She was on her own.
Everly considered leaving. She thought better of it a moment later, looking around at all the people who had come out to celebrate her father’s life, but an instant after that she realized she didn’t even care. None of them had truly known him anyhow. They had only come for the cake, which was now set out on a plastic folding table by the door, the words Our Most Sincere Condolences traced out in poorly scripted black icing across the center of the buttercream sheet. They probably wouldn’t even notice if she left, Everly thought, and even if they did, she could see no reason why she should care. No reason at all.
Everly stood up from the wall to leave, trying to appear as nonchalant as possible as she walked between the well-wishers, making her way toward the doors of the reception hall.
As she stepped out into the deepening evening air just beyond the doors, she caught sight of a blur of brown fabric far ahead of her. Straining her eyes against the dusk that was swiftly descending, Everly could just make out the shape of the strange man from before—the one she remembered and knew yet was certain she had never met—as he strode off into the night, the shadow of his curved bowler hat protruding distinctly above his head as he left without so much as an insincere commiseration offered her way.
Chapter Three
It was his own fault, and he knew it. Luca shouldn’t have told Jamie that he’d take on the second shift, but he hadn’t been able to resist. It had felt like the right decision at the time, and like all the worst decisions, it was only through the harsh lens of retrospect that he could see how little he had thought this through. After nearly a full twenty-four hours in front of the screens set up around the cramped surveillance room, Luca’s eyes had more than glazed over, and he was becoming afraid they’d get stuck that way if he stayed in there much longer: frozen in a state of half-awareness.
Struggling—failing—to suppress a yawn, Luca leaned back in his chair and ran his eyes over the screens again, searching for anything he might have missed the past thousand times he had scanned the camera feeds. It was proving to be an unusually dull shift—doubly so, for the added hours of monotony. Despite the long hours and unending boredom, it was almost worth it for the chance to be alone, if only for a little while.
To be the eyes instead of the watched.
(As far as he was aware, at least.)
And to use his eyes for his own purposes.
If only he could stay awake to use them. Luca could feel himself fading, and every few seconds he had to jerk his head up to prevent himself from collapsing from exhaustion. If only something interesting would happen, he thought. Something to wake him up.
Unbidden, his mind began to drift, in a half-conscious state, to the dreams that haunted him during the night—not the only reason, but certainly one of the reasons that had driven him to make the ill-guided decision to stay awake through the night in front of those awful screens.
Though, perhaps haunt wasn’t the right word. Haunting implied ghosts from a past lived through and regretted. If anything, Luca’s dreams hinted at something that hadn’t yet come to pass, if he was feeling high-minded enough to label himself as being prophetic.
And really, would he have been that far off?
He was never able to place a finger on what it was about his nighttime visions that unsettled him so, but more often than not, Luca would jerk awake during the night, drenched in sweat and with fleeting images filling his head, then vanishing moments later. He didn’t ever retain much from them—mostly just a feeling of dread—but occasionally he would find something tangible to hang on to, something that he thought he could remember, if only for that brief instant.
Sometimes he saw her. She was always different: sometimes a child, with strawberry-blond pigtails and a lopsided grin; sometimes older, with a sharp chin and mouth perpetually turned down on the ends; most of the time she was a young woman in her twenties, around his age—fierce, tall, defiant.
Always she burned.
Last night she had returned, the auburn hair a fiery halo encircling her head, her eyes burnished with their own kind of flame as they met his in sleep—and in memory. But she always left far more quickly than he would have liked, and in her absence Luca was always more shaken than he could reasonably account for. He didn’t think she was the cause of the fear that always gnawed at him after such dreams—though he could not have said why—but nonetheless, where she walked, so did the shivers that racked his body the next day, casting all his thoughts into a shadow of doubt and worry.
They were getting worse. When he was a kid, Luca would find himself awoken by a fiery nightmare once, maybe twice a year. They were always vague, already distant by the time he had shaken himself fully awake.
That changed years ago, for no clear reason that Luca could think of, but now they were arriving more and more frequently.
Most days now, he was afraid of closing his eyes for too long, afraid that that alone would be enough to hurtle him back into the dreams.
So, to avoid further encounters with the girl and her flaming hair and everything else that would inevitably follow, Luca had volunteered to stay on watch well into the night—long past when his normal shift would have ended. It gave him time to think, he had tried to tell himself. But really, by that point he would have attempted nearly anything to evade the dreams.
(A secret unbeknownst to Luca: he wasn’t the only one in that building to dream.)
Luca didn’t have a way to track the passing of time in the surveillance room (clocks in the building had an uncanny knack of being disobedient), but he knew that the night must have faded away when he heard the sharp beeping of the alarm that signaled the start of the morning. A few minutes later, the door behind him creaked open, and with the sound, Luca tensed, sitting up straight. Pretending he wasn’t doing anything wrong. Even though, for the moment at least, he wasn’t.
Taking in shallow breaths, Luca steeled himself, then turned his head, slumping immediately back in his seat when he saw that it wasn’t one of the building’s runners, but rather Caleb’s slim form stepping into the room.
Cast in the pale lights emanating from the wall of screens, Caleb Arya looked cold, in the way that he always seemed to lately. Racked with shivers from an invisible force Luca never felt himself, his friend held his arms tightly wrapped around himself even now. Adding to the ensemble that was Caleb were the permanent dark circles painted beneath his eyes, the clammy sheen to the skin of his forehead, the hitch in his breath every few seconds that was only audible if you were listening.
And Luca was listening.
“Long night?” Caleb asked, trying to arrange his features into a smile. He was always trying, for Luca.
As Caleb settled into the seat next to his, Luca tried to return the favor. “Not too bad,” he managed, though he knew it couldn’t have sounded all that convincing. “Nothing interesting, if that’s what you mean.”
Caleb offered a mock sigh, tilting his head toward the ceiling. “Shame. I know how much you value your midnight breakouts and breakdowns.”
Luca knew he was joking, but it still struck a chord in him. That was the other reason he took the night shift, though he hadn’t been as productive in that regard lately.
His illicit use of the surveillance room’s cameras was his most treasured secret. And his most dangerous one.
“Roll call?” Luca asked, without looking at Caleb.
“Five minutes.”
“Right. Well, I’ll be there soon. Need to wait for one of the blues to come in here and relieve me.”
Caleb sighed. “Don’t be too late this time. You know how the runners get when you aren’t in the lineup. You don’t want to anger them, Luca.”
“I know,” Luca said. “I’ll be there. I promise.”
Luca heard more than he saw Caleb get up and leave. Alone again, if only for a few minutes, Luca took one last opportunity to glance over the screens in front of him. His eye caught on activity in one of the uppermost screens, and he paused, watching.
“Sorry, Caleb,” Luca mumbled to himself. For a moment, his mind sliced to what the repercussions for not showing up to roll call could be—Caleb was right, he really couldn’t afford to anger the runners—but he steadied his resolve, bracing his fingers on the keyboard. “I’m going to be a few minutes late after all.”
Chapter Four
