“Who are you?” Everly asked, and she hated herself for the tremor she heard in her own voice.
The woman ignored her question but kept talking. “You have caused a considerable stirring throughout my building these past few days. I assume this means you have uncovered what you believe to be the truth of my affairs here and don’t agree with my methods. Am I correct in these assumptions?”
“You’re the Warden,” Everly breathed.
“You are incredibly resourceful,” said the woman, who must have been the Warden, with something like laughter hiding in her voice. “And so persistent. I feel I should applaud you for how far you managed to get before being caught. Though, of course, very little of what you thought of as being chance or intuition were as such. There were far more hands at play in all of this than you could possibly know. Still, an admirable feat.” The Warden paused, as though in contemplation. “You know, you remind me so much of your parents.”
“You mean the parents that you stole from me?” Everly hadn’t known that those words would ring so true, but as soon as she said them, she felt the weight of certainty behind them. “You took away my whole life, the lives of all these people here.”
“You should not speak of that which you do not fully understand, Everly,” the Warden said in a flat voice. “I would think this a lesson most children learn early on.”
“Fine,” Everly spat. “Why don’t you fill me in, then? Tell me all your excuses for capturing and tormenting and killing countless people—children—for decades.”
“It is not so simple as all that,” the Warden snapped. “Pain makes you stronger. Clearly, you did not learn this lesson the same way I did. Maybe that makes you lucky—but the inability to handle pain, that just makes one weak.” Everly heard the Warden take a deep breath, then Everly felt a hand being placed on her temple, a finger drawing up the side of her skull, sending a shiver racketing across her skin. “And why don’t you, Everly my dear, tell me how you felt, watching the life drain out of your friend. What was his name? Caleb?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Everly said, but her heart was pounding now. Louder and louder and louder and—
“Oh,” the Warden said, with something close to a chuckle. “I think you do. I have felt the very same, you know. The horror of watching something precious fade away, mingled with a very distinct fascination. An unwillingness to look away. A desire to know what will happen next.”
“You’re wrong,” Everly said. The words sounded false in her mouth the moment she said them, but she tried not to let that shake her. Tried not to let it show on her face, the impact the Warden’s implications were having on her.
The finger on Everly’s temple pressed in, hard enough that Everly winced at the pressure.
“Oh, Everly. Dearest, the sooner you understand how little you actually know, the sooner we can get on with the rest of it. To understand the situation of your mother, and your father for that matter, and even your grandfather, you will have to first understand the Eschatorologic itself.” The Warden stopped, her finger freezing somewhere along Everly’s hairline. “I wonder, though, if you are fully prepared for what that will entail.”
Everly didn’t want to give the Warden the satisfaction of asking for the answers she so desperately craved, of begging for them. So instead, she remained silent, lips pinched together.
After a long, heavy moment, the Warden chuckled darkly and took her hand away from Everly’s head. Without prompting, she began to speak. “The Eschatorologic was a dream that was first established long before your time. Before mine too, in fact. It began with the stories of people like your grandfather, who first conceptualized the building’s creation, and the potential use for it. In the years since arriving at this building, I have spent a good deal of time compiling everything that I could on the origins of this project, everything that I need to know in order to fulfill my purpose here.
“Do you know what this building is fueled by, Everly?” the Warden asked. “People. People like you, like me. We are what keep the Eschatorologic alive and well. And do you know why that is?”
This time, the Warden did pause, long enough that Everly answered, in a creaking voice, “The testing.”
“Yes,” the Warden said, something like appreciation in her voice. “The testing. It’s the reason all of us are here, really. You, me, your boyfriend out there. And tell me, what did your grandfather share with you about the testing, about how it works?”
“There’s—there’s something in our DNA,” Everly said, struggling to remember what Richard had told her, what seemed like so long ago now. “A genetic anomaly. He called it STM.”
“Precisely. Years and years ago, your grandfather became aware of this rare phenomenon which occurs in extraordinary individuals: the genetic code implanted in very few people globally, labeled by your grandfather as STM. Your grandfather spent many years traveling the world, testing individuals for the anomaly, and then observing those who tested positive, desperately seeking some sign of what it was that the genetic anomaly may have been responsible for.
“It wasn’t until he discovered this building that he had his first breakthrough. He was here, studying the strange pulses in electromagnetic energy, when a young woman walked in through the front doors and gave him all the answers he was looking for. Unintentionally.
“The Eschatorologic requires an immense amount of energy to continue to exist. As I am sure you are aware, it is no ordinary building.”
“What is it?” Everly whispered, though she was not entirely sure that was the right question at all. When is it, why is it, how is it. She didn’t know.
“It is somewhat of a catalyst,” the Warden said. “A zone between zones, a place outside of space and time. What Richard discovered when he stumbled across the building, and that first young woman, was the existence of what he has coined as interdimensional ley lines, as well as what exists beyond them. In other words, places in each world where the boundary of space and time is the weakest, or easiest to transcend. The Eschatorologic lies on one such line, which is how it can exist at all.”
“Interdimensional,” Everly mumbled. “You don’t mean—”
“This is where the genetic anomaly comes into play,” the Warden interrupted her. “For you see, it takes a great deal of effort for the building to continue to exist like this. To continue to straddle the planes of existence, of reality. The very otherworldly energy that we, somehow, can produce, is the fuel that the building requires to continue. There are a very select few of us, the enhanced. We are scattered through space, through time, and, yes, as you have surmised, through dimensions.”
She said this as though Everly should have been shocked at this revelation, should have held some innate disbelief at the Warden’s words. But the opposite was happening for Everly. Similarly to how, while watching Caleb die, Everly was given visions, images, of so many other instances in time, so many other people, now Everly thought she could hear the Warden’s words, said over and over and over again, always in the same voice, always the same sentences, tracing the same patterns, and now they were all lining up, clearer than anything Everly had ever seen before.
And so, as the Warden continued to say, “It is important for you to understand that multiple dimensions do exist.” Everly finished in her head by thinking, before the Warden could say, “They are not, however, well lined up universes lying parallel to one another, as so many of the stories and fictions which tend to circulate would suggest.”
The Warden kept going, and so did Everly, drawn into the Warden’s words, her own words, the way the two overlapped:
“Rather,” the Warden and Everly both went on, “they are more like tangled up string, intersecting and connecting with one another in random and various ways. As such, while in another dimension a separate version of you—or rather, an individual sharing your DNA and many basic features—may exist, it is incredibly unlikely that the two of you would be on the same time stream or share the same life experiences—in fact, it is nearly impossible.
“Equally unlikely is the probability of a person transcending dimensions and time streams, winding up in a space that is not their own. The genetic anomaly, however, helps with this. In the most basic of terms, it allows you to be open to spaces like the Eschatorologic, spaces that aren’t necessarily in your dimension or mine, but rather in all, and equally in none.”
“What do you mean?” Everly asked. “It’s just—blood and tissue. DNA.”
“Oh no,” the Warden replied. “It is so much more than that. The anomaly—it calls out to places like the building. Draws you to them. Opens up the building to you because you need each other. We don’t live long out there, you know. The enhanced. Without this building, we all die young and tragically, and without us, the building would crumble into nonexistence. But that will never happen. Not while you and I are here.
“We all have a role to play,” the Warden said and Everly thought. “We all have a part in the pattern that has always been within this building, and will always, always continue to happen. Mine is to be the Warden—the one that people perceive to be in control, because they need that illusion, they need someone to look to, someone to fear. Do you know what your role is, Everly?”
She didn’t know. She was starting to suspect, though, a voice whispering—or screaming—or scream-whispering—in the back of her head.
“There is so much that goes into ensuring that this building continues to run properly. When the first Warden stepped in, she was a broken woman desperate for escape. Here, she found the first place in her life where she wasn’t being squashed beneath someone else’s heel. The first place where she was important, where she was powerful. That first Warden seized that power and ensured that it would always be hers.”
As if from a great distance away, Everly heard as her voice asked, “The first?” From even farther away, she could distantly recall reading in Richard’s journals of the first time he had mentioned a Warden. It had been so long ago. So, so long ago. “Who was the first?”
“That’s just the thing,” the Warden said, and Everly continued to think along with her, answering her own question. “You remember what I said earlier, about people being able to coexist with other versions of themselves, from different points in their timeline, originating from separate dimensions? As it turns out, I was not the first of myself to enter this building. Nor the second, third, fourth. But far, far back, the very first version of myself to enter the Eschatorologic, she took up the mantle of Warden with stride, and so it has been for all the rest. There always comes a time when she can no longer live up to the duties of Warden, when she must step down. And that is when the next comes in, the mantle is passed on, the pattern continues.”
Patterns patterns patterns.
“What happened to her?” Everly whispered, though of course, she already knew the answer. She thought, perhaps, she already knew all the answers.
