“Where are my parents?” I said. “I want to see my parents.” I looked behind her for Orson, but he was gone.
“They’re in their suite,” she said. “Don’t be worried. I’ve just come to check on you. I hear you met my daughter.”
She knew.
I backed away from her and shot a look at Ida, whose face was drawn with concern. A second nurse came around the nurse’s station, ready to assist, cornering me in.
“What are you going to do to me?” I asked.
“You won’t feel a thing,” Dr. Fallon said kindly. “You’ll feel better in the morning. Less confused. I promise.”
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” I said. “I don’t want any tweaking. I’m fine. Get my parents.”
“They’ve already approved,” she said gently.
I tried to run. I screamed in protest, but they caught me swiftly, and I felt the sharp sting of a syringe in my arm. “No,” I whispered, pleading.
Dr. Fallon smoothed the hair out of my eyes. “You’ll be fine, Althea,” she said. “That is your name, right?”
An instant later, the hallway tipped and went foggy, and I was gone.
*
When I woke the next morning, molasses had been poured into the clock of my brain to clog the cogs. The sky, an opaque gray outside the window, dropped its cool light on Madeline, whose face was a pucker of worry.
“Thank heavens you’re awake,” she said, pulling her chair nearer. “How do you feel?”
Like crap.
“I want to go home,” I said.
“I know, sweetheart,” Madeline said. She reached to hold my hand. “We’ll get there. Two steps forward, one step back.”
Diego came in, as if he’d been standing just outside, listening. “How is she?” he asked.
“She’s awake,” Madeline said.
“You let them operate on me again,” I said.
“We had to, honey,” Madeline said. “You were slipping away from us.”
Something was missing. Some key word. My name. I hovered inside my mind, waiting for the answer, but nothing came. I pushed back my covers and lumbered over to my closet. I pulled open the door, and when I reached up for the tissue box, I could tell from the lightness before I looked into the layers of tissue: my jar was gone.
The jar with my name on it was gone.
“What are you doing?” Madeline asked.
“What’s my name?” I asked.
She exchanged a quick glance with Diego. “Althea, of course,” she said. “You’re Althea Maria Flores.”
“No, my real name,” I said fiercely. It started with an R. Rochelle. No. Rachel. No! I ripped fruitlessly into the tissue. “What is it?” I yelled.
Madeline’s eyes went wide with astonishment. “Darling, calm down,” she said. “You’ll hurt yourself.”
I threw the tissue box to the floor and caught myself on the closet.
Diego set a strong, supporting hand my arm. “Is it Rosie Sinclair?” he asked.
I tested the syllables, uncertain. My heart kept pounding. Rosie Sinclair. I searched Diego’s face. His eyes were sad and full of sympathy.
“You looked her up online, remember?” he said.
I did and I didn’t. My memory was spotty. “Rosie Sinclair,” I whispered, uncertain.
“Diego,” Madeline said warningly. “You’ll confuse her.”
“It calms her down,” he said. “Look at her.”
I pressed a hand to my face, still Althea’s, and then the baby rolled to assert its existence in my belly again. I glanced toward the fetus photo that I’d propped against the vase. The pieces settled back in place around a key point of tension: this body was Althea’s, but I knew in my heart that the real me was never pregnant, which meant the real me, inside, wasn’t Althea. I was still Rosie. Rosie Sinclair. Yes. Relief eased through me. Dr. Fallon hadn’t erased me, for now.
“Do you want to get back in bed?” Diego asked. “Rest a little more?”
I nodded. Diego helped me back onto my bed, and I sank heavily into the mattress. I’d been punished. Regardless of Dr. Fallon’s stated reasons, she had tweaked me because I’d wandered too close to Jónína, Orson, and the Sinclair 15. I was sure of it. She must have read Jónína’s notes and discovered I called myself Rosie. She’d discovered the jar I’d stolen.
I wasn’t safe here. Not even Diego and Madeline could keep me safe from Dr. Fallon because they trusted the doctor. I was grateful to Diego for helping me remember my real name, but I knew, if I was smart, I had to play Althea as long as I was here.
I gave him a weak smile. “Thanks, Dad. Stay with me?”
“Always, m’ija,” he said.
*
After the tweaking, I was secretly desperate to leave Chimera. I trusted no one, but I needed the therapists and nurses to help me, so I used them like tools and faked my gratitude. Over the next week, I grew noticeably stronger, and as I finally grasped how pregnancy had shifted my body’s center of gravity, I was able to work with it instead of against it. I graduated from my wheelchair to a walker, and then to a cane, celebrating each milestone with my team, but inside, I was as watchful as ever.
Besides that one time with Diego, I never mentioned my real name. I answered to Althea like a good girl. I was constantly afraid that Dr. Fallon would tweak me again if she heard I still thought of myself as Rosie. I had no idea what would happen to me if she succeeded in eradicating my consciousness from Althea’s mind, but I didn’t want to find out.
It tormented me to think my father was one building over, an inexplicable conspirator in the dream mining. Everything about Orson Toomey confused me. Memories of my dad were coming back to me. I had watched, fascinated, as he shaved, tilting his chin before the mirror. I had cuddled in the curve of his arm as he taught me to read, sharing letters and words, back when the paper smelled like magic. He was here, so close, and he didn’t care enough to come see me.
Night after night, I checked my phone and tried to reach my old friends, but they never replied. Each time I saw my empty inbox, my loneliness dipped to a new low. I had no one. Sleepless, desolate, I watched my door for Orson until I drifted into nightmares about Dr. Fallon and a thousand savage scalpels.
“When can we go home?” I asked.
Soon, the grownups all said, but never today.
I had to take matters into my own hands.
My chance came late one night when the nurses were called into a different patient’s room, and the hallway was unattended. I pulled on my sweats, slipped on my sneakers, grabbed my cane, and tottered down the hall to the elevator. I took it down and headed outside. The smell and sound of the waves below the cliff rose on an up-current of air. A new, light snow had fallen, adding its freshness to the cold night. The clouds had passed, and the stars were brilliant above me. An eerie, blue-green streak shimmered in the sky to the north, and in awe, I took the aurora borealis as a sign for courage.