The Keep of Ages (The Vault of Dreamers #3)

I can’t do this. But I have to. Without access to any records, there’s no other way, so I force myself to keep searching. Though each dreamer has unique features, their placid expressions give them an overriding sameness and anonymity, and as time passes, I find a numbness cocooning my heart. I don’t want to be uncaring, but I need to find my family. I can’t think of a better way.

Minutes turn to hours as I peer into hundreds of sleep shells. My elbows grow sore from leaning on the windowsills. Occasionally, a red light goes on above one of the sleep shells, but a few moments later, it goes off again by itself, like this is normal. Nothing else changes. No one comes to look for me. Despair wears me down. Hunger, too. Without my backpack, I don’t even have my water bottle.

I resume my search in the next row, and that’s when I find my sister.

My heart plummets and zags. I know it’s her. I shift, leaning farther into the dome to see her better.

Dubbs’s blond hair is smoothed back from her forehead, and translucent gel covers her closed eyes. She’s pale, but not deathly. In fact, compared to the children that surround her, she’s practically rosy. I’m wound so tight now, I can barely breathe. An IV line snakes under the neckline of her gown, and I instinctively touch my chest where my port is lodged beneath my skin. She must have one, too.

“Oh, Dubbs,” I whisper. She’s really here. It’s my worst fear.

How am I going to get her out?

I straighten up again and count off the rows to pinpoint where she is, so I can’t lose her again. She’s in the five o’clock direction, twelve rows in from the outside wall, seven rows out from the middle. I check the other sleep shells near her, but my parents aren’t there. Do I keep looking for them, sorting through all the dreamers in view? Or do I try to rescue Dubbs?

I instinctively check for cameras again but still can’t find any. The dreamers must be monitored somehow, though, because Jules came when a dreamer’s light stayed on before, and I’d be sure to disturb more dreamers if I walked to where Dubbs is. It’s going to be impossible to get her out without being noticed. I can carry her. I know that much. But I’ll need to move quickly once I get her, and before that, I need to know a way out.

I’m scared. I admit it. The only way I know to get out of here is through the chute, but I can’t imagine how I’d crawl back up that, especially carrying Dubbs. There has to be another way. Jules warned me not go back out via the stream, which means he thought I entered that way. It must lead out, somehow, but that seems extreme.

A better way out must exist. Logically, Jules and whoever else works here have to use a standard route. They can’t live down here always. I just have to find that other way back to the surface.

A faint rattling comes from below, followed by a soft, tuneless whistling. One of the red lights comes on over a sleep shell, and then several more. A man, not Jules, enters from the nine o’clock arch, pushing a wheeled stretcher. He’s wearing shabby gray coveralls like an old-time janitor, and he has a bright, round headlamp on his helmet that bobbles a bit with each of his steps. A gray drape over the stretcher covers the contours of a body, which jolts slightly as the man wheels it over a bump. Three or four more of the dreamers’ lights go on.

“It’s all right, everybody,” the man says amiably. “Nothing to see here. Go back to sleep.”

The dreamers’ lights stay on. Another goes on, as well.

Whistling again, the man pushes his cart through the rows of dreamers while red lights come on around him. Not all, but a few. After he passes, they stay on for a bit, then blink out. When he reaches the center of the room, Dubbs’s red light goes on, an outlier, and it stays on when he takes a left and turns in my direction. More lights come on and go off near him as he continues. Then the man pushes his cart up a ramp almost directly beneath me, through the twelve o’clock arch, and disappears. His whistling floats back behind him.

My sister’s red light is still on after all the others have gone off, calling to me like a beacon. Then it, too, goes off.

What do I do?

Quietly, swiftly, I hurry back down the stairs and peek into the tunnel just as the man with the stretcher vanishes at the other end. For a last instant, a bit of his light reflects along the two smooth tracks on the floor, and then the tunnel is dark.

I hesitate only an instant before I follow. I run lightly to the next turn of the tunnel in time to see his light at the other end of the passage before he turns again. I follow after him, running in the dark as quietly as I can. We pass several intersections with other tunnels, all just as dark, but I’m careful not to fall behind. I can’t afford to get lost.

The whistler finally slows to a stop before a big wooden door. He pushes it open, leaves it ajar, and jockeys the cart through. Peering after him, I see a wide, low-ceilinged room with two square metal doors at waist height. Black scorch lines smudge the walls above the doors, and the place smells ashy, like a kiln. I creep closer, hugging the wall, careful to stay out of sight. The man opens one of the metal doors, and lines up the stretcher in front of one of it. Then he grips one end of the covering and tips up the end of the stretcher so the body slides down, through the open doorway, into the oven.





11



THE STAR OF DREAMERS

THE MAN LOWERS THE STRETCHER again and rolls his shoulders. Then he shifts the stretcher clear of the oven door, closes it, and latches it. Then he pushes a button. A hissing noise of a furnace comes on. The man slides open a peephole on the door and peeks through for a moment while bright orange light escapes. Then he closes the peephole and reaches for the fabric cover on the stretcher to fold it.

I’m stunned. For an instant, I’m pressed back against the wall, bug-eyed and paralyzed. Then I turn and run as fast as the darkness will allow me. I have to get away!

I stub my toe and bang into a wall, where I stop. Idiot. I can’t get lost back here. I need the whistling man. He’s my guide back to the main vault. How far have I come? I pull out my phone, but I don’t turn on my light because I don’t want him to see me. I stand perfectly still, listening. The silence is so profound that I can hear my eyes blinking, and the darkness is like thick, black poison in my lungs, stealing my breath and feeding my panic. Softly, slowly, I turn back the way I came, desperate for any sound or a glimpse of headlamp to signal that the whistler is still nearby. I reach a widening in the tunnel and feel around, discovering the three open gaps of an intersection. I have absolutely no idea which way to go. I listen intently another moment and hear, very faintly, a cadence of whistling melody, but I can’t be sure which tunnel it comes from.

“Please,” I whisper desperately.

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