She didn’t know Caleb that well, but she knew he meant the world to Luca. And for some reason, she was starting to think of Caleb as a sign of hope—almost as if, if they could find him, if they could fix this, maybe they could fix everything else, too. Maybe they really could find a way out, for everyone. If they could get past one problem, then surely they could get past all the rest.
But first they needed to find Caleb.
Everly felt her way forward, hand brushing against Luca in the dark. “I want to try,” she said. He made a noise of protest, and she knew it was futile. A locked door wouldn’t suddenly unlock for no reason. But she wasn’t ready to go back yet. Wasn’t ready to give up.
She ran her hand over the surface of the door, seeking the doorknob. When she found it, her hand glancing over its cool metal, she held her breath and wrapped her fingers around it.
Please, she thought. Please work.
Clenching her fist around the doorknob, Everly twisted it. And heard a click, and felt the lock give under her grip.
Disbelief spiked through Everly as she slowly pushed the door open, allowing a sliver of light from the space beyond to hit Luca’s face, illuminating his stark bewilderment.
“What—but, how?”
Everly didn’t answer, didn’t know what to say. It had opened, and right then that was all that mattered.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s go.”
Beyond the door, the hallway was just as inky black as Everly remembered. Orange fluorescent lights lined the middle of the ceiling, casting a pale glow around the hallway that was barely enough to see by. Everly shivered as she stepped farther into the hall, reluctant to plunge herself into the eerie space beyond. Something felt wrong about the floor. More so than when she had been down here before. Something was off, something about the air, and she couldn’t put a finger on it.
Luca came up beside Everly and placed a hand on her shoulder. He offered her a questioning glance, and she attempted a weak smile in return.
The passage started off running back in a straight line, with no doors on either side to try, only slick, black walls. They walked in silence, the seconds stretching out with each of their footsteps against the polished black floor. Everly flinched at the thud of every step, certain someone would hear them coming.
Eventually, they reached a place where the hall split off in either direction. Everly turned to face Luca.
“Which way?”
He looked both ways, considering. “Left,” he said, and shrugged. “Fifty-fifty shot, right?”
Everly began to nod, began to turn left to walk down the new black hallway, but then her feet stopped. Without really understanding why, her body pivoted so that she was facing right instead, and a dull headache began to form at the base of her skull, a repetitious thudding that spread through her whole body, pulsing with the wrongness of everything around her.
She took a step down the right hallway. And then another. Luca’s eyes followed her as she took a third step, and then, unbidden, an image flashed through her mind, there and then gone.
A room. Like the testing rooms, only red. Bright red. Bloody red. A metal chair in the center with straps where a person’s arms and legs could be restrained. A monitor.
A table of lethally sharpened tools. An IV full of lethally dangerous liquid.
Gripping her head, Everly stumbled backward, into Luca, who quickly wrapped his arms around her to steady her. He looked down at Everly questioningly, but again, she had no answers for him. So instead, she shook her head, gazed down the black corridor in front of her with clouded eyes, and spoke in a too-soft voice.
“I think we need to go right.”
Luca didn’t say anything as he steadied Everly on her feet and then fell into step behind her, heading to the right.
The passage went on for some time, and still they didn’t encounter any doors—just another long path of silky black walls. For a while, they walked in silence, studying the walls around them and the never-ending hall ahead. After a few minutes had passed like this, with nothing other than the sound of their treading feet exchanged between Everly and Luca, he stepped closer to her and lightly touched her elbow.
“Hey, can we talk about what happened?” Luca asked her, speaking in a hushed tone.
“What do you mean?” she asked, voice equally lowered. Everly glanced over her shoulder as they walked, but, of course, no one was there.
“I mean how you opened a locked door, Everly. Because it was locked when I tried it, and then you—you just opened it. Like it was nothing. How do you explain that?”
Everly walked for a few more paces before responding. “Jamie told me something once, when he brought me down to this floor the first time. He said that some of the doors in this building are coded to scan a person’s fingerprints and only open for certain people. That it’s a special security measure in place for the more sensitive areas here. I haven’t thought about it much since he told me that, but do you think maybe that’s how I was able to open those doors? The one for this floor, and the one above?”
Luca thought about that for a few seconds. “Maybe,” he said. “But why you? Why would your fingerprints be coded into those doors? You haven’t even been here that long, and from what I can tell, you’re not on a much better standing with the Warden than the rest of us.” His eyes glanced down at Everly’s arms, where bandages still wrapped her skin beneath the gray fabric of her shirt.
“Richard could have done it,” Everly said thoughtfully. “I don’t know where he would have gotten my fingerprints, or when he would have had the time, but that could be it. I don’t know who else would have done something like that.”
Luca seemed ready to argue that idea, but his eyes caught on something behind her. When she turned to see what had drawn his attention, her breath hitched.
Up ahead, there were doors.
Lining the walls to either side twenty feet ahead of Everly and Luca ran a string of black doors that matched the rest of the floor. The doors blended in so well with the wall that they might not have even seen them if it hadn’t been for the polished silver doorknobs on each. Luca frowned at the first one, casting Everly a sideways look.
“Shall we, then?” he asked, reaching forward to turn the knob.
It didn’t budge under his grip. Locked. He frowned, then looked over at Everly. “You want to give it a try?”
She thought he sounded skeptical, but Everly pushed aside her own misgivings and walked up to the door and placed her hand over the handle. She wasn’t sure if she was surprised when she heard the distinctive click—the sound of the door unlocking.
Everly looked up at Luca, who was watching her warily. She swallowed thickly, then turned the handle and swung the door open. Everly peeked inside, Luca at her shoulder.
It was empty. The room was small, square, as black as the hall outside, and completely empty.
They moved on, opening the doors of room after room, each empty except a few unadorned shelves, a lab or two that looked like someone had forgotten to stock them with any equipment whatsoever. They found nothing of note, at any rate. Nothing to lead them to Caleb.
With every room they searched, their pace increased. They would check a door, find it empty, and rush to the next, the next, the next. Stalking their every move was the ever-present awareness that they could be seen at any second. Could have already been seen, and just didn’t know it yet.
