She placed one tentative foot on a branch, and immediately it bent.
She looked down. There was nothing but grass below her. This building was not like the rock mountain in the training arena. There were no footholds.
The window had a ledge, about two feet deep. If the window were open, it would be an easy leap, Plum thought. But it was closed, and if she didn’t land just right, there would be nothing to hold on to if she lost her balance.
Plum stood up straight, her feet rooted on one of the stable branches, and braced herself. Professor Nayamor would call this a poor decision, but Professor Nayamor did not have a friend inside that building. Professor Nayamor had not seen Artem, gaunt and frail and frightened, in her dreams. Professor Nayamor was not Artem’s only hope.
She was.
Without taking another moment to think of the consequences, she jumped.
It was all her effort not to scream. She landed on the ledge and stumbled backward when the window blocked her momentum. Don’t panic. She braced her hands on either side of the window’s brick frame, steadying herself.
Her legs shook. Her heart was pounding. But she had made it. When she realized this, she laughed. She laughed at all her fear and her worry. She laughed at Dr. Abarrane for thinking he could stop her from reaching her friend.
The window took some effort to open, but Plum managed it, and then she slipped inside.
This was the exact same building as in her dream of the nursery. She knew it. It had the same strange smell, as though something sharp and abrasive had stripped the floor and walls and air of everything that indicated human life.
“Artem?” she whispered.
The room was a strange bedroom, with two empty beds framed by metal bars on either side, almost like the sides of a crib but only half as high. There was an empty cart, with an empty silver tray on the top. There were no closets and no other furniture at all. It felt very unsettling, as though all traces of whoever had slept here had been erased.
The door was open, and Plum cautiously stepped out into the hallway.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. She counted more than once to be sure she wasn’t dreaming, because this was exactly what she had dreamed earlier that night. She had dreamed a great number of things, but never anything that really existed.
She even counted the floor tiles as she walked. Her shoes echoed against the white marble tiles, and so she moved slowly, peeking into each doorway she passed. Room after room had empty beds and empty carts.
Voices from around the corner made her stop short.
“… Patient has responded well to Treatment B,” a woman was saying. “Tomorrow the doctor will want a full report of his vitals.”
The voices were drawing closer, and Plum slid into an empty room. The door was ajar and she wedged herself behind it, keeping to the shadows and peeking through the crack between the door and the frame.
Two nurses walked briskly past. One of them glanced at her watch and said, “The doctor wants us to monitor him at the top of every hour.”
Once they were gone, Plum crept back out into the hallway. The patient she’d overheard the nurse discussing must have been Artem, she thought. She hoped she was right. If Artem wasn’t here, she would have to go back to the fork in the path and go the other way. The other way led to the world beyond the forest, and her professors said it went on and on forever. She didn’t know how she would find Artem then.
There was a pattern of beeping sounds coming from one of the rooms. Her blood went cold when she heard it. The beeping was steady and slow.
She came upon the open doorway where the sound was coming from.
This room had the same cart and beds as the other rooms, but it wasn’t empty. In one of the beds, there was a boy, fast asleep, one long tube trailing from his arm, and several thinner wires snaking out from under his collar and sleeves.
Artem.
CHAPTER 15
“Artem!” Plum gasped.
Just as in their shared dream, Artem was pale and there were dark rings around his eyes. Even his curly brown hair seemed dull under the strange and too-bright lights.
She stood at his bedside, her hands hovering over the wires that kept him plugged into the machines. The wires that snaked out of his sleeves and collar were monitoring various parts of his chest. If she disconnected the machine from his heart, the machine would stop working. Maybe the rhythmic beeps would turn into a sort of alarm and they would be caught.
The tube in his arm led to an IV that dripped in a bag over his bed. Plum recognized that odd purple liquid; it was the same thing Dr. Abarrane had given to her that morning when she couldn’t sleep.
“I’m sorry, Artem,” she murmured. “This might hurt a little.”
She slid the IV needle out of his arm as carefully as she could. A drop of purple splattered on the white floor. A fat red circle of blood swelled on Artem’s skin in the needle’s absence.
Plum looked to the clock that hung above the door. The nurses would be back at the top of the hour to check on him, and that meant they had five minutes to escape.
“Artem.” She shook his shoulder. “Artem. You have to wake up!”
It seemed like an eternity before Artem moved, even though it had only been a few seconds—Plum knew this because she was still glancing at the clock to prove that none of this was a dream.
First, his lashes fluttered. His hand twitched. And then, his eyes opened.
“Plum?” His voice was hoarse. “Are we in another dream?”
“No,” she said. “No, this is real.”
He looked confused at that, but then as his eyes began to sweep across the room, realization turned his expression fearful. The beeping on the monitor got a little faster. “The nurses,” he rasped. “They brought me here. They made me sleep.”
“I know,” Plum said. She was doing her best not to sound as anxious as she felt; it would only frighten Artem more than he already was. “We have to go. Can you sit up?”
Artem pushed himself upright by his arms. The monitor beeped faster, and Plum frowned at what had to be done. Giving Artem no warning, she pulled at the wires trailing from his sleeves and collar. He let out a yelp of pain as the monitors came unstuck from his chest.
The machine let out a shrill, loud, flat beeping now that it no longer had a heart to measure.
Artem covered his ears. Plum grabbed his arm and tugged him to his feet. “Come on.”
He wobbled unsteadily for a few steps, but by the time they reached the hallway, he was able to keep pace with her.
As footsteps came running down the hall, Artem was the one to latch on to Plum and pull them both into an empty bedroom.
“Where is the patient?” a nurse shouted.
“Calm down,” another said. “He can’t have gotten far.”
Plum and Artem huddled together in the shadow behind the door, and Plum assessed their location.
How were they going to get out?
There was a window, but no tree to climb down. They could listen for the nurses and run for the room by the tree Plum had used to climb in, but she worried about Artem. He had never done well with heights, and he might fall.
Something rumbled faintly in the ceiling, and a warm breeze of artificial air blew down on them, rustling their hair.
Plum looked up at the air vent.
“I’ve found our way out,” she whispered.
It took some effort, but by locking the wheels on the empty cart, Plum was able to use it to shimmy the vent cover away from the ceiling and hoist herself inside.
Artem’s legs were shaking slightly as he climbed onto the cart next. Plum grabbed his wrists. “I’ve got you,” she said. “Brace your feet against the wall like you’re walking. There. Like that.”
With a final tug, she managed to pull him up beside her.
It wasn’t a large air shaft, but there was room for both of them to kneel. As much as Plum wanted to keep moving, she could see that Art
em was still dazed, and she felt guilty for pushing him so hard after all he’d been through.
He was still pale, but the color was coming slowly back to his cheeks.
“It feels like years ago,” he said, “that you and I were lying on the back of that monster.”
“That was tonight,” Plum said. “Are you feeling all right now?” She nodded down the air shaft, to where there was a small rectangle of light bleeding upward from another vent. “If we follow the vents, we can find our way out.”
Artem nodded, and he let Plum lead the way. They had to crawl. What Plum had never told anyone was that she hated small spaces. If this were a tightrope over a pit of boiling red lava, she would have felt better than she did now. But she said nothing. What Artem had just endured was worse, and for once, he wasn’t allowing his fear of everything to best him. He was being quite brave, she thought.
They crawled for what felt like hours, until Plum heard a muffled voice. She came to a stop, and Artem nearly crashed into her. “What is it?” he asked.
“Shh.”
“If he woke himself, then he truly is the one we’re looking for,” a voice said.
Plum and Artem huddled over the air vent and peeked in on the room below them. This was not a bedroom. There was a computer and a steel table filled with odd metal instruments that looked almost like knives and needles.
Two people stood at either side of a metal table.
“Patient Number Four didn’t wake himself.” It was Dr. Abarrane. He sounded amused.
“Patient Number One?” the other person asked. It was the nurse Plum had seen earlier in the hallway.
“Yes,” Dr. Abarrane said. “Plum. They can’t have gotten far. He’ll still be weak.”
“What should we do?” the nurse asked.
From Plum’s vantage point, she could see the smile on Dr. Abarrane’s face. “We wait.”
Plum didn’t hesitate. She started crawling again, Artem at her heels.
“What did that mean?” Artem whispered.
“I don’t know.”
“Plum—”
“Just let me think,” she said. When the air shaft came to a bend, she stopped. She was breathing hard, she realized. Not from adrenaline or fear, but from anger. Betrayal.
Patients. Dr. Abarrane had referred to them as patients.
It all came flashing through her mind at once—her imagined memories of Dr. Abarrane finding her on those church steps in a crate meant to hold plums. “It isn’t true,” she said. Artem knelt before her now, and she took his hands. “Artem, none of what we were told was ever true. I think—I think those things we dreamed were real. The man with the sheriff’s badge and that city with the clock tower and—”
“The fire,” Artem said. “Did you dream about a house that was on fire?”
“Yes,” Plum said. “And a baby crying.”
“That baby was probably one of us,” Artem said. “Dr. Abarrane—” His expression twisted into a mix of confusion and sadness. “Were we even orphans, Plum? Did he take us from our parents?”
Plum thought of the woman she’d dreamed dead on the floor, surrounded by flames.
And then something very strange happened. Her vision blurred, and her cheeks felt wet, and she realized that she had begun to cry.
Plenty of students at Brassmere cried. Cried because they were injured, or sick, impatient, or sad. Cried because they were frustrated. Plum had seen it hundreds of times, but she had never understood the point. Why cry about something when you could fix it? But here, now, for the first time she had encountered something she could not fix. She could not put out the fire in that building she’d dreamed. Could not console the couple crying in that office. She could not bring that woman back from the dead.
She could not find her parents. And she could never, ever trust Dr. Abarrane again.
“Oh, Plum.” Artem dabbed at her cheeks with the sleeve of his medical gown. “Don’t do that. Don’t cry. We’ll find a way out.”
“I know that.” Plum sniffled. “But then where will we go?”
CHAPTER 16
Plum did not allow herself to cry for long. Artem tried to give her a hug, but she brushed him off. Somehow she knew that this would only make her cry more. There was something so sad about kindness sometimes.
“We need to move,” she said instead. “We have to get back to Gwendle and Vien and tell them.”
“We have to tell everyone,” Artem said as they resumed their crawl. “They have a right to know.”
“I don’t think they’ll believe us,” Plum said. She barely believed it herself. But this building was proof that some of the things she dreamed had been real. It was like there was a map of this place in her head, as though it had been whispered to her while she was sleeping one night and she’d retained it.
She thought of the pinks, who monitored her pulse and took her blood. Is that all they were? Patients? Experiments?
Plum stopped them at a vent that overlooked a stairwell. This was probably going to be their only way out, she thought.
“Do you feel well enough to jump?” she asked Artem. Her voice was still tight with her spent tears, but Artem was kind enough not to notice.
“Yes,” he said. “But won’t we be caught?”
“Maybe not,” Plum said. “I saw the building from the outside, and none of the other floors had any lights. I think we can sneak down to the second floor, then we’ll be close enough to the ground to climb down from one of the smaller trees.”
Artem smiled for the first time in what felt like forever. “You’ve got this all figured out.”
Plum didn’t have anything figured out. Her entire world was spinning. But dwelling on it wouldn’t help. She worked the vent cover up. Then she braced her hands on the edge and jumped down.
She landed hard, bending her knees to absorb the blow.
Artem came after her, and he only stumbled a little bit, steadied when she grabbed his arm.
The rest of the escape went exactly as Plum had planned, which Plum found unusual. As they climbed down the tree and made their way back into the forest, Dr. Abarrane’s words echoed in her head:
We wait.
What did that mean? What did any of this mean?
Artem stopped running, and Plum thought he might be hurt. But when she turned to face him, she saw that he was staring at the building from which they’d just escaped. And then he was staring at the forest that surrounded it.
“Are we … outside the fence?” he asked.
“It’s big out here, isn’t it?” Plum said.
He was shivering. All he had to wear was a thin gown that did nothing against the autumn chill. Plum shrugged out of her coat and draped it over his shoulders.
“Come on,” she said. “We have to get back to Vien and Gwendle.”
Plum would have liked to run. She could have run. But Artem was still weak, and Plum felt guilty for pushing him so much. He’d just spent three days trapped in a coma, unable to escape the loneliness of his dreams, and here she was making him run through a strange forest in the middle of the night.
They had to stop several times, and when they did, Plum huddled under the coat beside Artem to keep warm.
“I’m sorry,” he said, his teeth chattering from the cold. “I’m slowing us down.”
“It’s not your fault,” Plum said. “It’s Dr. Abarrane’s fault. All of this is his fault.”
She felt a surge of anger at his name, but that was a good thing. Anger motivated her to keep going.
By the time they reached the iron fence that surrounded Brassmere, the sky had begun to turn pale, and soon the sun would rise. Birds flitted in the trees, cheerily making music as they went about their business.
Artem marveled that they were standing on the wrong side of the fence. The twin gargoyles sat stoic on either side of the entrance, and Artem extended his hand high above his head so that he could touch one of their talons.
“They’re not really alive?” he
asked, and laughed. “All this time, I’ve been so frightened of even getting close to the gate. I was so sure they would eat me.”
“They’re not alive,” Plum affirmed. “That was a lie.”
She was going to say something else, but an odd sound of stone grating against stone made her fall silent. She looked up at the gargoyle Artem was touching.
The gargoyle turned its head toward her.
And then, it lunged.
CHAPTER 17
Artem grabbed Plum’s arm and pulled her roughly toward him. The spot where she had been standing was a mound of ruined dirt where the gargoyle had attacked.
The other gargoyle sprang to life, too, and Plum’s mind was spinning to understand. She hadn’t slept for hours, and she was exhausted. Focus, she scolded herself, and tried to stay sharp.
She braced herself for another attack, but the gargoyle didn’t come after her again. The gargoyles’ stone bodies transformed rapidly into leathery gray flesh, and they leaped into the air in tandem, their giant wings spreading out as they took flight.
“They’re heading for the school!” Artem cried. One of the gargoyles was barreling through the overarching glass window of the grand foyer. The other had scaled the side of the building that housed the dormitory, and its giant swinging tail was shattering the windows.
Plum and Artem climbed the gate in tandem. Despite his fear of heights, Artem did a good job keeping up with Plum. While they were climbing, at least. Going down was a different story. For once, Artem kept his fears to himself, but Plum could see that he was trembling. She slowed her own pace to keep time with him, and when they reached the ground, she said, “Are you okay?”
He nodded. “Let’s go.”
They ran and entered Brassmere through the mess of glass and splintered wood. It wasn’t only the gargoyles that had come to life. All the birds and insects in the wallpaper had escaped and were buzzing and flapping at the ceiling and remaining windows, trying to find a way out. The carved owls had broken free of the clock hands, and one of them was pecking at a student’s hair as he swatted at it, screaming.
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