We eat on his couch, facing the porch, and the lasagna is by far the best food I’ve ever had in my life.
I settle a foot under me and ask him about his recovery. He tells me about moving to different hospitals and rehab places. One of the best, it turns out, is right nearby in Atlanta. He had memory problems at first, and trouble speaking and finding the right words, but gradually that improved. His leg is improving, too. His wrist and hand, not so much. His family has been amazing, he says, and fierce about making him independent.
“What about you?” he asks. “Where’ve you been all this time?”
As I tell him about my months in the vault at Onar, I again feel my simmering rage at Berg. Burnham leans back, regarding me thoughtfully, and with a bit more prodding, I spill out the details of my escape, my time with Jenny and Portia, and my road trip with Ian. By the end, I’m so restless it’s hard to stay on the couch. I set my empty plate on the coffee table and hug a pillow.
“What do you intend to do next? Go home?” Burnham asks.
I’m not sure I can tell him yet that I plan to go for Berg. “Maybe.”
“You haven’t called your parents yet, have you?”
I shake my head. “No. I don’t trust them. They let Berg take me.”
“Have you talked to Linus?”
“I did last Friday. It wasn’t good.” It was, in fact, a bitter, confusing dose of disappointment.
“How so?” Burnham says.
“He tried to apologize.”
“And that’s bad?”
“Why are we talking about Linus?” I ask.
Burnham slides his plate onto mine and sets both our forks neatly on top. When he glances up, his expression is inscrutable.
“Tell me something,” he says. “I’ve watched the footage from the day we fell and the day afterward when you were in your so-called meltdown, so I know what you said to Linus about the dream mining. How much did Berg know about your suspicions before we fell from the ladder?”
“Are you wondering if he made me fall on purpose?”
“Yes.”
Waffles climbs onto the couch next to Burnham, and he ruffles the dog’s furry neck.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t see how he could have made us fall, or at least not directly.” I take a deep breath. “I’ve never told anybody this, but I was having a déjà vu when we fell off the observatory ladder. It sort of predicted our fall as it was happening. I had a similar experience once before, that time I half fainted inside the observatory.”
“Do you think the déjà vu was connected to the mining?” he asks.
I nod. “Berg was mining and seeding me back then. In the observatory, I had a vivid image of the man who hanged himself there, a really vivid image of him down to his ankles and his black shoes. I think that image came from a dream seed, and I think being around the observatory became a kind of trigger, like it jostled my subconscious and made me dizzy.”
“If you were having a déjà vu, and you knew we were going to fall, then what were we doing on that ladder?” Burnham asks.
“I didn’t know we would fall,” I say. “It wasn’t a pattern that I understood yet. I’m still not completely sure. I was fine when I started up the ladder. Then, once the déjà vu started, I couldn’t do anything about it.”
Burnham keeps petting Waffles with his good hand while his eyes aim unhappily toward the windows.
“Just say what you’re thinking,” I tell him.
“I nearly died, Rosie.”
“I know! I’m sorry,” I say. “I never meant to hurt you.”
He doesn’t say he forgives me, which is what I want to hear. He doesn’t say anything or do anything but pet his dog.
I can’t sit still anymore. I shift off the couch and take our dishes to the kitchen counter. “I shouldn’t have come here,” I say. “You blame me for everything.”
“Not everything.”
“Thanks,” I say with a pained laugh.
“I’d rather blame Berg than you.” He shakes his head briefly. “Really it was my own fault. I knew we shouldn’t go up that ladder. I saw the sign. I knew it wasn’t safe, but I followed you anyway.” His hand goes still on Waffles’s back. “I never expected you’d actually come visit me. This is kind of a lot to handle, Rosie.”
Regret seeps out of my heart with nowhere to go. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I really am.”
He looks up at me from his place on the couch. “Let’s agree about something. Let’s not blame anybody for what happened, and let’s not be sorry for each other.”
I clench the edge of the counter. “I blame Berg for ruining my life,” I say. “I’m not giving that up.”
“It’s not going to help you any.”
“It will, though. It’ll help me get even.”
I squeeze some soap on a scrubby and start washing the dishes. Burnham stands slowly and gives his left leg a little throw to get it moving. Then he brings over his glass. I wipe the counters while he puts away the extra lasagna.
“If you were going to get even with Berg, how would you do it?” Burnham asks, closing the refrigerator door.
“Why? Want to help?”
“Maybe.”
I glance over at him. Burnham the do-gooder might have a nefarious side after all. “I need to learn more about Berg’s research and find out how he’s connected to the Chimera Centre,” I say. “Ian told me there’s another place for dreamers in California, and I want to know if that’s connected to Berg, too.”
“How many dreamers did you see under Forge?”
“Maybe fifty? Sixty? They filled an entire room down there. More than I could count.”
“Then it had to be a serious project getting them out of there after you were expelled. They disappeared in a short time with nobody seeing,” Burnham says.
This is a logistical problem I haven’t considered before. “Good point,” I say.
“Do you know where the dreamers come from originally?”
“St. Louis. Berg has them supplied from the Annex, according to Ian.”
He nods. “Interesting.” He glances toward his computer corner. “I might have an idea.”
He takes a laptop and brings it to the couch. When he opens it up, I spot a piece of black tape covering the lens.
“We share the same paranoia,” I say, pointing to the tape.
“I hate cameras. Come sit.”
I settle in beside him, on his right. Burnham works the keyboard one-handed, with unerring speed. He pulls up a file with a bunch of numbers, and then a map of the United States with circles and dots spread all over it like bubbles. They look like files from his family’s pharmaceutical company. “These are sales of a specific Fister drug by location,” he said. “One sale is a dot. A thousand sales is one of these bigger circles. I can narrow down the time frames, and I can identify when a certain pharmacy has a peak of sales.”