The Building That Wasn't, page 20
Jamie walked quickly, only pausing once to make sure that Everly was still following. She jogged to keep up with his long-legged pace, panting slightly. “Where are we going?” she dared to ask, her desperation to know where he was taking her outweighing her fear of what he might say.
“Testing room,” he said without looking back at her. “It is required for all residents here to undergo frequent testing, to upkeep the functionality of the building.”
Everly frowned. Luca and Caleb had both mentioned tests to her, but none of what they had said conveyed anything that would keep the building running. She wanted to ask Jamie more, to find out what he was going to do to her, but before she could find the words, he stopped, pulled out his keys, and unlocked a door.
This. This is where it stops.
Her memories.
She.
Everly.
She can’t.
This is where her memories stop and she can’t pull them back, couldn’t pull them back, wouldn’t want to pull them back.
This is where Everly’s memories stop.
Not forever, though maybe that would have been its own kind of mercy.
Not all of them, not even all of those from the building.
But from that room.
The Testing Room.
Here’s what she knows (knew):
Everly followed Jamie into a room, and it was white, almost blindingly so, and she froze because it was the room, the same from upstairs, the same as the one drenched in blood that she had hidden in, and now she was back, only she couldn’t be because she was a hundred and one floors lower and this room was white but it wasn’t covered in blood.
(Yet.)
A chair stood in the center of the room, a chair with straps by the places where arms and legs and necks and torsos could be inserted, though Everly didn’t take any of that in.
Right next to the chair stood a table with a wide assortment of tools varying in length and shape and quality and sharpness. Primarily sharpness. Everly also didn’t take this in at the time, which was probably both a blessing and a curse. Maybe she would have been better prepared. Maybe it would only have made it worse, the anticipation of it.
What Everly did take in was a large, clunky machine that was set up behind the chair with the straps and the table with the tools. For whatever reason, her eyes latched onto that machine and remained latched even as Jamie took her arm, even as he guided her (forced her, shoved her) toward that chair, even as he locked her in and pushed her head back and chuckled darkly, though she did not hear because her attention was so focused, so precise, so wholly trained on that machine, and it was calling, calling, calling to her, and she could almost hear it, almost understand it, almost feel it there with her, like a physical presence, like a long-lost friend, like a lover in desperate need of attention, of care, of help.
And then:
Steel on flesh on flesh on steel on—
Hot, burning, searing, cleaving, tearing, heaving, fighting, clenching, falling—
Beauty, some would say.
Horror, most would argue.
Death, Everly would have said, if she could have said anything, if she could have strung two thoughts together, if she had been able, after the fact, to retain any of the memories of that room, that chair, that machine.
It’s a blessing she can’t.
It’s a blessing the instant the first edge of the first blade licked the skin of her flesh her mind turned in on itself.
It’s a blessing it’s a curse it’s a blessing it’s a curse it’s a—
She didn’t ask for—
None of them asked for—
The building. The building asked for this.
But it didn’t.
But it did.
But it just wanted to exist, and it was people, greedy people, power-hungry people, people who thought they could change the way of things, curious curious curious people.
Everly doesn’t remember what happened in that room. She never will.
Others are not always so fortunate.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Everly awoke to darkness.
That’s not right. Everly awoke to a gray room that was lit by the single fluorescent light above her head, but when she opened her eyes all she could see at first was darkness.
She could not move—only her eyelids, which fluttered open and then clenched tight when she still couldn’t see anything and then opened again and fear: Where was the light? Fear: Why couldn’t she see? Fear: Where was she?
Blink blink blink blink blink blink blink blink.
And then, as though from far off, a pinprick, small and distant and faint, oh, so faint.
The light grew and grew and expanded and formed, eventually, into the shape and texture of the fluorescent light that hung above her head, and she blink blink blinked at it, and then finally was able to squint around the rest of the room.
Her room. It was her bedroom.
It was—she tried to sit up and—
Flames, up and down and through and within the veins of her arms, legs, skin, bones—
Everly froze. Remained immobile in her thin, gray bed. Tried to remember.
She couldn’t remember.
She couldn’t remember, but the others could: the invasive memories that flooded her mind then, that told her what must have happened to her, even though she could not recall, even though she had not been there, even though she must have been.
The memories that weren’t hers, that had to be hers, that belonged to someone else, but were still there inside her.
The memories told her about the chair that she must have been strapped in.
They told her what must have happened to her while strapped in that chair.
She could not move, could not sit up enough to look down at herself and confirm, but what she could feel told her enough of what must have transpired next.
She could not see her arms, but she could see someone else’s—they must have been someone else’s—she could see someone else’s arms and they were covered in cuts and welts and bruises and burns and they were her arms and they weren’t and she could feel it.
Whatever they did to her.
He did to her.
Whatever Jamie did to her.
She could feel it but also she couldn’t because she was numb, blissfully numb, but they weren’t.
The others in her memory. In her head.
They weren’t numb, and so she wasn’t either, because she could feel, was living, their pain, was living their experiences, all of their experiences, of sitting in that chair in that white room—
Not a white room.
With straps around her arms and her legs and her torso and her neck.
Not hers.
And the knife, his knife, and other tools that she could not begin to name as they sliced, and skewered, and fought for dominance over what had once been hers but was now his—
And had never been hers, this wasn’t her story, this was someone else’s, many someone elses’, because she had no memories of this, of that room, of that chair, so it couldn’t have been her, it couldn’t have happened.
And yet.
And yet the longer she remained prostrate on that thin gray bed with nothing but the thoughts that weren’t hers and the memories that weren’t hers and the nightmares that weren’t hers, the more sensation returned to her body, the numbness wearing off.
And the more she could feel it.
It was less like burning, and more like the skin of her arms had been frozen and then cracked open and then pried apart and then poorly stitched back together again.
Behind the pain was something else. A different memory—again both hers and not. This one was a voice. A cold, harsh voice echoing around a cold, white room. We need your pain, is what the voice was saying in her head, layers upon layers upon layers of that voice, saying the same words in the same mocking sneer. The building needs your pain. It’s something inside you that is released when you suffer. And so, we need to harness that. We need you to feel it.
Accompanying that voice was the shrill sound of beeps, that a very distant, detached part of her mind paired with the beeps she had heard upstairs, days earlier, after Jamie had . . . tortured that woman on the hundredth floor.
It became like a cruel loop: the voice and the pain and the beeps and the voice and the pain and the beeps, memories and non-memories spinning, flying, crashing through her head, her body.
This went on for . . . she did not know how long. Minutes or days or weeks or years, and the reality of it was that in the building it probably wouldn’t have mattered, anyway. It all came down to the same, in the end, and eventually it was enough that it overcame her, and she collapsed back against her pillow, though she had never really been able to raise her head in the first place.
Time passed like this. Well, not really, but that is neither here nor there. Everly did not move for longer than she would have cared to recount, for every time she awoke and attempted to shift it would all start over again: the burning that wasn’t burning and the pain that was more like death than anything else.
So instead, she tried to remain as still and as silent as she could manage, allowing her mind to wander freely while her body could not.
The layers of pain brought with them other non-memories—these even more confusing than the others because they took place at home. In the house where she’d grown up. She saw different welts and cuts tracing her arms—not given to her in an all-white room with tools of precision, but rather in their living room or kitchen, with whatever her dad had on hand.
It couldn’t have been her dad—her sweet, caring father who would never harm her—it couldn’t, it couldn’t, it couldn’t.
So, what was it? Where did the images come from?
Beneath those false memories was yet another: of a room that looked very much like her own, there in the building, except perhaps larger. A woman sitting next to her with fair blond hair and bright blue eyes and worry, worry, worry carved into the lines of her forehead but a smile on her curved, red lips. The blond woman brushed a lock of hair behind Everly’s ear and murmured words—of encouragement or warning, she was not sure, but the words were earnest enough, and they almost made Everly listen.
Almost.
And then the woman was gone—was never there? Flashes overlapped, with and without the blond woman. With and without. With and without.
And then she saw a small child, wrapped in a gray blanket, asleep in the arms of a person whom she did not know, being carried far, far away.
And then, Everly woke up, and the memories stopped.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Luca did not see Everly for a week.
At first, he was concerned, because he knew she was being taken to be tested, but he was not anxious. Everyone was tested. It was an inevitability, here in the building. And everyone survived it.
Well, almost everyone.
But then a day passed, and then two, three, seven. Still, she did not return, and though Luca would not speak the words aloud, even to Caleb or Anker who cast him worried expressions at every mealtime now, he was becoming afraid for her.
It didn’t usually take this long to recover.
He had been on the verge of asking Jamie about her, which under normal circumstances would never have even been a thought to consider.
On the eighth day, as Luca was sitting in the dining hall for breakfast, struggling to come up with the right words to use to ask Jamie, he glanced up and saw Everly Tertium walking across the room toward him.
Or hobbling, really. Her steps were slow, stilted. An undercurrent of pain laced her every movement, and he could see the strain in her eyes, but he didn’t care.
She was all right.
(Here, of course, all right is an exceptionally relative term.)
Luca stood up as Everly neared their table, causing both Caleb and Anker to turn and look. None of them spoke as she collapsed into the seat next to Luca’s, staring down at her hands, refusing to meet anyone’s eyes. A beat passed before Luca rushed over to the counter to request another plate of food, which he brought back and placed in front of Everly. She didn’t acknowledge the food or look up at Luca. He felt a tightening in his chest, seeing how small the testing had made her. How helpless.
Normally, they were younger when first brought for testing. Normally they were prepared, in some form or another. They weren’t thrown in, unaware, and expected to cope.
Well. They were and they weren’t. But it wasn’t usually as bad as this.
She had bandages covering her forearms, and he wondered if she still needed them. The testing often marked them, but it was an odd sort of marking that tended to mostly disappear shortly thereafter. Or fade, at least. He didn’t know why—no one did, really. The memory of the pain always lasted longer than the pain itself. Memory, and light trails of scars that never fully vanished.
But Everly. From what he could make out of her expression, she still looked like she was in the middle of it. Haunted eyes, pale skin, twisted mouth. She looked like she was trapped, and it broke something in Luca, to see her like that.
At a loss for what else to do, Luca took her hand beneath the table, holding onto it tightly. She didn’t react, but he leaned in closer to her, whispering so the others couldn’t hear.
“It’ll get better,” he said, hoping it would be true. “It’s always the worst, the first time around, but it will get better. I promise.”
She didn’t say anything, but he felt her hand squeeze his back, sending a rush of warmth up his arm. They sat like that, together, for the remainder of the morning. When it was time for them to rise to go about their daily assignments, Luca could see that some color was already returning to her cheeks. He still held on to her hand, and she squeezed his again slightly before standing up, causing him to look over at her and see the faintest of grins there on her face—there and then gone, but it had been there, he was sure of it, so he was sure it would come back.
She would be okay. She had to be.
Chapter Forty
Richard slammed fist after fist into the door, bruising his knuckles until, finally, a harried Jamie yanked the door open.
“What?” Jamie snapped. “I’m busy in here.”
Richard pressed both hands flat against the larger man’s chest and pushed—oh, how good it felt to be physical, when usually Richard was the one to stand back and observe. He wasn’t as strong as Jamie, but he must have caught him off guard as the other man stumbled back a step, eyes briefly widening in surprise, then hardening as he steadied himself.
“You weren’t supposed to bring her in for testing,” Richard yelled. He could feel himself losing his temper. Good, he thought. He didn’t mind the chance to bite back at Jamie, for once. “Everyone else—you were to test everyone else. But not her.”
“That’s not what you said,” Jamie said flatly. “Increase the testing, across the board. That’s what you told me.”
“And what did you do to her? From what I hear, she was completely incapacitated for days.”
Jamie smirked. “It’s not my fault she’s turned out to be one of the weaker ones.”
Richard’s face darkened, his eyes slicing into the man in front of him. “You are never to touch her again. Is that understood? I’ve gone to too many lengths, come too close, for you to bludgeon it all away with your knives and saws.”
“That’s not the attitude you had when it came to the father,” Jamie said. “You were all too happy to let me have at him with my ‘knives and saws.’”
“That is different, and you know it,” Richard snapped.
“Look,” Jamie said, “between pampering your granddaughter, increasing testing, that kid who keeps running away, and everything else I have to deal with in here, I don’t have time to pay attention to the nuances of your requests. You don’t want me to do something, fine. But don’t expect me to read your mind, old man.”
Richard briefly frowned, that kid who keeps running away playing through his head. What kid? Rather than ask, he poked a finger in Jamie’s chest, pressing down hard enough that his finger ached in response. “Never again. Understood?”
Richard stormed away before Jamie could respond. He walked blindly, aimlessly around that bottom floor. He was so close—so close. When the news had trickled down to him of what had happened to Everly, he hadn’t been able to see straight. It made the reality of their situation—her situation—all too real for him.
She could not die. It would be like failing his daughter all over again.
Now that she was safely housed in the building, they had time. Not an indefinite amount, but enough. He hoped.
But it would all be ruined if Jamie killed her before he could save her.
This would never have happened if the Warden had stepped in. It pained Richard to acknowledge, but he knew Jamie wouldn’t disrespect the Warden like that.
That problem may be solved soon enough as well, he knew. Pieces were falling into place already. He knew it was only a matter of time before they all settled right to where they were meant to go.
But what kid kept running away? He didn’t know what that was about. But something—intuition or scientific reasoning or the building itself nudging him along, who’s to say—told him it wasn’t nothing. Something told him to look into it.
And all the same if he bumped other things along in the meantime. He needed to shift her out of her new routine, needed to separate her from the attachments she’d begun to form. He knew that’d push her toward the destiny the building had aligned for her—and push her right to where he needed her to be. It was all meant to happen, anyhow.
He’d just be helping destiny along.
Chapter Forty-One
It took all morning, and most of the afternoon, before anyone noticed the absence of Caleb Arya.
