At first, I try to watch my screen. I try to swipe on the touchpad to direct my view of my brain activity and Thea’s. I fully intend to stay conscious and in control, but soon my eyes feel too slow and my hands too heavy. I let them slip into inert silence, and suddenly I’m in the quiet, beige, private space behind my closed eyelids. Orson and the others disappear, and I feel a keen awareness take over, a sense of rightness. I belong here, like this, as pure, fluid thought.
Arself guides me along, sightless, through a narrow tunnel and directly into Thea. We come to the circle where her thoughts should be brightest, but they’re not there. Instead, she’s a heaviness, an obdurate wall of loss and darkness. I’m unsure what to do. I call her name, but nothing replies. I flash back to myself and open my eyes, and focus on Orson.
“Send the nanobots,” I say.
“Where do you want me to direct them?”
Arself supplies me with the right words.
“Just put them in my posterior auricular vein,” I say. “I can take it from there.”
My eyelids go heavy again and I sort through my dreams, calling up a blueberry ocean, a walk on the tracks back at home in Doli, a vibrant castle slipping into a sea of mud. I find a colorful, soaring songbird that flies through an underground tunnel, leaving whorls of light in its wake. I find the fish from the stream under Grisly, lurking just below the surface of the water.
A series of golden pods shimmers into my view, and a sharp memory of pain returns to me. It was one of these pods that stole the vision of Dubbs from me, back before, when I was imprisoned in my dreams. I recall the rift vividly now, but without the helpless despair. The golden threads swirled around my sister and I tried to hold her tight so I could keep her with me. But in the end, the pod took both Dubbs and my other voice with her. They were both gone, forever.
This is my chance now, to make that right. I control the pods this time. I can choose, and I choose a gift for Thea. It’s a bright dream vision from the galaxy moment when I connected to the dreamers, and all their shifting, brilliant power united me into something larger than I’d ever been before. I imagine that galaxy into the nanobot, where it pulses and strains with golden light, and I bring it over to Thea’s circle of quiet.
Here, I say, and I let the warmth transfuse out of the pod and into her void. At first, the light simply vanishes into the darkness and is swept away, like an evaporation of stardust. But I bring more, and with my own hands, I pour my galaxy into her emptiness until finally, a bit of it takes. It clings to a fine, invisible thread of substance, like dewy light along a strand of a spider’s web. Then another strand catches light and grows stronger. I feel the heaviness begin to roll like a slow mountain against the night sky. I nudge her with my puny, hopeful strength, and I bring her more of the golden light. I deliver more of my dreams, more of my memories, until at last, I feel the spark of her consciousness coming online, right beside mine.
She’s weak. She’s voiceless still, but she exists as a consciousness like before, back when we were only me, the two of us in one mind.
This is what I’ve wanted, I realize. Ever since she left me, this is the wholeness I’ve missed. Thea! I say joyfully.
Rosie? she says faintly. What are you doing here?
I expand in every direction, spilling light and warm shadows like evening in a canyon. She’s smiling, too. I can feel it in my cheeks and behind my ears. I don’t need to explain anything to her because in less than a moment, she intuits everything I’ve done and believed.
You’re hurting, she says.
No. I’m good.
But she guides me to the edge of my aching, down to the bottom of the canyon to a dark river, where I’m grieving for the dreamers and my father. For Larry, too, somehow. She grieves for them, too, in complete, endless sympathy. Loss and failure swim up-current through the river, tugging at me with their gravity.
These things are part of us, she says. Try to forgive yourself for hating Larry and losing him.
That’s impossible. I don’t know how.
You have to, she says. We can’t let Berg sour us forever.
I plunge into the black, cold current.
I hate him still, even though he’s dead, I say.
I know, she says. But because of him, you found Arself, and she knew how to bring you home. To me.
The river flows less swiftly. I lift back toward the surface, and I ease back onto the shore. Thea’s smiling again, urging me on.
You brought me your dreams, she says. You gave them to me.
Because I love you, I guess, I say.
She laughs. I’m back in the air, part of the light.
And I love you back, she says. And we love other people, too. Vali.
Dubbs.
Ma.
Linus.
Burnham, Tom, Lavinia, Madeline, Diego, Tito. Althea, gone forever.
It’s such a relief to be flying again, pure air and solace. The ping in my heart grows wider and ripples outward until we’re free.
32
BEGINNING
A CRACK OF THUNDER splits the night, and I jolt awake. Rain beats along the peaked roof of Thea’s bedroom, and a flicker of blue lights up the rivulets of water on the windows. A dim little light burns on the shelf in the corner, and when I try to sit up, an IV line tugs at the port in my chest. My helmet is gone. The computers that linked me to Thea are gone, too, but Thea is still in the bed beside mine. She’s helmetless, too. Her face is slack, her breathing barely discernible, but it’s enough to tell me she’s alive.
Another tumble of thunder rolls over the valley, and a breeze of misty petrichor drifts in the farthest window. I have a glimpse of someone sleeping in the lounge chair in the corner: Tom, by the shape of him. For once, he’s not holding his baby, and I notice a lump in the bassinet. With an effort, I push myself up to my elbow and work my tongue around my dry mouth.
Linus appears in the doorway. The dim light glows on his features, and from the way he’s blinking, I’d guess he just woke up, too.
“You’re awake!” he says in a hushed voice.
He angles near for a hug, and I breathe in his rumpled, cottony warmth.
“Are you all right? Does your head hurt?” he asks.
“No, I’m just a little thirsty. What time is it? How’s Thea?”
“She hasn’t woken up,” Linus says. “Orson says she’s likely to at any time, but so far, she hasn’t yet. You’ve been out a long time. Nearly four days.”
“It doesn’t feel that long,” I say. I push my hair back out of my face. My fingers are a little shaky, and when Linus hands me a cup of water, he helps me steady it while I sip.
“It’s so great to see you awake again,” he says softly.
His eyes burn with a bright, private light, and my heart does a neat little dive. He sets my cup aside with a faint click. Then he leans in to kiss me, and I close my eyes, tilting my lips to his. He’s warm, and perfectly right. Happy tingles go melting along my nerves and swirling in my belly. My fingers go around his neck and up into the back of his hair, and I can hardly think at all.
Linus eases away, smiling, just enough so that I can see him.
“I feel better now,” he says.
I laugh. “You do?”
He nods. “You had me scared, Rosie. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
“Really?”