“No,” Luca whispered. Then said, louder, “You’re wrong. Everly believed there had to be more than this, that there could be a way out, and I believe her. So, you’re going to help me find it.”
Dr. Dubose’s expression changed. At first it looked as though it was hardening—closing itself off, sealing away whatever secrets were stored up inside that head of his. But then, it all cracked apart, opening up to Luca, revealing—what? A truth. Luca couldn’t begin to wonder at what that could mean, but something was there. Something Dr. Dubose had been hiding away before, that he was letting Luca in on now. For a second, only a second, he thought he saw Dr. Dubose’s eyes cut to Michael.
“Come on,” Dr. Dubose said, already moving back toward the door. “We have somewhere else to be.”
Chapter Fifty-Two
Everly was no longer in the white room, pinned to a table.
She was in a gray room now, a bedroom, and she was staring down at the prone sleeping form of an old woman.
Lois.
If the Warden was to be believed, Lois was also her, whatever that meant.
No, Everly said to herself. No, it was no use trying to deny it. Trying to call the Warden deranged, or saying that she was wrong. Everly had felt the truth behind the Warden’s words the moment she said them, and now she was trapped here, with Lois lying in front of her and the Warden standing silently behind her, and she didn’t know what to think anymore. She didn’t know what to believe.
“Do you see?” the Warden had asked her. No, Everly didn’t see.
But she was afraid that she was beginning to.
“Look,” the Warden said, and she walked over to Lois, who did not stir beneath her touch as the Warden gently pushed back her hair, revealing the vulnerable skin at the back of her neck. The base of her skull.
And there, Everly could see the mark: the long, thin scar that so many of the older residents here in the Eschatorologic bore.
“Out there,” the Warden was saying, “beyond these walls, Lois here wouldn’t even be alive anymore. None of them would be. We are all fated to die at a very young age, due to this . . . gift in our blood, our bones. For most it’s around twenty-five.” The Warden lifted her gaze to Everly’s, her hand still resting in Lois’s hair. “Richard would tell you that when the brain stops developing, it no longer knows what to do about the anomaly filling up our DNA. And so instead of fighting to find the truth, it shuts down. Too much for it to bear.” Leaning forward, the Warden added in a whisper, “But between you and me, I think it’s more than that. I think it has more to do with balance—with the building knowing when it needs a replacement for one of us. Knowing when the energy’s growing thin.”
Twenty-five. The reason she was trapped here. It was the barrier to their leaving, the factor she had yet to find a way around. Though her mind was spinning, spinning, trying to catch up with itself, trying to spot what she had missed.
“And in here?” Everly asked, her voice fainter than a whisper.
“In here, the building takes care of that problem for us. It assures the brain that it’s okay, that we’re okay. So, we live. We get more time.”
Everly took a step closer to the foot of Lois’s bed. “What happens to them?” she asked. “Why are they all so . . .” She did not know how to finish the thought, but the Warden nodded.
“Being in the building allows our bodies to continue to function. However, the building extracts a toll. Energy. And a person can be stripped of only so much energy before they become—” She gestured down at Lois’s sleeping form.
“And the,” Everly motioned to the back of her own head, where she knew a scar would be, if she were Lois.
“Ah. You see, they still have the energy. The STM in their systems is still working, it just can’t be extracted as easily after they start to shut down like that. So, we have to go about the extraction through . . . other means.”
Everly swallowed thickly, but she didn’t say anything. She had begun to figure as much. In fact, looking down at Lois, she nearly thought that she could picture the day it happened. The day Lois was first given that scar, the one that since then Everly knew, without knowing, had been reopened again and again and again, fulfilling its purpose until Lois had nothing left to fulfill any longer. Everly thought that she could see a much younger Lois—who was still a much older version of herself—sitting in a chair that was reclined back at a sharp angle. Tied in place. Eyes closed. Breathing deeply. She thought she could see a person dressed in red walk up to Lois’s side, blade in hand. And she thought she saw what happened next, too, but she wished that she didn’t. Everly tried shutting her eyes but it didn’t help. The vision only clarified behind the darkness of her eyelids. With a shudder, she jerked her eyes open again and tried to pin her attention on this Lois, in this moment, and the black-clad woman who stood next to her.
A piece of her leaned toward this, almost wanted this fate, the Warden’s fate, Lois’s—wanted to become everything the Warden intended her to be. To become cruel, sadistic. To rule the building with an iron fist and never look back.
That piece in her head was clawing for purchase against the rest of her that was pushing back with everything she was, with everything she had left. Everly fought instead to remember the room coated in blood, remember listening as the woman upstairs was beaten. Remember the haunted looks on the faces of all the children downstairs. Remember the sensation of her own mutilated flesh.
In Lois’s room now, she gripped her head with shaking fingers, ignoring the Warden, who she knew stared at her as she heaved in deep breaths, trying to remember and cling to all those things, the reasons she couldn’t, wouldn’t become like the Warden who stood next to her. Could never turn into that, be a part of this.
She tried to remember all those reasons and remember who she was, why she wasn’t a person who could agree with this.
But she could feel the other side of her head, the side that was filling up faster and faster with thoughts that weren’t quite hers, as it grew stronger.
It was a battle raging in her own head.
And Everly was afraid she might be losing.
Chapter Fifty-Three
There wasn’t much of a crowd, but the people who had arrived were all happy, with bright smiles on their faces and party hats tied loosely on their heads. And they were all singing, voices rising together in an awful, discordant harmony as Mary Tertium sat at the head of the kitchen table, a cake in front of her adorned with twenty-five leaning, burning, dripping candles. She blew them all out, one by one, and when the final candle was extinguished, a cheer rose up among the people who had gathered there to celebrate with her. From the back of the room, a young girl with strawberry-blond pigtails clapped along as well.
“Thank you all for coming today,” Mary Tertium said to everyone gathered. “You can’t know how much it means to have all of you in my life. So, thank you. Thank you all.”
The people cheered again, and then someone found a knife and they sliced into the cake, which Mary was delighted to discover was marbled vanilla and red velvet, her most favorite of flavors. Slices of cake on limp paper plates were passed around the room, and Mary herself piled a large piece, slathered in a hefty dollop of icing, onto a plate that she brought over to the pigtailed girl. Kneeling in front of her, Mary lifted the plate and grinned as the girl’s face broke into the widest of smiles before grabbing the cake away and digging in with a fist full of small fingers. This, Mary thought. This was worth more than all the other presents she knew were stacked up in the other room. This right here.
She left the girl with her cake and circled around the room, saying hello to the friends she hadn’t seen in however long, and thanking others for stopping by, and hugging the ones she wasn’t sure if she’d see again because, really, it was a bit of a miracle they had appeared at this event at all—she hadn’t seen them in months and had begun to worry. An hour or so passed and the people all dispersed, leaving Mary alone once again with her husband and her small, pigtailed daughter. The only two people she wanted with her, anyhow.
“That went well,” her husband said jovially, though Mary could see the party had taken its toll on him. His smile had become a little lopsided, and his eyes were starting to squint the way she knew they did when he was getting close to needing to lie down. She smiled softly at him and walked over to place a light kiss on his cheek.
“It was perfect,” she said. “Thank you.”
“Well, you only turn twenty-five once. Might as well make an ordeal of it.”
She grinned, but it quickly turned into a grimace as a sharp pain laced through her head. She raised her hand to her temple, grunting slightly.
“What?” her husband said in a concerned voice. “What is it? Do you need your medicine?” For the headaches had been coming on more frequently of late, and so this didn’t seem so out of place just yet. Just another headache. An ill-timed headache, perhaps. But just another.
“No, I’m okay,” Mary said, hand still up to her head. She tried again to smile at her husband. “Too much socializing, most likely. I haven’t had to host that many people in ages.”
