“Luca,” she whispered. He reached up a hand, brushing a lock of hair behind her ear. “Luca,” Everly repeated, a little louder. “We should probably go back.” She didn’t move her hands, though, and he made no move to break away either. She breathed in his clean scent and sighed, wishing more than anything that they could stay there, in that safe little bubble, separate from everything they would face once they left.
Slowly, Everly took a step back, her hands falling until they reached his, and she squeezed them once. “Come on,” she said. “We need to go.”
Luca gripped her hands in return, and Everly moved to open the closet door, one of her palms still clasped in his. Before she reached the handle, Luca twisted her back around, pressing his lips against hers briefly once more.
“Okay,” he whispered against her ear. Then, turning the doorknob himself, “Let’s go.”
Chapter Forty-Two
Luca and Everly left the closet quietly, glancing around corners and over their shoulders perhaps more than was strictly necessary as they made their way to his room. Luca’s body hummed with energy. Everly was . . . he didn’t know. She was so unexpected, in every way. The more he thought he was coming to know her, the more she defied everything he understood.
It was a feeling that left him elated and filled with anticipation.
And also . . . strangely unsettled. He couldn’t have said why, not when the brilliance of that fleeting moment in the closet was still washing over him. But there was almost a nagging feeling, a voice that was trying to tell him something—to warn him, he almost would have thought, if he didn’t know that to be absurd. What could there possibly be to warn of?
The buzz within Luca dulled as they reached his room, and the reality of their situation returned to him. The reality of Caleb’s situation.
People disappeared from the building. This was a fact, like needing oxygen to breathe or gravity to remain tethered to the earth. And like both of those facts, this was one known if rarely acknowledged.
People disappeared from the building, and Luca had never thought to ask why, to wonder where they went, where they were taken.
No. No, that wasn’t true. He thought it, but never knew where to look. The cameras didn’t show what the building didn’t want them to see.
What the Warden didn’t want them to see.
So, for years, Luca had watched the feeds of the hundreds of people roaming through the Eschatorologic, and every so often he would become aware of a person who was once there, who once had a pattern and a routine and a purpose in the building, who suddenly just wasn’t.
There were hundreds, maybe thousands, of cameras that Luca could watch through, observe through. And none of them showed the missing residents.
People disappeared from the building, but never anyone Luca had known. Not really.
Never Caleb.
It should never have been him—that was supposed to be the point to all of this. Surveillance duty, and the trust he had spent years instilling for himself there in the building. The hours and hours of endless, meaningless tasks they put him through. It was all supposed to be for this. To keep his friends safe.
And he had failed.
Luca had thought the worst thing that could happen to him in the building, the worst punishment for his rebellious actions, would be to vanish himself. Turns out, Caleb going missing was so, so much worse.
It was almost jarring to open the door to his room and find it exactly as he had left it that morning—after Caleb had been taken, but before he possibly could have known. The normalcy of everything around him was almost too much, and Luca had to fight against the nausea that was threatening to undo him.
How had he allowed himself to forget, even for a second, that Caleb was out there, somewhere, all alone? In that closet, with Everly, how had he let himself distance so far from what was happening? Luca felt a spike of fear—immediate and sharp—but he shoved it away, forcing his expression blank again.
Luca heard the door closing, followed by Everly clearing her throat. “Okay,” she said. “Okay, so a plan. How do we find him? How do we get him back?”
Luca closed his eyes again and tried to take in even breaths. Then he tried to think. Caleb didn’t need him falling apart—that wouldn’t help anyone. Everly had been right, before, when she said he couldn’t be like . . . like this. So he paused, and he slowed his thoughts. He considered the options they had.
“He has to be on one of the two lowest floors,” Luca said, opening his eyes and turning back to face Everly with a new determination. “I know the layout of the whole building, at least where the cameras are. There aren’t many places above ground where they could be keeping him—it’s all residential rooms.”
“And the white room,” Everly said quietly, absently running her hands over her arms. “Up on the top floor.”
Luca’s stomach clenched, and without intending to, he realized he was staring at her arms. At the fresh bandages that ran from her wrists up past the fabric of her gray scrubs—he knew they would extend all the way to her shoulders. And he felt it—the phantom scars that he knew traced his own skin, in the same shapes and patterns as hers.
He hadn’t wanted to ask her. She hadn’t wanted to say. It was all the same, anyway. Part of what it meant to be a resident. So, he didn’t offer her words of comfort, though he wanted to. And he didn’t shudder at the thought of the white rooms, the testing rooms, though maybe he should have. Instead, he thought of what could be worse than that—what could be so bad in a building of blades and knives that even here it didn’t want to be seen, didn’t want to be caught?
Everly eventually broke the silence that had fallen over them. “So, if we assume that Caleb has to be on one of the two basement floors, how much space is there that you don’t know of?”
“On this floor, not much. There are a few doors that I’ve never been through, that are always locked and that don’t have cameras inside, but for the most part I know this floor. The lowest level, on the other hand, is full of unwatched, inaccessible spaces. He could be anywhere down there.”
“All right,” Everly said. “So then he’s probably on the floor beneath us. Luca, what do you know about what’s kept there?”
“Very little,” he replied. “There are files and documents in rooms down there. They’ve sent me down on occasion, to retrieve them from the archives. But other than that, I have no idea. No one goes down there, really. It’s kept locked tight, under strict lock and key, and there’s no footage of any of the rooms. If I hadn’t ventured down a time or two myself, I might not even believe that it exists at all.”
“Richard keeps his office down there,” Everly said quietly. “I don’t know what else is on that floor, but there are at least more labs and offices, if nothing else.” She raised her eyes to meet Luca’s, and he could almost read his thoughts mirrored in her eyes. “We should start there. It feels like the kind of place you would steal someone away to in the middle of the night.”
Luca felt queasy at the prospect, but he nodded. “Okay. Okay, you’re right, he’s probably down there. It’s just . . .” He trailed off, eyes roaming around the room as he tried to think. “I don’t know how we’re going to get down there. I have keys to this floor, and the upper levels, but not that floor. All the entrances leading in and out of the stairwell are kept locked, and you need a key to use the elevator at all this far down, not to mention you need to be programmed in for it to work, which I’m not; I’d rather not learn right now what would happen if I tried to use it.”
“What do you mean?” Everly asked, a strange expression on her face. “The door leading into the black floor was unlocked when I went down there, so was the door upstairs that I accessed the staircase from.” She shook her head, considering. “Do you think someone just forgot to lock them back?”
“No,” Luca said slowly, watching Everly curiously now. “Not possible. They lock automatically when they’re closed.”
Everly looked dumbstruck, and Luca’s thoughts mirrored her confusion.
“Seeing as how we don’t have any other options,” Everly finally said, “I say we go for it, anyway. Maybe we’ll get lucky again, and the doors will be unlocked.”
“Right,” Luca said, but he wasn’t convinced. He sagged, running his hands through his hair. “Whether we can get onto that floor or not, does it even matter? What if we do find him, Everly? What would we do next? We can’t get out, we can’t leave. We’d all be sitting ducks, the three of us, trapped in a building where our every move is monitored. Do you know what they’d do to people like that here? What they’ll do if we try this, try and go against the building so blatantly?” The truth was, Luca didn’t know himself. What could be worse than disappearing, than going missing in the middle of the night like you’d never existed?
Luca felt his breathing becoming erratic again, the panic from earlier in the hallway returning. It really was a hopeless cause, he knew. They could try to find Caleb, but they’d all wind up dead by the end, anyway.
