The Rule of Mirrors (The Vault of Dreamers #2)
Caragh M. O'Brien
For my sister,
Alvina K. Hart
1
ROSIE
THE VOICE THAT STAYED BEHIND
WHEN I FEEL SOFT, breathy pressure on my lips, I open my eyes and grab the guy’s throat.
“Stop,” I say. It’s my first word out loud ever, and the power of it thrills me.
The guy jerks free from my grasp and rubs his throat. He’s ugly and young. Mousy hair. Wispy, loathsome mustache. He’s in scrubs, like he’s a hospital attendant, but I’m not deceived. This is no hospital. It’s a vault of dreamers.
“You can’t be awake,” he whispers. He looks rapidly over his shoulder and then back to me. “Whoever screwed up your meds, it wasn’t me.” He reaches for the drip that will infuse a new dose of narcotics into my veins.
“No, wait,” I say. “Just wait, please. I need to talk to you.”
“This is impossible,” he whispers furiously. “You must be talking in your sleep.”
“Do I look like I’m sleep talking?” I stretch my eyelids super wide and reach up for his face.
“Don’t do that,” he says, with hushed urgency, and he pushes my arm back to my side.
“I know you like me,” I say. “You were this close to kissing me.”
“No, I wasn’t!”
“No one else has to know,” I say. “Is your name Ian? Is that what I heard? Please, Ian. Please talk to me for a second. I’m so lonely.”
From my inert position in my sleep shell, lying on my back and dressed in a thin gown, I doubt I could look more helpless if I tried, but I put every bit of pleading into my eyes, and before I can stop myself, real tears brim over. I hate appealing to him like this. I hate that my loneliness is so true.
He frowns above me, this ugly boy-man with droopy, soft lips. Big ears. Bulbous eyes. Soft everywhere. He might be man height, but I swear his voice never changed.
“Don’t cry,” he says. “I don’t believe this is happening.” He touches his sleeve to the corner of my eye, and then he smiles shyly. “All right. I’ll talk, but just for a second. I’m a big fan of yours.”
“Really?”
He nods. “I used to watch you on The Forge Show. I couldn’t believe my luck when you came here.”
“Where’s here?”
His brows lift in surprise. “This is the Onar Clinic, out of Denver. We do sleep therapy and research. You’re here to recover. Now hold still. This shouldn’t hurt. I just have to check your port.” He leans over the place in my chest where an IV goes into my skin and peels off some tape.
I try to make sense of this information.
The last thing I knew for certain was that Dean Berg had me trapped in the vault of dreamers under the Forge School. Linus was there, too, and a pang accompanies my memory of his limp body lying on the operating table. Dean Berg mined me that night, and the pain was excruciating.
Or wait. I recall a span of time after that, too. I was trapped in another vault, maybe this one. I glance up at the supply lines that run along the ceiling. Yes. I’m as certain as I can be that this is the same place. Ian was in that memory, too. I was here a couple of weeks or more, and I still had my other voice with me then. We tried to comfort each other. We tried for hope, but then—it comes to me fully now, the last thing I remember, when Dr. Ash was mining me. Us.
The gilded, honeyed lights surrounded our memory-dream of our sister Dubbs on the train tracks, ripping it away, mining it savagely out of us, and when my other voice couldn’t bear to lose our sister, she wrapped herself around Dubbs and held on so tightly that they both were torn away from me. A shattering of star bits swirled around me in the aftermath and broke the night into slivers of gold while I, in disbelief, in agony, screamed and tried to follow.
It was useless. The schism was complete, and my other voice was gone. I was left behind in our body. Me. The other, lesser voice who spoke only in our head, never aloud. Until now.
Ian slides a new IV into my chest, and the prick hurts. “Sorry,” he mumbles. He peels off a new piece of tape to secure it.
This is what I’ve struggled to wake up to. This hideousness. I’ve come close to surfacing before, enough to be certain that Ian has lingered over me previously, but this is the first time I’ve actually broken through.
It’s so hard to know what’s real.
I always depended on my other voice for reason and logic. She made our decisions while I mocked and doubted, loitered and craved. Of course, I have my own quicksilver, instinctive way of drawing conclusions, and I fall back on that now. Keep him talking.
“How old are you?” I ask.
“What would you guess?” he says.
I have no idea. “Twenty-five?”
He laughs and then modestly adjusts my gown once more. “I’m nineteen,” he says. “Three years older than you.”
“Four years,” I say. “I’m fifteen.”
“No. You had your birthday in December. You’re sixteen now.”
Alarm slams me. “How long have I been here?” I ask.
“Let me think,” he says. “You came right before Halloween, I remember. It was wild. Four truckloads of dreamers showed up at the same time, and Berg told us we had to keep a special eye on you. I was like, that’s her, Rosie from The Forge Show. I was so psyched. I loved watching your blip rank go up. The show wasn’t the same at all after you left.”
“But how long ago did I come here?” I insist. “What’s the date today?”
A mumbling of voices carries from the distance, and Ian looks over his shoulder until the noise passes. I can’t see much from my angle, but from the way Ian keeps turning, I assume a doorway opens in the direction of my feet. He faces me again.
“Today’s February eleventh,” he says.
My mind balks. I’ve been here in this vault for more than three months! Three months! This is worse than a prison. It’s stealing my life! I thrash my hand up in desperation.
“Please, Ian!” I say. “You have to help me. I can’t stay here like this!”
“Careful.” Ian catches my hand and holds it down.
“Are they mining me? Do you mine me?” I ask.
He smiles. “No. Not me.”
“Dr. Ash, then? Does she mine me?”
“Look, it’s all for your own good,” he says. “You have to calm down. It’s not right for your heart rate to go up like that. It’ll change your metabolism and everything else.” He reaches for the narcotics dial again.
“No, please!” I say. “I’m calm. See? I’m fine.” I try to smile.
“I mean it,” he says. “If you destabilize, they might decide to move you.”
“To where?”
“The main research lab,” he says. “To be honest, Onar is more of a sorting station than anything else. It’s strange for a dreamer to be here this long, but that’s what Mr. Berg ordered for you. I think it has to do with confidentiality. He trusts us here.”