I went inside and down the hall, which had four doors. One I could see, though—it was the master suite. One was a bathroom. The other two were closed. I mentally flipped a coin and chose the door on the left.
The bed was neatly made. A history book lay open on a desk in the corner. Framed pictures lined up along the bottom shelf of a bookcase, showing Nikki and various friends. Several of Jack.
But the most telling sign that this was Nikki’s room was the newly splashed Dead Elvises T-shirt draped over the chair at the desk.
I ran my fingers over the image, smiling at the care that she took to iron it.
“Oh, Nik,” I whispered. “We’re going to have so much fun.”
I tucked the note underneath her pillow so that only the corner showed, and then I left her house.
Somehow, seeing where Nikki lived made me all the more anxious to get back to her again.
NOW
After the Rats of NIMH bugged out.
“They do that every night?” I said, my voice hoarse. I guess I’d been screaming the entire time the rats were nipping at me.
I heard Devon rustle the straw beneath him. “If it helps, the rats make it easier to mark the passage of days.”
My chest constricted. I couldn’t catch my breath. “I can’t do this. I can’t be stuck here forever.” I started punching the ceiling, over and over, until I heard a horrific snap. “Shiiiiiiiiiiiiittttttttt!”
I cradled my crushed hand, the silence following my outburst intermittently broken by my own gasping breath.
“Maybe you won’t be here forever. You only have three months until your trial.”
I shook out my hand and then froze as the words sank in. “Trial?”
“Yes,” Devon said hesitantly. “Didn’t they tell you when they brought you here?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they were explaining the finer points of the incarceration while they were bashing my brains to a pulp. What about a trial?”
“Delphinian trials begin three months after detention. They decide if you are to be imprisoned for eternity. Or … not.”
“Not? You mean they might set me free?”
“If by ‘set you free’ you mean they kill you, yes.”
I closed my eyes. “So my options are an eternity of rats feeding on me, or death.”
“Yep. Makes you wish you could choose, doesn’t it. I would rather be dead, but the only way they’ll kill me is if they find the relic, and I don’t want to die knowing it’s in their hands.”
“That’s the only reason you’re staying alive?”
Devon sighed. “Brother, when you’ve been here as long as I have, you’ll come to discover there are only one or two essential things worth living for. Unique to you and you alone. My honor is one of them for me. I keep my honor by keeping the relic out of their hands.”
I closed my eyes. What was the essential thing I was living for? Honor, like Devon? I could hear Nikki inside my head snorting at that one. Music? The search for the next Forfeit? Eternal life? That one made no sense. Eternal life, by very definition, couldn’t be the thing worth living for.
If I had to choose one, I would choose the search for the next Forfeit. That’s what I was living for right now. The chance for another Forfeit who could survive the Feed.
I rubbed my eyes. What was the point of finding something worth living for if my life was no longer in my own hands?
Devon still had something the Delphinians wanted, so there was no way they would kill him. But me … I had nothing they wanted. “Why don’t you make the decision for them?”
“What, kill myself? This close to the Everneath, any scratch I get heals too fast. Except the scratches from the Ever-rats. You know how it is.”
Somehow knowing that I wouldn’t be able to off myself made me feel even worse. You never realize how much you rely on the option of suicide until the option is removed. I’m not saying that sentence would make a good bumper sticker, but it was the truth.
I felt around my cell until I found the jagged rock I had broken loose the night before. I found the smoothest part of the wall and, using the sharp point of the rock, etched a single line to mark my first day in the Delphinian Dungeons.
And then I started to dig at the bottom of the bars.
I had three months to dig a hole to freedom. All I could think about was going home. Maybe for the first time I could understand where Nikki was coming from when she chose going back home over an eternal life with me.
No. I would never understand the choice she made.
ELEVEN
I marked the passage of time, and the erosion of my hope, in weeks.
Week one: When I actually thought my stay here would be so short, it would be pointless to mark my days.
Week three: When I had to start reminding myself that the Nikki hallucinations were just that—hallucinations.
Week six: When I discovered the stone holding the iron bars in place grew back, despite forty days of me scratching away at it.
Week ten: When the rats had taken off enough skin that I felt my ankle bone sticking out.
Week twelve: When I started begging for judgment day, and my own death.
TWELVE
NOW
Judgment day.
I used the sharp rock—the one I’d been so excited about that first night—to scratch another tick on my homemade calendar on the rock wall. The line was jagged. Finding the energy even to hold on to the rock made my hands shake.
There was no need to add up all the marks. I knew that my fresh line would bring the total to ninety.
Ninety days in this prison. Ninety hallucinations of Nikki. Ninety midnights with the rats.
The rock slipped from my fingers, which were slick with fresh blood, and landed in a large pile of similar rocks, each one carved out of the stone by my fingers.
All those loose stones, and yet the walls were as firm as they ever were. Maybe the stones were hallucinations too. I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling.
Suddenly Nikki was lying beside me. Ninety-one hallucinations. “Starting to doubt your own mind?” she said.
I knew she wasn’t real. But I still answered her. Every single time.
“You would too,” I said. She just looked at me in a way I’d imagined the real Nikki would someday look at me. A way that says I’m the one who knows you. “Can I tell you something?” I asked. It hit me that yes, I was asking a hallucination for permission to speak.
“Yes,” she said, blinking in the dark.
“I dream of holding your heart in my hand.” Okay, three months in hell had made me a bit cheesy, but there was no avoiding it. I swallowed and breathed in. “And I have a confession. I don’t think I’m here to replace you. I think I’m here because I thought it would somehow lead me to you.”
Nikki looked up at the ceiling and brought her hand closer to mine, letting her pinkie finger hook around my own. “Why are you telling me this?”
Why was I telling her this? “Because they’re going to come and get me soon. For my trial. And someone has to know the truth.”
She grinned. “You realize, don’t you, that you’re leaving your legacy with a ghost.”
I rolled over onto my side, facing her. She mirrored me. I raised my hand, palm toward her, and she brought her hand to meet mine.
“Maybe a ghost is the safest person to talk to.”
From far away I heard a soft clank, notable because the only sounds we usually heard in here were the scurrying of little feet, the useless scratching of stone against stone, and our own voices. This was a new sound. I imagined a stone door opening, miles away—the sound traveling through endless corridors—and cloaked figures coming for me. For justice.
I could feel my time slipping away from me, draining from me. “They’re coming for me,” I said. “All this sacrifice, all this work, for a one-word answer that doesn’t make any sense. It was all for nothing.”
“What was the word?” she asked.
“Morpheus,” I said bitterly.
She tilted her head. “What does it mean?”
I rolled my eyes. “What does it matter? In here, what could it possibly matter?”
She ignored my protests. “Morpheus is not just a word. It’s a name. So who is it?”
I sighed, not sure I wanted to play along at this point. “Morpheus was the god of dreams.”
She nodded. “But you know that there are no real gods in the Everneath. So what does Morpheus mean?”
What does it mean? I picked up one of the rocks and threw it against the wall. Morpheus. God of dreams. What did I know about dreams?
“Dreams are the closest humans can get to the Everneath without actually going there. They’re a small gateway into our world for a specific moment of time.”
Nikki frowned thoughtfully. “So it’s almost like a bridge.”
A bridge. I’d never thought about it before, but Nikki was right. And considering the fact that she was my hallucination, I guess I’d gotten it right. Dream states were all about outer manifestations of inside energy. The Everneath was almost a larger version of a dream state.
“But what do dreams have to do with how you survived?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Didn’t I mention dreams at some point?”
Yes. She said she had dreamed of Jack all the time. And when he jumped into the Tunnels, he’d begged her to dream of him, like he had dreamed of her. And the last time I’d seen Nikki, in her bedroom, she had been dreaming of Jack.
What if dreams were a bridge between not only worlds, but people?
If dreams were a bridge … I curled my fingers around Nikki’s. “I know how you survived.”
“How?”
“Jack gave you energy the entire time. He dreamed of you, creating a bridge to you, and fed you. That’s how you survived. He was like …” I searched for the right word. “Your anchor, here on the Surface. Jack kept you alive.” Not only did Jack save her life by taking her place in the Tunnels, but he had kept her alive by supplying energy to her through their dreams.
Great. There was no scenario in this whole damn thing where Jack didn’t come off looking as awesome as the love child of Thor and Optimus Prime.
I heard the faraway clank of a heavy key turning in a rusty lock. Not as far away as the first sound I’d heard.
The three Everneath months I’d been here had felt like a lifetime, and for an Everliving that was saying something. I remembered when I’d tried my stupid escape plan as if it had happened years ago instead of just months.
Voices echoed down the hallway outside my cell. I couldn’t see any flashlights yet, though, so they were probably still far away.
Nikki watched me carefully. “Now that you know the answer, you can find your next Forfeit.”
I shook my head and gave a sad laugh. “I don’t want to find another Forfeit. I don’t want anyone else. I only want you.” I realized the truth of the words only when I had spoken them. This was about Nikki, and Nikki only. How had I ever pretended this quest of mine was about anything else?
Maybe I should’ve listened to Max from the beginning. Maybe he’d somehow felt where my obsession would ultimately lead me. And it was an obsession. As much as I tried to deny it, I knew that now. I came halfway across the world, faced the most dangerous beings on the Surface, only to reach a conclusion I must’ve known all along.
I wasn’t ready to give Nikki up. And she would probably be the death of me.
But I had been the death of her as well. Maybe now, as my death was coming down the hall, I could fully understand what Nikki had felt those last few days before the Tunnels, burdened with the knowledge that the end was near.
I closed my eyes. Squeezed them shut. Finally I knew exactly what I wanted, but now the Delphinians were coming for me, ready to mete out a punishment that maybe I’d deserved for a long time. Would it be an eternal punishment akin to the eagle eating Prometheus’s liver every day? Or would it be an instant blow, severing my head from my body?
I hoped it would be the latter.
I would miss my band … my family. But right now, all I could think about was how I’d never see the real sun shine on the face of the real Nikki again.
The light outside my cell grew stronger, and a strange smell accompanied it. The glow cast a shadow on the floor, making the vertical bars look as if they were swinging back and forth.
I narrowed my eyes, trying to bring the light into focus. “I thought the Delphinians didn’t like fire.”
“They don’t,” Nikki said.
I stared at the light emanating from down the corridor. It danced along the stone walls.
“Then why are they carrying torches?”
“Your eyes are playing tricks on you,” she said. I hadn’t seen anything besides darkness for three months. She was probably right.
Still, what was that smell? I could’ve sworn it was something burning. Was my nose playing tricks on me too?
And now the crackle of flames reached my ears. Whatever it was, it had to be coming from something larger than a few torches.