Everly mumbled something, half-heartedly agreeing with him as she kept digging through more files, finding nothing.
Luca meandered to the other side of the room, calling out, “Hey,” when he opened a side drawer in Richard’s desk. “I think these are journals in here.”
Happy for a distraction from Michael’s file, Everly quickly turned away from the filing cabinet and went to join Luca.
She had become so accustomed to the few journals she’d stolen—the random, thin volumes that she kept stored under her pillow—that she’d nearly forgotten Richard kept a whole drawer full of others down here. Kneeling beside the desk now, Everly’s hand roved lightly over the leather surfaces of the journals almost in wonder, contemplating all the answers that may have been here all along, just a floor beneath where she’d been sleeping.
“Richard’s journals,” she told Luca faintly. “I found these once before. He’s documented his years here, going all the way back to when he first started the building decades ago. Maybe even before then.”
“Do you think he could have written something in here that could help us find Caleb?” Luca asked.
“I don’t know,” Everly said honestly. “Maybe. There’s so much to look through, though.”
“Well,” Luca said, gazing longingly down at the journals. “It wouldn’t hurt to look. We haven’t found anything else useful yet.”
Everly knew how he felt. It was like they’d been spinning in circles with blindfolds over their eyes—going nowhere, with no idea which direction they were facing.
“All right,” Everly said, reaching a hand into the overflowing drawer.
The two settled together on the floor, each pulling out different volumes to flip through, eyes scanning pages faster and faster, looking for anything that could prove useful.
“Here, he writes about the floors, and the general structure of the building,” Luca said after a minute from where he sat cross-legged on the floor across from Everly. “It looks like originally they designated more floors for kids and adults, with no space set aside for the apartments the elderly live in.”
“Interesting,” Everly said. What had changed somewhere along the way, to have to restructure the building? There was so much she could tell Richard wasn’t saying in his entries; she wanted him to spell it all out for her, bit by bit.
“Look,” Luca said, pointing at a passage in one of the books. “He mentions the genetic anomaly again here. Didn’t you find something about that earlier?”
“Yeah,” Everly said. She flipped back a few pages. “Here. The genetic anomaly is seemingly unpredictable. There is no rhyme or reason for how it generates, which people it might choose. It is not strictly hereditary, though it has at times appeared to be transferred from parent to child. There are no visible indicators of the anomaly, other than the energy spikes. This much we have been able to ascertain, but very little else. As of now, we have only managed to isolate twenty unique individuals with the anomaly. So few, yet so much potential lies with these twenty young individuals.
“The genetic anomaly is the reason we’re all here,” Everly said, her eyes meeting Luca’s. “At least, that is what Richard led me to believe, when he tested me, and what Jamie implied, when he . . .” Everly trailed off, restraining herself from rubbing at her arms.
“It powers the building,” Luca supplied.
Everly swallowed thickly, nodding. Then she hesitated before asking, “Do you think it’s true? That the testing is the only way to keep the building alive? To keep us alive in it?”
Luca looked at her more closely. “I don’t know. It’s what I’ve always been told. I guess no one’s wanted to try and see what would happen to the building if the testing suddenly stopped.”
Or no one wanted to speak against the runners, ask them to try another way, Everly thought but didn’t say aloud. It just didn’t sit right with her; why would pain be the only way to give energy? Who was to say there couldn’t be another way, one they just hadn’t figured out yet, because the people who did the figuring out—i.e., Richard, Jamie, the Warden—didn’t have to undergo the testing themselves in order to keep the building up and running?
Luca frowned at this, but he didn’t comment further. Sighing, Everly looked down into the open drawer, full to the brim with old journals.
They were running out of time—Everly could feel it ticking away, the seconds until they were found here where they didn’t belong, the minutes they had left to find Caleb. But one of those journals could hold the answers. There were so many years’ worth of notes and memories. It could take a person weeks to go through all of them. Everly turned toward the open drawer.
Just one more, she told herself, reaching for another. When she noticed the year in the new journal she’d pulled out, Everly sat up a little straighter, and then began to riffle through the pages until she found the date she was looking for.
I’m so out of sorts this afternoon, I’m not sure what to do. I don’t know what any of this means. I am excited, but also strangely terrified for the prospects, the implications of this morning’s events. My hand is shaking as I attempt to document the incredibly unique proceedings.
The child was born today. He is perfectly healthy, a picturesque specimen for a baby boy. The Warden, surprisingly, didn’t seem as excited as I would have expected her to be. She didn’t linger for long before retreating downstairs. Who knows if I will even be allowed to see her again before her time is up.
The oddity of all of this lies in the overt fact that the child was conceived at all, and now appears to be thriving. This has never happened before, the patterns in the building have never been so blatantly defied. We have tested him, of course, and he has the genetic anomaly. While I cannot say that this is surprising, exactly, it is something new. Something that shouldn’t have been possible.
I now feel more desperate than ever to speak with her—I know she is the next, after all. There is no denying it any longer; the resemblance is there. If only Jacob would allow me to bring her here. Though, I understand why he can’t. I just wish the circumstances were different. I must try to convince him—for her own sake, her own good.
That had been written on the day marked in Michael’s file as his Initiation Date. Everly still didn’t understand it. She didn’t understand what her parents had to do with Michael’s birth, or what Richard was so excited about. She didn’t understand why she thought she could see a room, white and cold and sterile, but with a bed set up in the middle, a single chair placed to the side.
A baby, small and dark haired and screaming.
Luca.
Luca?
Luca with wide, fearful eyes. Everly with wide, fearful eyes.
What happened on that day?
It didn’t matter, Everly tried to tell herself. At that moment, it didn’t matter.
She kept looking.
There were only two more journals dated after that one. Everly quickly flipped through one of them, a few lines catching her attention. One entry from a few years ago said, I saw Lois today, as I suppose I can go back to calling her. If I hadn’t known it was her, I would not have been able to recognize her—she has deteriorated so much in the past couple of years. Then, a year after that: I can’t go up there anymore. I thought I could and it would be all right, but I can’t. It’s too painful. The proof of my failure, my one great failure—my heart can no longer handle all of this. I used to say I was not certain which was worse—the existence she would have had up there, or no existence at all. What is the worst is knowing I could have saved her, yet instead I did nothing.
After that there was a considerable gap in Richard’s writing. The final journal in the filing cabinet was only half full, and it started about five months ago, which was shortly before Richard had found her. On one page, he had written in frantic, nearly illegible scrawl: I know what I have to do, yet still I find myself hesitating. Can I really go through with this? Will it all truly be worth it? Will this right my wrongs from so many years ago, erase the distress I have caused to this building?
He wrote more after that, but Everly couldn’t make out most of it. A few days later, he had come back and written: It has to be now. I have no other choice—it’s for her own good; I know she will one day come to understand. Her own good, as well as for the good of the building itself. I have to bring Everly to the Eschatorologic.
Richard’s words made Everly’s blood run cold as she tried to process what he had written. He had known what he was doing when he brought her here—he had known what might happen to her. But he had done it, anyway. It didn’t make any sense, and Everly couldn’t believe that he would have done something like that to her. She didn’t want to believe it.
Furtively, Everly flipped through the remaining pages of the journal, stopping on the final entry. It was dated the day Richard had tested her, the last time she had seen him before he had gone missing.
