He was not trying to find her. As his eyes traced over the screens with half-hearted effort, Luca was willing his vision to avoid her, even though he knew she had to be somewhere in the building, and so she had to be somewhere on the screens. He knew that if he found her, he wouldn’t be able to look at anything else for the duration of his shift.
Fortunately for Luca, there were too many screens to count, and so even if he had been intentionally seeking her out, it likely would have taken a considerable amount of time to chance upon her. So, he continued to glance across the rows of tiny screens, relaxing as more and more of his shift passed without catching sight of her. He watched runners bring trays of food up to the older residents, children group together in the mess hall for lunch, Sophia sit stoically behind her desk. People worked, and slept, and sat in rooms and stared at the air around them. There were hundreds of people living in the Eschatorologic, and Luca fell into an easy rhythm of watching them all go about their routines.
It was nearing the end of his shift when his eyes traced over one of the small screens, and he kept going before his mind caught up with what he knew he had seen.
It was not the auburn of her hair, which he had so been dreading finding, but rather movement in one of the other nearby screens that drew his eye.
After watching the screen for a moment, Luca cursed and shoved away from the desk. He ran out of the room, down the halls, making his way across the floor as fast as he could without drawing any unwanted attention. The only comfort he had as he pivoted around corners and down new corridors was that, with him out of the surveillance room, there shouldn’t be any eyes on him.
(None except those of a person dressed in black who, once again, was fixated on the screens through which Luca now ran.)
When Luca flung open the door, he found Maurie in a ball on the floor, rocking back and forth and sobbing uncontrollably. Luca cursed again under his breath, then quickly entered the room and shut the door behind him. He stepped over toward the kid—a boy no older than eight or nine—and sat down on the floor next to him, placing a steady hand on his shoulder.
“Maur,” Luca said in a soft voice. “Maurie, you have to snap out of it. Do you hear me?”
But the boy made no indication of having registered Luca’s words. His wails only became louder, more frantic, and so Luca took the boy by the shoulders and pulled him up into a sitting position, shaking him twice.
“Maurie, you can’t do that. Not here. They’ll hear you. Are you listening? They’ll come.”
That, at least, seemed to get through to the young boy, for his breathing began to calm marginally, though wet tears still streaked down his thin cheeks. Eventually, his sobs turned instead to hiccups, and he sat there, with Luca’s hands on his shoulders, heaving silently until he could breathe normally. With a sigh, Luca removed his hands and looked the boy in the eyes.
“Are you okay now?”
He nodded once. “I—I don’t—”
“I know,” Luca said. “It’s okay. They didn’t see. It’s going to be okay.”
And Maurie nodded again, though neither of them was entirely convinced of this.
Luca left once he was sure Maurie wouldn’t break down again, and he headed back to the surveillance room, hoping no one had noticed his absence.
It was happening more and more often. More of the testing, and also more of this: the breakdowns. First Michael and now Maurie, in the same week. Something was happening to them, the people living in that building. Luca didn’t understand it, but he knew whatever it was, it couldn’t be good.
(And, as was often the case, Luca was right.)
Chapter Twenty
This is what Maurie saw:
Himself.
Maurie was preparing to return to his shift in the laundry room when he stumbled to his knees in his bedroom, overcome with . . . something.
Dizziness, one could say.
Pain, another might add.
The blinding torrent of uncertainty, a third might pipe in.
All of the above, really.
Maurie was overcome with a painful dizziness that accompanied the blinding torrent of uncertainty that was heightened by him having no idea what was happening to him.
It was getting worse for everyone in the building, after all.
And then he clenched his eyes shut to block out whatever it was that had overcome him without his consent. Only, rather than blissful darkness behind his eyelids, he instead saw his own face, reflected back at him.
This is not entirely correct. He saw his own face, but about twenty or thirty years older. It was hard to say, but Maurie could tell—as one can often tell their own face, even when others couldn’t—that it was him.
And he was screaming.
Not the real Maurie, crouched on the floor of his very gray bedroom. Well, that Maurie, too. But first, the one painted on his eyelids, who was strapped to a chair in an all-white room that Maurie himself had not yet been brought to (he was still too young, even by the building’s loose interpretation of “young”).
This Maurie had a blade to his neck that wasn’t meant to be felt, but oh he could feel it.
The slick cut that scorched through him as the blade ran up from his shoulder blade to the base of his skull, obliterating all other thoughts and logic in the face of the blinding pain that followed.
And because the other Maurie felt it, this Maurie did, too.
And so, he began to scream, clawing at his still-shut eyelids until they flung open, and he returned to the banal floor of his gray bedroom.
(Cell.)
The screaming cut itself off once the residual pain left, but then the tears came in its place.
This is how Luca found him: racked in uncontrollable sobs as the vision of what happened to the other Maurie was forever locked in place at the very front of his mind.
He thought that he had somehow seen his own future, which is not quite right.
