Chapter 17
LEAVING DR. EZEKIEL’S OFFICE, RAFE and Dez stop before a metal door in the middle of Goliath’s interior stone hall.
“Go ahead,” Rafe says. “Open the Vault.”
“I thought Dr. Ezekiel was giving me a key.”
“He did,” Rafe says, and taps the side of her face, near Dez’s left eye.
Dez steps close to the door, understanding that access is granted through her eyes—through her mind’s eye, more precisely, but she still isn’t sure what to do.
Rafe sighs. “I thought women were intuitive.”
“I thought mentors were helpful.”
“Get closer. Focus. See yourself inside.”
Annoyed, Dez widens her eyes, then narrows them. She broadens her stance, assuming an action pose.
She feels like an idiot. And Rafe’s impatience makes everything worse. She tries to imagine the room on the other side of the door, but she has no idea what it looks like.
“Maybe my mind’s eye is blind,” she says.
“Good,” Rafe says. “Use that.”
She thinks of what she just went through with Dr. Ezekiel and the kinetoscope, the translucent wall and astonishing trees, the fire and the diamond swordsman. How she’d felt almost blind when she lifted her head from the viewfinder.
She thinks of the gunman at the Dairy Barn. Grabbing hold of his eye, rendering him half blind. She thinks of the horrible sound she heard in the tri last night, when she couldn’t see what really happened to the former student, Charles Costella.
Be brave, Dr. Ezekiel said.
She grits her teeth, forces a breath into her lungs, and sees a flash of her brother laughing, at peace. The door opens, sliding up, so fast it’s like it disappeared, revealing a vast space within.
“What just happened? What did I do?” Dez says.
“You settled on an image powerful enough to unlock the Vault.”
“How can an image inside my mind unlock an actual door?”
“Everything Zeke programs here is designed to keep filmmakers as close to a raw artistic state as possible,” Rafe says matter-of-factly. “So that we’re never far away from our genius, always in a creative flow.”
“Does it need to be the same image every time I want to unlock it?”
Rafe shakes his head. “Many images will do. But the ones that work best are the ones you care about the most.” He points at the stone lip where the circular door retracted. “Watch your step.”
Dez steps through and looks up, pressing a hand to her mouth. The domed ceiling must be two hundred feet away. At the ceiling’s center, a stained-glass tree extends its knotty branches in every direction.
The room is gigantic, as vast as the Mesquite Dunes in Death Valley, with a floor made of black and white marble and walls of shimmering silver. It’s pin-drop quiet and has the warm metallic smell of a laptop overheating and, she thinks, frankincense. Crystal sconces illuminate just enough to see.
There’s no furniture, no books, no tech, only a distant gathering of students standing in the very center of the space.
“We’re late,” Rafe says, starting toward the crowd.
Their footsteps echo on the marble, attracting Dr. Moriah’s attention at the head of the group.
She watches them approach, stroking her snake between the eyes.
The students stand in rows, protégés next to their mentors, their backs to Dez and Rafe, about fifteen feet of distance between them and the next pair.
Dez notices a gap in the center of the formation and follows Rafe to fill it.
“Nice of you to join us,” Moriah says.
“Desdemona’s access was … atypical,” Rafe says, causing all the students to look her way.
The way Rafe says it makes Dez wonder if there’s something defective about her access, what she saw in the kinetoscope. Whether this, like everything else, is her fault.
“Let’s begin,” Moriah says. “Welcome to the Vault. This room is an archive of information that will facilitate your films. It holds … everything that matters. In a moment, your Lenses will drop, and your mentors will guide you through the process of using them. Your Lenses will replace any filmmaking equipment you have been accustomed to working with before. They are all you’ll need to make your films.”
“What kind of software—” Paul Rowan asks from the front row.
“Your mentors will make everything clear that needs to be clear,” Moriah says. “The rest you’ll do well to take on faith. Today is October first. Your first assignments are due no later than our midterm recess, one month from today. If I were you, I’d waste no time.”
A low harmonized humming sounds above, and when Dez looks up, the ceiling appears to be slowly caving in.
No, she sees, it’s a cluster of large, black cubes releasing from the branches of the stained-glass tree in the ceiling.
Dozens of them drop in tandem, speeding toward the student’s heads like supplies air-dropped on a beleaguered village.
Simon shrieks. Dez hears Alice Quinn quietly praying.
Dez stands still, looking up with a mix of anticipation and fear until, two feet before the cube slams into her head, it suddenly stops moving, caught by a long black cable.
“That’s your Lens,” Rafe says. “Take it in your hands.”
Dez looks around, sees the other protégés being guided to do the same. Nearby, Esther’s mentor Felipe stands close behind her, his arm threading around Esther’s body to help her guide the Lens closer. On the other side of Dez, Yael says huskily near Alice Quinn’s ear:
“You touch it when I give you permission to touch it, understand?”
“Forget about them,” Rafe says quietly. “It’s just you and me, okay?”
Dez nods, reaches up, and pulls the cube closer, tilts it so it’s parallel to her eyes, the way you’d position a laptop screen.
“How does it work?”
“Lean forward,” Rafe says. “It needs to scan your eyes to know it’s you.”
Dez moves her face close to the screen …
Moriah’s cobra lunges at her, its mouth open, full of fangs, its eyes as wide as oranges.
Dez recoils—and notices every other first-year also shrieking and recoiling. Somehow the albino cobra is coiled around each of their Lens’s cables. Alice Quinn is crouched on the ground as Yael kicks her to get up.
“What’s happening?” Dez asks.
“Stillness,” Rafe says. “Trust the process.”
All at once the cobras vanish into pixilated air.
Another special effect. And Dez’s Lens starts curving like a personal IMAX, until it encircles her and Rafe’s faces.
Slowly, smoothly the screen expands vertically in both directions, dropping to the floor like a curtain, then rising to form a dome about eight feet in diameter and several more feet above their heads.
Then the screen turns from black to pale gray, lighting the space, casting a glow upon their faces.
“You’re not in Death Valley anymore, are you?” Rafe says.
“This is …” Dez looks around, at a loss for words.
“Expensive?”
“Sure, but I was going to say—”
“Sexy?”
Dez looks at him, so close to her, and remembers the pop of her shirt button last night when Rafe recklessly ripped it open.
Who knew that bodice ripping could go exactly nowhere?
“Soundproof, too,” he says, rapping lightly on the wall of screen behind him.
It’s like he’s reading her dirty mind. But last night had ended so embarrassingly, Dez won’t let herself get drawn deeper into humiliation. Not now when she’s finally about to start making films.
“I’m used to my refurbished Canon Rebel and Adobe Premiere,” Dez says. “I don’t know how to—”
“Something tells me you’ll be a quick study,” Rafe says. “This Lens is yours for the duration of the term. Self-contained, and entirely customized, designed to be as intuitive for each filmmaker as possible. It has highly sensitive retina tracking to help you control the screen.”
“Meaning, I control it with my eyes?”
“Exactly,” he says. “Every morning when you come to the Vault, you come here. You expand the Lens as you just did.”
“Will the snake always—”
“No, that was just a welcome meme,” Rafe says.
“The serpent symbolizes knowledge and transformation. And this Lens will transform you.” He looks at her, gauging something she can’t discern.
“You’ll work alongside the other first-years, but you won’t perceive them, and they won’t perceive you.
Only you can access this particular Lens, this particular technology. ”
There’s so much Dez still doesn’t understand, but knowing this device is hers does give her a small, sweet sense of ownership.
She shared her former workspace—her mom’s garage—with a car, two petty cats, the always running washing machine, and Mo’s second-hand BowFlex.
She has never had nice equipment. She’s never had a space to work entirely her own.
“As your mentor for the first term,” Rafe says, “I’m granted oversight of your early films.”
“Do the last-years have their own Lenses somewhere else?”
“In another wing,” he says. “I know the space feels tight at first, but soon you’ll hardly notice it. Stretch your arms all the way out. Turn your body around.”
Dez does, mirroring Rafe’s motions, and discovers she can turn in any direction without touching the screen, or Rafe.
“You’ll want to keep your feet rooted on this platform,” he explains, pointing beneath them where a raised square tile about five feet wide subtly glows.
At its edges, on all four sides, there’s a space of about one foot between the platform and the base of the dome where the tile looks different, black instead of white, and dotted with golden flecks that remind Dez of stars.
“Inside the lens,” Rafe continues, “you never need to walk. When you find something interesting, something you want to use, simply focus and it will come to you.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Keep saying that and it will become your motto,” Rafe says. “All Lenses run on a kind of software called dur. In Sumerian, it means totality.”
“Did you say dur?”
“It’s a funny name, until you use it.”
“What’s with all the Sumerian?” Dez asks.