“What happened to my mother?” she found herself asking, the words spoken in a carrying whisper as Everly was hauled in the bulky arms of a runner down the black hall.
The Warden was already ten strides ahead, and so Everly didn’t really expect her to hear the question, much less answer it. Yet, after a pause that was long and thick and crammed with all the things that Everly knew she would never be able to fully see, fully understand, even having the Warden’s thoughts filling up her head, came a response.
“She was my friend, you know.”
“I know,” Everly said. She didn’t know how, but somehow the statement felt right. Except clearly, something had gone very, very wrong. Everly twisted again in the runner’s grasp, only to have their arms squeeze her in return. “What did you do to her?”
Another pause, longer and thicker than the first, if possible. “I didn’t do anything.”
“You had to have,” Everly pushed, voice rising again. She felt the runner’s arms tighten their hold around her, so she lowered her voice again. “She wasn’t supposed to die.”
“You’re right,” the Warden said, and Everly’s eyes shot toward the Warden at her admission. “She wasn’t. That was the beginning, I think. When she left, and never returned. That was the beginning of it all.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that she was supposed to keep coming. She was supposed to fall into the pattern of the building, and she was supposed to stay here forever, which would have allowed her to live. After she was married, after she had you, she was supposed to be drawn back, again and again. I know, I’ve seen it.”
“So why didn’t she?”
Ahead of her, Everly saw the slightest shake of the Warden’s head. “I don’t know.”
They continued in silence after that for a few minutes before Everly asked, in a voice even more quiet than before, “And my dad?”
“He was a disruption,” came the Warden’s response. Her voice had lost all softness from before, hardening into the cruel sneer Everly thought she was beginning to associate with the woman. Arrogant and controlled. Then, “We’re here.”
The Warden placed her palm flat against the surface of a door that looked just like all the others surrounding it. Instead of simply clicking unlocked, like all the other doors Everly had encountered in the building, this one let out a shrill beep, and then the door slid into the wall, leaving only a gaping hole in its wake.
She could do that, too. Everly knew that if she had approached that door before the Warden, she would have been able to open it just as easily.
Not that she would. Not that she ever would.
She also knew, in the same way she was growing to know everything, what she was very likely to find inside the room with the sliding door when she entered it. Nonetheless, even knowing, in that distant, undefinable way, even amid the suspicions that were creeping in around her, it was still a shock to see it with her own eyes.
Inside were two people. The first was Jamie, who looked up from the computer in front of him with a scowl, only to see who was entering and immediately straighten. His eyes shifted from the Warden to Everly with more understanding than even Everly felt just yet. She wondered how many times he had been through this. How many versions of her he had already encountered. The runner roughly dropped Everly to her feet, but no sooner was she standing on solid ground than she felt a hand roughly grab onto her arm, restraining her from going anywhere.
“Ma’am,” Jamie said, his attention focused wholly on the Warden now. His Warden. “It’s nearly done. Do you want to see?”
“Yes,” the Warden said with a nod. “I want to show her.”
The runner shoved Everly forward, causing her to stumble over her own feet. It was strange, the duality of feeling so prepared to wind up exactly here, yet so caught off guard by the reality of it. She didn’t want to see what she knew she was about to, but she also knew that she had little choice.
He was propped up against a long sheet of metal with his feet resting on a step, so that it almost looked like he was standing up. His eyes were still closed, his skin still ashen, his lips still blue. Wires were attached to his head and chest and arms, all leading into the computer that Jamie had positioned in front of him. An IV led into one of the blue veins in his left arm from a bag of purplish liquid that Everly didn’t want to consider the contents of.
Nearly against her will, she found herself coming up right next to him, watching his very still face for any signs of movement. The body was different, a distant part of her mind was telling her. Bigger, stronger, bulkier. It didn’t look weak anymore. He had been transformed. Reborn. Everly knew all of this, without having to be told, because the words were all hers. The Warden’s. Everly’s. So, she knew the reasons, she knew the process, she knew what was happening inside the stiff body propped up in front of her.
Nonetheless.
Nonetheless, her breath caught when his eyes flickered, shifted beneath their lids, and finally opened.
Everly looked into the dark eyes of what had formerly been Caleb Arya with something like a bittersweet resolution. He looked back at her without seeing her. Without seeing anything, really, she knew.
It was him, and it wasn’t.
She was her, and she wasn’t.
They all were. They all weren’t.
The Warden was watching her. Everly could hear the words she would have said, in a time past, or yet to come. He wasn’t strong enough for the testing, she would have said. So, we made him something new. Something better. Something stronger, so that he can continue to serve the building, even now. As all the runners before him have.
This time, she didn’t have to say any of that. Everly already knew. The words were already there. In their place, her hyperventilating filled the open air, breaths coming faster and faster, more and more erratic.
“No,” was all she could find it in herself to say anymore. That battle was raging in her head again, voices whispering in slithery voices, yes yes yes. She tried to put her head in her hands, but the runner wouldn’t let her. “No,” she moaned. “No, no, no.”
The Warden only watched her. And eventually, she smiled.
Chapter Fifty-Seven
A love story that wasn’t meant to be:
Once upon a time, a girl met a boy. A boy met a girl. They fell in love, as only people with no other choice can. They filled the darkness around them with the light they felt when they were together. They were happy.
Girl and boy continued to be in love, longer than they were meant to be, and made choices that in another life, another time, they might not have. They didn’t regret these choices, not at the time.
The boy thought the girl was everything he would ever need in life. He thought she was brilliant, and radiant, and fierce beyond all reason. He was a logical person, but he lost all reason around her. He didn’t mind this. He would gladly sacrifice reason for her.
The girl thought the boy would show her parts of life that she never would have thought she needed. He showed her what it meant to have someone to look after, to be excited for. To fear for.
Girl and boy thought they could make it, thought they could defy the odds, the fates, the forces that they already knew were working against them. They knew what was supposed to happen in their story, and they decided together that would never come to pass.
