Until Malaysia. Richard Dubose—recently made Dr. Richard Dubose—was trying to find lunch. As he meandered through stalls manned by people with loud voices and bustling tables of produce, trying and utterly failing to remember enough Malay to ask to buy a starfruit or a durian, he happened to stumble over something in the road. A pebble? A misplaced shoe? A tiny bit of fate? Who’s to say, really, but whatever it was, it caused Dr. Richard Dubose to fall, landing facedown in the street, where the crowd of shoppers kindly parted around him as they went on their way. In a panic, Richard sat up, searching around for his machine—which, of course, he carried everywhere, despite the odd stares that were often cast his way as a result. Just as he was beginning to hyperventilate, not able to locate the machine, he heard something. A bleep. A ding, a whirring, searching cry that perked his ears and caused him to swivel his head where he came face-to-face with the sight of his machine, lit up like he had never seen it before.
Holding the machine out to Richard was a small girl with small hands that were struggling to stay firmly wrapped around the handle well enough to keep it up. She smiled at Richard when she saw him looking, her eyes darting in the light of the machine.
Now speechless, Richard took the machine back from the girl, his eyes remaining focused on her all the while.
She gave him her name. He gave her his. She pointed at the machine and asked a question he hated himself for not being able to understand. He asked if she wanted to see it do more, which he didn’t know if she could understand, but she smiled and nodded just the same.
Feeling only the slightest twinge of apprehension, Richard led the girl back to the room he had rented for the month. The room that he was calling a lab, even though it was hardly even a room in the first place. The floor was dirt and the ceiling had holes, but it was all he could afford with the remaining funds he had from his university. No one wanted to see him succeed, and if not for the girl following behind him, even Richard likely would have given up in due time.
But the fact remained that the girl did follow him. She entered his room and sat down on his bed as he fiddled with the knobs on his machine and opened his suitcase to fish out a needle and syringe. The girl eyed these warily, but also, perhaps, curiously.
Richard did not expect the girl to agree. In fact, he expected her to run the instant the needle was anywhere close to her skin, and so it was with a hearty deal of shock that he realized she wasn’t going to flee. Not when he approached her, not when he gestured between her arm and the needle. Not even when he pricked through her skin, drawing from her vein a thick slew of blood that he then bottled up, staring at with uninhibited adoration. Unfiltered hope.
In his hovel in Malaysia, Richard did not have nearly the amount of equipment that he would have liked. He did, however, have just enough to look at the girl’s blood, and to determine all he needed to know.
All he needed to have hope again.
And to go in search of a place for that hope to rest.
In search of a building.
Chapter Eighteen
The person in black thought it was a good idea.
“Yes,” the person in black replied to Dr. Dubose’s suggestion. “Yes, I think you’re right. She’ll do better without you here.”
“So, I’ll step away then,” Dr. Dubose said. “For the time being.”
“Yes.” The person in black had accepted that what Dr. Dubose had said before was true—it was good that this young woman, Everly, had arrived. And now the person in black was thinking rapidly through possibilities and scenarios, calculations and stray factors. “You have become a comfortable figure for her. We need to take that away, see how she reacts. We need to give her the freedom to become lost in the building on her own.” That was how it had happened in the past, after all. Patterns were made to repeat.
“What would you suggest in the interim?”
The person in black shrugged, though Dr. Dubose, on the other side of the canvas divider, could not see this. “We have spare rooms down here, for emergencies. Take up residency in one of the vacant apartments, wait out the month. I will continue to observe her.”
“And then?”
“And then when she is cast free in the building without limitations or expectations, we will see where she goes. I know her, her mind. Sooner or later, she will find herself in a scenario where she cannot leave. Or wouldn’t want to. And then you may return—for the grand conclusion.”
“In the meantime,” Dr. Dubose said, “I want to increase the testing.”
“We have already been increasing it. You know this.”
“Yes, but now it is more important than ever.”
The person in black paused. “You cannot be seen. Not by her, at least.”
“Then have Jamie do it. He has more of a stomach for those affairs than me, anyhow. But this is just as necessary as securing her presence here.”
“Very well,” the person in black said, contemplative. “Since you are so sure it is necessary.”
“I am,” Dr. Dubose asserted fervently. “Oh, I’ve never been more sure of anything.”
Chapter Nineteen
Luca went to work that day, like he was supposed to. He sat in the chair of the surveillance room like he was supposed to, and he stared at the hundreds of screens spread out in front of him. Like he was supposed to.
He would always do what he was supposed to.
But his thoughts were far from where they were supposed to be.
They were focused on a fiery girl with fiery hair.
Real. She was definitely real, and here, and not a figment of his most buried imaginations.
Everly.
She had said her name, and he could have sworn he already knew it, though of course that would have been impossible.
No more impossible than knowing her face, he supposed.
She hadn’t seemed to know him, and in fact, the more they had talked out there in the lobby, the more she had diverged from her dream self. No longer was she mysterious and elusive, accompanied by that ever-present cloud of dread.
Now she was just a young woman. And he was almost relieved.
But she was Dr. Dubose’s granddaughter.
Luca certainly had not anticipated that development. For him, she had only ever been a figure cast in flames and smoke, born to life out of ether and desire. Realizing that, instead, she had been born to parents, had grown up, had lived a life outside of that building—it broke, in some ways, the spell that Luca had imagined her casting over him. In other ways it made her all the more real. And all the more impossible.
