Everly hadn’t understood what Richard meant when she’d first read that entry, which was somehow both days and a lifetime ago, but now she thought she was beginning to. The significance of age for them, he had written. And wasn’t that what had happened to her, what people kept telling her had happened? She’d aged too much for the outside world. And if she hadn’t returned to the building in time . . .
So, is that what happened to her mother, then? Did Mary Tertium outlive her durability in the outside world, and die because of it?
But how did Richard fail her?
And what could all of that possibly have to do with that woman on the hundredth floor?
A different screen, on the opposite side of the wall from the woman on the hundredth floor, housed that boy. Michael.
When Luca had brought her into the surveillance room, she had recognized it immediately as the place she’d followed Jamie into the other day where she had seen Michael on that screen. Who was that little boy, and why did he try so hard to leave, as Luca had mentioned?
And what had happened when he’d touched her?
“You’re probably wondering what’s wrong with me, aren’t you?”
Caleb’s words startled Everly out of her thoughts. She turned to him with wide eyes and lifted her hands, trying to let him know that wasn’t at all what she’d been thinking. Consumed in her own worries, she had nearly forgotten about the young man who sat next to her. He just smiled, though.
“It’s okay,” Caleb said. “I’m not dying. At least, I don’t think I am. It’s only that I’m not as strong as the others.”
Everly sat back, curious now despite herself. “Are you sick?”
Caleb tilted his head, considering. “I’m not sure, exactly. We don’t really have doctors down here, you know. At least, not the medical kind. I mainly get tired more frequently than most of the other residents, and I need to rest more. It’s not too bad, most of the time.”
“I’m sorry,” Everly said, but Caleb shrugged and changed the subject.
“So, you’re from the outside then?”
“I guess so.”
“What’s it like?”
“What’s what like?”
“All of it. The world.”
“The world?” Everly frowned slightly, thinking. “That’s a lot to try and describe in one sitting.”
Caleb shrugged. “Tell me anything. What’s your favorite thing?”
“My favorite thing,” Everly repeated faintly, trying to remember anything at all from the world outside the building. She had been in here such a short time—so why couldn’t she seem to draw anything to mind?
“Strawberries,” she finally managed to say, memories dancing back to the rows of green plants that went back and back and back, sticky red fruit grasped in sticky red hands.
But this made her remember the tainted versions of those memories she had called to mind not long ago—the ones with a version of her father who didn’t feel remotely like her father—which made her shake her head, turning away from Caleb so he couldn’t see the haunted confusion that she knew must have crept into her eyes.
Caleb was quiet for a moment. “I wish I could remember it,” he said softly. “Any of it. Or I wish I could go out, even just for one day.”
“So, it’s real, then,” Everly said, turning back to him. “Jamie said it’s something with energy—about using it all up.”
Caleb frowned. “The reason we can’t leave? I don’t know about all that, but yes, I suppose it must be real. They tell us we can’t leave. That we wouldn’t survive it, and no one is brave enough to test them at their word.” He offered her a dry smile. “I know my odds would probably be even worse than anyone else’s.”
Before she could say anything else—mention the hallucinations she’d had out there, the pounding in her head that felt like someone driving a wooden stake from one side of her skull to the other—Luca returned to the surveillance room.
Everly met his eyes. For the briefest of moments, everything around the two of them seemed to stop, suspended in a bubble of their own making. The moment passed almost as soon as it had started, and Everly quickly averted her gaze, feeling the tips of her ears turn pink.
She thought back to earlier, when he’d brushed a strand of hair away from her face. When they’d been close, so close. And he’d asked her something about dreams.
There was something about him, something she couldn’t put a finger on. Even with everything else that was falling apart around her, her thoughts kept returning, over and over and over, to this man with brown eyes and dark locks who had been by her side the whole morning. It was like she’d known him her whole life, not like they’d just met a few days before.
It didn’t feel . . . normal? Everly had been around other guys before in her life, and she’d never felt like this before, but she couldn’t . . . she couldn’t put a finger on why . . .
Everly shook her head sharply. Not that it helped.
Caleb stood up as Luca approached them. “I’d better go. I’m not supposed to be in here—you can only cover for me so much, Luca.”
Luca nodded at Caleb as he stepped out and sat back in the chair Caleb had vacated. “I miss anything interesting?”
“Not really,” Everly said, still thinking about her conversation with Caleb.
Something had been nagging at her, sitting there in the surveillance room looking over the dozens and dozens of screens. When she put a finger on it, she turned around in her seat.
“Luca,” she started, but then hesitated. She scanned the screens in front of her until she found the one she was looking for—the one with the woman on the hundredth floor, still sitting on her bed.
“There are adults upstairs,” she said. She pointed at a different screen, the one with Lois. “And elderly people. But down here, it’s not all kids, is it?” She shook her head. “So, what’s the difference? And why so many people? What are they all for?”
Luca was looking at the screens she had indicated, studying them. “To be honest,” he said, “I don’t really know. It’s my impression that everyone starts out down here, and then at a certain point they just take you away. Sometimes you end up there.” He indicated one screen, where a woman who looked to be in her early thirties was standing stiffly in the middle of a small gray apartment, her head facing straight ahead.
“See her? That’s Vanessa. She used to be down here, with us. When I was younger. They took her away one day, didn’t tell us where. Then, a couple of months into working here, I spotted her on that screen. There are others, too,” he said. “But some of them . . . some of them never show up on any of the other screens. They’re just . . . gone.” Luca met Everly’s eyes, his gaze more intense than she was used to. “Regardless of what happens to them,” he said, voice low, “everyone gets pulled upstairs eventually. You don’t see any of the older residents down here, do you? Not even any that are middle-aged. Everyone moves on. I have no idea why.”
