On the other side of the divider was an all-black room with a single desk at the back and a wall of screens. It looked oddly similar to the surveillance room, Luca thought. And in fact, walking closer to the screens, he recognized many of them from the same feeds that he was so used to watching, hour after hour, day after day. Only, the more he looked, the more he saw others, too. Other cameras into other rooms that he had never seen before—the hidden spaces that had been kept a secret, even from him. Luca frowned as he looked over all of it.
What was this place?
Dr. Dubose seated himself in the chair behind the desk, lips turning up in satisfaction. “It shouldn’t be long now,” he said. “There’s not much to do but wait, so you might as well get comfortable.”
Luca looked again around the small room—empty, save for the desk and the screens—and wondered how anyone was supposed to be comfortable in that space.
“What are we doing in here?” Luca asked. Anxiety was creeping back in, right alongside the curiosity he felt as he tried to examine the new windows at his disposal. The new angles into this building he thought he had known so well. “Where’s Everly?”
“Oh, she’ll be along shortly.”
Luca wanted to punch a wall. The old man clearly was set on not giving him answers, even here, even after everything he’d endured to get here.
Michael didn’t seem nearly as put out as Luca felt. He walked over to the desk, blue eyes scanning over the contents, as though he’d be able to make any more sense of it than Luca could. It was all junk, or gibberish, or cleverly hidden secrets. Nothing Luca knew how to use. Michael’s hand reached out, then, and Luca thought he saw the kid pick up something—a letter opener? For a moment, Michael held it in his hand, wide eyes staring down at it. Then he closed his fingers around the tool and backed a few steps away from the desk.
“I don’t know,” Michael mumbled, the excited light in his eyes already dimming. “This—this doesn’t feel right.”
Dr. Dubose chuckled. “Of course, it doesn’t. You aren’t used to the building’s patterns yet, Michael, so of course you would see this as wrong. But it’s all right. All will sort itself out soon.”
None of Dr. Dubose’s words made sense anymore. Luca tried to catch the man’s eye, but it was almost like he was avoiding him, which did not sit well with Luca. Realizing that he was unlikely to get any answers from Dr. Dubose, Luca instead faced the wall of screens, searching for any signs of Everly. It was hard, as there were even more screens down here than in the surveillance room, and many of them he wasn’t used to. Not like upstairs, where he knew the shape of every angle in every camera, where he could spot when something was wrong almost before it had even happened. But down here, with these new screens, his eyes stumbled blindly from one to the next, looking for any hint or trace or breath of her. Any indication that she was still alive, that she was okay.
“Who uses this room, anyway?” Luca asked as he searched the screens.
“The Warden.” This came from Michael, whom Luca had nearly forgotten about, as he was standing so quietly away from them. “This is the Warden’s room.” Michael’s eyes pinned onto Dr. Dubose, who Luca was strangely pleased to see had paled somewhat. “Isn’t it?”
A pause. And then, Dr. Dubose let out an uncertain chuckle. “A very perceptive young man, aren’t you? Now how did you come to that conclusion?”
Another pause, longer than the first, in which Michael’s eyes turned distant and foggy. “I think I dreamed it,” he said in a faint voice.
Dr. Dubose was openly staring at Michael. “Fascinating,” he said. “Michael, I do believe you and I are going to have some fun when all of this is over.”
“She’s coming back here, isn’t she?”
Dr. Dubose considered Michael for a long moment before responding. “In a manner of speaking, yes. Yes, she is.”
Luca didn’t know what to make of everything that was happening in front of him. Before he had time to process anything, really, his attention caught on one of the screens, like a magnet drawn to a sheet of metal. His heart slowed, stopped. Jump-started itself and started to spin.
“Everly,” he whispered, taking a step closer to the screen. “It’s Everly.”
And it was, though from the angle of this camera, Luca could not make out where she was—except that it appeared she was standing in a gray bedroom—nor whom she was in the company of.
All he could see was her. All he could ever see was her.
Chapter Fifty-Six
“No,” Everly whispered, snapping back to herself, away from the torrential thoughts filling her head as the Warden tried to pull her away from Lois’s room, tried to drag her somewhere new. It was like the other woman expected her to go along with it, to just fall into place.
Probably because that’s what she did, however many years ago this happened for her, Everly realized. But it wasn’t going to happen to her. She wouldn’t let it. This was Everly, taking a stand in the battle against herself.
The Warden stood up tall, staring her down, and Everly understood that it was supposed to be intimidating, but by then, she’d seen far worse. Her mind flitted for half a second back to the white room before she shook her head to banish the image.
Everly crossed her arms, not caring if it came across as petulant. “I’m not going anywhere else with you. Whatever you need to say, you can say it here. But it won’t change anything.”
The Warden’s eyes narrowed to slits as she glared at Everly. “Insolent girl, you don’t even know why you’re resisting.”
“I’m resisting because you’re unhinged,” she said, voice rising. But this felt right. This felt like fighting back against the rogue thoughts in her head, and she embraced that chance. “I don’t know what you want from me”—oh, but how she did—“but you can’t have it. You won’t make me more a part of this,” she gestured vaguely around in the air, “than you already have. I’m done. I’m out.”
“You’re out,” the Warden sneered. “Fool, where would you go? Would you leave? Run away from the building, you’re running away from any chance of living. You’d die within hours of being out there. Is that what you want? Are you so desperate to escape your fate that you’d sacrifice your own life?”
“It’s not my fate.” Everly shook her head, backing a step away from the Warden. “And it never will be.”
Lois’s room was small, though, and it was quickly apparent that there was nowhere she could possibly run. Before Everly could decide what to do, the Warden clapped her hands. Within moments, a horde of runners appeared at the door—bulky frames, blank faces. A spike of panic shot through Everly, and she backed up until she pressed against the far wall.
“Someone grab her,” the Warden said in a flat voice. “Bring her with us. We have more to see.”
“No,” Everly said, pressing more firmly against the wall, and then louder, “No! Back away!”
The runners, of course, did not listen to her, and soon enough two had grabbed her arms, a third wrapping thick arms around her torso, lifting her up off the ground as though she weighed nothing at all.
“Let me go,” she screamed, trying to kick out at the runner who held her, twisting in their grasp in an attempt to find some way to bite them, to make them release her.
It was useless. The runner was completely unfazed by her writhing, plowing on steadily down the hallway after the Warden, until they reached the elevator. By then, Everly had gone limp, fear slithering through her restrained form.
They descended to the lowest floor of the Eschatorologic. It reminded Everly now of the day she had stumbled down here on her own, rather than being carried unwillingly in the arms of a runner. That had been the day she found the white room, covered in blood. The day she found Luca. The day she spent the night in the Eschatorologic and set everything in motion.
It was also the day she had seen that woman on the hundredth floor. The one whom Jamie brutalized. The one who didn’t speak, or move, or react—likely, Everly now was beginning to see, because she had surpassed that threshold where her body could no longer keep up with her mind.
The woman who looked like her mother.
