“Please, get tested. I’m begging you.”
She laughs. “Why? Because you care? You couldn’t show up for one night.” Her voice goes hard. “You know what? Don’t call me again. You’re worse than no father.”
The recording ends abruptly, but her words leave a sizzle behind them. Emma has my complete sympathy. Berg sounds like a horrible father, and I’m glad she blasted him. Then I wonder what Huntington’s is. I’m not familiar with it at all.
I puzzle over the device in my hand. I once overheard a rogue conversation between the dean and Dr. Fallon on my walkie-ham. The signal must sometimes, if rarely, cross over from Berg’s phone to the walkie-ham frequency, and Linus must have been scanning for those crossovers. I try the next clip. This one is scratchy, but I recognize both voices.
“I suppose I could send some back,” Dr. Huma Fallon says. “But why? You didn’t lose a source, did you?”
“It’s just a glitch,” Dean Berg says. “We’re letting the source recover, but in the meantime, we have another client who needs a supply.”
“Which one, then? I’ll talk to my staff.”
“Sinclair Fifteen.”
A faint crackle comes over the line. “Okay, what’s going on, Sandy? What have you done?” Dr. Fallon asks.
“It’s nothing,” he says. “I simply want to help out this other client if I can. You do have the raw astrocytes, don’t you? Not a cultured seed. I need the dream pure.”
“It’ll take me a minute to find out.”
“I’ll wait, then,” he says.
“You owe me, Sandy. I’ll call you back.”
The recording stops, and there isn’t another one.
I lean back, pensive. I wish I had a date for this one. Berg has been sending my dreams to Fallon all along, but is this call old, or does he need a dream returned now that I’ve escaped? I can’t think why he would need one back.
It’s frustrating. Plus I’m hungrier than ever.
I reach over to snag one of the gum wrappers off the bedside table, and I lick the lining for the film of sugar. As I reach for another, I bump a white plastic spoon that topples to the floor. Retrieving it, I find a bit of red yarn tied around the handle, like it’s special. That’s quirky. I run my thumb over the concave surface. I envy how the casual castoffs of Linus’s life lie around here, undisturbed.
I miss having things of my own. I used to have a necklace with a New York City subway token that I wore all the time. Dubbs and I found the token on the train tracks near our boxcar, and it felt almost magical, a tiny portal to another time and place. I don’t know what happened to it. Berg probably threw my token away, like he threw away the rest of my life. I run my fingers idly down my neck. Unbidden, that old, lonesome feeling I used to have, the one that yearns and can’t be satisfied, twines its way into my hunger until I don’t know where one begins and the other leaves off.
I blink slowly out at the stars, framed by Linus’s window, until I don’t even notice them anymore.
*
When the mattress dips, I jolt awake. Linus is sitting at the edge of the bed. A small, shaded lamp glows on the bedside table, and outside the windows, full night has gathered near. In his hands, he holds a big bowl of chili with a bagel resting on the rim.
“I wasn’t sure if you like cheddar and sour cream on your chili,” he says quietly.
I sit up. I rub my eyes. My nerves jolt on again. The clump of grated cheese has melted on top of the brown chili, and I take my first bite with a taste of the sour cream, too. I half swoon.
“Who made this?” I ask.
“I did.”
“It’s amazing,” I say, scooping up more. Then I take a thick bite of bagel. It’s delicious, too. I go back to the chili. So good.
Linus reaches over to a computer on the desk and touches a button to make an indie playlist come on, just audible enough to cover our voices. Then he drops off his shoes and lounges on the bed, one elbow deep in the quilt. He brushes his bangs off his forehead. They fall back on.
“Tell me all about your famous life,” I say. “Do they cut your hair for the show?”
“Every time we film a new segment. Makes for consistency. It’s obnoxious,” he says.
“I’m sure.”
He smiles at me. “We were able to track down my Aunt Trudi. Contrary to our coverage of the reunion, she hadn’t been looking for me,” he says. “In fact, she didn’t care one bit what had happened to me. We had to pay her ten thousand pounds to pose with me.”
“Real nice,” I say.
He shakes his head briefly. “I did like seeing Swansea again, though, and the whole thing reminded me how lucky I am to have Otis and Parker.”
“How are they doing?”
“Good. They like when I visit. They put me right to work.” His nods his chin toward me. “How about you? Where’ve you been?”
I’m not ready to talk about the vault. “Places. Denver. Atlanta.”
“Really? With Burnham?”
“Yeah,” I say, still eating. “He loaned me a car and everything. He was really helpful.”
“How is he?”
I try to describe how Burnham is okay and how he’s not. Then I remember my awkward encounter with him in the night and run out of things to say.
“Interesting,” Linus says.
“Yes.”
“And then you decided to come here.”
It’s a leading sort of observation. I’m not sure it’s smart to tell him about my mission to kill Berg yet, if ever, but I nod at the walkie-ham. “You’ve been listening in on Berg,” I say.
“Did you hear the clip with his daughter?” Linus asks. “I think he could have Huntington’s.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a disease where you start to lose your mind early, like in your thirties or forties,” he says. “It keeps getting worse until you can’t think right or control your body, and then you die. It’s genetic. It’s horrible. His kids have a fifty-fifty chance of inheriting it, too.”
“He’s looking for a cure,” I say, thinking it over. “That’s why he’s involved with this dream mining research. He wants to save himself and his kids. It makes so much more sense now.”
“I think you’re right. That’s why he’s collaborating with the people at Chimera.”
“That’s the clinic in Iceland, right?” I read about it. I watch Linus carefully, curious to find out how much he knows.
His eyebrows lift slightly. “Okay,” he says slowly. “I know you don’t want to talk about this girl Althea, but she matters. She’s been to Chimera. She woke up from a coma there, and she says she has your mind. I’m not saying I believe her entirely, but she’s pretty convincing.”
“Come on,” I say.
“She knows everything about you up to the point you were in Berg’s vault,” Linus says, and he’s serious. “She says that’s where she left you.”
A shiver creeps over my skin. I look out the window toward Forge. I can just make out a few lights through the budding trees. I wouldn’t put anything past Berg, but if a second version of me is walking around on Earth, I’m not sure what to think.
“Is she like my mental twin, then?” I ask.