Nazarin has us get off before the safe house stop and take another train too far before we circle back. I have no patience for the circuitous route, but it makes me nervous just the same. Does he really anticipate people trying to follow us? As we trudge up the steps to the pastel Victorian house, I’m exhausted.
When we’re inside and Nazarin is making the strongest coffee he can from the replicator, I tell him about Leylani and Vuk. I kick off my heels, leaving them under the table. He’s surprised, and a little sad. I suppose it’s reassuring to see that even a hardened undercover cop can still feel for a girl who’s lost her lover, the father of her child, and doesn’t even know he’s dead yet. I doubt he felt very sorry for Vuk, though.
The coffee does nothing to wake me up; my eyelids are drooping as I sit at the table. I trudge to the Chair and climb in. I don’t even have the energy to clean my teeth or wash the makeup off my face. Nazarin dutifully plugs me in and draws the blanket up over me, and I’m asleep before he leaves the room, to brainload still more information on the Ratel. Instead of dreams it’s endless interrogation scenes, reams of numbers, facts and dates settling deep into the folds of my brain.
Flitting behind all the lessons is my never-ending unease. It’s almost like I can sense Tila hiding in my mind, just out of sight and reach.
Do you really think you can find out what happened? Do you really want to know? she seems to taunt.
And my mind can’t answer her.
NINE
TILA
That tablet we found didn’t last forever, of course. Without charging, something we were unable to do even if we’d known how, the battery only lasted a few months before it died. I felt so sad when the screen went blank for the last time. For a while, I’d had access to a completely different world, and then it was taken away. We were left back in Mana’s Hearth, isolated and alone.
Taema even came around. Well, somewhat. She stopped pretending to look away from the tablet, although she never suggested topics to research. We were lucky nobody ever found us with it. We wouldn’t have been punished, really, but people would have treated us differently—as if we’d wronged them by showing curiosity about life outside, when life inside was supposed to be so fucking perfect. Disappointment can be worse than anger. They’d also have been wary, wondering what we’d learned. But I knew Mana’s Hearth for what it was now, and Taema did too, even if she didn’t want to admit it.
It was a prison.
So, you see, this isn’t my first time in a cell. I spent the first sixteen years of my life in one, even if it was surrounded by trees and flowers.
I started to notice little things. Then bigger things. How we were kept in the dark about so much. And then there was the Meditation.
I thought it was a normal part of life. That everyone on the outside must do it as well. And some do, but not the way Mana-ma did it. Three times during the week, and then just after Sunday service.
It was always the same. We’d line up, quiet and patient. One by one, we’d each go up to Mana-ma and open our mouths, a little like a Catholic communion. She’d place a small tablet on our tongue. It tasted bitter and earthy. I always wanted to make a face, but forced my features to stay blank like everyone else. The pill dissolved on my tongue, and the world would grow brighter yet hazier at the same time.
We’d lie down in the meadow, or in the church if it was raining. We’d hold hands in one large circle. And we would lucid dream. Mana-ma would guide us through visions so realistic that when I awoke from them, sometimes the real world didn’t seem like the true one. The dreams were meant to be calming, with visions of nature.
“A mountain stream,” Mana-ma would say, and all of us world work together to create the perfect one.
“A sunrise,” she would say next, and the sky of our mind’s eye would bloom so bright.
The trouble was that collective dreaming hurt. Every nerve ending would feel as though it were on fire. Tears would leak from all our eyes. We’d cry out as each vision shifted. Yet we still did it. Day after day, week after week. I think she did it to bring us closer together, and because she could. Out there, with no Chairs, no needles, we made our own dreamscapes.
We’d do it on our own, too, without whatever drug she pumped us full of (it wasn’t Zeal, I know that much), and it meant we never woke up unable to remember our dreams. It made me and my sister incredible lucid dreamers. I still do it now, especially now that I’m in my cell. I can close my eyes, drift off, and then take off into the sky and fly. It’s pretty much the only thing I can ever thank Mana-ma for.
We only had Confession once a week, different days for different people in the Hearth, but it was always just after Meditation. We’d be weak with the comedown and pain and drugs, so we’d tell her everything.