MADELINE, DIEGO, Tito, Linus, Burnham, Dubbs, Orson, and the nurse are all in the sitting area near Thea’s bedroom when we arrive. Tom slides along the back wall, holding the baby, and he sways from foot to foot. Orson has commandeered the nurse’s desk, and he has the computer screen angled so everyone can see an image of a brain scan.
“You can see here and here are the areas of the most decay,” Orson says, pointing to dark areas. “The amygdala and the inferior lingual gyrus.” He enlarges one spot to show a jagged hive of holes. “Once these gaps start opening up like this, it’s only a matter of time before the brain shuts down completely. Typically then, the patient stops breathing, and they’re gone. I’m very sorry to say this, but I’m afraid Thea is within hours, maybe a day of this point.”
“But we have Rosie here now,” Madeline says. “She’s offered to give us more of her dreams.”
Orson glances at me. “That’s very generous of you, to be sure, but it doesn’t solve the problem,” he says. “It normally takes weeks to grow a dream seed into a sample that’s fit to be implanted into another brain. We don’t have weeks in this case.”
My gaze keeps zeroing back on the brain image on the computer, and my fingers start to tingle in a familiar way.
“How do you actually insert the dream seeds?” I ask.
“The actual technique, you mean?” Orson says. “We load up a series of nanobots with dream-seed astrocytes, the perfectly aged ones, not too mature, and then we insert the nanobots into a vein behind the patient’s ear. Then, with the helmet sensors on the patient for a mapping system, we can guide the nanobots to the amygdala or the lingual gyrus or anywhere else we need them to go.” He pauses, as if expecting questions, but then he goes on. “Once in place, the nanobots express out the dream astrocytes, and they cling to the existing brain cells in the patient. It’s a basic delivery system, but on a microscopic level, like little boats delivering packages to a steam liner. What really matters is the dream’s ability to take hold and mesh with the existing brain cells. That’s when they have a chance to repair damage in a fluid, dynamic way. Then even that takes some time. A few days, usually. Sometimes longer.”
What he’s saying makes some sense. I can imagine the little nanobots as the golden spheres that once ripped a vision of Dubbs out of me. A germ of excitement starts growing around my heart.
Are you there, Arself? I ask.
She doesn’t say anything, but the itching in my fingers grows stronger.
“Do you have a helmet here, and whatever other equipment you need?” I ask.
Orson leans back and folds his hands together. “I do. I used the helmet to record Thea’s most recent scan there,” he says, aiming his chin at the screen. “It still doesn’t solve the problem of the time we need.”
“Is there any way to speed things up?” Diego says. “If you harvest from Rosie today, when is the soonest you could try implanting her dream seed into Thea?”
“Wait a minute,” Ma says. “Nobody’s harvesting anything out of Rosie.”
The others all look at her. A hiss from equipment in the other room is clearly audible.
“It’s not safe for Rosie,” Ma says. “I’m sorry about your daughter, Madeline, of course. My heart goes out to you all, but we’re not risking Rosie’s health for a girl who’s essentially dead already.”
“Ma,” I say, shocked at how blunt she’s being.
“We don’t even know this doctor,” she adds. “He looks like Robert, but that doesn’t make him a good person. He could be as evil as Berg.” She turns to Orson. “Did you ever collaborate with Berg?”
“I did,” Orson says. “I purchased dreams from him. That’s how I developed Sinclair Fifteen in the first place.”
“Without Rosie’s consent,” Burnham says. “Berg sold you dreams from the Forge students, and none of them ever gave their consent.”
Orson shifts uneasily. “I have not always been the most rigorous in asking questions about where my supplies have come from. I admit that,” he says.
“Okay. That’s final,” Ma says. She looks anxiously at Madeline. “Is that why you invited us here?”
“Ma, it’s my choice,” I say. “I want to do this.”
“The doctor himself said it won’t do Thea any good,” Ma says practically. “I may not get all that mumbo jumbo about nanobots, but Thea’s already too far gone. I can’t be the only one who sees this.”
“We’d never force Rosie,” Madeline says. “Of course we never would.”
“You’d just ask.” Ma gets to her feet and takes Dubbs by the hand. “Come on, Rosie. We’re going.”
“No,” I say. “Wait. I need to see something.”
I move over to the computer and let my fingers do what they’ve been longing to do on the keyboard. The image on the screen turns ninety degrees, and then zooms in on a certain section of Thea’s brain, going smaller and smaller until space opens up between the neurons. Too much space. I’m in a gap. I don’t have deliberate logic for what I’m seeing, but in the back of my mind, Arself is making sense of it all and absorbing what we need to know. My fingers adjust the screen again, pushing deeper and sideways, to a lit string of light.
“What are you doing?” Orson asks.
Ignoring him, I expand out again, shift to another area, and zoom in again. Faster than before, Arself switches the screen to a new area, and then another. Warm, slow pleasure trickles around my skull, and I know what she’s thinking even though she doesn’t put it into words. We’re going to operate ourselves. We’re going to get in there, into Thea’s brain, and make it right.
Unless they stop us.
I lift my fingers from the keyboard for a moment, and then drop back onto them, quickly bringing the image back to where Orson left it. Then I straighten away from the computer.
“What on earth was that?” Orson says. “How’d you learn to do that?”
I glance over at Linus, who’s starting to smile.
“It’s just a little trick I picked up in the vault,” I say.
“Did Berg teach you?” Orson says.
“No,” I say. “He never taught me anything but fear.”
I take a deep breath and turn to Burnham, who shakes his head in a dazed way. I know my friends will support me, whatever I want to do. I could wait until later tonight, and sneak back down here, and try this myself after Ma and the others have gone to bed. It could be easier that way, but sneaking around is what I had to do at Forge, and I’m not going to do that anymore.
“I have an idea,” I say. “I’d like to operate on Thea myself. I think, with Orson assisting, I could give her some of my dreams directly. It might help her heal, and it couldn’t hurt.”
Diego’s jaw drops. Tito’s eyebrows shoot up. Madeline lets out a gasp.
“You’re sweet,” Madeline says. “Honestly. But that is the wildest idea I’ve ever heard, and I’ve heard my share of wild ideas.”
Linus leans back with his arms crossed, smiling openly. “Here we go.”
Dubbs scratches her head. “How can you operate?” she asks.
I take a deep breath and plunge in. “First of all, we’ll need another one of those helmets for me to wear, so I can get visual input on what’s happening in my brain at the same time we’re watching Thea’s,” I say. “Then we’ll need to be connected up, she and I, brain to brain, with a supply of the nanobots that I can control. Or probably it would be better if Orson controls the nanobots in case I fall asleep. I can give him some guidance until then.” The procedure seems perfectly obvious to me, now that I have Arself outlining it for me. Her thoughts are so quick and so confident that I’m beginning to feel like we’re wasting time with these explanations.
“This is preposterous,” Ma says. “You’re not a doctor!”
Orson is frowning pensively. “What she’s saying about a transfer is possible, in theory,” he says. “I hadn’t considered a direct transfer of dreams. Berg used to hypothesize about it, but I’ve never had a fully live dream host side-by-side with a patient before. I’m still not sure it will help Thea, but it has a chance. It would also be dangerous for Rosie.”
“It’ll work,” I say. “You know her brain and mine are compatible. This is the best way.”
I’m watching Orson closely, and I see the deeper focus in his gaze when he shifts from doubtful to interested. It’s the same look my dad used to have when he was excited about a new game we’d invented.
Madeline, Diego, and Ma are stuck between unconvinced and outraged, but Orson gradually outlines a potential process to them, the same one I imagined, and they talk it over. Ma’s stubborn, but I can see her coming around. Orson puts in an order for an extra helmet and other supplies, and Tito asks him to start all the way over from the beginning again and walk them through it once more.
Burnham snags me by the sleeve and I follow him over to the windows, where Linus and Tom join us. Baby Vali is asleep in the crook of Tom’s arm, and her perfect little face only adds to my determination. This baby needs both her parents. I know Thea would want me to fight for her life. She once told me she would give me her dreams if I needed them, and I only wish I’d felt as generous toward her then as I do now.
“Are you sure you’re up for this?” Burnham says. “You know you could die, right? That’s what Orson means by ‘dangerous’ for you.”
“What am I supposed to do? Let her die?” I ask.
Burnham coughs briefly into his fist. “There are worse things than dying.”
I arch my eyebrows high. “For her or for me?”
“For any of us,” Burnham says.
He is the last person I expected to be arguing against the surgery. Tom’s gaze is pinned on his daughter, and I can’t guess what he’s thinking. I turn to Linus.
“Burnham just doesn’t want to lose you,” Linus says.
“It’s not that,” Burnham says.
“Then what?” I ask. “We have a chance to save Thea. What’s wrong with you?”
“It won’t work,” Burnham says. “Why do I even have to say this? You’re not a surgeon. You have no idea what you’re doing. People don’t do brain surgery on themselves. There’s a reason for that.”
The adult voices go silent, and tension hovers in the room. I can feel the others listening to us from across the room.
I glare at Burnham. It bugs me that he’s actually being reasonable, but he doesn’t know how powerful Arself has become. He doesn’t realize who we are inside now. “We’re not going to let Thea die because of fear,” I say.
“This isn’t about fear,” he says. “It’s about common sense.”
“Then we’re not going to let her die because of that, either,” I say. “I’ve got this, Burnham. Really.” I lower my voice. “Arself’s helping me. She knows what to do.”
He stares back at me, and then shakes his head. “That is exactly what I did not want to hear.”
I smile.
Tom looks confused. “Who’s Arself?”
“You don’t want to know,” Burnham says.
* * *
When I slip into Thea’s room a few moments later, she’s resting exactly as she was before. My friends follow after.
“I’m not going to do anything yet. I just want to take a look,” I say.
In one of the cupboards, I find the scan helmet and lift it toward the window. This version is as light as a bike helmet, with delicate, retractable prongs. It’s strange to hold the device that I associate with helpless terror and recognize its potential as a tool I can use. While I’m fitting the helmet to Thea’s head and settling the nubs in her ears, I’m conscious of Linus and Tom watching. Tom, still cradling Vali, takes the chair by the window. I start up the computer and plug in the helmet. Linus brings a tall chair for me so I can sit beside the bed, see Thea’s face, and work on the laptop at the same time.
I can still hear the grown-ups discussing details in the outer room.
“Close the door, will you, Burnham?” I ask.
He steps farther in and closes the door.
I slide the computer closer and pull up Thea’s live brain scan with the typical cauliflower-like contours. Lights pulse on the screen, and it doesn’t take me long to get familiar with the controls. I can turn the image 360 degrees, and I can zoom in to find her hippocampus, then her amygdala, and then the gyrus. Though I never learned these things myself, Arself’s knowledge has become a seamless extension of my own mind, and I trust it implicitly. We focus in further on the dark spaces, the holes, and strategize a pattern for where we’ll go first, starting with a pocket of damage that’s the worst.
Engrossed, I hardly notice when Orson comes in the door behind me. Apparently, hours have passed. My mother has agreed to the surgery, and everyone else is also on board. The extra helmet has been delivered. There’s no reason to delay.
After we move an extra bed in beside Thea’s, I lie propped up beside her and hold my breath while Orson puts the second helmet on me. He carefully connects me together with Thea, and he has a series of a thousand nanobots ready to inject into my bloodstream. He has one computer, and I have another on my lap.
Thea’s parents, and Ma, and our friends, line the back wall where they can watch. Linus gives me a tight smile of encouragement. For a fleeting second, I wonder if this is the last time I’ll see him, and then I feel a rise of excitement with Arself inside me. We’re near the top of a roller coaster, teetering before the plunge.
“Ready?” Orson asks me.
“Yes,” I say.
At first, I try to watch my screen. I try to swipe on the touchpad to direct my view of my brain activity and Thea’s. I fully intend to stay conscious and in control, but soon my eyes feel too slow and my hands too heavy. I let them slip into inert silence, and suddenly I’m in the quiet, beige, private space behind my closed eyelids. Orson and the others disappear, and I feel a keen awareness take over, a sense of rightness. I belong here, like this, as pure, fluid thought.
Arself guides me along, sightless, through a narrow tunnel and directly into Thea. We come to the circle where her thoughts should be brightest, but they’re not there. Instead, she’s a heaviness, an obdurate wall of loss and darkness. I’m unsure what to do. I call her name, but nothing replies. I flash back to myself and open my eyes, and focus on Orson.
“Send the nanobots,” I say.
“Where do you want me to direct them?”
Arself supplies me with the right words.
“Just put them in my posterior auricular vein,” I say. “I can take it from there.”
My eyelids go heavy again and I sort through my dreams, calling up a blueberry ocean, a walk on the tracks back at home in Doli, a vibrant castle slipping into a sea of mud. I find a colorful, soaring songbird that flies through an underground tunnel, leaving whorls of light in its wake. I find the fish from the stream under Grisly, lurking just below the surface of the water.
A series of golden pods shimmers into my view, and a sharp memory of pain returns to me. It was one of these pods that stole the vision of Dubbs from me, back before, when I was imprisoned in my dreams. I recall the rift vividly now, but without the helpless despair. The golden threads swirled around my sister and I tried to hold her tight so I could keep her with me. But in the end, the pod took both Dubbs and my other voice with her. They were both gone, forever.
This is my chance now, to make that right. I control the pods this time. I can choose, and I choose a gift for Thea. It’s a bright dream vision from the galaxy moment when I connected to the dreamers, and all their shifting, brilliant power united me into something larger than I’d ever been before. I imagine that galaxy into the nanobot, where it pulses and strains with golden light, and I bring it over to Thea’s circle of quiet.
Here, I say, and I let the warmth transfuse out of the pod and into her void. At first, the light simply vanishes into the darkness and is swept away, like an evaporation of stardust. But I bring more, and with my own hands, I pour my galaxy into her emptiness until finally, a bit of it takes. It clings to a fine, invisible thread of substance, like dewy light along a strand of a spider’s web. Then another strand catches light and grows stronger. I feel the heaviness begin to roll like a slow mountain against the night sky. I nudge her with my puny, hopeful strength, and I bring her more of the golden light. I deliver more of my dreams, more of my memories, until at last, I feel the spark of her consciousness coming online, right beside mine.
She’s weak. She’s voiceless still, but she exists as a consciousness like before, back when we were only me, the two of us in one mind.
This is what I’ve wanted, I realize. Ever since she left me, this is the wholeness I’ve missed. Thea! I say joyfully.
Rosie? she says faintly. What are you doing here?
I expand in every direction, spilling light and warm shadows like evening in a canyon. She’s smiling, too. I can feel it in my cheeks and behind my ears. I don’t need to explain anything to her because in less than a moment, she intuits everything I’ve done and believed.
You’re hurting, she says.
No. I’m good.
But she guides me to the edge of my aching, down to the bottom of the canyon to a dark river, where I’m grieving for the dreamers and my father. For Larry, too, somehow. She grieves for them, too, in complete, endless sympathy. Loss and failure swim up-current through the river, tugging at me with their gravity.
These things are part of us, she says. Try to forgive yourself for hating Larry and losing him.
That’s impossible. I don’t know how.
You have to, she says. We can’t let Berg sour us forever.
I plunge into the black, cold current.
I hate him still, even though he’s dead, I say.
I know, she says. But because of him, you found Arself, and she knew how to bring you home. To me.
The river flows less swiftly. I lift back toward the surface, and I ease back onto the shore. Thea’s smiling again, urging me on.
You brought me your dreams, she says. You gave them to me.
Because I love you, I guess, I say.
She laughs. I’m back in the air, part of the light.
And I love you back, she says. And we love other people, too. Vali.
Dubbs.
Ma.
Linus.
Burnham, Tom, Lavinia, Madeline, Diego, Tito. Althea, gone forever.
It’s such a relief to be flying again, pure air and solace. The ping in my heart grows wider and ripples outward until we’re free.