Everly shook her head and blink blink blinked but there was no helping the onslaught of images that rained down upon her.
A small boy, swaddled, eyes closed, so small so precious so special, so special, so special.
The boy on a screen and he was small and then bigger bigger bigger bigger.
The boy and she felt love and she felt . . . fear? And she felt disgust.
No. No, she felt . . . she felt uncertainty . . . she felt . . . freedom, she felt like he would carry her away on wings, like he’d break down the doors in her way, like . . .
Everly blinked. Hard. She shook her head. She took another step back and stared down at her hand, and when she looked back up, she could see Michael doing the same thing—holding up his hand and looking at it with wide, uncertain eyes.
Had he felt the memories, too?
“Sorry,” Everly said, feeling shaken. “I—I’m sorry.”
Michael blinked and then looked at her again, face settling back into a smile. “That’s okay. Strange things happen here all the time.” He turned to Luca. “Can you stay? We have an hour before they send the other runners back in.” Michael nodded to the runner Luca had named Julia. “She wouldn’t care, I know.”
Luca offered him a half smile but shook his head. “Sorry, little man. I have to get back to work. You keep up the good fight, though, you hear?”
Michael beamed at him, nodding vigorously. Everly and Luca started to walk away, and Everly waved back at the boy. “See you, Michael. It was nice meeting you.”
He looked at her for a second, eyes brimming with a strange sort of understanding. “Nice meeting you, too,” he said to her, then he ran back to join in with the other kids. Everly noticed, though, that he still held the hand she had shaken up against his chest, fist clenched tightly shut.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Michael had never entered the building and would never leave.
His first memory was this: a woman with very red hair leaning over him, star-shaped tears streaming down her face and landing in little plinks along the soft skin of his face.
Except that he knew that wasn’t real, so actually his first memory was this: Luca. He remembered a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old Luca handing him an orange in the hallway one day, grinning at him and then running off with his friends. Michael had held that orange tightly in his small hands and refused to eat it.
No one had ever given him anything before.
If dreams counted, though, then Michael’s first memory was this: a woman (who happened to look quite a bit like the woman with the red hair and starry tears), who held his hand, and swung it back and forth, and smiled at him—and whom he smiled at in return.
That was it, that was the whole dream. As far as Michael could tell, the woman and he would continue to walk down an infinitely long path, always swinging their arms, always smiling, always walking.
That was also the only dream Michael had ever had. It was the repeating episode of a show that came back time and time again, every single night when he fell asleep.
Not that he minded. If nothing else, he was always happy in the dream. He never wanted to wake up from it, even though not much of anything happened in it.
So really Michael knew two things: he knew that he liked the dream with the red-haired woman who would swing his arm and smile down at him.
And he knew that Luca’s new friend, the woman named Everly, was the woman from that dream.
Chapter Thirty-Three
As Luca and Everly headed away from the brightly colored corridor, Luca couldn’t help glancing over at Everly every few seconds. She walked with her eyes cast down at first, but then she turned to Luca.
“Who was he? That boy?”
“Who, Michael?” Luca asked, raising his eyebrows. “He’s just one of the younger kids. I’ve known him most of his life—he was brought here when he was young, like me.”
(This is not strictly true, but Luca couldn’t know this.)
Everly blinked at that. “You mean, not all of the kids have always been here?”
“No, there are some like you who are brought in when they’re older. Though, admittedly, most are much younger than you when they arrive.” Luca peered at Everly inquisitively, but she didn’t say anything.
“Anyway,” Luca went on, “Michael’s . . . special. He’s different from the others. More, I don’t know, bright? Everyone here has this spirit about them, like they’ve given up. But not him. He’s always so upbeat, so ready for anything. He’s a good person to have around, especially on the days when you’re not feeling so great about things.”
This was part of the reason Luca had wanted to bring Everly to the dome. Michael had a way of making any bad situation look a little better, and Luca could only guess at how Everly had to be feeling right then. He didn’t know what had happened—had decided not to ask—but the mere fact that she was back in the building meant that something had gone wrong, and now she was here. Stuck, like all the rest of them. Luca had to wonder how her grandfather played into all of this. Certainly, the great Dr. Dubose could have some level of control over his granddaughter’s place in the Eschatorologic. Wherever he was now, though, he wasn’t here, and he wasn’t the one who had brought Everly to Luca’s room that morning.
Jamie had made it all sound very permanent, and Luca knew better than most how closely Jamie held the ear of the Warden. Everly might not yet be fully aware of the degree to which she was now a resident in the building, but Luca knew it was unlikely she would be finding her way out any time soon. If she was like the rest of them—if she was special in that singular, terrible way—then he knew she’d never be able to.
The other reason Luca had wanted to bring Everly to see the dome was so that she could see them. The children. The youngest residents inside the Eschatorologic, and so she could understand what it meant to live there. What the building did, to even its most innocent of patrons.
“He was the boy on the screen, wasn’t he?” Everly asked suddenly.
Luca looked at her sharply. “What do you mean?”
“The other day, when I followed Jamie into that room . . . there was a small boy, huddled alone in a room. He looked . . . very alone.”
How had she seen that, Luca wondered. There were so many screens in the surveillance room; how had she noticed the one tiny screen with Michael?
“Yes,” he said. “That was Michael. The runners had just gotten to him. He . . .” How to explain? “Michael has these incidents. Times where he tries to . . . escape, I guess.” Luca sighed. “It’s hard to describe. It’s like he falls into a sort of trance, where his body carries him toward the lobby.”
“The lobby?” Everly asked.
