I shift the box to the floor by my feet and roll up my window. Ian reminds me about my seat belt and pulls back out on the highway. I watch the sky grow from dark gray to pinker. Ian sniffs occasionally beside me. He asks if I mind if he smokes. I tell him to go ahead, and he cracks the window while he does. He rolls it back up with a sucking noise when he’s done.
“You’re probably wondering where we’re going,” Ian says, some time later. “I know a nice motel on a lake where I used to go duck hunting with my dad. The season’s wrong, but it’s peaceful there. Not a lot of people. The motel rooms all have a coffeemaker and a minifridge. It’s a drive, though. We won’t make it ’til late tonight. How’s that sound?”
“Fine,” I say. I intend to ditch him long before then. I stretch my legs a bit. I reach down to take off my boots and manage a stealthy grab from the drug box. “I remember you once told me you had another girl you talked to at Onar,” I say. “Who was she?”
“She didn’t ever really come around all the way like you,” he says. “I just imagined she did. I know the difference.”
“What happened to her?”
“I don’t know much about it. They moved her out to Miehana.”
“Where do the dreamers come from?” I ask.
“I already told you. St. Louis. You were an exception.”
“But where in St. Louis? They don’t just have a bodies factory there.”
He glances over briefly. “They get them from the Annex,” he says. “It’s an emporium. You can buy whatever you need there. Berg orders them online.” He warms to his topic, as if proud to share his expertise. “We have two kinds of dreamers, the ones that are basically soil, for seeding dreams into, and the mineable ones that haven’t fully decayed yet. Those are the valuable ones.”
“Where does the Annex get the bodies?” I ask.
“I don’t know. Pre-morgues, I guess. It’s fully legit, if you’re worried about that.” He glances my way again and smiles. “You think it’s gross.”
“I may be biased.”
Ian laughs. “There’s nothing wrong with it,” he says. “I mean, I know most people aren’t comfortable with the idea of shipping bodies around, but they don’t like to think about where their meat comes from, either. Personally, I’d rather have brains recycled than left to rot in graves. This way they can help somebody. How’s it any different from recycling eyeballs or hearts?”
“It’s completely different if the person isn’t dead, like me,” I say.
“I know that. You were a special case.”
“If you knew that, why did you let them mine me?”
The road hums under our wheels for a stretch while he doesn’t answer. I realize I sound too accusatory and lower my voice.
“Ian John,” I say. “You knew I was from The Forge Show. You knew I wasn’t like the other dreamers. You told me so.”
“I know.”
“So then, why did you let them mine me? Didn’t you see it was wrong?”
He shakes his head. “You were sick. Berg said that sleep therapy was the best thing for you. The mining you didn’t even notice. It was like trimming your fingernails. It was nothing. A pinch of sand from the seashore.”
He sounds suspiciously like he’s parroting what he’s heard. I’m not going to be able to persuade him otherwise. I think I was too perfect a temptation for him.
I pull one of my feet up under me on the seat. “Berg told me I was staying at his vacation place. He says he hired people to look after me there and I imagined the vault.”
“I don’t know about that. He visited you at Onar, though. He took you out for air.”
“What do you mean?”
He looks at me sideways. “It was part of your therapy. He’d dress you up and prop you up for a visit out on the porch.”
I recall the closet of clothes and wigs and gear at Onar, and suddenly it takes on horrifying possibilities.
“And you let him do this?” I ask, shocked.
“Sometimes you have to trust people who know what’s best for you,” he says.
“That is total crap.”
“I don’t like this way you’re talking to me,” he says.
“Berg destroyed me. He ruined my life, and you let him!”
“We saved you. You needed treatment. I saw what you were like on Forge, Rosie, and you were a mess, no offense.”
I fume, glaring out the window. Unbelievable. I hate this person. I hate everything about him, from his cat cage to his mustache. I hate him almost as much as I hate Berg.
“Take me to St. Louis,” I say.
“No. Your old boyfriend’s there. We’re going to the hunting motel. You’ll like it. You need some quiet.”
He pets my arm, and I jump out of my skin.
“Don’t touch me!” I say.
He returns both hands to the wheel and accelerates the Jeep. “I was trying to be nice.”
“I don’t like being touched,” I say.
“I don’t like to be yelled at,” he says.
“Then you shouldn’t have touched me!”
The road flicks by, straight and ever faster. Any wavering of the steering wheel would send us into a ditch. I have to be smart. Now.
“I won’t yell anymore,” I say in a low voice.
“Say you’re sorry.”
He’s got me. He has brought me back to this. He’s still speeding up.
“I’m sorry. I might not be the easiest girlfriend,” I say, “but I’m trying.”
“Try harder.”
I struggle to think like him and guess what he wants. “We were never going to fight,” I say. “We promised, remember? I’m so sorry. It’s all my fault. Forgive me?”
He slows the car slightly, and I hear him take a big, steady breath.
He taps the steering wheel again with his Fagan fingers. “I guessed you were a spitfire underneath,” he says.
I cringe into myself, despising us both. My biggest fear now is that we’ll drive all day and get to his duck hunting, minifridge motel before we have to stop for gas. But I have a handful of the sleep med vials and syringes in my pocket. I am not unarmed.
17
THEA
HOME
I WASN’T PRIVY TO THE CONVERSATION between Diego and Madeline, nor the showdown when they talked to Dr. Fallon, but by dawn, Althea’s parents and I were flying away from the Chimera Centre in our private jet. I watched the island drop below me and shrink as we rose over the ocean.
“Do you need anything? Feel okay?” Madeline asked me.
“I’m fine,” I said, pressing the armrest button to lean my seat back. In fact, I was a mess of emotions, from grim relief at finally leaving Chimera to sick fear for Rosie who was still asleep somewhere in Berg’s control.
“I still think this is a mistake,” Madeline said. “I don’t see how talking to one scientist changes everything. If anything, this hybrid glitch of Althea’s is all the more reason why we should stay. Dr. Fallon is still the best person in the world to be treating her.”
“We’re done here,” Diego said.
I sent him a grateful look. Apparently, there were rare times when he called the shots for the family. I gazed out the airplane window at the ripply clouds below and tried to process all I knew. My gut told me Ma needed to know that my father was alive, but even if I was able to communicate with her, the news would rip her up. She was married to Larry and had been now for years, but I knew she still grieved for my dad. I was starting to understand why Orson never told her. In the ways that counted, he wasn’t actually my father.