WHEN WE GET DOWN to the kitchen, Linus has cleared away the cutting board and the mess. He brings over a bag of bagels. On the stove, a pot of marinara sauce is simmering, and the juicy smell is beyond amazing. The shades, pulled down to cover the windows, are backlit with gold from the evening sun. It feels like a totally ordinary kitchen, but this is arguably the strangest day of my life. I want to dismiss Thea’s entire claim that she has my mind, but I’m also so shocked by her that I guess I am believing her. She has me second-guessing everything I say or do. It’s like how I felt the first time with all the cameras at Forge, only a million times worse. When I lift my hand, I’m seeing the motion through my own eyes and wondering how it looks to her through her eyes at the same time.
Tom is in a chair at the table already, peeling an orange. Thea quietly apologizes to him about something, and though he seems a bit stiff, he says not to worry. He offers her a wedge of orange, which she accepts. She sits heavily in the chair beside him and lounges back in a relaxed, elegant way, as if she deserves to make herself comfortable.
I slouch.
“Coffee,” Linus says, and puts a steaming metal pot beside the bagels. “We’re out of milk. Help yourselves.”
Thea and I pick raisin bagels from the bag and both smear cream cheese the same way, in dabs. I lick my fingers, knowing I shouldn’t. She uses her napkin, which she rests on the top of her belly. What I don’t understand is this poise of hers. If we have the same brain, I don’t get why she’s smarter and calmer than I am. Unless she only seems smarter and calmer. Could be she’s as restless as I am inside.
She looks at Linus sometimes when he isn’t looking at her, and I can’t tell if she’s wistful or chagrined. He hardly looks at her at all. He doesn’t sit with us. Instead, he positions the fourth chair where Thea can put her feet up on it and tells her to do so. Then he goes back to brace his hand on the counter beside him.
I am not deceived. Some friction unites them. I don’t want to care, but it eats at me because I don’t understand it.
“Do you have déjà vus anymore, or any headaches?” Thea asks me.
I’ve never talked about the déjà vus in front of a stranger like Tom before, so the question makes me uneasy. “No. Do you?”
“I’ve been getting headaches,” she says. “They’re bad, but they don’t last long. I also had a déjà vu in the clock tower today.”
“She’s supposed to report any headaches,” Tom says. “They could mean a problem with her surgery.”
“I’m not going back for any more tweaks,” she says.
She fills us in about her recovery at the Chimera Centre, and she describes the lab she found there. I can see why she’s not psyched to have any more surgeries.
“What if they had never put Rosie’s seed in a new body?” Linus asks her.
Thea turns to him. “I’d be stuck in a petri dish, like all those other dream seeds,” she says. “I doubt I’d even know I exist.”
“What about Thea? What would have happened to her?” Linus asks.
“I don’t know,” she says. “Diego and Madeline were keeping me—I mean her—alive for the baby’s sake.”
Linus glances briefly toward Tom, and then back to Thea. He looks like he has more questions, but he doesn’t ask them. Instead, he aims his eyes toward his feet.
“What’s going on?” I ask.
Linus lifts his gaze toward Thea, as if she’ll answer for them. She stares back at him, waiting likewise. I set down my bagel. This testy vibe of theirs bugs me. They had, what, two phone conversations together? I slept in his bed last night. I thought that counted for something.
“You might as well tell me,” I say. “I can’t read your mind.”
“It’s no big deal,” Thea says. “Apparently, Linus thinks I’m nothing like you.”
Linus crosses his arms. “That’s not exactly true,” he says.
“How are we different?” I ask.
“He likes the way you’re trusting and sweet,” Thea says, with her gaze still on Linus.
“I’m not,” I say.
“I guess then we are similar,” Thea says.
Tom lets out a low whistle.
Linus steps over to the stove. “You can stop anytime,” he says quietly.
Steam escapes as he lifts the lid and gives his red sauce a stir.
“So, Thea,” Tom says in a cheery, clear voice. “Did you tell Rosie about our trip to Doli?”
“What?” I ask.
Thea gives me a small smile. “I wanted to tell you I saw Dubbs yesterday,” she says. “We went to visit Doli, Tom and I. Ma and Larry were there, too.”
“Really? How were they all?” I ask.
“They were fine,” she says. “They didn’t recognize me, of course. They miss you. Dubbs looks good. I can’t go home, but you could.”
“Maybe someday,” I say, and look toward the window. It’s getting late. In a couple of hours, it will be dark out. All I want to do is get revenge on Berg. Nothing has changed that. I need to call Burnham and finalize my plans. It helps now that I know a secret way into Forge.
“You could also come with us to Holdum,” Thea continues. “Althea’s family would be glad to have you. The ranch is beautiful. I’ve been thinking about this, actually. You could take one of the bedrooms on the third floor near mine. We could sit out on the porch with the baby on sunny days and take turns pushing her swing.”
Her fantasy is so unlikely that I don’t even know where to begin. I lean back, studying her, and then I realize she’s trying to give me alternatives to my revenge plans.
“Do you ever hear voices?” she asks.
“No.”
“Me, neither. Do you ever miss it?”
Again, I feel awkward discussing this in front of others. “Sometimes,” I say.
“What voices do you mean?” Tom asks.
Thea shifts her feet on the extra chair, and it squeaks against the floor. “I started hearing a voice in my head back when I was at Forge,” she says. “It wasn’t just a normal voice, like when you talk to yourself. It felt like another side of me with a will of her own.” She glances at me. “Right? From deep inside?”
I nod. It’s so strange to hear her explaining out loud what I have only known inside my mind.
“First she would just show up randomly and say something, but then we started having conversations,” Thea continues. “Arguments, sometimes. After we were stuck in the vault, we talked even more.”
“I think it started because Berg was mining us,” I say. “It was a kind of response to that. A defense.”
“A subconscious thing,” Thea says.
“I suggested that before,” Linus says. “Rosie Id and Rose Ego.”
“No, we were really more us,” I say. “Two voices but the same individual. Subconscious or conscious didn’t matter much by the end.” I face Thea again. “You decided to leave,” I say.
“Yes,” she agrees. “It was better than waiting it out in the vault, sleeping our life away while they mined us down to nothing.”
She sounds a little too superior to me.
“But leaving was suicide,” I say, feeling my resentment kick in again.
Thea spreads her hands on the table. “Apparently not, since I’m still alive. I thought staying was suicide.” She glances toward Tom as she goes on. “So we split. I took the conscious side of me and left.”
“But I was conscious by then, too,” I insist. “Just as conscious as you. You should have listened to me.”
She looks surprised. “I did listen,” Thea says. “But your main reason to stay was that you were afraid.”
I stand up, ready to smash something: bagels, plates, anything. “I was not!”
“Calm down. It’s not like I deliberately left you behind,” Thea says. “I just did the best I could at the time. I was only trying to survive.”
“Don’t tell me to calm down!” I say. “I don’t care what your excuse is. You left me in that hell. They kept mining me for months, Thea. Months! I’ll never be the same!” I pull down the neckline of my shirt to show the port that still bulges under my skin.
Thea, Linus, and Tom go motionless. Tension sucks the air out of the room.
“I’m sorry,” Thea says quietly. “I never wanted to hurt you. Us. I never meant to hurt us. I’m really sorry, Rosie.”
I still want to destroy everything in sight. I want to scream it to her again in my head: you left me! Thea’s chin trembles slightly. It hits me finally that she’s upset, too, only she contains it better. I take a deep breath and release my shirt. Thea isn’t the one to blame. She didn’t mine me. She only tried to survive. She just needed to do it a different way, and she’s paying, too.
The chill of my anger redirects where it belongs, toward Berg, and like a poisoned black arrow, it drives deeper into my heart.
I slouch back onto my chair, deflated, and jam my hands under my legs. “It’s okay,” I say finally.
“Don’t be mad,” she says.
It’s hard to look at any of them. They’re like a unit, all breathing and alive, teamed up against the monster on my side of the table. I focus on the coffee pot. “I’m not mad,” I say.
I’m not anything.
* * *
Soon after, I excuse myself, pretending to need the bathroom. I collect my coat and bag from Linus’s room, and then I tiptoe back down the stairs. The others are talking softly in the kitchen like mature, reasonable people. I let myself out the front door, pull my cap low over my face, and head for my car.
I drive out of town to a lot behind an abandoned antiques business and park where I can watch the wind moving over the prairie in long, slow ripples. In the wake of my anger, I’m strangely calm. Fatalistic. The stiff winter grass has yielded to new green, but the setting sun is painting it orange. Each blade is still perfect, making a sea of collective silk. The beauty brings a familiar pang of longing, and I wish I had my video camera. Without it, I have no choice but to live in the moment, so I do, memorizing it.
When I call Burnham to tell him I’m ready to go in, he says to give him a couple of hours to prepare, so I settle in. I crack my window. Gradually, the big sky deepens into darkness. Sirius, the Dog Star, shows up first, followed by the trio of Orion’s belt, and then the other constellations, the ones I always wanted to learn the names of. Maybe I still will, but tonight their distant light seems aloof, uncaring.
I don’t mind that the universe is uncaring. I can be uncaring, too. It’s a lot easier that way.