“Rosie?” she asks. “Are you okay?”
“I’m good,” I say. “I have Dubbs. She’s sleeping, but I think she’ll be all right.”
Thea lets out a huge breath of relief. “Thank goodness! Can you bring her here? What about Ma and Larry?”
“I haven’t found them yet,” I say. “I hit a few snags.” I fill her in about Grisly Valley and my time in the vault of dreamers. She wants all the details, and I go over everything I can remember, ending with my escape with Dubbs up the ladder. The only thing I leave out is the new presence in my brain that showed up after they mined me. It’s been dormant lately, and I’d be glad if it stayed that way. “I’m with Linus now. We’re staying at a friend’s house.”
Linus wordlessly offers me a bowl of soup, and when I glance up, I see he’s listening carefully to my end of the conversation. I take the bowl but set it on the overturned crate.
“How long were you actually down in the vault?” Thea asks. “I’ve been trying to reach you for days.”
“Since Tuesday,” I say.
“I can’t believe you were mined again,” Thea says. “I’m so sorry. I wish you’d come here. Bring Dubbs and come. I promise you’ll be safe, both of you.”
“About that. When I was down in the vault, I overheard a conversation between the doctors and Berg. It sounded like your parents invited a doctor over from Chimera to check on you. I wouldn’t trust him one bit. He’s there to mine your dreams.”
A light patter sounds on the roof, and I glance out to see the rain has started.
“You mean Orson. Orson Toomey,” she says slowly.
“That sounds right.”
“What else did Berg say about him?”
“Nothing, why?”
Linus is sitting opposite me in the beach chair again, quietly consuming his soup. He holds it close beneath his chin.
“We’re family, right?” Thea says. “We’ll always be family, no matter what. Don’t you agree?”
“For lack of a closer word,” I say dryly. “What’s going on?”
“There’s something I need to tell you,” she says, with a note of dread in her voice. “I should have told you days ago, but I never had the right chance.”
I can’t imagine what it might be. “I’m listening,” I say.
“It’s about Dad,” she says. “Not Larry. Dad.”
I’m surprised she’d bring him up. She knows how much we don’t like to talk about him. I tuck my free hand under my leg. “Go on.”
“It turns out someone found his body,” she says. “He was recovered from an icy crevasse a few years ago in Greenland, but the people who found him never reported it to the authorities. They were scavengers. They sold his frozen body to a research facility in Iceland, and those scientists never reported him, either.”
A dark, ugly idea starts to form in my mind.
“Wait,” I say. “Just hold on. Not the Chimera Centre.”
“Yes,” she says.
“And then what? Didn’t he still have his uniform?” I ask. I’m picturing his frosty corpse laid out on an operating table. “They experimented on him, didn’t they. Is that what you’re telling me?”
Linus is still in the chair opposite me, but he has set aside his soup, and he’s leaning forward tensely, his elbows on his knees.
“It’s more than that,” Thea says quietly. “A doctor at Chimera seeded a dream into Dad, and he woke up. He became alive again, only he wasn’t our dad anymore. He had a different mind inside him, the mind of his seed donor. Like me.”
I almost laugh. It isn’t possible. What are the chances this happened to two of us from the same family?
“I don’t believe this,” I say.
“Rosie, listen. I know it seems impossible, but it’s true. I’ve met him. I’ve talked to him.”
“You’ve talked to him!” I shriek. I can’t be hearing this. I pull my feet up onto the couch and curl into a tight ball. I shake my head, refusing. He was dead. How can he be alive?
“Rosie?” Thea asks.
I can barely hear her. It’s hard to breathe.
“No,” I say flatly.
“I know it’s a lot to take in,” she says. “I was shocked, too.”
I let out a laugh. Shock doesn’t begin to describe it. “You’re completely serious,” I say.
“Yes. On my life.”
I glance across at Linus, barely seeing him.
“And how long have you known this?” I ask.
“Since I was at Chimera. I found out there,” she says.
“Months ago?” I ask, my mind reeling anew. “And you kept this to yourself? What’s he like? What did you say when you talked to him?”
“He looks a lot like Dad, only a little older,” Thea says. “Same dark hair. Same eyes and nose and everything, but he isn’t Dad. You’d know that immediately if you met him. He doesn’t laugh like him or say what Dad would say. He’s a stranger. A doctor.”
And now it falls together. “From Chimera,” I say.
“Yes,” Thea says. “I guess he’s more of a scientist. He does the research experiments in the lab. He’s the one who developed the method for putting your dream seed into me, the one that expanded and took over. He’s the one staying here at the ranch with us now.”
“Unbelievable. Why on earth would you trust him?”
“I don’t, but my parents do,” she says. “He saved my life, Rosie. It’s complicated.”
Dumbfounded, I try to grasp all that she’s telling me, but it’s too much. This is my dad we’re talking about, my own father. The pain of missing him has sunk into the dirt of me, the subterranean, fatherless mire of me. I may not examine it often, but the loss is as raw and strong as ever.
And now he’s alive? But not really alive? And he’s actually staying at her ranch?
“Why didn’t he call us?” I whisper. “He should have told us, me and Ma.”
“He thought it would be better not to,” Thea says. “More merciful, instead of opening old wounds. I’m not saying I agree with him, but that was his reasoning.”
But you did the same thing, I think. You didn’t tell, either.
“Please don’t be mad at me,” Thea adds. “I wanted to tell you. I just didn’t know how. It was a shock for me, too.”
“Hey,” Linus says gently. He’s hitched his chair nearer.
“She’s telling me my father’s alive, sort of,” I say to him, dazed. “He’s an evil scientist now.”
From his sympathetic expression, I see he’s been following my end of the conversation.
“He can’t hurt you,” Linus says. “It’s going to be okay.”
“Is Linus there?” Thea asks.
“Of course,” I say, and I hold the phone blindly away from me for him to take.
Linus moves to the other end of the room, near the little black stove, and when he speaks, it’s into the phone. “It’s me,” Linus says. “Hold on. Slow down.”
His voice is the same, like he sounds when he’s talking to me. Another cruel surprise.
“Yes,” he says. “That’s a good idea. Okay. I’ll tell her, of course.” And then, “Don’t cry, Thea. She’ll understand. It’s not your fault.”
It is her fault. It’s all her fault.
“Does Ma know?” I say. “Ask her, Linus. Does Ma know?”