“You just scanned my mind’s eye?”
“Exactly,” Dr. Ezekiel says.
“Are we finished here, Zeke?” Rafe says.
“The campus is open to her now.” Dr. Ezekiel studies Dez through the glasses at the tip of his nose. “Be careful in there, Desdemona. But more importantly, be brave.”
LEAVING DR. EZEKIEL’S OFFICE, RAFEand 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.Seeyourself 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.
