of something that frightens you. Like the fact that I have your parents hidden away here at Grisly. They’re not doing well.”
My heart leaps in terror.
“Very good,” Berg says.
“You’re despicable,” I say.
He lifts a thin wire before his face and inspects the end. With gloved fingers, he screws a tiny, flexible needle onto the wire. “Now I want you to think about Linus. Our very own Linus, right here beside you.”
My heart pricks again.
“See this?” Berg says, nodding toward his computer.
“Impressive response,” Jules says. “You should attach.”
“Soon,” Berg says, turning the wire slowly where I can see it. Then he sets it aside and holds up a small jar that contains a shimmering substance, a thick, viscous liquid that seems to flash with miniature lightning. “Guess what this is.”
“I have no idea,” I say.
Berg smiles. “This,” he says, “is a failure. A very special failure. It’s a dream seed that I donated myself, but it isn’t purely mine. It’s been mixed with some of your dreams. In other words, it’s a hybrid, with your special kind of resilience. I brought it with me all the way from Iceland.”
“Why is it a failure?” I ask.
“Because I’ve tried it already,” he says. “I’ve been seeded with this hybrid to see if it can arrest and repair my Huntington’s, and it didn’t work. Apparently, the damage is already too great.”
“Then why bring it here?” I ask.
He tilts the jar, letting the slow liquid flow to one side. “Because it might work in Linus. Or you,” he says. He considers me with a calm, maniacal gleam in his eyes. “You’re my best chance, Rosie. It will be strange starting life over as a teenage girl, but it’ll be better than not existing at all.”
I am completely stunned. “You’re out of your mind!”
“I believe you’ve said that before,” Berg says calmly. “And now, Anna, if you would be so kind, pass me the scavenging line. We’ll mine one last sample of her dreams before we introduce the hybrid.”
“No!” I say. “You can’t! Anna, help me! Kiri!”
I see a needle catch the light, and Berg tilts my helmet slightly so he can reach the sensitive skin at the back of my left ear. I try to wince away from him, but it’s impossible. He swabs the place with cool disinfectant, and then I feel the sting of the needle entering my skin. Berg turns to his computer again, frowning intently.
“See here?” Berg says. “We follow the fear in.”
I hold my breath as the first hungry, feasting nanobots enter my veins, and a rush of anger wars with my fear.
Arself! Help me!
Hold tight, she says, and for one unspeakable moment, a cold, grim winter hardens my soul into pure darkness.
In the next instant, Arself sends an electric tendril of herself through the scavenging line and into the computer. Light knocks me backward.
Now, says Arself. We’re home.
My lungs fill with desperate air. I’m starved and exploding at the same time. A flash of molten energy pours through my veins, and next I’m speeding and flashing through a thousand firing circuits along a million electric miles. I’m everything. I’m Arself and myself and every dreamer that ever offered up a shred of dream. Lightning carries me through and around the whole world, and then I’m back to me and Arself, here on this deathbed. My body’s motionless, but I hover, ready for everything, eager, alert, alive.
Through half a dozen eyes, from different angles, I’m watching the scene in the operating room where time is expanding in slow motion. Berg’s features have barely registered surprise.
We’ve lost so many of us, Arself says.
With a pinging noise, we speed through the network and drop by each dark sleep shell in the vault. We gather the fine, ephemeral loss of each dead dreamer into our invisible arms. Then we swirl hugely, galaxy-like, with a golden spiral of wings, and time collapses into the cold, empty space around us. Breathless and wondering, I’m suspended in Arself in a realm beyond answers. I’m aware that my body is back in the operating room where my journey with Arself started, but at the same time, the true essence of me is everywhere else, glimpsing an existence so much bigger than anything I’ve ever imagined. Power and fragility. Connection. Bliss and loneliness. It’s like the stars have come with all their splendor to swirl and live in my own cupped fingers. They’re humming my language. They have secrets to tell me.
And finally, I get it. Arself doesn’t have to translate it into human words for me because I can feel it. The dreamers were each precious on their own while they lived, but they aren’t individuals anymore. They’re part of us, and they’re safe in the golden wings with Arself and me. For a moment, I grasp this. I know it intuitively, to the roots of me. There’s no separation anymore. We’re us, all belonging and promise. I’m other, finally, like I was always meant to be. I feel a growing sense of victory in Arself, and it’s my victory, too. The starlight in my chest expands to a shimmer, and we breathe in the golden air.