A shrill siren pierced through the echoing halls, followed by flashing red lights from atop the elevator doors. The abruptness of the alarm jolted Luca free of his numb reverie, and he saw as Everly, too, was shaken to attention, with her hands covering her ears and her eyes searching wildly around them.
It was the elevators. Luca had been so out of it, so lost in his own head, that he hadn’t even realized what they were doing.
Everly had brought them to the elevators. And the elevators had denied them access.
As suddenly as it had started, the alarm cut off, leaving behind only a hazy ringing in Luca’s ears. The red lights continued to flash around them, casting an eerie glow across the surfaces of the black walls and shadowing Luca’s and Everly’s faces in the tinted light. Luca stood with his back to the closed elevator doors, searching the empty halls to either side of them. Waiting.
It was then that he realized the halls weren’t empty. Down the dark hallway to the right of the elevator, Luca could just make out the silhouetted form of a person standing in the shadows, turned away from them. It was a silhouette he recognized. One he knew all too well.
The shadowed man tilted his head, as though observing them. Then he took a step forward, two, three, until he had moved away from the shadows and into the cascading red light.
Jamie.
In the crimson glow of the corridor, Luca could just make out the shape of a smirk, twisted across Jamie’s lips. Luca flinched, and his blood stilled. Jamie just crossed his arms and watched them, waiting.
Luca didn’t move. Something new bubbled inside him now. Something molten. All those years, time after time of being brought in for testing by this man. Of letting him do whatever he wanted to Luca. Of staying quiet, of not fighting back. It all rushed through him at once.
Then the image of Caleb, lying cold and still on the table in that awful red room, flashed before Luca’s eyes. He could so easily imagine Jamie being the one to have dragged Caleb in there, to have stuck the needle in his arm that injected that terribly fatal serum. To have been the one to watch with the same cool smirk Luca saw now as the energy drained away from Caleb, his life fading with every passing second.
And even if it hadn’t been Jamie who killed Caleb, he might as well have. He was a part of this system as much as anyone.
“You shouldn’t be on this floor,” Jamie said flatly, as though he hadn’t a care in the world.
“You killed him,” Luca heard himself saying, as though from a great distance away. Then a moment later, in a low growl, “You killed my friend.”
“Mr. Arya was no longer serving the building as he should have been, I’m afraid,” was Jamie’s response. “It was out of my hands.” As though to demonstrate that fact, Jamie lifted his hands in the air.
“You killed him,” Luca roared, leaping forward. His motion was stopped short with a jerk on his arm, and glancing over Luca saw Everly, desperately clinging to him in an effort to keep him back. She shook her head once, eyes wide. Luca turned back to Jamie, fire burning in his gaze. “He’s gone,” he said, voice breaking over the word.
“As I said, Mr. Arya had outlived his purpose. And beyond that,” Jamie said, taking a smooth step closer to Luca and Everly, “you needed to learn, Mr. Reyes, that your actions in here do have repercussions. Or had you forgotten?” A cruel smile cut across his lips. “Had you begun to think yourself immortal, beyond the scope of being caught, being turned in?”
Luca froze, going stiff in Everly’s grasp. “What do you mean?” His voice turned hoarse over the question. “Someone turned me in?”
It’s all my fault, was the immediate thought to follow. It’s my fault Caleb’s dead. They killed him because of me.
“Oh, don’t go too hard on Anker. He doesn’t hold anything against you, I’m sure. He just realized where he fit into the structure of this building and where his loyalties should lie. Something you could stand to learn from.”
Anker? Luca found himself thinking in disbelief. It was Anker? Though a darker part of him thought it made sense. They’d been bringing Anker in more and more for testing lately. Luca had seen the bags that had been growing under his eyes, the paleness that had begun to linger in his complexion. People can only endure so much before they break, and apparently Jamie had found a way to break Anker. Luca thought of finding Anker just after Caleb had been taken, the way the other man had tried so hard to get away from Luca, the wild look in his eyes at being confronted.
It was Anker’s fault, it was Luca’s fault. But above all, it was Jamie’s.
The fire returned to Luca, and he burst away from Everly, charging for Jamie with a sound bursting from his throat that didn’t sound human. He shot forward blindly, aiming only for Jamie’s tall form, with no other intention in mind other than to hurt him, the way he’d hurt so many others.
Before Luca could even reach Jamie, however, Jamie whistled out a high, sharp note, and a group of runners swarmed into the dark hallways around them, one immediately beelining for Luca and bear-hugging him. The others circled around behind Everly, preventing them from going anywhere. Luca strained against the runner’s hold, but it was futile. The man was inhumanly strong; there was no budging.
Jamie observed all of this with a calm, unbothered expression.
“I am sorry that it has had to come to this. Warden’s orders, I hope you understand.”
“Who is the Warden?” Everly asked, and Luca could hear a certain desperation bleeding into her voice as she understood the same thing he did. They were caught. “What does she want with us?”
“You’ll have to ask her yourself,” Jamie said, then he nodded at the runners who had gone behind them, and another pinned Everly in place. As Luca continued to struggle against the one who had taken hold of him, trying without success to get out, to escape, he felt a sharp pain in his neck, and then everything went dark.
Chapter Forty-Eight
Everly’s eyelids were heavy. So heavy. As though they had been pinned down by lead staples, and then glued shut for good measure. With great effort she managed to pry them open, only to shut them again abruptly at the blinding brightness of her surroundings. She took a deep breath, and then cracked her eyes open again, squinting at the room that she had woken up in.
It was the white room. Or, she supposed, one of the white rooms. The walls here were not yet covered in blood, which wasn’t necessarily the most comforting of observations. Everly tried to sit up more, to get a better grasp of her situation, but she felt the pressure of restraints pinning her in place. Looking down, she saw metal clamps around her arms, legs, and torso. She couldn’t move.
Panic began to settle in. How had she gotten here? What was happening to her? Slowly, so slowly, Everly’s memories from earlier filtered back in.
The elevator, Jamie, the runners. The pain in her neck. Reflexively, she tried to reach and touch the sore spot just above her clavicle, before remembering that she couldn’t move. They must have injected her with something, knocked her out.
Alarm shot through Everly, fast and hot. Luca. Where was Luca? She listened, trying to tell if there were any sounds to indicate that someone else—that Luca—could be in the room with her. Nothing. She heard nothing over her own ragged breathing as she tried to keep her rising hysteria under control. Had he been taken, too? Was he—
No. She wouldn’t let herself finish that thought. He was fine. He was being kept somewhere else, that was all. The fear was trying desperately to swallow her whole, but she allowed herself an instant to hope, to imagine that he could be safe.
Safer than she was, at any rate.
Why hadn’t they already killed her? That was what Everly wanted to know: if she was in here to die, then why hadn’t they gotten on with it already?
Her fear was reaching a peak when Everly heard the distinctive creak of a door opening behind her, beyond her limited range of view. She tried to crane her neck to see who it was, to no avail. The door closed again with a loud click, followed by the sound of a lock falling into place.
Everly started to sweat, thinking through all the awful possibilities for why she could be here, what they might do to her next. Worse and worse thoughts shot through her mind as she waited in terrible anticipation for her visitor to reveal themselves, to get this over with.
A minute passed, then two, three, and still the person refused to come into Everly’s line of sight. For so long the room was still and silent enough that she began to wonder if she had imagined the door opening, the person walking in. Finally, nearing her wit’s end, Everly heard the muted click of heels on the tiled floor.
The person didn’t come all the way around in front of Everly, but she could feel them lingering just beyond her head. “Well, Everly,” said the voice of a woman, a voice that was both familiar and completely foreign to her. “It seems we have found ourselves in quite the predicament here.”
