I FELT KIND OF BAD

about it, honestly. it wasn’t a clean cut. Too much hesitation; I could barely watch as I did it. But I did make sure he was dead before I took his eye. That was something?

And I kept the scalpel. I had a feeling I would need it again.

By then a low, whooping alarm had been set off, but when I peeked out from the examination room, the halls were empty. I couldn’t remember ever seeing anyone here besides Dr. Kells and Wayne, but that didn’t mean much. There was a lot I couldn’t remember.

Wayne’s eye squelched in my closed fist. It was larger than I’d thought it would be, and rounder, too. Part of the optic nerve was still attached to it, peeking out between my fingers. Every second that passed could bring Kells with it, so I darted to the left, to where I thought her office might be. The fluorescent lights flickered and buzzed above my head, and the white walls seemed to curve and bend around me. There was no way to know how far I’d come, no way to make sure I was going in the right direction.

I tried to unravel my tangled memories of this place so I could pick a direction, any direction, to follow. But empty hallways dead-ended with locked steel doors or doors that opened up to rooms with nothing and no one in them. And there were no windows, no statues, no artwork, nothing that even remotely resembled the blurry picture of Horizons as I remembered it.

I grew panicked, turning corners and opening doors to find nothing but whiteness and metal. None of it looked familiar. I was a rat in a maze; I might not be locked in a cell, but I was still a prisoner. I tried to believe that Jude would get Jamie and Stella out, that Noah was alive and would be waiting for me, but every dead end killed a little bit of hope, until I barely had any left.

But then, I noticed a tiny door painted white to blend in with the walls. I opened it and crawled through. I was staring at a narrow flight of metal stairs.

I climbed them, of course. They creaked beneath my feet and my heart felt like it might burst. When I opened the door at the top, the hinges squeaked and I cringed.

Behind the door, something metal clattered to the floor. I heard a whispered obscenity. I knew that whisper.

“Jamie?” I asked, pushing open the door.

“Mara? Mara? No fucking way.” Jamie’s voice echoed in the mostly metal room, which was in fact an industrial kitchen. I searched for him but all I saw were gleaming, distorted reflections of myself in the steel cabinets that lined the walls.

“Where are you?” I asked.

I ducked beneath a hanging pot rack and caught one reflection that didn’t match the others. I tilted my head to one side as the reflection changed, distorted, as Jamie pushed open a cabinet door and crawled out of it. He nearly tripped on the cooking utensils scattered on the floor as he ran to me. He stopped just short of a hug. “Oh my God—Mara—what the fuck happened to you?”

I looked up, staring at myself in the steel backsplash behind an enormous oven. This was what I saw:

One scalpel (held)

One tape recorder (held)

One human eye (brown) (held)

One blood-soaked surgical gown (worn)

One gold Rolex (worn)

I really wished the stupid hospital gown had pockets. My reflection shrugged, even though I had not.

“Blood’s not mine,” I said.

“I’m afraid to ask . . .”

“Wayne,” I said.

“Well, then, I have never been so happy to see you covered in blood.”

And I’d never been so happy to see him. He was not a mess, and was not wearing a hospital gown either. He had on clothes that would have been normal—khaki pants, a polo shirt, no shoes, just tube socks—except they weren’t normal for him. They didn’t fit him either. The cuffs of his pants came to his ankles, and the shirt he wore hung loosely off his frame. His hair had been buzzed so short that his scalp shone beneath it.

“We have to find Stella. Any ideas?” I asked.

Jamie shook his head. “I don’t even know where my room is.”

“How did you get out?” I silently hoped that Jude was the answer.

“I was playing solitaire when I heard the door to my room—cell, whatever—hiss and unlock. The hallway was empty, so I made a run for it. Except I didn’t know where to go, and at one point I thought I heard footsteps behind me, and I didn’t really want to run into anyone, obviously, so I opened the first unlocked door I could find—this one,” he said, swinging the kitchen door, “and hid. But not before I made a metric fuck ton of noise, obviously.”

“And I was the footsteps.”

“You were the footsteps.” His expression softened. “I’m glad you were the footsteps.”

“Me too.”

“I really want to hug you, but you’re disgusting, no offense.”

A smile turned up the corner of my mouth, a real one. “Why is it that whenever anyone says something offensive, they always add ‘no offense’ after it?”

“Offensive or not, you’re objectively covered in blood,” he said, giving me a long look. His eyes landed on the watch on my wrist. “And bling. WTF?”

“Jude’s.” I turned away from Jamie and poked my head out into the hallway, trying to decide which way we should go.

“Did you just say what I think you said?”

“The watch belonged to Jude,” I said slowly. “He left me a tape, told me how to get out of here,” I said, holding out my palm and releasing my fist slowly, so as not to let Wayne’s eye slip out.

“Okay. One, that is foul, Mara, and I don’t understand, but that seems to be the running theme here. Two—what tape?”

I showed him the tape recorder in my other hand. “I’ll play it for you but not now. But Jude’s the one who let me out.”

Jamie’s eyes widened.

“And he’s the one who let you out too, I think. Listen, I’ll tell you everything, but now we need to go.”

“I appreciate this, Mara. I appreciate our situation, I really do. But listen to yourself. You’re talking about trusting the guy who is largely responsible for our current situation.”

I took a deep breath. Jamie was right. But he hadn’t heard what Jude had said about Noah. And now wasn’t the time to tell him. “I didn’t have much of a choice,” was all I said. “Look, I woke up in this room, and Wayne was dead.” Well, mostly dead. “The tape was in his hand, the door was locked, and on the tape Jude said the only way out was to use Wayne’s eye to trick the retinal scanner, which would get me out. It also opens the door to Kells’s office, which is where we have to go next. But first I thought, ‘Well, Mara, your situation can’t get much worse,’ and so I did what Jude told me to do. And that led me to you.” I started walking down the corridor, trying in vain to ignore the squish of Wayne’s eye in my fist.

Jamie didn’t have to work hard to keep up with me; he was taller than I remembered, taller than me. “And I’m happy about that, truly, but am nevertheless concerned about the veracity of our would-be savior.”

I stopped short. “Do you want to go back?”

He rubbed his forehead with both hands and pulled at his face until his eyes drooped.

“Well?”

“No.” He dragged out the word.

“Then kindly shut up and help me.”

But, Stella found us first. She’d relied on the old hide-in-the-broom-closet trick, except that when we passed it, she reached out and grabbed Jamie by the sleeve, making him scream, which made me scream.

“What is wrong with you?” Jamie said, hitting her lightly on the shoulder.

“Sorry! I wanted to get your attention without calling out.”

“That worked out well for all of us,” he replied.

Stella looked mostly the way I remembered her, except for the clean mom jeans she wore, along with a weirdly formal silky blouse. I couldn’t imagine her choosing those clothes for herself—I couldn’t imagine anyone choosing them for themselves. But her face was the same—her olive skin healthy, her black hair shiny and brushed. And she wasn’t covered in blood or any other bodily fluids. Of the three of us, I was the mess.

“My God, Mara. It’s good to see you, but you look—”

“I know.”

“No, but, like, really—”

“I know,” I said. I turned a corner, then another one, trying to follow my faded, faulty memories, but there was no part of me—no conscious part, anyway—that recognized where we were. Jamie was equally clueless.

But Stella wasn’t. If it weren’t for her, we might never have found it.

“She brought me back here, once, for some kind of written test,” she said as we stood silently in front of a nondescript door. But this one had an extra little camera thingy above the top right corner of it. A retinal scanner. Just where Jude said it would be.

“Well?” Jamie asked. “Use the eye.”

I reached out to hand it to him.

He backed away, shaking his head. “Nope. I’m squeamish.”

I looked at Stella.

“Not a chance.”

“I need one of you to do this,” I explained. “There’s a map inside, and our files.”

“So . . . come look with us?”

I felt a flare of anger and tried to swallow it down. “Haven’t you noticed that one of us is missing?”

Stella and Jamie exchanged an uncomfortable glance.

“I can’t be here. I have to find Noah.”

“Mara,” Stella started to say. “Noah’s not . . .”

“What?”

“Alive,” Jamie finished.

I ignored the word that came before it. “He’s alive,” I said with an intensity that shut both of them up. “Jude said he is. He said he was going to find him, and he found both of you and let you out, didn’t he?” Jamie opened his mouth to speak, but I didn’t wait for him to answer. “I was supposed to come here, to get our files—the real ones, so we can finally understand what the fuck is happening to us and then find the map that will lead us out of this place. But first I need to find Noah.” I struggled to explain what it felt like, knowing he was alive, knowing he was here but not with me. I couldn’t. “So you get the files”—I looked at Stella—“you get the map,” I said to Jamie, “and I’ll find you again.”

Jamie put a tentative hand on my shoulder and I flinched without meaning to. “Okay,” he said quietly. “Listen. I know you want to find him. But it doesn’t make sense for you to try before you even know where you’re going. So come in, we’ll get the files, get the map, and then get out. Together. We’ll do this together. Okay?”

I looked at my friend. He had always been on my side, even when he hadn’t agreed with me. He didn’t believe that Noah was alive, but at the moment it didn’t matter. He was right. I would have a better chance of finding Noah if I had the map first.

So I handed the tape recorder to him and opened my fist. Wayne’s brown eye stared at nothing. I pinched it very carefully between my thumb and forefinger and held it just above my own eyes, like Jude said.

The door unlocked. We went inside.

Date: 2015-01-29; view: 719