William set his fingers against a door that would have looked more at home in a temple or cathedral than a laboratory. Its ornate surface bore a scene straight from a children's book, with long-eared hares in tall grass and birds caught in swirling wind.
"I think you'll enjoy this one," he said as he shoved the gorgeous door inward a few inches. "It's one of my favorites."
"No," Mike replied. "I won't."
We all turned. Unlike William, who regained most of his composure on the hike from the bubble room to this one, Mike was still surly. He stood several feet behind us, curled in upon himself like a primary student forced out of bed early.
"I'm not gonna enjoy myself like everything is fine after what just happened."
William blinked and removed his hand from the door. "Everything is fine."
"My girlfriend's permanently purple!"
Veruca rolled her eyes and shook her head as if she'd anticipated Mike's outburst and was still irritated by it. She turned to examine the embossed door while William spoke in a slow, soothing tone.
"Your girlfriend is temporarily lilac. With any luck, it will scrub right off. Worst case, her skin will shed in six weeks. My team would have called by now if there were complications."
Mike tried to look intimidating with his noodle arms and ratty tee, but it wasn't convincing. Knowing what I did about William's surprising solidity beneath his gaudy jacket, my money was on him even if blindfolded and unarmed.
"You don't get it," Mike said. "She's a beauty blogger. Her whole brand is all-natural skincare. She can't show up on camera with a purple face!"
Veruca moaned. "So take a vacation. It won't kill you. Willy, is this gold filigree? Where did you buy this door? I need one for my apartment."
"It won't kill you!" Mike snapped. "Your dad supports you! We have to stream daily, or we lose subscribers. Lose enough, and sponsors drop us. Do you think I want to spend my whole life mocking amateur videos and making fart noises? We have to keep going, even when we're out of material. That's the gig!"
William massaged a spot between his eyes. "If I sponsor Violet's channel for a year, will you relax and finish the tour?"
Ahh. There was the Wonka I remembered from my time on the job. Two thousand temp workers a year received the hourly wage of a department store manager—sans benefits. But one angry streamer threatening a lousy review opened his wallet in seconds. Business first. People second. Always.
Mike brightened. "Are you serious? A whole year? You'd do that?"
William lifted his cane, and I couldn't help but imagine a war room somewhere with wall-to-wall monitors and a team of yes-men like Thomas from the temp office. Were they sitting in silence, waiting for him to hit that golden button?
"Please look into a one-year sponsorship for Miss Beaurigarde's beauty channel. Email me the details to review tonight." His thumb and brows raised simultaneously. "Well? Can we proceed?"
Mike nodded, lips pursed like he'd successfully bullied William on his lady friend's behalf, and William returned to his original position. I bit my lip, excited to see the wonders stored behind such an extravagant set of doors, but my excitement deflated like an old balloon when he flung them open.
"I don't get it," Mike said. "Is this a joke?"
"I think you over-sold this one," Veruca agreed.
I wasn't about to third the sentiment, but I had to concur that the room was underwhelming. At first glance, the sterile white space with an empty, floor-to-ceiling aquarium in the center reminded me of the transparent prisons designed for captured supervillains in the movies. On closer inspection, however, it was more like the underside of a clear inkjet printer. Dozens of multi-axis rails with large nozzles hung from the ceiling inside the tank like stalactites.
"Another 3D printer?" Veruca asked, and I was a little disappointed in myself for failing to identify it first.
"Exactly! Good eye!" William said with glee as he approached a lone chair beside the aquarium.
The padded chair, which had a cuff like a blood pressure station in a pharmacy, was bolted to the floor. William flopped into it, crossed his legs like a mischievous prince upon a throne, and pushed up his right coat sleeve. It wasn't until he unbuttoned and rolled his cuff that I realized I should have looked away. My guess about his lean muscle tone had been spot-on. Damn.
I examined the mechanics of the fish tank. The transparent plastic walls. The bolts securing the chair to the tiled floor. Anything to save myself the embarrassment of accidentally ogling William's Statue-of-David forearm.
"What's this one do that the other doesn't?" Mike asked.
"And a good question!" William said. "The printer in the chocolate room can print anything imaginable. This one can print anything you imagine!"
Veruca shook her head. "Still not following."
William shoved his arm into the cuff and strapped it down before he replied. Or, at least, I assumed he did. It was hard to interpret his movements by sound alone while examining the zip-tied line of wires and hoses stretched between the cuff and a hole in the floor.
"My designers created everything in the chocolate room with 3D software. We have a 3D scanner to copy the reference material, and they spend hours each day perfecting flavor, consistency, and ingredients. This machine is less precise. You feed it fantasies, and it prints them in perfect detail—palatable or not."
Veruca's exposed midriff moved into my line of sight and blocked my view of the hex bolt directly below William's wrist. I turned my head to the featureless ceiling as if it might spontaneously become a fresco.
"You feed it fantasies," she asked, "through your arm?"
"Through my blood," he replied.
My head snapped back down, and the part of my brain that still remembered I was on assignment barged to the forefront. What was that? Did he say blood?
"Dreams aren't stored in blood!" Mike said with a cackle. "That's ridiculous. They come from your head!"
"You're the expert," William said.
He flipped a switch beside the cuff and sucked a breath through his teeth. The chair hissed, then thrummed like a heartbeat. William exhaled and relaxed into the chair, eyes closed, as the machinery above the fish tank whirred to life and a thin tube in the bundle beneath his arm filled with crimson liquid.
"It's printing something!" Veruca shouted. She hurried to the aquarium—far too quickly for someone in heels—to watch the rails descend.
Mike followed, and after a moment's hesitation, I did as well. It seemed wrong to abandon William to a mechanical chair that might exsanguinate him at any moment. But the printer was ridiculously fast, and its results were unbelievable. In the time it took Veruca to run five feet in heels, the machine laid down a chocolate topographic map that covered the entire floor of the aquarium.
As I watched, it coated the chocolate terrain with wispy sugar-grass in pink and purple, tiny toadstools with rainbow sprinkles, and mint-green mud puddles. Dark chocolate stumps sprouted, a layer at a time, and grew into trees. Cream-puff mushrooms the size of office chairs spun from printer heads faster than the tires on an F1 racecar.
I choked on my next breath as liquid poured into a crooked stream that ran like a chasm through the terrain. Not the thin melted chocolate I would have anticipated from William's imagination, but a scarlet-colored cherry pie filling—the kind you knew at a glance was homemade. If I were alone, I would have wept with joy at the sight. It was unbelievable. Impossible.
It was my fantasy.
Okay, not exactly mine. I'd have made the grass pastel blue and the clouds candy-floss pink. But it was so close. Did William and I somehow share the same dream? We both loved sugar, so it made sense we'd both imagine a candy world. But the same landscape with the same cherry river? It was—
"A world of pure imagination," he said, directly behind us, and we all jumped. "Try not to leave fingerprints on the tank."
When did he get out of the chair?
"Can we eat it?" Mike asked—because, of course he did.
"Not yet. One day, we'll build a room that guests can explore. For now, we keep the chamber sealed to recycle the materials. Would you like to do the honors?"
He gestured to a plastic handle that hung beside the aquarium, and Mike didn't hesitate to yank on the thing with gusto. I wasn't sure what I expected it to trigger—a flush of water? Flamethrowers?—but I did not expect the printer to whir back to life and un-print the entire scene, one layer at a time. Was that even possible? Hadn't some of the materials merged after printing?
William wandered back to the chair to fiddle with the cuff while Veruca and Mike watched the machine like cats with a feather wand. I took advantage of the opportunity to follow him.
"Uh…William?"
He flipped the cuff open and fiddled with a needle in the base, near where his wrist would have been. "Hmm?"
"About what Violet said. About us..."
His head raised, and there was a flash of something feral in his golden eyes. Fear? Panic? Rage? But it vanished quickly, replaced by the uptight expression I'd grown accustomed to.
"Have I been anything less than professional with you, Charlie Bucket?"
My face felt hot and cold at once. That response was far from the one I hoped for and left little room to press for a better one. I shook my head for lack of a better option. "No."
"Good. Good. That's good."
Was it? God. Why was he so hard to read? I could really use some of his superior auto-whatsits memory right now.
Mike interrupted at a volume many decibels above where it needed to be. "Can I have a go?"
I could have picked him up and thrown him bodily from the room for ending our conversation so abruptly, though I had no idea what more I could have said. I needed more clarity, though. Damnit, Mike!
William released the cuff and stood to face him. "It's not sanitary at the moment. The mechanism that should have replaced the needle failed to function. I'll look into it after the tour."
Veruca's heels echoed on the tile floor as she stomped over. "What. Have you got a disease or something?"
The patchy flush of anger flared in William's cheeks again. "Needle sharing is a health code violation. You should know this. Your father works in pharmaceuticals. And I can honestly say I don't want to see this young man's fantasies printed in chocolate. Do you?"
Mike guffawed. "Smart! You got me there."
Even I had to chuckle. William wasn't wrong. I had no desire to see the mess inside Mike's head. But it did give me a wild idea. What if I could show William what was inside my head? If he was embarrassed rather than angered by Violet's accusation, maybe a glimpse at our near-identical fantasies would bring him out of his shell?
"I think that went well!" he said with a grin and a tiny hop. "Congratulations on making it through a single demonstration without incident. I think you've all earned the right to visit our final room with samples. Mike, this next one is going to blow your mind. I'm sure of it. Let's go!"
He pointed his cane into the air like a starting pistol and danced towards the exit with Veruca and Mike in tow, but I hesitated beside the chair, overwhelmed by temptation. In under ten seconds, I could wriggle out of my jacket, strap into the cuff, and flip the switch. It was almost too easy.
I pushed up my sleeve and steeled my nerves, but the sight of the needle gave me pause. Was it true that diseases were transmitted by sharing such tiny things? If William had something contagious—or worse, monstrous—what were my chances of catching it?
Ugh. Damnit. Arthur's nonsense was getting to me again, and I didn't have time for nonsense. William was nearly to the door, and it was now or never. I had to be quick.
But…when I looked at him, all I could see was his toothy grin. There was a twinkle in his eyes for the first time since we left the cafeteria. He was so happy his demonstration went well. Could I really ruin that for him? Was I that selfish?
I let my sleeve fall, and a weight settled in my chest.
"You coming, Charlie?"
William's smile faltered, and I nodded as quickly as I could to prevent it from vanishing altogether. "Sorry! I was thinking about the malfunctioning needle mechanism."
I scurried to catch up, and his expression brightened again.
"There'll be plenty of time for that after the tour if you're still interested in my offer."
I stopped in my tracks.
If you're still interested? Wait. Was that why he was acting so strangely? He thought Violet's accusation would make me turn down his partnership? Seriously?
The excited "Of course!" that squeaked out of my throat sounded more like a cartoon dog than an adult human, but I didn't care. I'd been so obsessed with the idea that Violet had shamed or offended William, I hadn't stopped to consider the obvious. She'd thrown him off his game!
The edges of his eyes crinkled, and his lips twitched as if he was holding in a laugh. With the end of his cane, he pushed a button on the wall. The gorgeous double-doors opened automatically, and he held an arm out towards them like an usher.
"Well, then. Shall we?"