Chapter 18
“WHAT DID YOU DO?” RAFE demands.
“I don’t know,” Dez gasps. “I just wanted to see him.”
Rafe steps in front of her and reaches for the screen as if he’s trying to tear the scene down with his hands.
But Dez can’t bear that. She grabs his arms. “Please. Don’t make it go away.” She pushes him back until his body relents. She stares at the image all around her, so crisp and clear it’s like she’s in the room with Mo.
Her heart pounds.
She can turn her head and see every angle: cacti at dawn out the half-open blinds, a candy wrapper that’s fallen from a panicked doctor’s pocket to the floor, a whiteboard with cartoon faces of different levels of pain.
Is it really Mo? Dez can scarcely make sense of what’s before her eyes, and she can’t begin to fathom how or why.
Then something strange happens on the screen. It’s like the camera’s focus moves out of the ICU. Dez sees flashes of a hallway, doctors and nurses speeding by. It’s so immersive, she feels faintly nauseated. She sees two large metal swinging doors—
And on the other side, her mother’s horrified expression.
With a motion of his hand, Rafe swipes it all away, leaving them standing inches away from each other, breathing heavily in the dim, gray light.
“That was my brother,” Dez struggles to say. “In the hospital.”
“Yes.”
“When? How?” Dez asks. On-screen her mother wore the same clothes as the night Mo was admitted. Had her brother flatlined right after Dez left to go to Acheron? Had it put him in the coma her mother told her he was in now?
Rafe runs a hand through his thick, dark hair, looking at a loss for words.
“You weren’t supposed to see that,” he says. “You shouldn’t have had access.”
“Well, I saw it.” Dez touches her temples, remembering the shooting pain she’d felt right before Mo appeared on the screen. “Now you need to tell me what’s going on.”
“Our equipment has the ability to work with filmmakers telepathically,” Rafe says, “to be controlled by your mind’s eye. But you haven’t learned that yet. It’s not something you’ll learn for months, sometimes years. And even then, I don’t see how—”
“I don’t care about the fucking curriculum, Rafe.”
He swallows. “I think your emotions overrode the Vault. I’ve never seen it happen before. It’s not a bad thing, necessarily.” He scratches his head, thinking. “It might have something to do with your vision. I wonder what else you can see.”
“Rafe, how did Acheron get that footage of my brother? Is it real?”
“It’s real,” he says, meeting her eyes. “If an image or a scene passes through a Lens at any point, it gets saved in the Vault.”
“Who filmed it?”
“Acheron has a vast network—”
“What does that mean? You’re paying some nurse to strap a GoPro on her head?” Dez feels near tears. She’s so confused, and what she just saw seems cruel.
Then Dez has a sickening realization.
“Rafe? Before we got on the plane in Death Valley, and I said I wouldn’t come here unless I could see my brother whenever I wanted …”
Rafe stares at her. He nods.
“Is this what you meant?”
“Dez—” Rafe sighs.
“Is it?”
“This is the closest you’re likely to get.”
“No. No. You told me—”
“The workload here, Dez, you can’t just take a weekend off. You won’t be able to keep up.”
He puts a hand on her shoulder, and she hates herself for wanting to fold into him. He tricked her.
“Everyone here has until November first to complete their first film,” he says. “That isn’t easy. And if you don’t do it, that’s it, it’s over. You’re out, and you’re on your own. We can’t protect you.”
“Acheron was never going to fly me back to see Mo,” Dez says.
“Do you even think that’s what your family wants?” Rafe says, cutting through Dez’s bramble of a heart with the truth.
She was always trapped here. If not by Rafe or by the school, then by her own actions that night at the Dairy Barn. She deserves to not go home.
She sniffs. “I want to meet with the lawyers. Or was that a lie, too?”
“None of it’s a lie. You can meet with our legal counsel anytime.”
“What you’re doing isn’t ethical,” Dez says, waving her hand in the place on the screen where Mo used to be. “That should be private.”
“You’re preaching to the choir,” Rafe says. “And if you’re interested in filmmaking ethics, you should join Jet’s Eye for an Eye club. When I first read Plato’s Republic, I wanted to tattoo it on my body. Unfortunately, we don’t live in an ethical era.”
“How convenient,” Dez says. “I’m sure no authoritarian has made that claim before.”
“But weren’t you glad,” Rafe asks, “ just for a moment, to get to see Mo?”
A tear slides down Dez’s cheek. She was.
“Okay, Dez,” Rafe says quietly. “Pitch me.”
“Pitch you what?” she mutters, wiping her eyes.
“You want to make a film about your brother,” he says. “What you just did, accessing that footage with your mind before anyone showed you how? You got my attention. Let’s see if you can keep it.”
Dez doesn’t have to reach for the idea. It’s right there, waiting between her eyes, almost fully formed. Before she expanded her Lens, she’d been imagining shooting scenes that would approximate her brother’s likeness. Now she’s wondering what more might be possible.
“What else is in the Vault?”
“I told you—”
“Don’t say ‘everything.’”
“Everything.”
“I need you to be more specific.”
“See for yourself,” Rafe says, and nods in the direction of the screen.
She turns to face it. Sees nothing but gray for a long time. She thinks of Mo. Not in the hospital, but across his life, the boy she’s always known. After a moment, she notices a dim orange light on the right side of the screen. Growing brighter.
“Good start,” Rafe says. “Now relax. Enter the drift of your emotions. Let it flow.”
She stares at the glowing shape, getting larger and coming into three-dimensional focus.
It resembles an old-fashioned Rolodex, tipped vertically on its axis.
There’s a dark core in the center, around which something like cards slowly rotate in steady rhythm.
It grows larger as it seems to grow closer, until the things that resemble cards on the Rolodex are about the size of movie posters.
Each one features a variegated image, which Dez soon realizes are moving, changing.
And one—she notices, just before it revolves beyond her vision—features her brother’s unmistakable face.
“They’re …” she starts to say.
“Scenes,” Rafe says. “Scenes from your brother’s life. We call this his Lifeline.”
“What?” Dez whispers, wanting to slow the spinning deck so she can focus on a single one.
Dez can’t fathom what is happening. Nothing about this makes sense.
But she could ask a hundred questions and Rafe still couldn’t explain what she’s experiencing right now.
Her acute love for her brother, her need to see him—not a mummy in a hospital, but the kind, outgoing, bright and lucky kid he’d always been—is so powerful, so actively engaged by what she’s seeing on the screen that she doesn’t even need an explanation. All she wants is this.
Every single spinning card on the Lens features something from Mo’s life. She reaches out toward his face at six, at thirteen, at eleven, nine, at two years old. She sees a hundred of his T-shirts, haircuts, Band-Aids, smiles with missing baby teeth. Her fingers halt. Longing swells in her heart.
“How do I stop it from spinning?” Dez says. “How do I look at just one?”
Rafe reaches forward and simply taps on one of the scenes. The rotation stops. The scene Rafe tapped gets pulled from the deck of scenes, pivots forward so Dez can see it head-on.
“Once you’ve had more practice,” Rafe says, “you can use your mind to pull the scenes.”
And then, with a whoosh Dez feels in the pit of her stomach, Moses fills the whole dome.
Not his face, Dez realizes, but his point of view.
It’s almost like she’s seeing through Mo’s eyes as he mows the lawn during magic hour at the Oasis Hotel, his summer job last year.
Dez hears not only the up-close whine of the lawn mower, but also, strangely, the T.
Rex album blasting in Mo’s earbuds, like a soundtrack for the scene.
Did her brother film himself at work, out of boredom?
His sense of cinematography while running a lawn mower is unexpectedly impressive.
She gazes for a moment at the sunset and hears gravel crunch as a car pulls out of the hotel parking lot.
For a moment, she thinks she can smell fresh-cut grass.
“Let me show you what you can do with mind selection,” Rafe says.
Without moving, merely staring, Rafe pulls another scene from the deck.
This one features a green and empty soccer field.
As it slides to fill the dome, Dez suddenly remembers: Mo used to play games on this field when he was five.
He spent more time lying down on the field, making grass angels than he did actually playing soccer.
Dez remembers sitting on the sidelines, the sugary tang of the Hi-C juice boxes her mom would bring in a cooler.
She remembers the scratchy purple uniforms Mo used to hate wearing.
Whose camera is Dez looking through now?
It looks like it could have come from the iPhone lens of a teammate’s parent.
But what are any of these scenes doing in the Vault?
Do people accidentally consent to sharing their memories with places like Acheron when they click “Yes” on Apple’s terms of service?
The image shifts up, toward the puffy, white clouds. Dez feels warm sun on her shoulders. And then she hears her mother’s voice, shouting: Get up! You’ll be trampled!
Dez stares at the clouds above Mo’s soccer field as they drift and rearrange. Even if some soccer mom had forked over the video, why would anyone have captured the sky like that, as if they were lying in the grass next to Mo?
“Where did this come from?” Dez asks.
“Soccer moms,” Rafe muses, “unsung heroes of the film world.”
“Why are all these scenes archived so meticulously?”
Rafe lifts a shoulder. “AI helps with some of that.”
“But how—”
“I can tell that you’re asking yourself a series of very boring questions right now. Things like what kind of suckers sign away their kid’s digital privacy for free? Don’t worry about how we got it. Focus on how to use it.”
Dez wants to know more about the origins of all these scenes, how they got into Acheron’s Vault, and for what purpose. But she also knows what Rafe means. She already wants to use everything she’s seen in the Vault in her film about her brother.
“Are you really set on making this film?” Rafe asks.
“Yes,” she breathes.
“If you do it, Dez,” Rafe says, “you won’t have help from a Scribe writing the script.”
“That’s fine. I can do it on my own.”
“Only do it because you can’t not do it. You’re still going to have to make the O’Rourke film as well. It’s going to mean double the work.”
“It’s okay. I don’t mind.”
“You say that now because you have no idea how challenging this is going to be.”
“I’ll make it work.”
“I’m going to regret this,” Rafe says.
“I can do it, Rafe. I need to do it.”
He nods. “Don’t tell anyone you’re working on a film about your brother.”
“Why?”
“Because your peers are all following their assignments. And when anyone finds out you’re only using that assignment as a cover story for what you ‘really want to do,’ I can’t protect you.”
His eyes graze her lips, and she remembers last night.
“Fine,” she says. “But can you do me one favor?”
“What?”
“If I keep up with my other assignment, when I finish this film, can you help me get it to my brother? So he can see it? So he knows I didn’t just abandon him?”
Rafe thinks for a moment, then nods. “I’ll make sure your brother sees this film.”
“Thank you,” she whispers. “I know you probably think I’m being foolish or sentimental. That wasting my time—”
“Actually, no,” he says, and Dez looks at him, feeling her heart lift. Then Rafe clears his throat and looks away. “I try to think about you as little as possible.”
Gone is the intimacy—but not the heat—from last night. She can’t tell what Rafe wants. One minute, it seems like he’s supporting her; the next, it’s like he’s belittling her. The only thing she knows is she can’t trust him farther than she can throw him onto a bed.
Which she learned last night isn’t very far at all.