“Can I get you something? I can take you to the hospital. Should we call your parents?”
I breathed again, deeply and calmly. “They’ll only worry.”
“Maybe they should. I’m worried.”
“I’m really all right,” I repeated. “See?” I straightened and produced a smile.
Tom shook his head. “Your eyes are strange.”
“Really?”
“They’re dilated.”
I guessed things looked a bit brighter than usual. I rose to my feet, pleased to find that I was completely steady. I brushed my hair back around my ears. “This is my chance,” I said, my voice low. “Wait for me here.”
“You’re not going anywhere.”
“Actually, I’m going to the ladies’ room, and you’re not coming with me. I’m really okay,” I said, and gave him a measured look. “Trust me.”
He got it, finally, and quit arguing. I left him in the rose garden and went alone up the steps to the dean’s tower. That headache was a killer, but it had given me the perfect excuse to go exactly where I wanted.
*
The foyer’s gold-leaf dome gleamed above as I entered the cool stillness of the dean’s tower. To my right, the door to the dean’s office was open wide, and I had a familiar glimpse of the thick carpet, white bookshelves, and lush curtains. Congenial voices and the clink of a teacart drifted out, reminding me of the time I’d been summoned to meet the board of trustees.
I crossed in the opposite direction, toward the elevator, and when it came, I pushed the B button and held it, hard. It yielded inward an extra click just as it had once before, and then the elevator began to drop. Instead of slowing at the next level down, it accelerated, falling deeper into the earth. With a thrill, I realized Dean Berg hadn’t altered the secret button since I’d been here before.
Then I wondered why not.
When the elevator slowed to a stop, heaviness lurched in my gut, and then the doors opened on a quiet, dark landing. Cautiously, with one arm bracing the door, I leaned out, expecting a light to come on with a motion sensor. It didn’t. I switched on my phone’s light and cast the white beam before me. To one side stood a kitchenette counter with a dusty coffee machine. Gone were the microwave and minifridge from before. Gone, too, was the table with the vase of flowers.
Before me, through the wall of glass where I had first seen the rows of dreamers, I found the dark of emptiness.
I stepped away from the elevator and let the doors swoosh softly closed behind me. The dark grew more intense, and my phone light seemed pitifully meager. My pulse picked up. I tried the door to the vault, and the handle gave unexpectedly beneath my fingers. Inside, the air was cooler, with a faint, sour tinge. The vinegar of my nightmares. I cast my light before me into a void, left to right. Deep in every direction, the room was bare. The overhead framework that had supported the tubes and wires for the sleep shells was gone. The floor was clear except for a couple of old, dried leaves. But it wasn’t a simple empty space. Nightmares had breeded here. Silent screams had soaked into these walls. Berg didn’t keep his sleepers here anymore, but I could feel their agony calling to me. I’d been one of his captives, too.
My heart began to thud painfully. I crossed to the far wall, to the door that led to the operating room where I’d been mined. The sense of déjà vu hovered near again, as if I was about to see the surgery tools and head cage from before, but when I scanned my light inside, the tables were gone along with every other sign of medical torture. The only thing left was a camera in the upper corner. That was all.
Where are you? I asked my inner voice.
If she was ever going to surface again, it should be here, where Berg had tortured me. He’d asked me questions, clamping my mind on a pivot point where I was both awake and asleep. He’d found a way into me through pure fear. At the memory, sweat broke out along my skin. Somehow, searching for clues to Berg’s research felt like a search for myself.
Can you hear me? I asked. Are you there?
Still nothing. And then I remembered. She had hidden then, too. She had burrowed deep to stay away from Berg. Of course she wouldn’t surface here. This was a dead end.
I turned back to the landing by the elevator, and there I scanned my light around once more. Across from me, another door accessed the tunnel I remembered. It led to the bottom of the clock tower pit, and now that I thought about it, that tunnel extended past the pit, in a direction I’d never followed.
Where did it go? With a trickling of adrenaline, I made a decision: this was my chance to find out.
I tried calling Tom to tell him what I was doing, but my phone had no service this deep underground. I had to hope he would keep waiting for me and not call attention to my absence.
I pushed open the door to the tunnel and a skittering of leaves shifted along the floor. With my phone light aimed before me and my belly in the lead, I walked steadily along between the brick walls, sidestepping spider webs and the desiccated remains of a rodent. Soon I came to a glass-walled, octagonal chamber in the middle of the tunnel, and I knew I’d reached the bottom of the clock tower pit. I was curious to explore it, especially to look for the mechanism that opened the ceiling barrier that separated the glass enclosure from the pit above, but I didn’t have time now.
Instead, I aimed down the tunnel in the direction I’d never explored before, hoping to find a new, hidden way in and out of Forge. The walls changed from brick to stone, and the floor became rougher, descending in a gradual slope that forced me to watch my step. Eventually, I came upon a side door on the left. Wooden, with an arched top, it was thick with undisturbed dust. I ruled it out. What I sought was an exit that had been recently used.
As the tunnel went on, the floor leveled out again. The dusty silence grew oppressive. I was about to give up and go back to the arched door when my light reached the end of the tunnel. Another wooden door shut me in, but the knob was free of dust, and the floor had more dried leaves. A thin sourness laced the air. A faint powdering of light came through the crevice under the door. I tried the knob and pushed hard, but the door didn’t budge.
Frustrated, I turned and rested my back against the door, trying to guess how far I’d come. It was impossible. My back ached and my throat was dry. My phone still had no signal, and its battery was getting low. Not good.
A faint clanking noise came from the other side of the door. I pressed my ear to the wood and listened. A distant, mechanical, repetitive noise was punctuated by another clanking, and then a low mooing noise. A cow.