The way to escape this building, the Warden. Her fate.
All this time, the others had all been watching her, watching as she silently processed everything she did and did not know. She saw Richard, who stared at her curiously, a furrow growing between his brows. Luca, whose eyes had taken on a wildness in the course of the day. So much so that he almost didn’t even seem like himself anymore. Michael, who looked more wary now than before. He had something clenched in his fist, held tight against his chest.
“What?” Luca asked, breaking into the brittle silence that had settled upon the room. “What is it? Do you know what we need to do?”
Her eyes stayed locked on Michael as she opened her mouth. As she prepared to tell them all what she knew. Their way out.
In the space of the millisecond between when Everly opened her mouth and when the words could come out, two things happened, too swiftly to have been noted by anyone who wasn’t observing very closely.
One: in a gray bedroom on the second floor of the Eschatorologic, in a recently prepared bed with gray sheets and gray pillows and a gray quilt, lay a woman with auburn hair and blue eyes ringed in green. As she stared up at the ceiling, she took in her final breath as the Warden, and in the next breath she had become little more than a shell.
Two: all those memories, all those thoughts, all that ability and life and purpose—all that energy, that unnatural, pesky, eternally goading energy—had to go somewhere. So, it did. It fled as far down into the Eschatorologic as it could, to a dark office with screens along one wall, where it found a younger woman with identical auburn hair and identical blue-green eyes, and they filled her up.
Everly took in a breath as Everly Tertium. And the next she took in as someone else. With that breath, the battle ended.
Her eyes cut around the room now. From Michael, whose eyes now radiated a fear they hadn’t held moments before. To Luca, who was oblivious but had desperation leaking into his expression the longer Everly took to respond. To Richard, whose grin had blossomed into something wider. Something greedy.
“You did well,” she said in a voice that she both did and did not recognize as her own. Her eyes refocused on Luca, who looked more uncertain than before. “We all did, didn’t we? And look where it’s brought us. Right where we’ve always been. Right where we will always be.”
“Everly, what are you talking about?” Luca asked.
“You know,” she said, “you made an excellent hero for this story. It’s too bad, really, that we don’t need a hero anymore.”
Before anyone could react, she had reached behind her, to the desk, reaching for a perfectly sharpened letter opener, which had never been used on letters. This was how it had always gone before, after all, and so that was what she was searching for. It was always a perfectly sharpened letter opener against the perfectly exposed skin of his neck, and it always ended quickly that way. There was always too much blood for it to be anything else.
Except this time, the letter opener was gone. The Warden before her had left it on the desk, and it should have been there, ready and waiting for her to use, except it wasn’t. Except it was gone, and it shouldn’t have been.
The moment was nearly over; the others would respond soon enough if she didn’t do something. So instead, she reached for the only other object in sight on the desk: a lamp. Picking up the lamp, which was heavier than it looked, she took two steps and was upon Luca.
The extra second it took her to pick up the lamp, rather than the slim letter opener, allowed something to click inside her head. Something—a voice, an urge, a desire, something—made her hands slow as she brought the lamp down along the side of Luca’s temple. Even this lesser thump vibrated up her arms, and time seemed to suspend (even more than usual) as she stood, lamp in hand, staring at Luca.
For the span of a single breath, Luca continued to look at her, and a different part of her head—such a confusing jumble now, that head—worried that it hadn’t been enough. She raised the lamp again, preparing to crash it down over him once more—fiercer, if need be. But no. His eyes fluttered, his knees bending beneath him. She watched as Luca’s body collapsed to the ground at her feet, a bleeding gash now apparent on his forehead.
He did not move again.
Without prompting, the door to the office banged open, and a single runner entered, taking hold of Luca’s ankles and dragging him unceremoniously away from the room. This had been expected, clearly. Prepared for. The door clamored shut behind the runner, and silence fell across the office.
Chapter Sixty
The Warden stared at the just-closed door. Then, from the other side of the room came something that sounded an awful lot like a squeak. She looked in its direction and saw Michael, who had turned pale and wide-eyed as he watched the events playing out in front of him. She began to step toward him, something else trickling aimlessly through her thoughts as she looked down at the small boy, but before she could do anything, he had bolted, running out of the office and down the hall.
“Leave him. We have more important things to discuss,” came a voice from behind the desk. The voice of Dr. Richard Dubose. Funny, she had almost forgotten he was there. Now, she sized him up, eyes slowly traveling over his tweed coat, his wrinkle-lined face. Assessing. She had the thoughts of all her predecessors in her head now; they’d never liked the doctor all that much. Mostly, they saw him as a pest, someone who couldn’t conform to the balance of the building. She’d taken one life today, why not two?
Lamp still in hand, the Warden took a step, circling around the desk.
“Such as?” she asked, distracting him. But also, she wanted to know. There would only ever be one Dr. Richard Dubose in the building. If she was going to be rid of him, she would at least keep with her the last dregs of his secrets. “What is it you think is so important we need to get into it now?”
Richard’s eyes were wide, his breathing erratic. “Your life,” he said hoarsely. “I can save it, Everly.”
“Don’t call me that,” she snapped. It wasn’t who she was anymore, not really.
She saw Richard swallow. “You don’t have to be confined to this,” he said. “A life in the building, a life of passing your legacy on, one to the next. You—you’re nothing but another in a long line of short-lived monarchs.”
“Yes,” she answered dryly. “A short-lived monarch in this castle that you trapped me in. You’re the reason I’m here, you know. You knew what would happen when you pulled me in here, when you invited me to this building.” She scoffed. “You knew I’d never be able to leave.”
“Don’t you see?” Richard wheezed. “I saved you. Out there? You’d already be dead. But in here, we have time now. Time to set things right. And I finally know how to do it—how to give you a full life, rather than having it cut off at twenty-five.”
“And then what?” she asked, edging still closer to him, circling around the desk. “So, you found a way, will you save all of them? All of your precious residents, your test subjects locked in this building: will you show them the way out, too? Let them have a life away from the building?”
“Well,” Richard stuttered, face turning red. “I don’t—that’s not the point here. The point is you, Ever—” He cut himself off before he could finish saying the name. Starting over, he said, “It’s only about you. About saving you, the way I couldn’t save your mother. I sent her out there to die, kept her away. That was my fault, but I can give you another chance. The chance she didn’t have. That’s what all this has been for—bringing you here, increasing the testing. It’s why I told your father to come to the building, why I gave him over to Jamie. It’s all been for you.”
The mention of her father—or someone’s father—didn’t faze her. Some buried part of her was probably screaming, but the rest of her was numb. Didn’t even care. For most versions of herself, the father of Everly Tertium had not been a man she’d ever want to mourn.
So instead of lashing out at the scientist before her, she studied him: this man who had seemed so large to her when she’d first met him. So vast and mysterious. Now he was just a small old man, cowering behind a desk that was rightfully hers. “Why do you want this so much?” she asked. “Why try so hard to save me? You don’t even know me, you realize.”
“Because,” he said, voice breaking. “It’s what she would have wanted.”
“Who, your daughter?” The Warden barked out a hard laugh. “The woman you tossed aside to work on this little science experiment of yours? The woman you let die? No, you’re not doing this for her. You’re doing this because your ego can’t stand the fact that you’re not always in control. It can’t stand the fact that you failed in the past, and so you’re trying to compensate for that now. But you know what? I’m not here to appease your savior complex. I’m not your guinea pig anymore.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Richard said, pleadingly. “I can help you, save you. I have the answer now; you just need to listen.”
“Oh, but I already have the answer,” the Warden said. She’d reached the other side of the desk, her fingers tightening around the lamp. “An interesting boy, that one.” She watched with cruel pleasure as Richard’s eyes widened, taking in her words. “Don’t you see? I don’t need you anymore. And this ‘cure’ you so desperately wanted for me? I don’t need that, either. Why would I ever want to leave?”
Yes, all the voices in her head now chimed together. We don’t need him. We have everything we’ll ever need. All the power we’ll ever need.
“This isn’t you, Everly,” Richard cried out desperately as she took another step closer to him, lamp still in hand.
And she knew it was meaningless coming from this man’s mouth—what did he know about who she was?—but something else echoed in her mind, struggling to reach through, to break the surface. When it did, it was like a beacon cutting through a black night.
