Normally, they were younger when first brought for testing. Normally they were prepared, in some form or another. They weren’t thrown in, unaware, and expected to cope.
Well. They were and they weren’t. But it wasn’t usually as bad as this.
She had bandages covering her forearms, and he wondered if she still needed them. The testing often marked them, but it was an odd sort of marking that tended to mostly disappear shortly thereafter. Or fade, at least. He didn’t know why—no one did, really. The memory of the pain always lasted longer than the pain itself. Memory, and light trails of scars that never fully vanished.
But Everly. From what he could make out of her expression, she still looked like she was in the middle of it. Haunted eyes, pale skin, twisted mouth. She looked like she was trapped, and it broke something in Luca, to see her like that.
At a loss for what else to do, Luca took her hand beneath the table, holding onto it tightly. She didn’t react, but he leaned in closer to her, whispering so the others couldn’t hear.
“It’ll get better,” he said, hoping it would be true. “It’s always the worst, the first time around, but it will get better. I promise.”
She didn’t say anything, but he felt her hand squeeze his back, sending a rush of warmth up his arm. They sat like that, together, for the remainder of the morning. When it was time for them to rise to go about their daily assignments, Luca could see that some color was already returning to her cheeks. He still held on to her hand, and she squeezed his again slightly before standing up, causing him to look over at her and see the faintest of grins there on her face—there and then gone, but it had been there, he was sure of it, so he was sure it would come back.
She would be okay. She had to be.
Chapter Forty
Richard slammed fist after fist into the door, bruising his knuckles until, finally, a harried Jamie yanked the door open.
“What?” Jamie snapped. “I’m busy in here.”
Richard pressed both hands flat against the larger man’s chest and pushed—oh, how good it felt to be physical, when usually Richard was the one to stand back and observe. He wasn’t as strong as Jamie, but he must have caught him off guard as the other man stumbled back a step, eyes briefly widening in surprise, then hardening as he steadied himself.
“You weren’t supposed to bring her in for testing,” Richard yelled. He could feel himself losing his temper. Good, he thought. He didn’t mind the chance to bite back at Jamie, for once. “Everyone else—you were to test everyone else. But not her.”
“That’s not what you said,” Jamie said flatly. “Increase the testing, across the board. That’s what you told me.”
“And what did you do to her? From what I hear, she was completely incapacitated for days.”
Jamie smirked. “It’s not my fault she’s turned out to be one of the weaker ones.”
Richard’s face darkened, his eyes slicing into the man in front of him. “You are never to touch her again. Is that understood? I’ve gone to too many lengths, come too close, for you to bludgeon it all away with your knives and saws.”
“That’s not the attitude you had when it came to the father,” Jamie said. “You were all too happy to let me have at him with my ‘knives and saws.’”
“That is different, and you know it,” Richard snapped.
“Look,” Jamie said, “between pampering your granddaughter, increasing testing, that kid who keeps running away, and everything else I have to deal with in here, I don’t have time to pay attention to the nuances of your requests. You don’t want me to do something, fine. But don’t expect me to read your mind, old man.”
Richard briefly frowned, that kid who keeps running away playing through his head. What kid? Rather than ask, he poked a finger in Jamie’s chest, pressing down hard enough that his finger ached in response. “Never again. Understood?”
Richard stormed away before Jamie could respond. He walked blindly, aimlessly around that bottom floor. He was so close—so close. When the news had trickled down to him of what had happened to Everly, he hadn’t been able to see straight. It made the reality of their situation—her situation—all too real for him.
She could not die. It would be like failing his daughter all over again.
Now that she was safely housed in the building, they had time. Not an indefinite amount, but enough. He hoped.
But it would all be ruined if Jamie killed her before he could save her.
This would never have happened if the Warden had stepped in. It pained Richard to acknowledge, but he knew Jamie wouldn’t disrespect the Warden like that.
That problem may be solved soon enough as well, he knew. Pieces were falling into place already. He knew it was only a matter of time before they all settled right to where they were meant to go.
But what kid kept running away? He didn’t know what that was about. But something—intuition or scientific reasoning or the building itself nudging him along, who’s to say—told him it wasn’t nothing. Something told him to look into it.
And all the same if he bumped other things along in the meantime. He needed to shift her out of her new routine, needed to separate her from the attachments she’d begun to form. He knew that’d push her toward the destiny the building had aligned for her—and push her right to where he needed her to be. It was all meant to happen, anyhow.
He’d just be helping destiny along.
Chapter Forty-One
It took all morning, and most of the afternoon, before anyone noticed the absence of Caleb Arya.
People went about their chores, their assignments, their lives as though nothing was different. For most of them, nothing was.
That morning, before meeting Luca for breakfast, Everly had woken up before the alarm, pulling out the journals from beneath her pillow and shielding them with her body, in case anyone was watching.
Not that it mattered, really. They’d already done their worst. What more could they take from her?
Well, they could take the journals, she supposed. And despite the fact that she had stolen them from Richard, she was beginning very much to think of the journals as her own—to think of them, in fact, as her only remaining possessions. The only things in that building that she could pretend belonged solely to her.
She’d turned to the journals more desperately that morning than in mornings past. She longed for an explanation, a reason, anything to tell her what had happened to her. Why it had happened. To tell her what she couldn’t remember, and what all of this—the pain, the violence, the terror—was for.
She hadn’t found anything like that in the journals. Richard never told her what she wanted to know, even in written form. Instead, she’d found an interesting passage, dated 1981.
The data are progressing nicely, though I must admit not as quickly as I would have hoped. The Warden, as she has now asked us to call her, has implemented certain strategies that, while I do at times question, have admittedly led to an increase in results.
The runners she has helped make, for instance, have been able to aid in monitoring the children downstairs, until they are old enough for testing. However, it has become apparent that the tests do not work nearly as well on individuals over a certain age, nor on those who are not in peak physical condition. We may have to do something about that in the future.
