With his hand still wrapped around hers, Luca’s eyes leaped from the clasped hands up to Everly’s eyes and back. He opened his mouth as if he wanted to say something (I dreamed of this, he would say, and wouldn’t say, and would dream of saying, and would never admit to dreaming of saying), but before he got the chance, a piercing ding echoed through the lobby. An instant later, the elevator doors slid open, revealing the tall, pale form of Jamie Griffith.
Jamie’s eyes focused on Luca first, who had dropped Everly’s hand and moved a foot away, then jumped over to Everly, then swung back. “Mr. Reyes,” he said, and Everly took that to mean Luca. “I think it is time you should be heading back down, don’t you?”
Luca straightened and nodded once without speaking. He started to walk away but turned back briefly, eyes again catching Everly’s for an instant.
“And Miss Tertium,” Jamie said, drawing Everly’s attention back to him. “I see you have returned to us. Are you looking for your grandfather?”
“Yes, actually,” she said, then glanced around, realizing that Luca had left, though she hadn’t heard the ding of the elevator doors opening. “Do you know where he is? I need to talk to him.”
“Of course,” Jamie said brightly. “I can take you right to him. In fact, I can give you that tour I suggested before, if you’re up for it.”
Everly considered his offer. She remembered Richard’s hesitation around Jamie, the way he had pushed against going with him. But she did need to find Richard. And maybe she could get Jamie to tell her what Richard was clearly keeping to himself about this place.
Besides, she tried to reason with herself, Jamie didn’t seem like a bad guy. (They never do.) He was nice to her, at least. So maybe Richard was wrong about him.
“All right,” she said. “I’d like that. Lead the way.”
Inside the elevator, Everly was surprised to see Jamie pull out a key ring from one of the deep pockets of his red uniform, selecting a small silver one that looked suited for lockets and music boxes. While neither of the latter were available inside the elevator, there were the two circular key holes on the elevator’s wall panel, and Jamie inserted the dainty silver key into one such hole next to a button labeled B2. Everly did not say anything, but her insides buzzed. What was important enough to warrant being kept so locked up?
(Black offices with screens, white rooms with tables, furnaces wide enough for a single body.)
As the elevator began to descend, Everly looked over at Jamie, studying him closely as she asked, “Jamie, did you ever happen to meet my dad? His name was Jacob Tertium. He . . . he . . .” died, she couldn’t bring herself to say.
Jamie tilted his head, as though considering. “Nope, can’t say I’ve had the pleasure. Why do you ask?”
“Oh,” Everly said, “no reason.” If she was honest with herself, Everly didn’t know why she had asked Jamie that. Some part of her thought maybe, maybe Jamie could be the person to send her dad the anonymous letter she’d found? Not that she had any reason to suspect that. But despite what Richard had told her, she wasn’t convinced he’d offer her the answers he’d promised. She’d been hoping Jamie might be able to.
The elevator doors slid open as they reached their destination, and Everly exited onto the floor beyond.
More halls. Always more halls.
These halls were black rather than the bleak gray that permeated through the rest of the building (except where it didn’t).
Unlike the upper levels, this floor did not run straight back in a single-file line, with doors uniformly paneling the walls on either side in a two-by-two pattern. Rather, down on this black-painted floor, the halls seemed to spiral away from the elevator’s focal point like roots seeking water by growing far and fast away from their source. She couldn’t see where they all went, or how far back the halls stretched, and this filled her with a distinct and unnameable queasiness: distinct because it was similar to the feeling of standing on the edge of a lofty bridge and having vertigo wash over you; unnameable because Everly had never stood on the edge of a bridge, and so she wouldn’t know that this was precisely what she was experiencing.
To reconcile the odd sense of unwinding Everly felt as her eyes tried to take in the entire black floor at once, she chose instead to focus on the black tiling that her feet treaded across as she followed Jamie down one of the paths, and then another, and finally a third, at which point Jamie halted. He placed a single palm flat against the black-painted frame of the door and then pushed gently against the door’s surface, stepping into the space beyond. As Everly joined him she realized that it was a lab of sorts. The only labs that Everly had seen were of the high school biology sort, but she thought this was probably close enough: brilliantly white walls that contrasted starkly against the darkness of the hallways just outside; rows of long stainless steel tables covered in beakers and test tubes; stacks of papers piled up on the stainless steel tables and in corners on the white-tiled floor and propped up haphazardly in the cubbies of shelves that lined the back wall of the room.
“This is one of the open labs,” Jamie said, gesturing around the room. “Available to the few of us who may need it.”
“What are the labs for?” Everly asked, gazing around the space, looking for some indication of why a lab would be needed in a building that otherwise could pass for an unorthodox apartment building.
“Think I’ll leave that one to your gramps to answer,” Jamie said with a chuckle. There was an edge to his laugh. Something Everly didn’t understand yet.
“So, Richard works in this lab?” Everly asked, pressing more.
Jamie tilted his head to the side. “Sometimes. He mostly stays in his private lab. Says it’s easier to get work done that way.” Another chuckle. “Can’t say I blame the man. Sometimes the noise in this place can get to you. Come on,” he said, stepping back toward the door. “I’ll show you where I spend most of my days, and then I’ll take you to where your grandpa is probably camping out.”
Everly followed Jamie as he wove through a series of interconnecting halls, all painted the same impossible black that made the floors and walls and doors all blend one into another, like an endless sea of ink. Finally, they stopped in front of another door, and Jamie again laid his palm flat upon it, pushing the door open.
“Here we are,” he said as Everly came in after him. “Home sweet home.”
It was a much smaller room than the lab he had first shown her—to the extent where she was almost hesitant to call it a room at all. Far more like a closet—a very dark, cramped closet.
A large table took up the middle of the room/closet, upon which sat numerous computer monitors and hard drives, all blinking ferociously up at Everly with their flashing lights and muted beeps. Set up perpendicular to the first large table was a second desk, covered in just as much hardware and cables, and between the two was a chair that could swivel back and forth between the two workstations.
“This is where you work?” Everly asked, going over to inspect a rubber duck that was positioned at the base of one of the screens on the desk.
The correct answer would have been: yes, and no; yes, this was where Jamie worked, but no, this was not only where Jamie worked—there were also the other rooms, the (usually) white rooms, one of which was, in fact, only one hall to the left and currently empty, but also currently not white, because it had not yet been sanitized after his most recent . . . session in there.
But instead, Jamie responded by saying, “Yeah,” and then he rubbed the back of his neck, as though self-conscious of the half-truth he was choosing to share. “I know, tech nerd, right?”
“No,” Everly said. “I think it’s great. What do you do in here?”
“Well, I was brought in to speak computer. Essentially, people like your grandpa find data, and I upload it into a program I developed that assesses the information for viability. I don’t understand what half the data means, but I guess that’s what the others are for.”
Another partial truth: some of the data came from men like Dr. Richard Dubose, but some of the data also came from actions that Jamie himself carried out in rooms like the currently not-white room a hall to the left. But again, Jamie chose to edit this facet of the truth out in his explanations. For now.
Everly slid her hand along the top of one of the monitors. “So, all the data you look at,” Everly said, watching Jamie as she spoke, trying to gauge how much he might know. “What’s it all for? I mean, I know you don’t understand all the science behind it and everything”—(an understatement)—“but you must know something, right? What you’re working toward?”
Jamie smiled as Everly spoke, the same as ever, but his face had assumed an inscrutable expression now, and he shook his head.
“Sorry,” he said. “Even if I did know, I doubt I’d be able to explain it well. I’m horrible with words. That’s why I’m the computer guy, right?”
Everly nodded but bit the inside of her cheek in frustration. “Right,” she said.
Then Jamie’s smile widened into a more genuine expression, and he waved toward the door. “I’d better get you to the old man,” he said. “I’ve got work to do, and you’re probably bored to death looking at all this junk.”
“Not at all,” Everly said. “In fact, I think this is all fascinating. Any chance you’d let me come back sometime? I would love to learn more about what you’re doing, even if I don’t understand any of it.” A truth and a lie: she would like to come back, but not at all because she was fascinated by computers and completely because she was fascinated by everything else in the building. And Everly was ever so slightly better at people than she was at technology; she knew that Jamie had kept his half-truths from her, now what she wanted to know was why. More than that, she wanted to know the other halves he was keeping to himself.
