The McLellens’ boxcar has the same footprint as ours—a long, narrow rectangle—but it feels completely different because they jacked up the ceiling to fit in a loft and added a ton more windows. Money’ll do that. I babysat and ran errands for the McLellens for half my life, so I know my way around. Their place is freshly painted and up-to-date, with a huge flat-screen TV and an open laptop on the kitchen counter. My gaze goes instinctively to the camera lenses, which are uncovered, and prickles rise on the back of my neck.
“Do you mind?” I ask. I step over to her laptop and close it. Then I take a dish towel and fold it over the top ridge of the TV to cover the lens there. I check the bookshelves, the lamps, and the corners where the paneling meets until I’m sure no other lenses are aimed at us.
Peggy, chewing thoughtfully, watches me and makes no comment. She’s a tall, big-boned woman with short hair, dark skin, and a penchant for wearing red. Her sleeveless dress today is no exception, and I can see the soft, swirly mark of an old scar on her upper arm.
I get back to my fork. “What do you know about my family?”
“You just missed them. They took off yesterday afternoon,” Peggy tells me. “They got a credible tip on your whereabouts. Someone had a photo of you sleeping, and your parents decided to go in person and check it out. They wouldn’t say where.”
“Sleeping how?”
“It was just your face on a pillow. In profile. Very little color, but some. It was pretty artsy, actually,” she says.
Inside, I go still. “It was just a picture? Not a video clip?”
“Just a picture. I take it you know the one I mean,” she says.
I do. It’s from a video taken when I was lying in bed with Linus. It sickens me to remember how we were spied upon. Was that really only a few nights ago? So much has happened since then. “How’d my parents get the picture?” I ask. “Who sent it?”
“I couldn’t say. Your ma showed me the picture, but otherwise, she was tight-lipped about the whole thing,” Peggy says. “She was trying to protect me, or so she said.”
As far as I know, the only person who could have sent that image is Berg, and if he’s luring my parents to him, they’re in real danger.
“Were they driving?” I ask.
“Yes. I sold them a car a while back,” she says. “They got a little money from people who donated to help search for you. You wouldn’t believe how stressed your parents have been. When that picture came yesterday, your ma was beside herself.”
In a sick, painful way, I’m almost glad to hear she was upset. “Really?”
“Of course!” Peggy says. “And Larry, too. What’s wrong with you?”
Guilt shuts me up. A good daughter’s not supposed to have ugly feelings toward her parents, but I have layers of them. Resentment and anxiety are uppermost at the moment. It’s so easy to blame Ma for letting Berg take control of me. She’s responsible for bringing Larry into our lives, too, and what a prize he’s been. The one thing I’m clear on is that I miss my sister, Dubbs, and I’d do anything to keep her safe.
“Once I find them, I’ve got to convince them to leave the country with me,” I say. “We have to go somewhere else and start over with new identities. It’s our only chance to have a normal life now. Berg’ll never stop looking for me.”
Peggy wipes her fingers daintily with a napkin. “If you ask me, that sounds like fear talking.”
“It is,” I say. “I’m not ashamed of it. Fear’s healthy when you want to stay alive.”
She looks doubtful. “I don’t buy that. Rusty and I have been here, what, thirty years? Plenty of times I’ve been scared. Plenty of times we’ve had trouble at the business, but you don’t let someone run you out of your home. Now, if you’re tired of that boxcar and have better prospects, that I’d understand. But our kind, we don’t run. I don’t see Larry as the running type, nor your ma, either. And certainly not you.”
I throw up my hand. “I’m not talking about local trouble. Berg has allies all over the world.”
“So?”
I can’t explain this to her. She isn’t going to get it.
“Don’t you make that disgruntled face at me, Rosie,” Peggy says, pointing her finger at me. “You just lay it out properly. Start back at the beginning. Don’t leave anything out. I saw you on that fancy show of yours. We all did. But I never understood why you got out of your bed and broke the rules. Did you want to get expelled?”
So I try. I tell her I wanted to expose what Berg was doing with the dreamers, but I got caught. Berg took me from the school and stuck me in a vault with more dreamers at the Onar Clinic in Colorado. For months, I was kept asleep there and mined for my dreams. Once I finally escaped, I made my way to Burnham in Atlanta, and then I went back to Forge, where I met up with Linus again.
I pause, remembering the morning in Linus’s bedroom when we were joined by Thea and Tom.
“Go on. I’m listening,” Peggy says.
I try to explain that this girl Thea has my mind in her body. Unsurprisingly, Peggy looks skeptical. I skip the part about nearly killing Berg in the dean’s tower, but when I get to how Berg kept Thea captive in the basement even though she was in labor with her baby, Peggy looks more thoughtful. Meanwhile, I go through my second helpings. Peggy opens a jar with a pop and pours me a sloppy serving of applesauce for dessert. The sweet, wet taste is heaven.
She leans back and fixes a bobby pin over her ear. “That is some wild story,” she says at last. “If even half of what you say is true, Berg’s a psychopath. How can anyone be that evil?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “He doesn’t think he’s evil. He’s trying to save himself and his kids. He’s mining dreams for medical research.”
“How’s that now? He’s the dean of a boarding school,” Peggy says.
I nod toward her laptop. “Look up the Chimera Centre and Dr. Huma Fallon. Berg’s connected to that research. He sells dreams from Forge students and other dreamers to doctors who try to heal or rejuvenate brains, like for coma patients. That’s how Thea got my memories into her. Berg has a personal stake in it, too. He wants to find a cure for his Huntington’s disease before it gets worse, and he wants to be sure his kids don’t get it.” He also spoke about wanting to be immortal, but I spare Peggy that outlandish detail.
She leans back in her chair and crosses her arms. “Suppose what you say is true. I’m not saying I’m convinced, but just suppose. It still doesn’t explain why Berg is pursuing you, specifically,” she says. “What is it that makes you so special?”
“Not me. My dreams,” I say, and I rise to do the dishes. I squirt plenty of blue dish soap on a yellow scrub sponge. “Berg told me my dreams are unusually vivid and versatile, especially when I’m scared. He said he’s trying to figure out why. There’s a lot of money involved, I guess.” I nod toward the closet. “This is just the beginning. Berg’s never going to give up looking for me. He needs me too much.”
“I’d like to give him a piece of my mind,” Peggy says. “Not literally, of course.”
I laugh. “I don’t suppose my parents took a phone with them.”