Later that afternoon, Luca sat on the floor of the dome with his back against the wall, watching the younger kids as they played. He liked being in here—seeing the freedom that still existed behind the eyes of those younger than him. He liked to think back to when he was that young and carefree, but more often than not when he tried to remember those wayward years, he came up empty, and so instead he came here.
Standing next to him, empty eyes looking out over the room of children, was a runner Luca had taken to calling Julia. He didn’t know her real name—didn’t even know if runners had names—but she was always there when he came to the dome. She never sent him away, even though he technically wasn’t allowed to linger there long. She carried the same bulky, almost malformed frame as all the other runners. The same distant expression. But Luca always liked to imagine he could see a soft side in her, somewhere. He liked to think that sometimes he caught her watching the children with something like wistful affection in her eyes, rather than the blankness that he knew should have been there.
On the other side of Luca, a new figure plopped down on the floor. Michael. Luca smiled down at him, but it was a pained smile, laced with the memory of the other night, of what could have happened. Michael didn’t seem to notice, and instead he propped his chin on his knees and looked at Luca.
“Don’t you have to go?” Michael asked. “You’re usually working right now.”
“I know, kid,” Luca said in a tired voice. “I know. Thought I’d come in here first. See your beautiful face.” He made his eyes cross, and Michael laughed, the sound of which drew out a small smile from Luca. It fell away an instant later as the weight of what he was avoiding settled over him again.
It was always hardest for him right after being tested. The pretending. Acting the part of a loyal, happy resident. He could usually forget, or at least tell himself that it wasn’t all that bad, living there.
The lies were never strong enough in the wake of the testing, though—with the pain still lacing his arms and the memories of that room still lacing his mind—and so Luca was afraid of what he might do or say if he went back there, back to the surveillance room and the confidence of the runners and the position where he was given (theoretically) so much, and in response expected to (theoretically) trust them in return.
And the truth was, there could be much worse in store for him than the testing. It was painful, but it was expected. It was the thought of the unexpected the runners could throw at him—dangers beyond the scope of imagination—that lingered on his mind with every camera he redirected, every kid he rescued just in time.
People who defied the building didn’t get hurt. They vanished—went missing from the feeds in the surveillance room, and never showed up again. Luca didn’t know where they went, what happened to them. But he couldn’t imagine anything worse than that: disappearing one day without a trace, and without anyone to miss him, much less find him.
But even the threat of ceasing to exist wasn’t enough to make Luca stop.
Though maybe it should have been.
His hands were still shaking in the aftermath of the testing, so he kept them clasped in his lap. His shoulder was still aching, his arms still trembling. It would go away in a few hours, he knew from experience. But not the memories of that room.
White room, silver tools, white chair, silver smile. Jamie’s. All Jamie’s.
And right now, he couldn’t pretend any of that away.
So instead, he was here, with Michael and Julia, as far away from his responsibilities as possible.
If Michael registered any of what was on Luca’s mind, he didn’t show it. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes, and Luca couldn’t help but wonder how long ago the kid had gotten a good night’s sleep.
And he couldn’t help but wonder if some part of Michael knew what happened in the testing room. If perhaps he had been in there, even.
They usually didn’t start bringing the kids into that room until after they were ten—apparently the equivalent of adulthood within the building. Luca didn’t know Michael’s exact age, but he would guess right around ten. Young enough, in theory, that he might not have been brought in for testing yet.
In theory. That was always the key, wasn’t it?
“Do you have to go back?” Michael asked without opening his eyes, and Luca thought he heard something in the kid’s voice. Something small. Something scared, maybe. So he observed Michael, with his eyes still closed, for another moment, then leaned his head back and shut his own eyes.
“Not yet,” he said. “Soon.”
Chapter Eight
Everly sat in the dark, her back hunched over the kitchen table that was scattered with various stacks of envelopes and crumpled-up papers. Her elbows were propped up on the table, right over twin bills that screamed Overdue at her in bright-red letters. She wasn’t looking at the bills, though. Her head was buried in her hands, her eyes clenched tight in a futile effort to stop the tears that were never far away these days.
Sucking in a ragged breath, she jerked up, another headache coming on. She’d been getting them for years, but they’d been growing so much worse recently. Just one more problem plopped onto the growing mountain of problems that was her life.
None of it really mattered anymore: the bills, the house, her headaches.
Her dad had been all she’d had. Twenty-four, and Everly still lived at home, bouncing around from part-time job to part-time job. Oh, she’d tried things, sure. Spent a year at a college three hours away, and when that didn’t work out, she’d tried her hand at a few internships, traveled for a while. Nothing stuck. So she’d come home and had jumped from one brightly colored smock with a name tag to another for the four years since, waiting for something better.
That something better had yet to come along, but all that time, Everly had always had her dad. While any past friends had long moved on and nothing else in her life ever seemed to line up right, her dad was the one constant that she’d come to rely on. She’d taken it for granted that he was always there, that she could always turn to him.
But always can be such a flimsy word.
“Evs, you can only ever be yourself,” she could remember him saying to her, time and time again, when she thought she was failing at making the life she was supposed to live, at becoming the person she was supposed to be. “So, it’s up to you to make sure you become the best version of yourself,” he would say. “And that’s all you’ll ever need to be.”
As she stared upward at the flickering yellow ceiling light above her table in the kitchen, Everly thought she could remember a time before when she had been just as alone. More than that, when she had been aching, bleeding, crying, fighting. Fighting? She had been scared, uncertain, and alone. Just like now. It was just like now. It was—
It was not real.
Behind Everly in the kitchen, a whistle began to sound, sharp and insistent, and it made her flinch. She had forgotten that she put the kettle on, but now she gladly took the opportunity to move, to shake herself awake.
None of that had been real. She didn’t know what she had been remembering, but it didn’t matter, because it wasn’t real.
The bills were real. The red warnings splayed across them were real.
The heat of the stove was real, and she paused for a moment in front of it, hand outstretched so that it was an inch away from the blistering steel of the kettle, trembling there as the kettle continued to scream at her. Closer, closer, closer. Then: blink. Snap. Hand pulled away, head shaken awake. Blink blink blink.
She pulled the steaming kettle off the stove, listening as the biting whistle finally died down, and poured the water into a mug that was set on the counter with an old tea bag sitting inside. While Everly bobbed the tea bag in and out of the hot water, her thoughts began to trail toward the strange man from the day before.
Her grandfather, if he was to be believed.
It was absurd—she had no other word for it. The thought of meeting a stranger who may or may not be her grandfather at some strange building with an even stranger name.
The Eschatorologic, she thought. What kind of a name for a building was that? What struck Everly was not only its unorthodox name but also the fact that she had never heard of this building, which supposedly stood less than two miles from where she lived.
