The Vault of Dreamers (20 page)

Then I noticed a dim glow on the sixth floor, in the corner. I adjusted my video camera
and used the zoom to close in. A solitary man was leaning back in his chair, watching
an array of screens. He had his chin in his hand, and he appeared to be lost in contemplation.
He didn’t move, or reach for his touch screen. He barely seemed to breathe, and with
only a faint reflection of light from the screen animating his face, it looked more
like a mask than a true visage. Only when he finally turned did I recognize that he
was Dean Berg.

He pivoted his chair, slowly, until he was facing out the window, toward the girls’
dorm. Toward me.

While I held my camera perfectly still, my heart began to pound. He knew where I was.
He knew I was watching him. Button cameras covered this attic, just like they spied
on every other place at this school. I’d thought it was too dark for me to be visible,
but I had to guess I was discernible to someone who knew where to look.

The dean obviously did.

He must have been watching me all along.

What are you playing at?
I thought.

If he expected me to say something, or freak out, he was going to be disappointed.
A few of the pieces suddenly clicked together: the way I was allowed to sneak around
at night, the way he’d personally helped me to get into the observatory, the way he
was watching me right now.

I didn’t have to understand every nuance to grasp that I was in a game, a weird, one-on-one
game with Dean Berg. The school, the show, and the other students were all part of
it, too, but they were mainly the board and the other unwitting pieces. I was the
only student who suspected something wrong was happening at night. My opponent was
the dean. I just didn’t know yet what the stakes were, or what it would take to win.

*   *   *

I was exhausted and thick-headed when I woke the next morning. Janice’s sleep shell
was back in place, and Janice herself looked as healthy and bright as a sunbeam. The
other girls were thriving, too.

But I came to a resolution. The situation was too twisted and weird for me to handle
on my own. I planned to show my footage to Mr. DeCoster in front of all the other
Media Convergence students, so the viewers and Janice’s parents could ask for an explanation
as to why Janice’s sleep shell had been removed in the night. After that, it would
be out of my hands.

Responding to a couple of friendly greetings by rote, I rolled my video camera into
a towel to conceal it and headed for the bathroom. I just needed to check that my
footage clearly showed how Janice’s sleep shell was gone in the night. I would face
consequences for being out of bed myself, but hopefully, the school would be lenient
on me.

In the privacy of a stall, I checked the index of my video camera. The most recent
clip started with the darkness from under my quilt. I skimmed forward, searching for
the first flicker of when I’d brought the camera out of my sleep shell to film the
dorm. But the video clip stayed dark. It didn’t show the dorm room without Janice’s
sleep shell, or the stairs I had run down, or the basement, or the attic. The entire
clip was a deep, unfocused brown-black.

I didn’t understand. I checked the time stamp on the clip: 9.19.2066:00.43. Last night.
After midnight. I knew what I’d seen, and I knew what I’d filmed, but my camera showed
nothing.

I gasped and fumbled with my camera, dropping my shower kit to the floor.

“Are you okay in there?” one of the girls called from the other side of the stall
door.

The only explanation terrified me. Someone else had erased my footage. Someone had
come to my bed while I was asleep and taken my video camera out from under my covers
and changed the footage.

“Rosie?” the girl said, knocking. I recognized Rebecca’s voice. “Is that you?”

“I’m okay,” I said. “I just dropped my stuff. I’m fine.”

I grabbed my things and wrapped my camera in my towel again. I clutched everything
to my chest and tried not to hyperventilate. My mind scrambled for a better explanation,
but there wasn’t one. When I was in the attic, Dean Berg had turned to watch me from
the dean’s tower. He’d known all about where I was and what I’d been doing. Was it
crazy to consider that he’d come to the girls’ dorm and taken my camera and messed
with my footage?

I let out a strangled laugh.

I was coming unglued.

I reined in my panic, thinking fast. I needed to be careful. Very careful. I didn’t
know what to do yet, but until I did, I had to hold on to one thing: I couldn’t tell
anybody what was happening.

They’d never believe me.

18

THE LADY KNIGHT

I WAS TOO
terrified not to behave like a good student. That day, Friday, I worked hard in my
classes, kept my nose down, and went for a run. In the cafeteria, I made a point of
taking lots of vegetables and protein, as if I could fortify myself against my fear
of getting back in my sleep shell by eating a healthy dinner.

As I pressed the metal bar of the milk dispenser with my glass, Linus came out from
the kitchen. He leaned his hip into the counter beside my tray.

“Hey,” he said. “I saw you’re studying Del Toro in Masters.”

“Yes,” I said, and moved my cup to the chocolate milk to make a mix. “I’m supposed
to compare him to Poe and Mustafa as an innovator.”

“That sounds cool.”

I moved around him toward the canisters of silverware. “I’m trying to make the most
of all my opportunities here.”

“I can tell.” He put a napkin on my tray for me and smiled. “Very admirable. Want
some of that ice cream? I saved some for you.”

I wanted to tell him I wouldn’t be calling him anymore. I needed to sleep. I needed
to be good. “Thank you, but no.”

“I thought it was your favorite.”

“It is, but I don’t want it every day. That might spoil it,” I said. I was so bad
at lying. I smiled tightly. “I think the pace here is catching up with me. I’m actually
looking forward to going to sleep tonight.”

He tilted his head back slightly. “You don’t want to burn out.”

“No,” I said. I gripped my tray. I didn’t know why it was harder to pretend to be
a normal student when I was with Linus, but it actually hurt that I couldn’t tell
him what was really going on. I gazed past his shoulder, spotting Janice, Paige, and
a couple of the other girls, Mae and Rebecca, together at a round table.

Linus followed my gaze, and then looked back to me. He thoughtfully rubbed a knuckle
to his eyebrow. “I’ve got plenty of work to do myself. A little studying, too.”

“Really?”

“Turns out I need to learn geometry for the GED. Who knew?”

I laughed. “Good luck with that.”

He gave my shoulder a squeeze and then leaned in to kiss my cheek. “See you around.”

“Hold on. Not so fast,” I said, and shifted to make sure I got a real kiss, with actual
lips meeting mine. Linus obliged. I thought it would be fast, but it kind of slowed
down, and edges blurred, and then, through lingering, I forgot where I was.

He smiled. “Don’t lose your dinner, Sinclair.”

I glanced down to see he was steadying my tray for me. I felt right for the first
time all day.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Anytime.”

*   *   *

For the next few weeks, I took my sleeping pill every night like everybody else. There
was no way I could face getting in my sleep shell unless I knew I’d be unconscious
there, and it was a relief to escape my fears and wake physically rested and refreshed.
Part of me longed to forget what I had seen at night and accept the bright existence
of my daylight hours. Days at Forge were certainly full enough without me also trying
to unravel the puzzle of what was happening at night.

But as time passed, I felt increasingly restless and unlike myself. Without the night
to clear my head, I felt an insidious poison crawling just beneath the surface of
my conscious mind. It made me tense, and irritable, and the more I tried to smile
and pretend it wasn’t there, the more false I felt to myself.

I couldn’t fully bury the possibility that Dean Berg had put his hands under my covers
to take my video camera, but I couldn’t come up with another explanation for my deleted
footage, either. Maybe he’d sent Dr. Ash to take the camera, but that was only marginally
less creepy. I tried setting my video camera to spy on the dorm out of my wardrobe,
but it never caught anyone coming in. It seemed to prove that we were undisturbed
at night, but I still wasn’t reassured. I kept checking the other cameras I had set
up for my bogus ghost project and they, too, yielded nothing.

Dean Berg scared me. All I had to do was see his smiling, youthful face—and he could
show up anywhere on campus—and I had to fight not to cringe and flee. He made me feel
dirty, ashamed. It was bad enough that I suspected he’d come to my sleep shell in
the night, but I also felt like I’d capitulated to him. I couldn’t tell anybody about
what I knew because they’d think I was just a crazy kid who skipped her pill. Without
ever making a threat, he had trapped me into secrecy.

As an added frustration, sleeping at night also meant I couldn’t have a candid conversation
with Linus. I saw him almost daily, whenever our schedules allowed, but aside from
assorted kisses, which were brilliant, our exchanges were superficial and inhibited.
It was often easier not to see him than to pretend I wasn’t hiding anything. I felt
like a puppet performing for the cameras with my puppet boyfriend.

On Sundays, when I called home, my parents sounded busy with their own lives. Larry
pestered me about my blip rank, which gradually drifted back down to the forties.
Ma worried that I looked tired, which wasn’t remotely possible since I was sleeping
my full twelve hours a night. Only Dubbs was good to talk to, and her bubble of conversation
always left me smiling. “I miss you,” she’d say. “When are you coming home? You’re
famous enough now.” She mailed me a drawing of a purple shark which I taped to my
wardrobe.

One Monday afternoon, for Practicum, I had an assignment to film scenes in a gradation
of color, from black and white, through pastel, to super vivid. I started with the
dome of the observatory, and recalled that I still hadn’t retrieved the video camera
I’d put in the satellite dish. The place evoked an unpleasant memory for me now, and
I had no urge to climb up it today.

Next, I filmed some of the tilting gravestones in the cemetery, and then a chapel
window, interested by how dull the stained glass looked without any illumination behind
it. The chapel reminded me of Ellen, with her knife and her kitty purse. It still
disturbed me to think of how upset she had been when I joined her in the bathroom
stall. I felt like I had sat beside an abyss of despair instead of a living girl.
A gust of wind moved through the graveyard, ruffling the grass between the stone markers.
I hoped Ellen was okay.

When I met up with Janice in the dining hall, even though the room was as bright and
noisy as usual, I was still preoccupied by my mood of gray scales.

“Do you ever think about Ellen?” I asked.

“Who?” Janice asked.

“The singer in the bathroom the night of the fifty cuts,” I said.

“To be honest, not really. No,” Janice said.

She had another swizzle stick to add to her collection, and her dinner consisted of
cole slaw and fries. Without even trying, I had loaded up my tray with comfort foods:
a Sloppy Joe, mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese, green beans, and applesauce.

“Do you think she’s okay?” I asked.

“Why are you thinking about her?” Janice asked, smearing a fry in ketchup.

“I was by the chapel taking footage. It reminded me of her,” I said. “I was wondering
if she went to the chapel for the acoustics, to sing.”

“I think she probably went there to be alone,” Janice said. “She knew she was getting
cut.”

I idly spooned up some applesauce and sucked it through the gap in my teeth like I
used to do when I was little. “Let me borrow your phone,” I said.

Janice had it on the table, and I drew it across to me. It didn’t take me long to
do a search for Ellen Thorpe. To my surprise, the top listing was an obituary for
a girl of the same name, and then I realized it wasn’t a different girl. It was the
same Ellen. I had to check again twice before I could believe it. I passed the phone
back toward Janice.

“Did you hear about this?” I asked.

Janice frowned, scanning the article, and her eyes went wide when she looked back
up at me. “That’s awful. You’d think they would have told us.” She typed on her phone,
and then studied it for a long moment. “She died in a car crash. She was driving alone
at night and hit a tree.”

“Is there anything more?” I asked, trying to see upside down across the table.

She shook her head, typing again. “There’s no condolence site. She’s not on Facebook.
I wonder if her family took all her stuff down. What do you think?”

“It’s sad,” I said.

Janice passed the phone back to me, and I scanned the related news articles. It only
said Ellen’s car had hit a tree at seventy miles per hour. I felt kind of freaked
out. I had sat next to this girl only a few weeks earlier. I had thought she was home,
getting help.

“It’s really sad,” Janice agreed. “She was pretty bummed in the bathroom. Didn’t she
have a knife?”

I glanced up and wondered if she was thinking what I was thinking.

“Do you think it was suicide?” I asked. “I heard a lot of teen driving accidents are
actually suicides but nobody can prove it.”

“That is seriously sick.”

Sick or not, I couldn’t help wondering how much Ellen’s death had been an accident,
or if there were others like her. I felt kind of ill. “How many Forge alums kill themselves?”
I asked.

Janice tucked her chin back and made a face. “Somebody really got up on the dark side
of the bed this morning.”