The Vault of Dreamers (33 page)

“It’s rather fitting, considering he overlooked your first transgression,” Mr. O’Toole
said. “He clearly has a soft spot for you.”

“And if it turns out she’s mentally unstable, the school can foot the bill for her
care. That should satisfy my dear Mrs. O’Toole’s soft-hearted concerns,” Mrs. Peabody-Lily
said. “Solves everything.”

“I’m not giving up my parents,” I said. “Certainly not to have Dean Berg named as
my guardian.”

“We’re not asking you to give up your parents,” Mrs. O’Toole said gently. “We’re simply
asking you to obey the rules, like every other student. Do you want to stay at Forge
or not? This is your education we’re talking about. Your future.”

I glanced at Otis.

The old man shrugged. “They’re mad. All of them. But you play their way or you go
home.”

I thought then of the sleeping bodies in the vault. I was the only one who knew about
them, the only one who had a shot at saving them. I looked around at the watching
adults and ended facing Dean Berg. He was smiling with grave concern, as if he had
nothing but my well-being at heart.

“I’ll stay,” I said.

Dean Berg’s smile expanded warmly. “Wise decision.”

29

THE OBSERVATORY

THE DEAN WANTED
to confer with the school’s legal team about the guardianship contract. He emphasized
that my parents would only surrender guardianship
if
I disobeyed the rules. He added that I should talk to my parents and take the day
to think it over, and in the meantime, I should attend my classes like normal.

As if normal was possible anymore.

As soon as I made it down to Media Convergence, Janice leapt up from the couch and
pounced on me.

“What happened? Are you crazy? What were doing up at night?” she demanded.

“Did you watch the meeting in the dean’s office or not?” I asked.

“I did. We all did,” she said.

The other students in the room had gone silent, watching us. Henrik and Paige were
hovering nearby. Burnham’s usual desk was horribly empty.

Mr. DeCoster rose from his desk in the corner. “What can we do for you, Rosie?” he
asked.

I shook my head. “I just want to call my mother.”

“Here. Borrow my phone,” Janice said, and she thrust it into my hand.

I dialed my mom’s work number, and got a busy signal. I wondered if she was on the
line with Dean Berg. I tried several more times, but the line was always busy. When
I tried our home line, thinking to leave a message with Larry, that line was busy,
too.

“I can’t reach her,” I said finally, when I handed back Janice’s phone.

“Don’t worry,” Janice said. “She has to know what’s going on here. She’ll call you
as soon as she can.”

I tried to picture my mom juggling calls and trying to keep everything going at the
cafeteria, too. I knew she’d call me when she could.

My gaze kept going to Burnham’s empty seat until I couldn’t stand it anymore. I went
over to the Ping-Pong table, snatched up a ball, and strode back to Burnham’s desk.
I set a paperclip in front of the touch screen he always used, and just like he had
done once, I rested the white ball inside the clip so it couldn’t roll away. It looked
small and fragile there, but playful, too.

The room had grown quiet around me.

“He’ll be back,” Henrik said.

That was what we all wanted. I wondered how many of the others didn’t believe it was
true.

For the rest of the day, I was distracted and preoccupied. All of Burnham’s friends
were. I kept thinking about him, but I also kept thinking about the vault from last
night and Linus angry at me. Each trouble gave me a different kind of guilt that hung
heavily inside me, like the clock weights in the pit of the tower. As the hours passed
and I didn’t say anything about the sleepers in the vault, I felt worse, like I was
becoming an accomplice to their captivity.

Again and again, I circled back to the way Dean Berg had practically dared me to talk
about the vault in front of the trustees today. He had to have some way to protect
his secrets. He could possibly, theoretically, close off the tunnel that connected
the bottom of the pit to the vault. Somehow.

I felt like a mad girl, inventing bizarre scenarios.

What would happen if I simply told the viewers what I knew? I could even go back to
the pit myself, now, during the day.

A fitful wind blew up the quad, and I brushed my hair back, squinting toward the rose
garden at the base of the clock tower. Pale, soft petals lingered on isolated blooms,
and in the slanting afternoon light, their beauty touched me strangely. Above, on
the clock tower, the motto around the face seemed to mock me:
Dream Hard. Work Harder. Shine.
I couldn’t do any of those things while a vault of helpless dreamers slept beneath
my feet.

They were my real ghosts. My real project wasn’t a class assignment at all. I teetered
in indecision, weighing if I should go into the clock tower. The cameras of the show
would record my movements.

Cameras. They were my best tools now. I simply had to use them right, and I still
had one video camera I had never checked. Several posts around the rose garden had
button cameras on them, and I found the nearest one and spoke directly to it.

“Linus, if you want to talk, I’m heading to the observatory.”

Burying my hands in my pockets, I lowered my head into the wind and headed east out
of the quad. I could never pass behind the art building without remembering my first
kiss, but today the sight of the wooden spools left me wistful.

I didn’t want loneliness. I didn’t want longing.

I strode down the pasture path without waving to Otis in his tower, and I headed up
the little knoll to stare at the place where Burnham and I had climbed the observatory.
The ladder was gone. Even the holes where it had been bracketed to the stone had been
filled, since yesterday, with tidy patch.

Slowly, I closed in on the place where we’d fallen, searching for the exact paver
where Burnham had hit his head. No grizzly hint of blood remained. I paused with the
toes of my shoes aimed at two pavers, undecided. Resentful. I wanted to at least be
able to blame a specific stone.

So pick one
, she said.

I wiped the end of my nose with my sleeve and sniffed. Picking one wasn’t the same
as knowing. I wanted certainty, and I wasn’t getting it.

A flapping noise drew my gaze upward, and a dove flew feet-first toward a nook in
the eaves. I strode closer and nearly tripped on a ladder that lay in the grass. It
wasn’t the heavy, old one that had been removed from the wall, but a lighter, portable
kind that a worker would use.

Go on,
said my voice.

I pictured how bad it would be if I grew dizzy halfway up the ladder, and I rubbed
my tender right elbow.
How do I know you won’t mess with my balance?
I asked.

She shifted faintly.
If I wanted to hurt you, I would have done it in the pit.

That was reassuring, in a twisted sort of way.

The road to Forgetown was still empty, so I turned toward another small camera, this
one on the wall of the observatory.

“Parker,” I said clearly. “If you’re watching, tell Linus to come talk to me. I want
to see him. He’ll listen to you.”

Wrangling the ladder up against the observatory, I bounced it a couple times to settle
it on steady footing. I looked up the length of the ladder, eyeing the shiny rungs,
and started up. My right elbow still hindered me. I’d gone up half a dozen rungs when
the ladder did an infinitesimal shift and I froze, waiting to see if it would slip
farther. Beneath me, the ground tilted. A muffled cooing noise came from somewhere
above me.

Then the tingling began, and the first hint of dizziness.

“No,” I said, wrapping my arms around the ladder.
You said you wouldn’t make me dizzy.

That’s not me.

Then help me
, I said. I focused hard on the rung directly before my face, waiting while a fringe
of blackness crowded the edge of my sight.
Make it stop,
I said.

Then let me,
she said.

I quit fighting and closed my eyes. A sharp, driving pain scraped through my brain.
For a vivid instant, I saw the stiff body of a dead man hanging from a noose, and
then he imploded into a cloud of black particles. They shimmered, swirled once, and
were gone.

I should have felt wildly unstable on the ladder, but instead, I felt solid again.
Purged. Healed.

“What just happened?” I asked aloud.

Pesky garbage. It’s gone now,
the voice said.

I rested my cheek on the cool rung of the ladder. She wasn’t the chattiest inner voice,
but she made sense to me
. Am I hallucinating you, or are you my subconscious?

Ours,
she answered.
Our subconscious
.

That fit. I smiled, satisfied.

I moved steadily up the ladder to the dome level, and then up the second, shorter
ladder to the satellite dish. As I leaned into the dish, another gust of wind messed
my hair, and light reflected brightly in the concave shape. The duct tape and plastic
protecting I had secured around the camera were awkward to unwrap, but I worked the
camera free and returned with it to the dome level.

Sitting with my back to the sloping dome, I checked curiously through the footage.
The video camera had captured one long, uninterrupted, two-week sequence of sky, from
the day I’d turned it on until the camera had run out of memory and shut itself off.
The summary bar of the video showed alternating light and dark stripes, for the days
and nights, with cloud cover and rain. I turned up the little speaker on the camera
and skimmed my finger back and forth along the footage, listening for audio spikes,
where I slowed the audio to regular speed.

I heard bird noises, bongs from the clock tower, and occasional trucks. Nothing special.
It shouldn’t have been a letdown, but it was. Another audio spike fell in a nighttime
segment, and I switched it to normal speed and lifted the camera to my ear.

A guy’s voice came in, thin with a poor connection, but just audible.

“I’m in the lookout tower. You should see these stars,”
he said.

A girl answered him even more quietly.
“Are you still upset about Paige and the face app?”

It was Linus and me, I realized, surprised. It took me another second to recognize
our first conversation on the walkie-hams.

“Guys don’t get
upset
. Besides, you were right. It wasn’t really your fault. Gorge on Forge took down the
footage of me, for what that’s worth. Are you awake every night?”

“Yes. Since the fifty cuts. I skip my pill.”

“You know that defeats the whole purpose, right? I mean, it’s great to be able to
talk to you, but you have to sleep for your creativity to go into full effect.”

“I know that’s what they say, but I’m not so sure that’s the reason. Why did you say
that thing about how I’m safe as long as I stay in bed?”

“Because students who leave their beds get sent home. I don’t want that happening
to you.”

The conversation kept going, and I listened, spellbound. How nice Linus sounded. I
had been so eager and excited to talk to him back then. It was strange that I’d ended
up getting caught out of my bed, just like he’d warned me against. If I had listened
to him, things would have turned out so differently. I never would have known about
the vault.

When the conversation finally ended, I stared, stupefied, at the video camera in my
hands. Another truth sank in. Just as the walkie-hams could pick up a rogue transmission,
like mine had during the time I had overheard the dean and Huma, they could also transmit
a conversation out to the airwaves. This video camera had picked up the transmissions
via the satellite dish, which meant it would have been child’s play for the dean to
tap the same airwaves and listen in. In fact, all he would have needed was a third
walkie-ham on the same channel. I should have thought of this before.

My nighttime conversations with Linus had never been private. All those times I’d
poured out my heart and worried and questioned, we hadn’t been alone. I felt so stupid.
What else had I said into my walkie-ham over the past few weeks? Everything. Assuming
Dean Berg had listened in, I had never had any secrets from him. Not one.

It must have been so easy for the dean to play me, all this time. Did Linus know?
He could have been part of the game this whole time. He worked for Dean Berg. Or he
used to. Or maybe he still did, and they were only pretending Linus was fired.

“Rosie? Are you still up there?”

I glanced over the edge.

Linus was down below, gazing up.

30

REAL USE

WITH THE FORESHORTENED
angle and his hands on his hips, he looked annoyed, but not any more annoyed than
I felt myself.

“What are you doing?” he demanded. “Do you have a death wish or something?”

“I had to get a video camera,” I said, sliding the band over my wrist.

He braced both hands on the ladder. “I can’t believe they let you go up there. Are
you getting this, Otis? Are you asleep, Bones? You should have sent someone to bring
her down.”

“I don’t need any rescuing,” I said, and I turned again to descend backward. I moved
carefully but quickly down the ladder, without the least bit of vertigo. My inner
voice had fixed the problem entirely.

As my foot met the earth, Linus pivoted me into his arms. He had a new scratch on
his cheek and a scab on his lower lip from last night.

“What did you think you were doing?” he said. “You could have fallen again.”