Everly nodded slowly, but a terrible feeling slithered through her. What happened to the others? Those who weren’t given a room upstairs?
What happened when you got older?
There had to be a way out, a way that she could leave this building before she became like the people up there. A way for her to live past twenty-five out in the real world and have a real life. She wasn’t ready to accept that this was it, that there was nothing else for her. She wasn’t ready to give up even the idea of a life beyond this without doing everything in her power to find a way out, to find a way to outlive this genetic anomaly in her veins that apparently wanted her dead at twenty-five.
“Luca,” she said, “why are you so sure there isn’t a way for us to leave?”
He shrugged. “It’s what we’ve always been told. And it also feels . . . wrong, thinking about trying to leave. You know?”
Strangely, she did know. Right now, sitting in the surveillance room, Everly tried to imagine, really imagine, herself walking out those front doors, leaving and never looking back, and it made her almost sick to her stomach. It was like her body had acknowledged, even if her mind hadn’t fully yet, that there really was no escape. That this was where she had to be.
She didn’t accept that.
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “There has to be more than that. There has to be. Where there’s a lock, there has to be a key; if we’re locked in this building, then there needs to be a way out. There has to be,” she said, voice rising at the end when she saw Luca shaking his head.
“Everly,” Luca said, his voice lowering. “Listen, there’s more to it than that. There’s something else you should know about the building, about the . . . testing.”
Just then, the door snapped open and a runner with blue scrubs and empty eyes strutted in without speaking. Luca hurriedly leaped from his seat, beckoning for Everly to follow as he left the surveillance room. Out in the hall, she wanted him to go on, to finish what he had started to tell her, but he was walking too quickly, and it took a lot of her effort just to keep up with him.
They wound up back at the dining hall, where they ate another meal just as salty and awful as the breakfast had been. Still Luca didn’t speak to her, didn’t mention whatever it was he had been going to say. She wanted to ask but didn’t know how to do it without anyone else in the crowded dining hall overhearing.
After dinner, Luca led her down a new corridor, where she realized a group of girls and young women were congregating, some of whom were throwing curious looks Luca’s way. Luca was looking down, and Everly was amused to see his neck turning red.
“You go through there,” he said, his first words to her since the surveillance room. He pointed at the door that the rest of the girls were streaming through. “Get washed up, find a change of clothes—they should be stacked against a back wall.” He was already walking away when he called back over his shoulder, “Follow the rest of them back out to roll call. I’ll find you then.”
Everly’s mouth twitched in silent amusement as she watched him go, then she went through the door he had indicated, finding it to be a sort of communal showering space. There was a wall lined with shelves, filled with essentials such as soap and towels. Everly grabbed what she needed, took a quick cold shower, then slipped into a new pair of gray scrubs, throwing the old ones into a large basket near the door that was labeled Laundry.
Luca was right—it was easy enough to follow the other girls as they left the showers and headed down the hall together, winding up, Everly discovered, in the round, colorful room that she had met Michael in earlier. Everyone seemed to be lining up, placing themselves into some sort of order that Everly didn’t understand, but that appeared to be roughly by age. She scanned the room, looking for Luca, and when she found him, she made her way over to where he stood, grateful for a familiar face.
“What are we doing?” she asked him.
“We’re lining up for roll call,” Luca said, in answer to her question. “We do this every morning and every night, so the runners can make sure everyone is accounted for. Here,” he said, moving over slightly. “Go behind me. I’m sure it’ll be fine for now—you’re supposed to be following me, anyway.”
Everly did what he said, standing behind and watching as everyone else formed lines throughout the room. A steady buzz of conversation saturated the room, but when one of the doors on the side slammed open, a dead silence took over. Looking over Luca’s shoulder, Everly could see ten runners, dressed in their distinctive blue uniforms and black masks, striding into the room. The one in front was a balding man with a stern look in his eyes, who glanced once over the assembled children with the same cold, vacant eyes that all the runners seemed to have. The residents around her stood up straighter at the sight of the runners, and so Everly tried to do the same.
About an hour passed as the runners went down the lines, identifying kids and marking them off one by one on the lists they held in front of them. One of the runners—a woman with thick eyebrows and bushy hair—reached where Luca and Everly stood and Everly froze, suddenly terrified of the person in front of her. What if she wasn’t in the right place? What if she did something wrong?
The runner didn’t speak. None of them did, as far as Everly could tell. She stood in front of Luca, who told her his name, then nodded back at Everly. “She’s new,” he said to the runner, who then cast her dead, uncaring eyes in Everly’s direction, making her squirm where she stood. Luca nudged Everly with an elbow, mouthing the word name.
Everly gulped thickly. “E-Everly,” she managed. “Everly Tertium.”
The runner barely reacted; her clouded eyes glanced down at the list in her hands, and she must have found Everly’s name, for she nodded once before moving on to the person behind her. Everly nearly sagged with relief, but Luca elbowed her again, jerking his head up. She straightened her spine, straining to remain still as the runners concluded their check. The runners all left the dome together in a swarm of blue, and as soon as they were gone the lines of residents began to file back out the door they had come in through.
Everly remained close to Luca, afraid of losing him in the crowd and never being able to find her room again. The people around them eventually began to disperse little by little, heading different ways to find their respective rooms. Everly came up so that she was walking beside Luca.
“You have to do that every night?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “Every morning, too. It’s not so bad. You get used to it.”
He led her down a couple more halls, then stopped in front of a door. “I believe this is you. It should still be unlocked, but don’t try to open it after the lights shut off. They lock us all in during the night.”
Everly nodded, but her mind drifted to that morning, when she had been able to open her door. Had they just not locked it the night before?
“Thank you,” she said to Luca. “For showing me around and helping me.” She let out a shaky breath. “It’s a lot, you know?”
Luca grinned crookedly. “No problem. All in a day’s work.” His face turned more serious, and his eyes met hers. “It will get easier. I promise.”
This was a lie, and a poorly concealed one at that. It would, in fact, only get much, much worse.
However, since Everly did not know this, she only nodded again, and tried to smile.
I won’t be here forever, she vowed silently to herself. I don’t want it to get easier, I want to get out.
Everly bid Luca goodnight, and she let herself back into the cell that had become her home. Slowly, she made her way over to the narrow gray bed she had woken up in that morning, what now felt like a lifetime ago.
It was still hard to accept that she might never leave the building again. Impossible, really.
Yet so many people kept telling her the same thing, over and over.
Even if it wasn’t true, as some small, hopeful part of herself still tried to cling to—even if it was a well-concocted lie and really they were all kidding themselves—there had to be a reason all those people were here.
They’re here to change the world, Richard had told her, what seemed like forever ago. But from where she was lying, a floor beneath the ground in an all-gray room, it didn’t seem like anyone was changing the world. It seemed like they were all prisoners to a madman’s game. Nothing more.
Alone for the first time in what had seemed like a lifetime compressed into a single day, Everly pulled out the stolen journals from where she’d hidden them beneath her pillow that morning. Angling her body so as to hide them from the view of any cameras that may be above her, Everly dove into Richard’s words, trying to find something that contradicted what people had been telling her all day: that she was trapped here. That she could never leave. That none of them could.
She did not find those words of consolation she so desperately sought. Instead, she discovered an entry dated 1966 that snagged something in her mind.
A fascinating young woman visited me today in the Eschatorologic. That is what I have decided to call it—or rather, what the building has decided to be called. It’s strange, this building. I can’t quite put a finger on the pulse of what is happening around me, but I know it is something. Something significant? One can only hope.
