INKY DARKNESS PRESSES against the windshield. It spreads, clinging, an ultra-blackness that blots out the stars, the road, and the headlights. And yet the Toyota’s speeding along. I can feel the momentum and hear the wind whipping past. In Fagan gloves like Ian’s, Linus has taken my place behind the wheel. Elation lifts my heart, but then I remember his eye and misery follows. With the dashboard casting a faint glow over his features, I can just make out his profile, but he won’t look at me. When I ask him where he’s taking me, he doesn’t reply, and then comes the creeping feeling that he won’t look my way because something’s wrong with his face. I know this, but I can’t see it yet because he hasn’t turned, and suddenly I don’t want him to. What if his other eye and his cheek are melting? My voice box locks onto itself. I can’t speak. A prickle scatters through my body, and at the same time, a leaden heaviness consumes my muscles. My heart beats harder, but it also feels thick. It feels wet.
I look down at my chest to find that black ooze is seeping through my shirt, from my heart. Linus! I whisper, terrified. Help me! I press against the wound of my heart, trying to keep the ooze in, and finally Linus turns to me. Where his face belongs, a boil of black sludge slowly churns around a single, clean, protruding eyeball. The eyeball slices open mechanically to reveal a tiny figure inside, a man at a control center with levers and cogs. It’s Berg. He smiles at me knowingly, and the black ooze gushes from my heart.
I jolt awake, gasping.
The car is filled with murky light. A film of moisture beads the windows. I’m in the backseat, parked on a deserted side road where I stopped when exhaustion caught up with me. My heart’s beating wildly, my skin’s slick with sweat, and I’m clutching my bulky sleeping bag to my chest.
“I’m okay,” I whisper desperately.
It was a nightmare. Just a nightmare. A horrific blend of fears. Linus betraying me, Berg in charge, me helpless—these are all terrors I can’t bear to face.
I pull on my shoes, shove open the car door, and step out onto the dirt. Depthless violet touches everything, near and far. Dawn has come, the stars are fading, and I can’t see another car or a house in any direction. The only truth is red sand, mesquite, and saltbush sloping toward the distant horizon. I take a deep breath of the cool, tangy air and push my thick hair back from my face.
“I’m all right,” I say again, more certainly.
But my heart still aches. It’s been two full days now since I’ve seen Linus, and it feels like so much longer. I pull out the sticky note Peggy gave me and look at his number. It’s possible, I suppose, that it’s a secure way to reach him, but I don’t know if it’s worth the chance. He could be waking up in St. Louis, in an apartment I’ve never seen, sitting alone at the side of his bed, checking his messages to see if I’ve tried to contact him. Or he could be on location somewhere, drinking a cup of coffee in his stylish clothes, prepping to shoot another episode of Found Missing.
Finally, self-indulgently, I choose to imagine him asleep in his rumpled bed where we lay together. Early light is sifting in the dormer window, crossing his knuckles at a slant. He’s half in shadow, with his face relaxed and his dark hair a mess. He smells of cotton and salt, and his chest barely moves with his slow, even breath.
“No,” I mumble, sliding the note back in my pocket.
It’s no good thinking of him this way, reducing the real Linus to nostalgia. He isn’t mine. I can’t be with him now. My dream made that clear. No matter how little Linus is to blame for the camera in his eye, Berg rides along inside Linus like a tiny, perpetual spy, seeing everything he does, invading every aspect of his life.
A buzz in the car makes me turn, and I instinctively think it’s Linus calling. Instead, I find a message from Burnham that says he’s had a recyclable phone delivered to Thea already. It occurs to me then that Linus might have tried my old disposable phone, so I dig it out of my backpack. Sure enough, I’ve missed two calls from him. An odd little thrill goes through me, part relief and part power. I compare the callback number to the one Peggy gave me, and they’re different, which makes me all the more skeptical that either is secure.
What am I thinking? I just decided not to contact him. I’m not going to change my mind.
I do a quick check of Peggy’s Facebook page, but she hasn’t added anything new.
Unwrapping my last fresh recyclable phone, I dial up Thea. As it rings, I grab a bagel from my supplies and step out of the stuffy car again.
A girl’s quiet, uncertain voice comes on. “Hello?”
“Thea? It’s Rosie,” I say. “Did I wake you?”
Thea gives a soft laugh. “No, but this phone showed up only ten minutes ago. Imagine my surprise. How are you? Where are you?”
I am so, so relieved to hear her sounding normal. I barely allowed myself to think that she could be dead or back in a coma. Grinning, I meander into the desert, where dew has darkened the dust and the tops of pebbles.
“I’m in Arizona,” I say. “And I’m good. How are you? How’s the baby?”
“I’m exhausted,” she says. “You wouldn’t believe how tired. But my baby’s unbelievable. She’s absolutely incredible.”
“Really? I’m so glad. What’s she like? Tell me.”
“She’s the sweetest thing,” Thea says, her voice warm and dreamy. “She has these stern little eyebrows that’ll melt your heart. And she never cries. She’s sleeping now in a little bassinet right next to me. I just want to watch her, every second. Tom’s in love with her, of course. He’s a big fat marshmallow.”
“What did you name her?” I take a bite of bagel as I listen.
“Valeria, after my grandmother,” Thea says. “She was a pistol, apparently.”
Valeria was not our grandmother’s name. We had a Kelly and an Alvina, but I let it pass.
“Thanks for helping me with her,” she adds. “That was bad in the tunnel.”
“I know. I’m just glad you made it okay. I’ve been worried,” I say.
“Tom was fit to be tied when he found out.”
“I bet,” I say, smiling. It’s easy to picture the big, protective guy in a state over Thea.
A bird chirps from nearby. I turn my gaze in the right direction and search the bushes for movement.
“Want to hear something kind of different?” she asks.
“Sure.”
A shifting noise comes over the phone before she goes on.
“When I was in labor, I had the strangest vision right before the baby came,” Thea says. “I could see Althea’s grandfather on the porch here at the ranch, and Althea’s old dog Gizmo, only Gizmo was still a puppy. A little collie. And I was a girl with little-kid hands. The thing is, it felt like a real memory, like my own. What do you think that means?”
“I don’t know. Has that sort of thing happened before?”
“No. I’ve had some of Althea’s feelings before, around Tom especially, but that’s the first time I’ve ever had anything like a real memory.”
“What feelings for Tom?” I ask.
“Just feelings. That’s not the point. It just made me wonder if part of her is still alive in me.”
I pause a moment to idly push a dry stick with the toe of my sneaker.
“You said something,” I say. “That night, you asked me to give a message to Althea’s parents and her grandfather. You told me to thank them and tell them they did right by you.”
“I did?” Thea asks.
“Yes.” At the time, her voice even sounded a little different. I was terrified, actually. I thought she was dying. I chomp down on my bagel again and work through a thick, stale bite. She’s quiet for so long, I start to wonder if we’ve lost the connection. “Thea?”
“I’m just thinking,” she says. “It’s scary. It was a nice memory, but I don’t want Althea to come back. I couldn’t handle sharing my brain with her, and I wouldn’t want her taking over, squeezing me out. Is that selfish of me?”
I hadn’t thought of Althea taking over.
“No,” I say. “Or yes, it is, but you deserve to feel selfish about your own mind.”
“Even if it was hers first?”
“Thea! You’re not giving up, are you?”
“Of course not.”
“Are you having headaches or déjà vus? Any dizziness?” I ask.
She exhales a big breath, and then speaks very quietly. “Actually, the headaches are pretty bad.”
“Have you told your parents?” I ask, alarmed.
“They know,” she says. “Did you say you’re home? How’s Dubbs?”
“You’re changing the subject,” I say.
“I want to hear about you,” she says firmly. “And our family.”
I squash down my anxiety for her, but I’m not forgetting it. “You’re not going to like this,” I say. Then I tell her about my visit to the boxcar and how our family was gone. I add in my run to Peggy’s and the mess with Ian. “Berg’s after me,” I say. “He wants to mine me again, and I’m worried he’s kidnapping Ma and Larry and Dubbs to force me to cooperate with him.”
“And you think they’re in Vegas?”
“That’s what Berg said.”
“I’m trying not to freak out here,” Thea says. “It’s weird that they didn’t leave any note for you. Did you look everywhere?”
I’d completely forgotten Dubbs’s note. Now I chuck away the rest of my bagel and pull the scrap of paper out of my pocket. “There was something from Dubbs, actually, but it didn’t say much. She hid it under the bed, where she usually kept her journal.” I smooth the paper and read the message into the phone. “It says, To Rosie, period. From Dubbs, period. See you, no period.” I hadn’t noticed the periods before. Dubbs is eight. She’s not big on punctuation. Then again, maybe she is. I’ll take any clue.
“There’s no drawing?” Thea asks.
“No.”
“Does it smell?” she asks.
I lift Dubbs’s note to my nose and breathe in the dry scent of lemon. An odd possibility occurs to me, and I inhale the scent again. No, I think, awed. Then I smile.
“The little sneaky genius,” I say. “It smells of lemon.”
“You know what that means,” Thea says, excited.
“Yes. Just a minute. Let me find a match.”
“We’re like twice as smart now,” she says. “This is so exciting. Check quick. Valeria’s waking up again.”
“Hold on. I have to go back to the car.”
Dubbs and I once had a trick for secret messages that we wrote with lemon juice. I read about it in a magazine from the library, and we spent a string of summer afternoons squeezing lemons, writing messages to each other with the juice, and letting them dry so the writing disappeared. Sometimes we’d write a decoy message on the paper with regular ink, so no one would ever guess a hidden message was layered beneath.
Now, with the phone tucked under my ear, I light up a wooden match and hold it beneath the paper, close enough to feel the heat, but not near enough to catch fire. At first, nothing happens, and then the heat makes brown letters appear where the dry juice is hidden in the paper and completes the message.
To Rosie. From Dubbs.
See you at 240 Mallorca Way
in Miehana, CA.
Don’t tell. I miss you.
The last line encircles my heart and squeezes. I hold the match an instant longer to see if any other writing will appear, and then I wave it out.
My brilliant, brilliant sister left me an address. And she hid it, too, like she knew someone might come looking through our house, like she knew she was in danger. Not good. The address is in Miehana, the same place as the big vault of dreamers. It can’t be a coincidence.
“What did you find?” Thea asks.
“It’s an address in Miehana, California: Two forty Mallorca Way,” I say, trying to remember if I’ve ever said anything to Thea about the vault in Miehana. I don’t think so. “It has to be where my family was going. She says not to tell anybody.”
“Dubbs is a genius,” Thea says. “You’re going there, right? I wish I could go with you!”
“You just had a baby. Your head’s a mess.” Already I’m walking around the car to get in the driver’s seat. I toss the matches on the dashboard and take another sniff of Dubbs’s note. Now it smells like smoke as well as lemon, and it’s almost as good as having her in the car with me.
“At least tell me what can I do to help,” Thea says. “I have money now. What do you need?”
“You sound like Burnham.”
“Burnham! Exactly. We have to tell him. He’ll be a huge help.”
I look again at Dubbs’s note where it says Don’t tell.
“I’m not sure I want to tell him,” I say.
“Why not? How much does he know about you and me?” Thea asks.
“I wasn’t sure you’d want me to tell him about us.”
“What is wrong with you? That’s ridiculous,” Thea says. “Call him back. He already knows I was in a coma. You should at least explain to him how we’re connected. Then he and I can put our heads together. He’ll be a brilliant ally. He knows all about computers. You know, I bet he could even break into the Forge computers if he tried.”
I switch the phone to speaker and rest it on my knee. Then I start up the car and shift into gear.
“He did try,” I say.
“What?!” she exclaims.
“He tried and failed, just a couple days ago while you were locked in the vault at Forge. In fact, the whole thing backfired,” I say. I turn the car around and head back toward the highway. “The point is, for the very first time, I might actually have an edge over Berg. This address could be the key to the vault of dreamers in Miehana, and he doesn’t know I have it. I have to be careful who I tell and what I do next.”
“We have to be careful,” she says. “Don’t you dare try to do this on your own. Imagine how I feel. I care about Ma and Dubbs as much as you do.”
I notice she doesn’t mention Larry.
“And Larry,” she adds. “Besides, we don’t know anything about that address. It could be a trap. Why don’t you come to Holdum instead? We can work together and figure out a plan.”
“I think we’re both safer apart,” I say.
She lets out a laugh. “What are you talking about?”
I hesitate, not certain how she’s going to take this. “Berg told me your parents want to buy more of my dreams for you.”
I aim around a pothole.
“They probably think you’re dead,” Thea says, her voice low. “They wouldn’t want to mine you if they knew you were alive.”
“No? Have you told them about me?”
“I have, obviously, but it didn’t do much good,” she says. “They won’t believe I’m you inside. They know Rosie Sinclair was a star on The Forge Show, but they think I’m just obsessed with you. They don’t realize Sinclair Fifteen comes from you.”
“What are they? Stupid?” I say.
“You know what?” she says calmly. “Sometimes you sound just like you used to when you were a little voice in my head and you said the sort of thing I knew not to say out loud.”
“And sometimes you sound like a superior butthead.”
“I’m trying to be rational here,” she says. “Madeline and Diego are very shrewd people, but they’re not cruel. They must think the original source of my dream seed is dead. Or a volunteer. A dream donor or whatever.”
Thea’s deluding herself, but I keep my opinion to myself this time.
“Did they tell you to invite me there?” I ask.
“They suggested it,” she says. “When I told them how you helped me deliver my baby, they said you would always be welcome here.”
“I see,” I say, coming to a stop before the highway. I crack my window to let in a little air. “I hate to point out the obvious, but having me nearby would be awfully convenient if they ever needed to mine me.”
“Rosie, they wouldn’t. I promise you. That would never even be a possibility.”
“No? What if you fall into a coma again? What if your headaches get worse?” I say. “Why not tap old Rosie? She’s got dreams to spare.”
From her end of the phone, a muffled shuffling happens.
“I’d give you my dreams in a heartbeat,” she says.
I laugh. “Oh, great. Now I’m a selfish jerk.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“No?” I say. “I guess I’m not as generous as you. I wouldn’t sacrifice my dreams for you. I already did that when it wasn’t my choice, and I’m not doing it again.”
I’m surprised at how vicious I sound. But they mined me and mined me until I was a pathetic shred of myself. I barely survived. I’ve never been the same.
“Rosie,” she says sadly. “You know I had to leave you.”
“Don’t.”
I already feel ugly and bad enough as it is. I don’t need her bringing up her justifications again for why she abandoned me, and sure as I live, I don’t need to think any more about what it was like in the dream hell of Onar. The simple, bitter truth is, I’m never letting anyone mine me again, ever.
“You said you’re sorry. We’re done,” I say.
A little squawking noise comes over the line, and then a guy’s murmur. It’s disconcerting to think Tom might have been overhearing her end of the conversation.
“Valeria’s awake,” Thea says. Another shuffling noise follows. “She needs to nurse. Listen, will you call me later? We’ll figure out what to do about Berg, okay?”
“I’ll try,” I say.
“Don’t be mad at me.”
“I’m not mad,” I say. I am, obviously, fuming mad.
“Then will you please tell Burnham about me, really? Please?” Thea says. “He’d never believe me if I tried to tell him myself.”
“I will.”
“Call me after you talk to him.”
She’s off.
I ease onto the highway and get up to speed. She thinks we belong together, like we’re still halves of the same whole. She’s wrong, though. We aren’t the same. We have completely different lives now. What’s more, we don’t even really think alike. We never did, actually, even when we were part of the same mind. That’s why we could disagree with each other before. You have to be separate to disagree.
And yet. We still have fifteen years of shared memories, and she helped me find the lemon juice clue. I hold the note above the steering wheel and take a moment to memorize the address. For the first time, I wonder how Dubbs got it.
Then I touch Dubbs’s note to my nose again and breathe in the lemony, smoky fragrance. It’s a small, churlish comfort to think that Dubbs will recognize me rather than Thea if we ever all meet together.