The Vault of Dreamers Read Free

the kitchen moved warily nearer, but I still couldn’t see the guy who had
     been hit. A clatter came as something dropped on metal. The cook stepped out of my
     sight. I heard another smacking punch.
    “Clean it up, you royal bastard,” the cook said. “You hear me?”
    A shuffling clank and a stream of indecipherable words came next.
    “What’s that?” the cook demanded.
    “I wasn’t going to use it,” came the guy’s voice, clearly.
    Smack again.
    The girl beside me gave my tray a nudge. “You’re holding up the line,” she said. “Let’s
     go.”
    “The cook just hit somebody,” I said, edging farther along.
    “You’re kidding. Really? Where?” she said.
    I craned to look back in the kitchen, and when I caught a brief glimpse of a brown-haired
     guy crouching near to the floor, cleaning something, I stopped again.
    “Back there. He just hit him, hard,” I said. I had the tense, flayed feeling that
     I was supposed to do something about it, even though it was none of my business.
    Other students went around us and kept picking out food.
    “I don’t see anything,” the girl said, bumping my tray with hers again. “They have
     banana pancakes. Sweet.”
    I slid my tray down the poles and peered through the next counter slot, trying to
     see the guy once more, but instead, the cook’s sweaty face blocked my view. He looked
     casually across at me through wafty sizzles of sausage smoke, and I felt the same
     vicarious burn of anger that came whenever my stepfather clocked me.
    I ducked my head and moved down the cafeteria line, but I hardly noticed the food
     anymore. First Janice, then my own track mark, and now this flash of violence in the
     kitchen. They were like cracks at the edges of The Forge Show , cracks that made me question the appearance of everything on the stage around me.
     I paused by one of the wooden pillars with my tray.
    Morning light dropped in the big windows, glinting on saltshakers, and the dining
     hall buzzed of coffee and sugar. In a corner beneath an abstract wall sculpture, Janice
     was eating with a couple of guys. She smoothed her long blond hair from one side of
     her neck to the other, like an angel spreading its glittery wings, and with my mental
     lens, I saw how naturally she projected a photogenic presence. She wasn’t the only
     one, either.
    We were the show. I got that. I knew that coming in, just like everybody else, but
     accepting the constant cameras wasn’t the same as liking them, let alone performing
     for them. The Forge School was an elite arts academy, while The Forge Show was the reality show that tracked and broadcasted the activity of each individual
     student at the school. It was a smart, interactive system. Viewers at home controlled
     who they watched by selecting their favorite students’ feeds. The feedback of their
     viewing choices, in turn, determined student blip ranks.
    To sweeten the value of popularity, banner ads linked to each blip rank were incrementally
     more expensive as the ranks rose toward #1, and students banked a fraction of what
     the advertisers paid, receiving the funds at graduation. For the most popular students
     with the highest blip ranks, their banner ad funds after three years of high school
     could top a million dollars.
    I’d certainly watched the show before, from home, back when my dream to come here
     had seemed impossible, but until I’d arrived on campus, I hadn’t fully understood
     how the stage aspect of the school pervaded everything. The other new students like
     Janice were perpetually projecting extra-watt versions of themselves for the cameras.
     For them, it seemed effortless. They even thrived on it. But to me, who preferred
     the other end of a camera, the super-visibility was exhausting.
    A big, old-fashioned tally board on the wall made a flipping noise while it updated
     the blip ranks of every student in the school, and I watched as my name settled in
     at 95th place. Great. My oatmeal