The room was white.
White walls, white floor, white ceiling.
He tried to backtrack in his mind, tried to understand what was happening, but it was like fighting against the tide trying to form a coherent thought.
Where am I?
A testing room. Some testing room.
What happened?
He remembered a heavy darkness spreading through him. He’d been injected with something, knocked out. And someone—runners, probably—must have dragged him here.
What do I do?
Nothing. Luca’s limbs felt heavy and his head throbbed. As best he could tell, they hadn’t restrained him to the chair he’d woken up in, but they might as well have. He was paralyzed in place, afraid that if he were to move a muscle, it would be enough to signal that he was awake, and that would be the beginning of the end for him.
I need to get up. I need to move.
But he couldn’t.
The longer he waited in that chair, eyes clenched shut, the more he could feel the sweat dripping across his brow despite the coolness of the room. Time passed like this—minutes and seconds and hours, they all felt the same to a man who’d grown up outside of time—and eventually he felt his body beginning to shake. It started small at first, a slight trembling in his hands, but as more and more time went on without change, his whole body started to quake. It would be any second, he knew. Any second they could come in. And so, any second could be his last.
Luca didn’t want to die. Not yet. Not like this.
The shaking had spread to his lungs somehow, and Luca’s chest rose and fell in rapid succession. It felt like he was choking on the air around him. Like it might be that air that did him in, before the runners had a chance to do it themselves.
Sparks were flashing across his closed eyelids, and a pounding was thundering in his head when Luca heard the door creaking open behind him, and he froze, the choked air in his lungs going still along with the rest of him.
Footsteps. More than one pair. A heavy, slower tread. A light and quick one. They both entered, and the door closed back, and still Luca didn’t open his eyes, even as he heard the two sets of feet walking around him to where he was certain, if he were to look, he would see the two people standing right in front of where he was propped up.
It took the hand on his shoulder. It was a small hand—warm, reassuring, though he couldn’t have really said why—and it didn’t shake or rattle or thump when it touched Luca. It just rested there, light against the tense skin of his shoulder.
He knew it wasn’t Jamie or the Warden or any of the rest, and so finally Luca opened his eyes, dizzy when he found them connecting with the round, blue ones that he knew so well.
Michael was smiling down at Luca, bobbing slightly up and down on the balls of his feet in a way that almost seemed like he was floating in the air, like a kite on the clouds. His smile grew when he saw that Luca was awake, and he shifted, casting a wide-eyed glance over his shoulder at the second person who had come in.
Luca looked over, too, and stiffened, all relief he’d initially felt upon seeing Michael fleeing when he saw who Michael had brought to him. Or who had brought Michael, as the more likely alternative.
Dr. Richard Dubose at least had the decency to look abashed at Luca’s state, but still his shoulders were thrown back with that form of authority that comes from presiding over a place for so many years without question. Luca looked between the two—the young boy and the old man—and didn’t have a word to say. He could only raise his eyebrows and wait.
“Luca,” Michael said in a high, breathy voice as he turned back so that his face was once more close to Luca’s. “Do you see? I found Dr. Dubose. And he found you! I saw you weren’t at roll call—well, everyone saw, really—and we were so worried. Or, I was worried. Some of the others didn’t seem so bothered by it, but I knew something was wrong, and I tried to tell the runners that, but they wouldn’t listen. But then there was this dream, and my door was unlocked, and I found Dr. Dubose, and now we’re here!”
Luca had to reach up and put both of his hands on the small boy’s shoulders to cease his rapid recounting, feeling that his breathing had become labored just from the effort of trying to keep up. “You found Dr. Dubose?” was what he finally managed to croak, his voice sounding rather like it had gone out of use for a millennium or so.
Michael nodded, beaming. “I did!”
With a groan, Luca sat up all the way. He placed a hand to the side of his throbbing temple, looking around Michael to Dr. Dubose.
Luca did not want to speak with Dr. Dubose. He didn’t know what the man’s stake in all of this was, but he knew that he didn’t trust him. However, of the three people in this room, he was the most likely to know what had happened to Everly, and to be able to do something about that. Except . . .
“Wait, kid, did you say you found Dr. Dubose in a dream?”
For a second, Michael stopped bouncing. His eyes grew wide and round, and he nodded once, solemnly, almost reverently. Right after that he was back to grinning, though, and he sprang around to Luca’s side, so he could speak close to his ear. In a loud, whisper-like voice, Michael said, “I saw where he was. In the dream, I knew where to go, and so when I woke up, I still knew.”
Luca leaned away and tilted his head, just enough so he could meet Michael’s eyes, which were now so close to his.
There was something about the kid’s eyes . . .
“Michael,” Luca said in a low voice, glancing sidelong at Dr. Dubose across the room. “Did you see anything else in your dream? Did you see Everly?”
A beat, and then Michael shook his head.
Luca’s shoulders sagged—he hadn’t realized he’d been holding them so tense before. He sighed, glanced down again at Michael. Looked back across the room. “You know where she is, don’t you?”
Dr. Dubose opened his mouth, but before he could say anything, Luca interjected, “Don’t deny it. I don’t know where you’ve been all this time, but it’s your fault she’s in here. So, you need to help me find her now, and you need to help me get her out.”
Luca thought he saw Dr. Dubose swallow thickly. He hoped it wasn’t his imagination. “She can’t leave,” the man said. Luca was opening his mouth to object when Dr. Dubose added, “Not yet.”
“What do you mean?” Luca asked. “Why not yet?”
When Dr. Dubose didn’t answer him, Luca’s gaze hardened. “She’s your granddaughter. She didn’t ask to be here—none of us did. And I know if anyone can get her out, or any of us out, it’s you.” He jabbed a finger in Richard’s direction.
Dr. Dubose let out a sound that was almost like a chuckle—like a half-suppressed laugh. “You don’t know anything, boy, so don’t pretend like you do. You have no idea what’s at play here, what you’ve unknowingly become a part of.”
A roaring was growing in the back of Luca’s skull. It had started off dull and soft—when he woke up, he thought, maybe. But now it was growing. Louder and louder and louder, and now it was in his ears, pushing its way inside of him, filling him up from the inside out. The roar had been nameless, voiceless before, but now he thought it spoke with the words of Dr. Dubose, telling him he knew nothing, he could do nothing.
Through the roar, a thin voice cut like a needle through water. Luca couldn’t quite catch it, couldn’t quite see what it was, where it was coming from, but he reached for it, sitting there in the testing room they had brought him to. He reached and he reached and he reached and—
