The Vault of Dreamers (29 page)

Any kind of coma did not sound good to me. “His parents are with him, right?” I asked.

She nodded. “Of course. And his brother and his sister. We might have more news in
the morning. From what I understand, he’s not in any pain.”

“Do you think he’s going to be all right? Honestly?” I asked.

“I wish I could say, but it’s really too soon to know,” Dr. Ash answered. “Each case
is so individual, and I’m hardly an expert on the brain. I wouldn’t want to give an
uninformed opinion.”

I was amazed that she could be so convincing when she lied. She knew plenty about
brains. She operated on them.

When she lifted the little tray and held it toward me, I noticed a tongue depressor
beside the cup. “I’ll be checking to see that you swallow your pill,” she said.

I felt a prick of adrenaline. She had as good as admitted to viewers that I was at
risk for skipping my pill. Did they notice? I glanced back at Orly, who was watching
us with her typical dour expression. The other girls had climbed in their sleep shells
and were closing their lids.

“Shall we?” Dr. Ash was still holding the tray toward me.

I took my pill, tossed it back, and swallowed it down with my water. When I opened
my mouth, Dr. Ash pressed the little wooden stick inside my cheeks, first one side
and then the other. Then she nodded and gestured toward my sleep shell.

I climbed in.

Dr. Ash slid my lid closed for me and gave it a light pat. “Sleep well.” Her voice
came slightly muffled through the glass.

At the other end of the room, Orly turned off the overhead light, and I could hear
Dr. Ash walking away. Night came earlier since we’d passed the equinox, and the room
was already dark. My brink lesson came on: a soothing scene of a stream trickling
down a mountainside, with delicate spring wildflowers on either side. As I watched,
the sleep drugs eased through my veins with twice the speed as normal, and an undertow
of exhaustion began to drag me under.

Don’t give in
,
said the voice in my head.

I jolted back awake, but only for a moment. I couldn’t withstand the punishing lethargy.

Take Burnham’s pill
,
she said.

Why? There’s no point.

As if a lion suddenly jumped on my chest, a jolt of adrenaline charged through my
body. Before I could reason, I shot a hand into my pillowcase and scrambled to locate
the tissue I had hidden there. I pulled it out and focused desperately on unwrapping
the pills.

Just one
, Burnham had warned me. I slid one of the yellow pills onto my palm and tossed it
back, swallowing it dry. I could do nothing more. My eyelids closed heavily, my arms
went limp, and my mind snagged into an uneasy tangle before I descended over the edge.

Except I didn’t.

Gravity seemed to stagnate inside my body, causing my organs to neither fall nor float.
My bones turned gray, like fog in the early morning, and then a tingling swarmed in
my fingertips. It spread into my hands and up my arms. It burned in my sore right
elbow and kept going. I could feel each pulse as my heart pumped blood through my
veins, and in the space of two breaths, I went from soporific to hyper-awake. Energy
and strength lit me up from within, and I couldn’t keep my eyes closed.

Nice drugs, Burnham,
I thought.
Seriously.

My first instinct was to jump out of my sleep shell and tear around the room. I fought
to resist it. My foot vibrated at a rapid pitch, and my mind clamped onto a single
warning: wait until after midnight. I had to wait until the techies went home.

I hid my two extra pills in my pillowcase and pulled out my walkie-ham.

“Linus?” I whispered. “Are you there?”

I listened impatiently to the static. I tried the other channels, then dialed back
to four.

Be patient,
I told myself.

But it was impossible. My mind clicked like an unleashed train that could go in ten
directions at once. It headed toward Burnham lost in his coma, and then it veered
to the ladder on the observatory to relive the agony of my fall. It zipped next to
the kitchen to revisit Linus cutting chickens, and then to the sixth floor of the
dean’s tower, where Dean Berg plotted with his projections and screens.

“Linus,” I tried again.

No reply.

Burnham’s pill had me totally wired. I tried breathing slowly, deliberately, but at
the same time, I couldn’t stop vibrating my leg.

I gulped back a laugh. I pressed my hands to my temples.

For heaven’s sake
, said my voice.
Take it easy. They’ll see you thrashing around
.

I’m going crazy here
, I said.

Unbidden, a redolent memory of Thanksgiving dinner surfaced from the back of my mind:
turkey with gravy, mashed potatoes, stuffing, and cranberry sauce. I could taste the
meat and the tangy sauce together, and then the cloying, buttery heaviness of the
mashed potatoes. A calm worked its way around the buzz in my gut, coating and soothing
it until I could breathe more evenly. I managed to stretch out my toes and quit shaking
my leg.

How do you do that?
I asked.

Have a little more turkey.

I let out a soft laugh, grateful. Soon, I was calm enough to lie still under my quilt
and pull together the bits of a plan.

I needed to find out what was going on once and for all, and get evidence about it.
Burnham’s injury was not, I believed, directly caused by whatever Dean Berg was doing
at night, but
my
fall was most definitely connected. It was possible that Ellen had been damaged by
Dean Berg, too. I wasn’t going to sit around while casualties piled up, especially
now that I had evidence that someone had tampered with my night footage of the dorm.
Add what I’d overhead between Dean Berg and Huma Fallon, and it was enough.

If I could just find the operating room, I was certain I’d find evidence I could film,
and this time, I would take it public myself, immediately. Once, while Dr. Ash was
operating, I had heard Dean Berg talk to her about returning to the surface, which
implied that the operating room was somewhere underground.

I had two possible leads: the secret door behind the vending machines in the dean’s
tower, and the pit in the clock tower. Somehow I had to find a way down, even without
a swipe key.

“Linus?” I whispered again into my walkie-ham.

Then, at last, I remembered how Otis had come to the kitchen looking for Linus. He
was probably busy with Otis and Parker, donating his blood. I narrowed my eyes at
my walkie-ham and touched a finger over the little pockmarks of the speaker. It was
all right. If Linus never answered, it didn’t matter. It would be better to go without
him, anyway, and not risk getting him into trouble.

After the clock tower struck midnight, I gave it another half hour to be sure the
techies had all left. A look out the window convinced me that the dean’s tower was
dark, as much as I could see. I couldn’t spot the dean in his dark penthouse, but
I took it as a good sign that he wasn’t at his sixthfloor station.

I dressed swiftly. Omitting my sling for my sore arm, I put my walkie-ham in my jeans
pocket and grabbed my camera and the penlight I’d stolen from the infirmary. I crept
cautiously down the stairs, hugging the shadows, until I reached the ground floor.
There I peered out a window beside the front door, watching for movement. I tried
my walkie-ham one last time.

“Linus? Are you there?”

No reply. I was going out alone.

26

THE CLOCK TOWER AGAIN

BY NIGHT, THE
fragrant air pulsed with the drone of crickets, and the void of the prairie seemed
to encroach onto the campus. Trees and bushes merged into the same lacy black, and
the lawns dulled to gray. I stole along the edge of the girls’ dorm where the shadows
were deep, and at the corner, I darted across to the film building to hide between
the foundation and a dumpster. Broken bits of glass crackled beneath my sneakers.

I watched and listened, but nothing moved. Then I hurried behind the hedge of the
film building, keeping low, and crouched at the next corner with my back to the foundation.
Across the narrow road to my right, the dean’s tower stood massive and still, and
now that I was nearer, I saw lights in a first-floor corner office. That ruled out
any chance of trying to sneak in there. To my left, the expanse of the quad was clear
all the way to the auditorium at the other end. Before me, the clock tower ascended
out of the rose garden toward a moonless sky. Its face was illuminated, and a green
light blinked at the top.

The door of the clock tower was my next goal.

The only hiding points between me and the rose garden were a couple of oaks, an iron
bench, and a garbage can. I didn’t delude myself. The cameras could easily track me
across such an open area, even in the dark. If the dean or a security guard was watching,
I would be spotted.

I couldn’t go farther, not without a break of some kind. Ten long minutes I waited,
and then half an hour while I debated how risky it was to stay put or run for the
tower. Nothing moved in the quad, and no one was visible in the lighted office of
the dean’s tower. I checked my walkie-ham, but Linus never came on. My elbow ached
again, and mosquitoes found me.

And then I caught movement beyond the rose garden. A man with stooped shoulders was
walking slowly past the library steps. As he moved under one of the streetlamps, the
light dropped on his gray hair and the shoulders of his yellow shirt, but I didn’t
recognize his features. He continued along the sidewalk with a steady, unhurried stride,
and when he came to the dean’s tower, he set a hand on the stair railing and leaned
back to look upward.

“Sandy!” he called. “Sandy, you old devil! Come out and play.”

He bent forward, leaning over his shoes, and a moment later he straightened again.
With his back to me, he urinated on the steps. I gasped, holding back a laugh.

A moment later, the door opened and Dean Berg hurried down the stairs.

The old man called out the dean’s name cheerfully, and the dean spoke to him in a
voice too quiet for me to understand. He set a hand gently on the old man’s arm and
backed him up a step or two, out of the mess. He passed him a handkerchief. The old
man shook his head as he rearranged his trousers.

“Nope. Not going back,” he said clearly.

Running footsteps sounded, and Linus came sprinting across the quad.

“Linus!” the man called in a buoyant voice.

“Hey, Parker,” Linus said. He leaned over with his hands on his knees, winded. “What
are you doing here?”

“I came to see Sandy,” Parker said. “We’re going out for a drink.”

Linus straightened and plucked at the neckline of his dark shirt. “You’re not supposed
to be up here. I’ve been looking all over for you,” he said. “Otis is worried sick.”

The man looked uncertain for the first time. “I told you. It’s on the calendar.”

A security cart passed me then and rolled to a stop by the steps. It was followed
by a truck that parked between me and the others, blocking my view. Otis came out
of the driver’s side and headed around the vehicles, and in that instant, I realized
I had my chance.

While all of their attention was focused on Parker, I crawled out from my hiding place
and bolted for the rose garden. I tore through the garden toward the side door of
the clock tower. I pulled hard at the door and slipped inside, closing it softly just
as someone convinced Parker to climb in the front of Otis’s truck.

I’d made it. I listened for a shout or any commotion outside, but the only sound I
heard was the pounding of my heart in my ears. The darkness of the tall, narrow room
was impenetrable. I looked up, toward the gears, but aside from a faint, crescent
gleam on one of the bells high above, I couldn’t see a thing.

I pulled out my penlight to cast a cone of thin, white light before me and slid my
sneakers forward. The railing around the pit appeared, and then the ghostly chains
of the clock. Everything seemed bigger and colder than it had during the day when
I’d been here with Linus. I aimed my light down into the pit, where the chains descended
into darkness. The ladder rungs projected from the wall of the pit as a series of
elongated U-shapes. I kept hoping my eyes would adjust and show me more, but the black
of the pit was bottomless.

This is a mistake
, I thought. If I fell, I’d be dead.

On the other hand, this was my best lead. I had to go down and see if the pit led
to a tunnel the way I thought it could.

I slung the strap of my video camera over my shoulder and gripped my penlight in my
teeth, sideways, so I could use both hands. Then I carefully stepped over the railing
into the pit and lowered myself down, feeling with my feet for each rung.

My right elbow flared with pain each time I bore my weight with that arm. Linus had
said that the pit was thirty feet deep, and I judged that each rung was about a foot
apart, so I silently began my count, one rung at a time. I tasted metal, and my breath
came fast around the penlight in my teeth. The farther down I went, the cooler and
mustier the air grew, and once, at the count of seventeen, I had to skip a rung that
shifted dangerously under my weight.

My progress was painful and slow, but I didn’t dare go faster. At the twenty-fourth
rung, I heard a winding noise in the clock mechanism far above. I froze. I wrapped
my left arm through the rung and seized it in the crook of my elbow, preparing for
a dong from a bell. It didn’t come.

Shaking, I took the penlight in my free hand and shone it up. The darkness above me
was complete. I was very deep, deeper than I’d guessed, but when I shone the light
downward, past my feet, only the faintest glint of a reflection came back up to me,
like a seam of water between stones. I was still far from the bottom.