Anger—or any heightened emotion—seems to key a lock, help him into a hallway full of dark happenings. So he tries to keep his temper muted. He tries to keep his emotions as gray and blank as stone. He tries to focus his energies on more practical matters, managing the museum, studying history, tinkering with his inventions. But he has been having dreams lately—dreams about an old man with long white hair and a warm whispering voice, dreams about pressing his hand to sand and green grass growing in the shape of it, dreams about blowing fire from his lungs like a dragon, dreams about splitting open trees and even mountains by concentrating hard enough, dreams about, no other word for it, magic. The old man spoke to him in his dreams. He wanted Lewis to stop hiding from himself, embrace the strengths he kept contained. And while these dreams at first made him uneasy, he has come to find them weirdly comforting, as if someone out there regarded him with a paternal kindness, wished him well.
Ever since his hands burned and he hurled Clark—the room brightening with the expended energy—his body has felt achy, his mind slow, as if hungover. He wishes it was all a dream, but he knows better. He still feels in a dream now, as he stands in the museum’s Sun Room, the largest of its galleries, a high-ceilinged space with tall, rounded windows running the length of it. He is holding the rib of a stegosaurus in his hand, the long, sharp curve of it like a yellowed scimitar. He rotates the exhibits every month. The Rise of Egypt. The Fall of Rome. The Space Race. The Great American West. For the past two days—with the help of Ella, his aide—he has been building dioramas, bolting together bones, hanging posters, readying one of their most popular displays, When Dinosaurs Ruled.
Whenever people walk through the museum to study their enormous skulls, their spiked teeth, their rib cages like baskets big enough for several men to fit inside, they seem in disbelief that something so fierce and powerful could be wiped out so easily. From there, he knows, it doesn’t take much imagination to recognize that at any moment something can come blazing out of the sky and change everything.
He hears a voice, Ella’s. She is saying his name as if it were a curse. She stands on a stool and wrenches a bolt into place that will secure a section of vertebrae. “You aren’t listening to me?”
“Apparently not.”
“I’ve asked three times whether this stage will be labeled Cretaceous or Jurassic.”
He rubs a hand across his face. “I’m not myself.”
“If you would simply sleep, like a normal person would, like I tell you to regularly, maybe this wouldn’t be an issue.” When she speaks, she punctuates her sentences with the wrench, jabbing it in the air as if to knock him about with it.
“You’re right.”
“Eight hours. That’s what I get. And I feel great.” She brings the wrench to her temple. “My mind is sharp. My body is healthy. Unlike yours.”
“Yes. I’ll try that. Eight hours.”
The museum is a sacred space, a cathedral sought out in dark times. People hush their voices and remove their hats when they walk through it. They close their eyes and lower their heads before the exhibits. Lewis knows he makes people uncomfortable, just as people make him uncomfortable, so he remains hidden away in his study during their open hours. Ella has become the public face of the museum. She watches over it, answers any questions people might have when they retreat here. The space is shadowy and cool, orderly and manicured, full of polished treasures. It is everything the Sanctuary is not. Its celebration of the long, difficult novel of humanity, the individual stories that make up the larger story of civilization, gives people hope, purpose. Others have endured and so will they.
But today it is empty, because everyone is at the stadium.
Lewis told Thomas not to do it, begged him not to sentence the girl to a public death, and on what grounds? Terrorism. That was what Thomas told everyone. Two decades ago two rangers had gone missing, believed dead, though in fact they had abandoned the Sanctuary. Somehow, all this time, they managed to survive on their own. This girl, their daughter, had come hoping to lure others out, to breach the wall and risk all their lives. It was an act of terrorism. She was a terrorist.
Lewis said, “Everyone will recognize that as a lie.”
“Fear beats logic every time,” Thomas said. “You’ll see. Everyone will be screaming for her blood.”
“She’s a child.”
“What’s the average life-span around here? Thirty? Forty? She’s practically middle-aged.”
This was yesterday in the Dome, where they met in a first-floor sitting room. Thomas lounged in a wingback chair while Lewis stood. He refused the offer of a seat, refused a plate of spiced grasshoppers, refused even a smoke. “Let me speak to her. Please.”
Thomas wore snakeskin boots and fondled a thin wooden pipe. He tamped a pinch of tobacco and sparked a match and brought the flame to the bowl and puffed until it glowed orange and smoke tusked from his nose. “How does this have anything to do with you?”
“If there are indeed outlying communities, we need to reach out to them.”
Thomas made an encompassing gesture with the pipe. “Do you know what has kept people alive all these years? They believe. They believe in the wall.” His voice was quiet, but Lewis knew this was how he yelled. Smoke swirled like a storm taking form. “What you’re talking about would threaten everything we’ve built here.”
“Their faith has already evaporated like all the water in the world.”
“The rains will come. They always do.”
They always had—this was true. But it had been so long, months now, that rain felt like a barely remembered dream, the same as his election promises. More than a year ago, when he took office, he promised he would rebuild the crumbling sections of the city. He would rid crime from the Fourth Ward. He would expand the gardens. He would drill a new well and repair those broken. He would make every citizen live up to their potential, live their best life, evolve, whatever that meant, and so on, none of it true. And with the wells failing and the storage tanks emptying, the weather felt like a punishment, like a reprimand for his election, the round reaches of the sky a magnifying lens that sharpened the sun that would crisp them to death.
For a moment Lewis considered telling Thomas about the letter, sharing its secrets, but only for a moment. In case Clark should actually make good on her promise and depart the Sanctuary, Thomas should know as little as possible about where she is headed. “I would like to speak to her. Before you do what you’re planning to do.”
“No, I don’t think so.” He sucked at the pipe and it sizzled with his breath. “But. If you give me what I’ve been asking for, if you give me my guns, I’ll consider letting you speak to her.”