The moment I emerge from the stairwell, I know that I have found it: Fifty feet down the hall, Thomas Fineman is standing outside the door to an examination room, arms crossed, with several bodyguards, speaking in low tones to a doctor and three lab techs.
Two, three seconds. I have only a few seconds until they’ll turn, until they’ll spot me and ask me what I’m doing here.
Their conversation is indecipherable from this distance—they are speaking practically in whispers—and for a second my heart bottoms out and I know that it’s too late, and it has already happened, and Julian is dead.
Then the doctor—Dr. Hillebrand?—consults his watch. The next words he speaks are louder—impossibly loud, in the space and the silence, as though he is shouting them.
“It’s time,” he says, and as the group starts to unknot, my three seconds are up. I rocket into the first door I see. It’s a small examination room, thankfully empty.
I don’t know what to do next. Panic is building in my chest. Julian is here, so close, and totally unreachable. There were at least three bodyguards with Thomas Fineman, and I have no doubt there are more inside. I’ll never make it past them.
I lean against the door, willing myself to focus, to think. I’ve ended up in a small antechamber. In one wall is a door that I know must lead to a larger procedural room, where complex surgeries and the procedure to cure deliria take place.
A paper-draped table dominates the small space: On it are folded gowns, and a tray of surgical instruments. The room smells like bleach and looks identical to the room in which I undressed for my evaluation, almost a year ago, on the day that started it all, that rocketed me forward and landed me here, in this new body, in this new future. For a second I feel dizzy and have to close my eyes. When I open them, I have the feeling of looking at two mirrors that have been placed face-to-face, of being pushed from the past to the now and back again. Memories begin budding, welling up—the walk to the labs in the sticky Portland air, the wheeling seagulls, the first time I saw Alex, the dark cavern of his mouth as he looked at me from the observation deck, laughing…
It hits me: the observation deck. Alex was watching me from an observation deck that ran the length of the procedural room. If this lab is laid out like the one in Portland, I might be able to access Julian’s room from the seventh floor.
I move cautiously into the hall again. Thomas Fineman is gone, and only a single bodyguard remains. For a moment I debate whether I should take my chances on him—the knife is there, heavy, waiting, like an urge—but then he turns his eyes in my direction. They are colorless, hard, like two stones; they make me draw back, as though he has reached down the length of the hall and hit me.
Before he can say anything, before he has time to register my face, I slip around the corner and into the stairwell.
The seventh floor is darker and dingier than any of the others. It is perfectly silent: no conversations humming behind closed doors, no steady beep of medical machinery or lab techs squeaking down the halls in white sneakers. Everything is still, as though the air up here is not often disturbed. A series of doorways extends down the hall on my right. My heart leaps when I see the first one is labeled OBSERVATION DECK A.
I ease down the hall on tiptoe. There’s obviously no one up here, but the quiet makes me nervous. There is something ominous about all the closed doors, the air heavy and hot like a blanket; I get the creeping feeling that someone is watching me, that all the doors are mouths, ready to open and scream out my presence.
The last door in the hall is marked OBSERVATION DECK D. My palms are sweating so badly, I can barely twist open the door handle. At the last second I remove my knife from the front pocket of my wind breaker, just in case, and uncoil Mrs. Fineman’s T-shirt from around the blade. Then I drop into a crouch and scuttle through the door onto the observation deck. I’m gripping the knife so tightly, my knuckles ache.
The deck is big, dark, and empty, and shaped like an L, extending along two whole walls of the procedural room below. It is completely enclosed in glass and contains four tiered rows of chairs, all of which look down over the main floor. It smells like a movie theater, like damp upholstery and gum.
I ease down the stairs of the deck, keeping close to the ground, grateful that the lights in the observation deck are off—and grateful, too, that the low plaster wall that encircles the deck, underneath the heavy panels of glass, should conceal me at least partially from the view of anyone below me. I ease off my backpack and place it carefully next to me. My shoulders are aching.