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.