He did to her.
Whatever Jamie did to her.
She could feel it but also she couldn’t because she was numb, blissfully numb, but they weren’t.
The others in her memory. In her head.
They weren’t numb, and so she wasn’t either, because she could feel, was living, their pain, was living their experiences, all of their experiences, of sitting in that chair in that white room—
Not a white room.
With straps around her arms and her legs and her torso and her neck.
Not hers.
And the knife, his knife, and other tools that she could not begin to name as they sliced, and skewered, and fought for dominance over what had once been hers but was now his—
And had never been hers, this wasn’t her story, this was someone else’s, many someone elses’, because she had no memories of this, of that room, of that chair, so it couldn’t have been her, it couldn’t have happened.
And yet.
And yet the longer she remained prostrate on that thin gray bed with nothing but the thoughts that weren’t hers and the memories that weren’t hers and the nightmares that weren’t hers, the more sensation returned to her body, the numbness wearing off.
And the more she could feel it.
It was less like burning, and more like the skin of her arms had been frozen and then cracked open and then pried apart and then poorly stitched back together again.
Behind the pain was something else. A different memory—again both hers and not. This one was a voice. A cold, harsh voice echoing around a cold, white room. We need your pain, is what the voice was saying in her head, layers upon layers upon layers of that voice, saying the same words in the same mocking sneer. The building needs your pain. It’s something inside you that is released when you suffer. And so, we need to harness that. We need you to feel it.
Accompanying that voice was the shrill sound of beeps, that a very distant, detached part of her mind paired with the beeps she had heard upstairs, days earlier, after Jamie had . . . tortured that woman on the hundredth floor.
It became like a cruel loop: the voice and the pain and the beeps and the voice and the pain and the beeps, memories and non-memories spinning, flying, crashing through her head, her body.
This went on for . . . she did not know how long. Minutes or days or weeks or years, and the reality of it was that in the building it probably wouldn’t have mattered, anyway. It all came down to the same, in the end, and eventually it was enough that it overcame her, and she collapsed back against her pillow, though she had never really been able to raise her head in the first place.
Time passed like this. Well, not really, but that is neither here nor there. Everly did not move for longer than she would have cared to recount, for every time she awoke and attempted to shift it would all start over again: the burning that wasn’t burning and the pain that was more like death than anything else.
So instead, she tried to remain as still and as silent as she could manage, allowing her mind to wander freely while her body could not.
The layers of pain brought with them other non-memories—these even more confusing than the others because they took place at home. In the house where she’d grown up. She saw different welts and cuts tracing her arms—not given to her in an all-white room with tools of precision, but rather in their living room or kitchen, with whatever her dad had on hand.
It couldn’t have been her dad—her sweet, caring father who would never harm her—it couldn’t, it couldn’t, it couldn’t.
So, what was it? Where did the images come from?
Beneath those false memories was yet another: of a room that looked very much like her own, there in the building, except perhaps larger. A woman sitting next to her with fair blond hair and bright blue eyes and worry, worry, worry carved into the lines of her forehead but a smile on her curved, red lips. The blond woman brushed a lock of hair behind Everly’s ear and murmured words—of encouragement or warning, she was not sure, but the words were earnest enough, and they almost made Everly listen.
Almost.
And then the woman was gone—was never there? Flashes overlapped, with and without the blond woman. With and without. With and without.
And then she saw a small child, wrapped in a gray blanket, asleep in the arms of a person whom she did not know, being carried far, far away.
And then, Everly woke up, and the memories stopped.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Luca did not see Everly for a week.
At first, he was concerned, because he knew she was being taken to be tested, but he was not anxious. Everyone was tested. It was an inevitability, here in the building. And everyone survived it.
Well, almost everyone.
But then a day passed, and then two, three, seven. Still, she did not return, and though Luca would not speak the words aloud, even to Caleb or Anker who cast him worried expressions at every mealtime now, he was becoming afraid for her.
It didn’t usually take this long to recover.
He had been on the verge of asking Jamie about her, which under normal circumstances would never have even been a thought to consider.
On the eighth day, as Luca was sitting in the dining hall for breakfast, struggling to come up with the right words to use to ask Jamie, he glanced up and saw Everly Tertium walking across the room toward him.
Or hobbling, really. Her steps were slow, stilted. An undercurrent of pain laced her every movement, and he could see the strain in her eyes, but he didn’t care.
She was all right.
(Here, of course, all right is an exceptionally relative term.)
Luca stood up as Everly neared their table, causing both Caleb and Anker to turn and look. None of them spoke as she collapsed into the seat next to Luca’s, staring down at her hands, refusing to meet anyone’s eyes. A beat passed before Luca rushed over to the counter to request another plate of food, which he brought back and placed in front of Everly. She didn’t acknowledge the food or look up at Luca. He felt a tightening in his chest, seeing how small the testing had made her. How helpless.