Always more work to be done.
Chapter Twelve
The black paint of the walls around him was hard to focus on after so many hours in front of the brightly lit screens of the surveillance room, but Luca didn’t mind.
Jamie had pulled him out at the end of his shift, and Luca had been certain that he was being sent back.
To the testing room.
To that hard metal chair.
To . . .
But that wasn’t what Jamie wanted him for. He had asked if Luca still had the keys, and then sent him down here.
The black floor.
Very few residents knew enough about the building to even be aware of the black floor’s existence. Luca didn’t know of anyone else who came down here. He knew the runners and reds alike probably had access, but he had never run into another soul while traversing the black halls of the basement level.
His feet tapped off the black tiles of the floor as he went—the only noise in the abandoned corridors—and he relished the sound. It meant he was alone, which was a novel concept within the building.
Though he knew that would never entirely be true. His eyes traced over a spot on the ceiling where he knew an invisible camera was planted. He could visualize the angle from the other end—from his chair in the surveillance room that he had sat at nearly every day for years now—and he knew that whoever was in there now was watching him as he made his way to the back of this floor.
Luca was glad Jamie had sent him down here. It meant that they still trusted him enough to send him off on his own within the building. Six months before, Jamie had approached Luca and presented him with a ring of keys that he said could unlock nearly every door in the Eschatorologic.
Not every door, he had implied. But enough. He wasn’t allowed to keep all the keys—Jamie always took back the ones that were too valuable, too dangerous. But access to anything beyond the door to his room was more than Luca had been privileged to before—more than he knew any of the other residents had access to. He knew it was so he could carry out roles around the building without needing a runner escort—like the job he had been given now—but it still felt like a taste of freedom to him. One of the first he had ever been given inside that building.
Depending on the day, Luca was sometimes asked to go up, either to bring or take away something from the residents who lived above ground. They never remembered him, but he enjoyed getting to talk to the older residents, nonetheless.
Other days, Jamie would send Luca to tell someone—usually either a runner or Dr. Dubose—a piece of information. Luca never really understood the messages but was happy enough just being able to roam around the building.
Today, he had been asked to go down to the black floor and retrieve a file for Jamie. Luca didn’t know what most of the rooms on this floor held—too many of the locks didn’t belong to any of the keys on his ring and too many of the rooms didn’t have cameras—but usually when he was asked to come down here it was to retrieve a file. No one told Luca what the files were for or what was within them, but to the best of his knowledge this floor was nothing more than a glorified filing cabinet. The first few times he had come down here, Jamie had shown him the rooms he would have access to, and how to know where to pull the files from. Now, Luca was sent out on his own, and he was taking the opportunity to drag his feet far more than usual.
The longer he lingered on this floor, he knew, the longer he could avoid his regular duties.
The longer he could avoid the surveillance room.
The cameras.
Her.
Impossible, incredible, intangible her.
One hour before, Luca had been working.
Just working.
It had been fine—normal, uneventful.
And then he’d just . . . seen her.
In a camera feed. On a screen. Like she was anyone else.
The girl from his dreams.
He knew that it couldn’t be real, that dreams didn’t manifest themselves like that, out of nowhere. Especially not for him—Luca had never really been the type to have dreams come true.
And yet.
She had been there—he was certain of it.
In the lobby of the building.
His building.
Luca had been reeling over this, over the stupefying sight of her face, a face that he thought he knew so well, reflected as if straight from his dreams, and there, into the building’s lobby.
And then Jamie came in, yanking him out of the daze he had fallen into upon seeing the girl’s face on the screens of the surveillance room.
Luca was glad for it—the distraction. Glad to have something else to focus on. Except that now he was alone with only his thoughts, his memories, his dreams, and so there was nothing to stand in the way of him thinking back to her face, only an hour before.
So close to where he had been seated a floor below.
Luca shuddered internally. It was possible that he hadn’t seen her—that it had been someone else entirely, or that his mind had made her up. He didn’t think he wanted to know the truth. Didn’t want to know yet if it was real or not, if she was real or not.
So instead, he was down here, avoiding reality as thoroughly as he could.
Luca came up to the door he needed to access. None of the doors on that floor had any labels, but he came and went so often that by now he knew this part of the floor well, and knew which doors were the ones he would be able to go through. The key ring jangled in his hand as he pulled it out of the deep pockets of his gray scrubs. His key ring had far fewer keys than the ones belonging to the runners, but Luca still relished the sight of all those small pieces of metal, strung together and belonging to him. As much as anything could belong to him. The proof that, to a limited extent, he could leave the narrow world that had been built up for him.
