AFTER THE LIP GLOSS, Ian brings me a stick of cinnamon bark—dry, brown, and fragrant.
The next time, he brings me a chocolate chip, just one. The silky, melting taste of the chocolate is so sweet and rich that I nearly swoon with pleasure. I look to his hand for more, but he tosses the remaining chocolate chips back in his own mouth and masticates. Bastard. Otherworldly ripples of light emanate around his face like a halo.
“I could only give you one,” he says. “More than that might mess up your digestion. Like it?”
I’m salivating. “It’s heaven.”
Next he holds up my old video camera, the one my teacher from Doli High gave me, the one I used at the Forge School. I know the width of the wristband, every dial and scuff mark. My palm knows its cool weight even before he passes it over.
“Where’d you get this?” I ask.
“I summoned it for you,” he says. “The battery’s dead, but I thought you might like to hold it for a while. Happy birthday.”
I startle. “But I missed my birthday.”
“Yes,” he says, extending the word into a hiss. “But I bought you three extra years of age. You’re nineteen like me now, and I have another present for you. A surprise. I couldn’t bring you to see my grandmother, so I brought my grandmother to see you. Let me help you sit up.”
The ceiling drifts silently higher until the room is unnaturally tall. Through the door comes an old, bent woman with a cane. She teeters into a cone of light from a spotlight high above, so that her white veil gleams over her gray hair. Bizarrely, she’s carrying a dusty wedding gown over one arm and a bouquet of dead flowers in her other hand.
“I thought you could borrow my wedding dress,” she says.
A jolt of panic hits me. “This is wrong,” I say, looking to Ian. “Is this a dream?” I try to smell him for his tobacco, but the air tastes empty.
“If it is a dream, that doesn’t make it untrue,” he says.
“I know what’s real,” I whisper.
“Do you? What about me?”
My heart leaps in terror.
Ian’s face shimmers for a second and comes back into focus, nearer and harshly clear. “Desperate people invent desperate solutions. It’s not my fault if they do,” he says, in the voice of Dean Berg.
“No!” I scream. I bolt up, banging into the lid of my sleep shell.
I wipe madly at the gel on my eyelids and scramble frantically at the curved glass to push it open. I suck in a gulp of air and barely bite back another scream.
The room is dim. I’m alone and fully awake. Shivers of the nightmare fall away from me like black sand, seeping into the floor with a trickling, mocking sound. Rubbing more gel from my eyelids, I find pads and wires stuck to my temples. I rip them off and blink hard. I can’t have imagined Ian. I can’t have dreamed him all those other times. Our conversations have been too real, and he’s brought me things that I know I’ve touched and smelled.
But he’s not here now. I don’t have my video camera. There’s no granny with a veil.
I’m trembling beneath my gown. In the dark, windowless room, two dozen other sleep shells are parked around me with their lids glowing faintly. The open doorway lets in light from the hall. I check instinctively for cameras, but the upper corners of the ceiling are in shadow, and considering the times when Ian lingered to talk to me, we must have been unobserved. This is my first time fully awake with no one hovering, and I can’t waste my chance.
With shaky fingers, I pull down the neckline of my gown to inspect the place where the IV goes into me. A piece of tape holds the IV line in place, and a needle goes directly into the skin over my left breast. The small, foreign lump that serves as a port is fixed under my skin. It feels like a mini jelly donut in there. With a pinch, I loosen the tape and take out the IV needle. A second line leads out of me from a spot several inches below my belly button, and I’m able to disconnect its coupling from the longer tube. I can only hope my plumbing is going to work normally. I swing my legs around and reach my toes down. The floor is cool and smooth underfoot. All I need is a little strength, a little balance, and I lurch across to the next sleep shell.
I brace myself on the lid.
Inside, a pale, blond girl lies with her eyelids covered in translucent gel. She’s five or six. I stare, transfixed. I’ve seen her before, back in the vault under Forge. She had a teddy bear and a fresh wound on her forehead then. Now the wound is healed over. Gracie. That’s what Berg called her. Her lips and skin have turned a chalky gray. She doesn’t seem to be breathing, and then, just barely, her chest moves.
I jolt back as if she’s accusing me of a crime. I can’t take her with me. I can’t! I tried to save her once before at Forge, and now I can barely save myself. I stagger to the tablet at the foot of her sleep shell to find her name: Huron 6. Like the Great Lake, and the six is likely her age. I’ll try to remember. That’s the best I can do. I have to get out!
My muscles have atrophied so badly that each step is a painful jolt, but I make the doorway. Far down the hall to my right, a door is marked EXIT, and a window shows a square of night. To my left, several open doorways are brightly lit. The nearest gives a glimpse of a metal operating table. Holding my breath, I listen for voices, but the hall yields only a vacant hum.
With one hand skimming along the wall for balance, I head toward the exit. I pass one closed door, and then another. The next door is open, revealing a large closet with a dozen wigs in tidy rows, and a large makeup kit. From a hook, an odd, skeletal frame of plastic hangs. It looks like the supports could be hooked behind a person’s back and arms and neck to hold someone in a posed position, like a puppet. It could move a person, too. A layer of sweat breaks out over my entire body.
“What is this place?” I whisper.
A buzzer sounds behind me. I bolt into the closet and close the door. Flipping off the light, I crouch down and wait, my heart charging. The buzzing stops. Nobody comes. I practically taste the fusty smell of wigs in the dark beside me, and then I crack the door open to peer anxiously out. Still nobody comes.
I can’t stay here. I have to take a chance.
I lurch back into the hallway and hurry the last few steps to the exit door, where I lean hard against the release bar. The door doesn’t budge. I try again, using all my puny strength to push the heavy door open a crack, and a couple of snowflakes drift in.
I gape. They’re so fragile and white, and in an instant they melt. I’ve seen snow in person only once before, and it seems magical now, as if this door opens into a completely new world. When another buzz startles me from behind, I slip out into the night and bolt for the nearest shadow.
Cold knifes through me. I’m backed against the building. A trace of cigarette smoke laces the black air. A single lamp illuminates a small parking lot edged by dark trees, and a thin layer of unshoveled snow rests inches before my feet. Slow, isolated snowflakes drop silently into the sole cone of light above the cars. Already I’m shivering in my thin gown. A narrow porch runs around the side of the building, and I scan frantically along it for the red glow of a cigarette. I know someone’s out here. Ian probably, but I see no one.
Below, a smatter of distant lights hints at a valley with civilization, but there’s nothing closer. I was expecting a bigger facility, a hospital maybe, but the cinderblock building has the grudging, municipal air of a dog pound after hours.
A sedan, a Jeep, and a pickup truck are parked a dozen yards away. I’m weighing my next move when approaching headlights crown over the ridge. I hurry barefoot down the cold steps, scramble over the snowy gravel, and hunch down behind the far side of the pickup.
Footsteps sound on the porch, and the scent of cigarette smoke grows stronger. The arriving car noses in by the steps, and the engine cuts dead. Then the car door opens with a rush of radio music that’s quickly terminated.
“Look who’s out smoking. What would your dad think?” says the driver.
I know his voice. He’s another attendant.
“Where’d you go?” Ian says.
“None of your business, Gertrude.”
“Don’t call me that,” Ian snaps. “You were gone more than two hours. What if something had happened here?”
“You’d have handled it.” He sounds dismissive, despite his words.
I stay low, barely breathing, cupping a hand around my mouth in fear that my fog will lift up and catch the light.
“A man shouldn’t be paid for a job he doesn’t do,” Ian says.
“I’ll be sure to remember that, seeing as you’re such a man yourself,” says the other guy. “Did you get in some good time with your little girlfriend?”
“Have you been drinking?” Ian says.
“Give it a rest.”
A jingling noise comes from the car. Then a door slams.
“You should at least take your keys,” Ian said.
I grasp onto this information, hopeful that the guy chucked them in his car. The man’s boots are loud on the steps.
“Doesn’t it ever get to you, what we do here?” the man says.
“It’s a good job. A man’s job,” Ian says. “That’s what my dad says.”
“Your dad’s a regular genius. Where’s he now? Miehana? Snaking for those California babes?”
“None of your business,” Ian says. “I should report you for shirking.”
The guy laughs. “Go ahead, you piece of weasel crap. Then I’ll report how you fraternize with the dreamers. How’d you like that?”
The door to the clinic swings open with a squeak. Next, it closes with a heavy click.
I hold motionless, listening, trying to learn if Ian has gone in, too, or if he’s still on the porch. Silent snow drops into the cone of light. My teeth chatter once, so I open my mouth and jut my jaw out to stop the noise. The trees whisper with a breeze, and the wintry air skims my back through my gown. I lean forward an inch, and then another, scanning the porch where I heard Ian’s voice.
I’m smelling cigarette smoke ever so faintly. I can’t see any movement, though, and finally I can’t wait a moment longer. Any second now, the man inside will discover my empty sleep shell. He’ll ask Ian where I am. They’ll start their search.
I touch my way around the truck, bracing myself for balance and wincing at the snowy gravel beneath my feet. A second more I pause, listening, and then I sprint to the car that has just arrived and yank on the handle. The interior light comes on as I jump inside and close the door. I scramble my hands along the dashboard, over the seat, and down by the pedals until finally I connect with the keys.
Shaking, I locate the biggest one and jab it in the ignition.
The door to the clinic bursts open, and a big man hurtles out to the porch. Ian charges out right behind him. I get one clear flash of Ian’s stunned expression, his mouth the open O of a gasping fish.
“Hey!” the big guy says.
I turn the ignition with a roar and the headlights shine on. I slam the car into reverse and floor it backward in a wide arc.
“You can’t take my car!” the man yells. He’s running toward me.
I rip the gear into drive and aim right at the guy. He rushes for the car door, but I hit the accelerator hard, and he gets jolted into the blackness beside me. I jerk the wheel to steer onto the road, barely missing a post that appears out of nowhere. I jab my bare foot harder on the gas and hold myself up by the steering wheel so I can see over the dashboard.
Night trees flash past in a wild kaleidoscope of high beams and black. A void of eager emptiness opens on my left, signaling the edge of a cliff. Bumps jolt me wildly in my seat, but I don’t slow for anything—not my seatbelt or ice or stop signs—until I make it out to the flatland and a straight, two-lane highway. Some bottle clinks on the floor, toasting my acceleration, and I roar the car as fast as it will go.