Her face darkens like the landscape blackened by clouds passing before the sun. “There is something you have to know, Gene. Let me tell you—”
“There’s no time, Ashley June. Dusk is almost here.”
“Yes, and whose fault is that? What took you so long to get here? I wanted to explain everything to you. There’s so much to explain, stuff you won’t even believe at first. I wanted to take you down to the fifty-ninth floor and show you things that would help convince you of the truth.” She stares at me. “You know how difficult that was, all the red tape I had to jump through to get that floor opened? It’s been locked forever. If I didn’t have this whole metropolis fawning over me, if I didn’t have the authorities at my every beck and call—”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about. But listen to me! I can save you.”
“You want to save me?” she says, her voice edged with derision. “What if I don’t want to be saved? What if I think you are the one who needs to be saved?”
“What are you talking about?”
She steps forward until her face is almost pressed against the glass. Her breath frosts, disappears. “Gene,” she says, her voice attaining gentleness again, “there are secrets that have been hidden for centuries.”
“What secrets?”
“Have you ever felt . . . at odds with your body? That it sometimes feels like it’s too small or too large or too cumbersome in all the wrong places? Like you’re a square peg trying to squeeze into a circular world?”
I don’t say anything.
She strokes the length of one long pale arm. “Remember that time in the closet in the school gym? The spin-the-bottle game?” She looks about the Panic Room. “That closet was about the size of this chamber, wasn’t it? Everyone else was outside the door, and it was just you and me inside. We made out with fake passion, engaged in maneuvers that meant little to us. It was just a masquerade. At the time, I thought it was because we just weren’t doing it right. But now I realize it wasn’t the actions. It was us. We weren’t right.” Her eyes fall on mine, tender. “We were wrong, Gene. Something was wrong with us.”
“Ashley June, you’re not thinking clearly—”
She raises her hand, silencing me. “No, Gene. My thoughts have never been clearer or sharper. I feel restored, comfortable in my own skin for the first time in my life. I’m saved. Saved from the petty existence we once had, all the faking, the pretending.” Her eyes fill with a naked wistfulness. “I can save you, Gene. I can finally make you real.”
A cold wave sweeps over me. “You’re not yourself, Ashley June. This is not you. Because the Ashley June I knew would never say something like that. She was a fighter.” I take a few steps back. “I don’t know you: I don’t know this.”
“I am Ashley June,” she says, and slaps the glass. “More than ever.”
“No!” I shout with such vehemence she jolts back. “I can save you! Bring you back, Ashley June!” My words tumble out quick and loud. “Don’t you remember back at the mountain village? You fanged Sissy. And she turned, almost the whole way. But the cure, the Origin, brought her back. The Origin is me and her, our joined blood. And in the same way it re-turned Sissy, the Origin can re-turn you! And she’s here, Sissy’s right in this building!”
At the mention of Sissy’s name, the atmosphere suddenly changes. The sunlight flames out, goes dark. All warmth is suddenly sucked out, and a coldness swoops in. And when Ashley June speaks, her voice has lost all emotion, volume, affection. “There’s just two flaws with your plan.”
“Ash—”
“First, I don’t want to be saved,” she says. “I don’t need to be saved.”
Outside, long, thin shadows of skyscrapers slice across the metropolis.
“And second,” she continues. “Sissy is already dead.”
Forty-one
SISSY
WHEN THE ELEVATOR suddenly swallows Gene and whisks him up along the atrium wall, Sissy’s initial reaction is outright anger.
He left me behind, she thinks. To search the more dangerous floors of the building alone.
But she catches his expression as he is thrust upward. A look of astonishment. She sees his hand pounding the elevator buttons as he is flung higher, until all she can see is the soles of his shoes.
She runs over to the panel of buttons by the elevator door. She’s never ridden or operated an elevator before and is unsure which button to press, or if they need to be pressed in combination. She settles on pushing them all frantically, randomly, until the buttons become less plastic protrusions to press than punching bags on which to vent her rising fear.
“Gene!” she shouts, her head snapping back as she stares up. The elevator keeps rising, faster yet, as if it is being catapulted through the glass atrium roof.
Then the elevator stops. At the top floor where it’s now a mere speck of light. She hears shouting. Coming from the elevator. It’s Gene, his distant voice galaxies away.
“I can’t hear you!” she yells back, but she knows her voice is as inaudible to Gene as his is to her. For a moment she thinks about finding a stairwell and running up to join Gene. But she drops that thought. Gene warned her not to enter the floors between the glass lobby and top floor. Dark floors that might be holding hundreds of duskers sleeping off the night’s festivities.
And then she’s hearing his voice again. Loud and jarring, screeching out of speakers at the security desk.
“Sissy, can you hear me? Go to the security desk! I’m using the intercom. Go to the security desk!”
She races over. Next to the speaker is a set of different-colored buttons. Uncertain which button to press, she settles on pushing them in sequence and yelling out Gene’s name. On her fifth try, finally, she gets a reply.
His voice crackles through. “Sissy, the elevator’s stuck on this floor! See if you can find some external controls at the desk.”
“Okay,” she says, then stares at the daunting dozens of buttons before her. She punches all of them, randomly, trying to make sense of them.
“Sissy, can you—” Gene starts to say before his voice is drowned out by static.
Then something else.
Someone else.
Sissy’s fingers halt midair above the buttons. Maybe she imagined it and—
“Help me!” Epap’s voice.
Immediately she’s pushing the TALK button.
“Epap?! Oh crap, that’s his voice, that’s Epap!” She bends lower to the speaker, her lips almost touching the metal grill. “Gene, do you see him, is he okay?” She starts smacking the speaker, as if to coax out a response. “Gene! Are you with him now?”
Then a horrific scream screeches out of the speaker.
It’s Epap. “Help . . . don’t, please don’t, no!!!” he screams.
That gets her moving. She doesn’t care anymore; she’s going to storm up the stairwell if she has to. And as she turns to run, she looks up to the elevator.
It’s descending.
By the time it reaches the lobby, Sissy is already there, slapping the doors with impatience. Even before they open, she sees that the interior is empty. Gene must have gotten out to help Epap on the top floor. She leaps inside, presses the button for the top floor.
The button doesn’t light up. She presses it again.
The door slams shut. But the button still hasn’t lit up.
And now the elevator starts ascending. The sight of the lobby dropping away makes her feel queasy in the pit of her stomach. As if gravity has been reversed and she is falling up into the sky. She spins around, sees the blur of passing floors blink past her, the bold numerals painted on the doors of passing floors flashing by too quickly for her to read them.
This is all wrong. She can’t shake the feeling that she is being played, an invisible hand controlling her actions like a puppet. She slaps the glass in anger, hardly believing how gullibly she walked into the trap. She has to stop the elevator somehow. Can’t allow it to transport her to where it wants. There’s a key above the panel of buttons. She turns it. Something clicks in the panel, and all the floor buttons light up, then go dark.
The elevator only seems to pick up speed, lurching her upward faster. Then it begins to brake. The floor numerals rushing past her on the wall slow down and become readable. 55, 56, 57, 58. Then the number 59 drops into view slowly, coming to a complete stop before her. For whatever reason, the elevator has stopped five floors short of the top floor.
Ping, she hears the elevator sound.
She pulls out the handgun from her waist. Slams in the magazine. Gets into a crouch, ready for whatever might be on the other side of the doors.
Forty-two
SISSY
THE DOORS OPEN.
Sissy can’t see a thing. After being in bright sunshine for hours, she finds the darkness before her an impenetrable wall. She tightens her grip on the handgun. The smallest movement, the slightest shift of gray in black, and she’ll blast away. She stays in this position even as the elevator doors start to shut on her. She slides forward into the path of the closing doors. They slam up against her with surprising force and don’t retreat. She holds her position, but when an alarm inside the elevator begins to screech—loud enough to awaken anyone sleeping in the building if allowed to continue—she’s forced to make a decision: move out of the elevator or remain inside at its mercy.
She pauses, Then steps forward. The doors close behind her.
And now she’s swallowed up in darkness. And silence.
She traces the wall for a button but can find none. The elevator is gone. There’s no way of calling it back up.
“Gene!”
Nothing. Only her echo rebounding back from unseen walls. But the silence is not necessarily a bad thing. If there were any duskers in here, they’d surely be roused by now. By her smell. By the sunlight that had briefly poured inside when the elevator doors were opened. But there are no howls of complaint, no clatter of nails scraping against makeshift sleepholds. Nothing. In fact, judging from the ancient fusty air, it doesn’t seem as though anything has stirred in here for years, decades.