Everly tumbled out of the elevator and into the lobby, panting hard and struggling to keep her feet from tripping over themselves as she escaped far from any reminder of the hundredth floor. She had to walk over to Sophia’s desk and lean against it while she caught her breath.
She still was not thinking about what had happened, or what she had seen, but one thing was becoming ever clearer the longer she tried not to think and tried not to process all that she had been exposed to on the upper floor of the Eschatorologic: she needed to find Richard. She’d thought she could do it on her own, find the answers on her own, but it was all too strange. Too impossible. She needed to find him, and she needed to force him to tell her the truth—whatever that took. She didn’t know what to believe anymore, whom to turn to, whom to trust, and could feel herself spiraling. But then she heard the elevator doors opening behind her, and after flinching briefly at the sound, she turned around to see Jamie stepping out.
He looked at her curiously as he approached, and Everly gulped, certain that all her fears and suspicions were splayed across her face. Jamie smiled, though, and came up right next to her.
“Miss Tertium,” he said brightly. “What a pleasure. Looking for the doc again?”
Everly cleared her throat, trying hard to banish the tremor she could feel raking her body—the thoughts, the thoughts, she was banishing the thoughts. “Yes,” she managed to say. “Do you know where he is?”
Jamie’s brow furrowed slightly as he frowned—an expression that looked odd to Everly on his usually cheery face. “He didn’t tell you? Look, I’m sorry you came all this way, but I don’t think Richard is available.” Everly opened her mouth, but Jamie cut her off. “He’s not in his lab, I can tell you that, but he is pretty wrapped up in his work today. I can make sure to tell him you stopped by, if you want.”
Now it was Everly’s turn to frown in confusion. “What’s he working on?” she asked, but Jamie shook his head.
“Couldn’t say. I don’t understand half the projects that man involves himself in.”
Everly bit her lip, frustrated and unsure. She wasn’t ready to leave yet.
A lie. She had been ready to leave since she had entered that final room upstairs.
But she knew there was much more to it than that.
A thought struck her, and she lifted her head. “Jamie,” she said, trying to strike a level of intentionality in her voice. “Since Richard can’t show me around the Eschatorologic today, do you think you could instead? I know you said you would be up to showing me more of your work, and I would still love to see, if you’re willing.”
A half-truth. She would love to see more of the building, more of the parts that Richard hadn’t toted her around to yet. She did not, however, have any care or interest in computers, or programming, or rubber ducks.
All a means to an end, she told herself.
Everly could see Jamie’s hesitation, could see the rejection building in his mouth. But then that hesitation froze, shifted over, was transformed by something . . . else. Something that Everly couldn’t read.
(That something, by the way, was the voice of the Warden in Jamie’s head, telling him to distract Miss Tertium, distract her at all costs. Keep her engaged in the building, whatever you do.)
“You know what?” Jamie said, his smile slowly returning to his face. “Sure, why not? You can come down with me to my lab space if you want. I’ll show you some of what goes on behind the scenes as far as the tech side of the Eschatorologic.”
Jamie started walking back toward the elevator, gesturing for Everly to follow. He inserted his key into the slot by the B2 button. They exited a few seconds later into the sprawling black floor and headed all the way back to Jamie’s office.
“Here we are,” Jamie said, letting her in. “Home sweet home. Sorry it’s a little cramped; I’m not exactly used to visitors down here.”
“No, it’s great,” Everly said, stepping over a jumble of cords that lay haphazardly on the floor.
“Here,” Jamie said, moving a stack of papers off one of the chairs. “You can sit. I’ll get everything set up.”
Everly sat down and watched as Jamie booted up his computer, then proceeded to type rapidly for a minute or two, fingers flying over the keyboard as he brought up whatever he wanted to show Everly.
“So,” Jamie said when he was done typing, and he spun around in his chair to face Everly. “This is the core program I’ve been designing for the last few years and working with. See this here,” and he pointed to a string of code that looked like gibberish to Everly. “That’s where I input the data from each round of testing. Essentially, the information your grandpa provides me. Then it runs through this string of commands,” he slid his finger down the screen, “and spits back some statistical data that I then share with the boss. Energy readouts and all that. Pretty cool, huh?”
Everly leaned closer to the screen, as though assessing the code. “Very interesting,” she lied. Then, without turning to look at Jamie, she asked, “So who’s this boss of yours anyway?”
“Oh, the Warden? Well, no one knows, really,” Jamie said in an altogether unconvincing voice. “I send over the data as encrypted code and then the Warden sends back messages if there’s any further information. Not much of a people person, I gather.”
“The Warden,” Everly repeated, trying out the sound of the title in her mouth. “You’ve never met him? But he is in the building somewhere, isn’t he?”
“I assume so,” Jamie said, but Everly thought she saw him look down, evading her gaze. “All our servers within the Eschatorologic are connected, and the data is sent back and forth on the same receiver, so the Warden would have to be somewhere in here to be able to get it. No idea where, though.”
“What does this person do? This Warden?”
“The Warden guides us all,” Jamie said, as though reciting from a liturgy. Everly stared at him, but he didn’t elaborate.
“So,” Everly said, trying a different tack, “what kind of data do you process?”
Jamie opened his mouth to respond, but before he could, a sharp beeping started to ring from the computer in front of him. Jamie turned back to the console with a frown, typing out something quickly, and then spoke toward the computer. “What happened?”
Everly jumped slightly when a voice came back at them from the computer. “Sir? You should come up here. It’s—well, he tried to leave. Again. It’s all under control, but I thought you should know. The runners have all shown up, for whatever good that does.”
“Fine,” Jamie snapped at the voice. “I’ll be up in a minute.” He pushed a button on the computer that made the screen go dark, then got up and swept out of the room.
Jamie was clearly frazzled. He kept running his hands over his buzzed hair and twitching his head back and forth. It was perhaps for this reason that he didn’t notice, or didn’t care, that Everly followed him. They got back into the elevator, and Everly was surprised when he took out his keys and pressed the button for B1.
As the elevator doors slid open again, revealing a new level, Everly’s breath caught. Floor B1 was not what she had been expecting. For one, it had color. Too much color, Everly thought, as she followed Jamie down the hall. The wall to her left was a bright red, to her right an equally vibrant blue. The ceiling was green, the floor purple, and as Everly walked down it she couldn’t help but feel as though she were in a tunnel barreling toward the center of a carnival.
Jamie took them on a path that wove through more colorful hallways, until they reached a bronze door that he shoved open, pushing his way into the room with Everly unnoticed at his heels.
“What happened?” Jamie asked sharply to the people inside.
Everly saw three figures in the room, two of whom were burly men dressed in dark-blue uniforms with black masks that covered the lower halves of their faces. There was something about the men that made Everly’s stomach churn, that made her do a double take, as though there was something off about them. Something in their stature, maybe, or the way they stood as Jamie barreled toward them. Or maybe something about the way that neither of them spoke, or moved, or even seemed to breathe.
Behind the two eerie men dressed in blue was a wall of screens. They covered an entire side of the room, and looking more closely Everly realized that they showed video of different locations throughout the building. She noticed the lobby, a series of gray hallways, even bedrooms of the residents she had visited with Richard. Everly was so caught up in taking it all in that she almost failed to notice the third person in the room, until he was at her elbow, pulling her to the side.
