“Really? How were they all?” I ask.
“They were fine,” she says. “They didn’t recognize me, of course. They miss you. Dubbs looks good. I can’t go home, but you could.”
“Maybe someday,” I say, and look toward the window. It’s getting late. In a couple of hours, it will be dark out. All I want to do is get revenge on Berg. Nothing has changed that. I need to call Burnham and finalize my plans. It helps now that I know a secret way into Forge.
“You could also come with us to Holdum,” Thea continues. “Althea’s family would be glad to have you. The ranch is beautiful. I’ve been thinking about this, actually. You could take one of the bedrooms on the third floor near mine. We could sit out on the porch with the baby on sunny days and take turns pushing her swing.”
Her fantasy is so unlikely that I don’t even know where to begin. I lean back, studying her, and then I realize she’s trying to give me alternatives to my revenge plans.
“Do you ever hear voices?” she asks.
“No.”
“Me, neither. Do you ever miss it?”
Again, I feel awkward discussing this in front of others. “Sometimes,” I say.
“What voices do you mean?” Tom asks.
Thea shifts her feet on the extra chair, and it squeaks against the floor. “I started hearing a voice in my head back when I was at Forge,” she says. “It wasn’t just a normal voice, like when you talk to yourself. It felt like another side of me with a will of her own.” She glances at me. “Right? From deep inside?”
I nod. It’s so strange to hear her explaining out loud what I have only known inside my mind.
“First she would just show up randomly and say something, but then we started having conversations,” Thea continues. “Arguments, sometimes. After we were stuck in the vault, we talked even more.”
“I think it started because Berg was mining us,” I say. “It was a kind of response to that. A defense.”
“A subconscious thing,” Thea says.
“I suggested that before,” Linus says. “Rosie Id and Rose Ego.”
“No, we were really more us,” I say. “Two voices but the same individual. Subconscious or conscious didn’t matter much by the end.” I face Thea again. “You decided to leave,” I say.
“Yes,” she agrees. “It was better than waiting it out in the vault, sleeping our life away while they mined us down to nothing.”
She sounds a little too superior to me.
“But leaving was suicide,” I say, feeling my resentment kick in again.
Thea spreads her hands on the table. “Apparently not, since I’m still alive. I thought staying was suicide.” She glances toward Tom as she goes on. “So we split. I took the conscious side of me and left.”
“But I was conscious by then, too,” I insist. “Just as conscious as you. You should have listened to me.”
She looks surprised. “I did listen,” Thea says. “But your main reason to stay was that you were afraid.”
I stand up, ready to smash something: bagels, plates, anything. “I was not!”
“Calm down. It’s not like I deliberately left you behind,” Thea says. “I just did the best I could at the time. I was only trying to survive.”
“Don’t tell me to calm down!” I say. “I don’t care what your excuse is. You left me in that hell. They kept mining me for months, Thea. Months! I’ll never be the same!” I pull down the neckline of my shirt to show the port that still bulges under my skin.
Thea, Linus, and Tom go motionless. Tension sucks the air out of the room.
“I’m sorry,” Thea says quietly. “I never wanted to hurt you. Us. I never meant to hurt us. I’m really sorry, Rosie.”
I still want to destroy everything in sight. I want to scream it to her again in my head: you left me! Thea’s chin trembles slightly. It hits me finally that she’s upset, too, only she contains it better. I take a deep breath and release my shirt. Thea isn’t the one to blame. She didn’t mine me. She only tried to survive. She just needed to do it a different way, and she’s paying, too.
The chill of my anger redirects where it belongs, toward Berg, and like a poisoned black arrow, it drives deeper into my heart.
I slouch back onto my chair, deflated, and jam my hands under my legs. “It’s okay,” I say finally.
“Don’t be mad,” she says.
It’s hard to look at any of them. They’re like a unit, all breathing and alive, teamed up against the monster on my side of the table. I focus on the coffee pot. “I’m not mad,” I say.
I’m not anything.
*
Soon after, I excuse myself, pretending to need the bathroom. I collect my coat and bag from Linus’s room, and then I tiptoe back down the stairs. The others are talking softly in the kitchen like mature, reasonable people. I let myself out the front door, pull my cap low over my face, and head for my car.
I drive out of town to a lot behind an abandoned antiques business and park where I can watch the wind moving over the prairie in long, slow ripples. In the wake of my anger, I’m strangely calm. Fatalistic. The stiff winter grass has yielded to new green, but the setting sun is painting it orange. Each blade is still perfect, making a sea of collective silk. The beauty brings a familiar pang of longing, and I wish I had my video camera. Without it, I have no choice but to live in the moment, so I do, memorizing it.
When I call Burnham to tell him I’m ready to go in, he says to give him a couple of hours to prepare, so I settle in. I crack my window. Gradually, the big sky deepens into darkness. Sirius, the Dog Star, shows up first, followed by the trio of Orion’s belt, and then the other constellations, the ones I always wanted to learn the names of. Maybe I still will, but tonight their distant light seems aloof, uncaring.
I don’t mind that the universe is uncaring. I can be uncaring, too. It’s a lot easier that way.
31
THEA
THE TUNNEL
WHEN ROSIE DIDN’T RETURN from the bathroom, I knew that we had trouble. Linus and Tom searched the house. I instantly guessed that she would head for the tunnel, but I’d promised not to tell.
“She must have gone up to Forge,” Linus said. He pulsed his hand into a fist. “Did she say anything to you about where she might go?”
“No,” I said.
“Did she give you her phone number?” Tom asked.
“No. Do you have it?” I asked Linus.
“I don’t have one for her,” Linus said. “She called me last on a disposable phone.”
“Are you serious?” I asked. “None of us can reach her?”
“Burnham might know how,” Linus said.
“Burnham Fister?” I asked, surprised.
“She stayed with him a few days before she came here,” Linus said.
She didn’t mention it to me. I felt vaguely left out. Then again, we were different people now. She’d made that abundantly clear when she’d yelled at me.