She pushed both doors open with a flourish and left, wrapped only in her towel; her bare feet created a wet path out into the hallway.
When she was out of sight, Grant reached down and picked up the small key.
Lucy walked over and took it and held it in her palm.
“I don’t understand,” she said.
Grant turned. “I do,” he replied. “She’s scared. And she should be.”
Lucy led them past the door to the Remembering Room and to the end of the hallway. She had seen the door before, but hadn’t thought to ask what was on the other side. Inserting Cass’s key, they pushed the door open and found themselves in a smaller room. The place smelled like fresh paint and melted plastic; it was warm and suffocating and dark. Lucy turned on a light near the door and it flickered on. The only thing in the entire room was a curtain and Lucy’s breath caught as she walked over and began to open it slowly.
Behind the curtain was a two-way mirror, and it looked down into a control room. Four or five men and women operated the controls. Moving cameras. They zoomed in on areas, zoomed out. Rotated cameras. Followed people as they walked down the sky bridge. Occasionally, the camera would pause and one of the operators would pick up a walkie-talkie and give directions—dispatching guards, or help, or cleanup.
“No cameras in the homes,” Lucy noticed, scanning the screens.
“But in the hallways. All public areas,” Grant noted. “What are we supposed to do now?”
“Why does Cass have a key to this place?” Lucy asked and she peered closer. She could see a camera of Cass walking down the bridge to her room.
“It’s a master,” Grant said, but he was distracted as his eyes scanned the screens in front of them. “We’ll never find Ethan like this. We have to ask someone down there...”
“But...”
Grant looked at the mirror and spotted an intercom button. He pushed it and he could see the operators look up toward them; Lucy walked up to the glass and tapped it. “Can they see us?” Grant shook his head. He motioned for her to be quiet and he leaned close to the intercom.
“I’ve been sent to look for someone,” Grant said. Lucy looked at the faces below. They were talking to each other. Someone clicked through to the room.
“We aren’t authorized to take orders from the observation deck without a visual confirmation,” someone said back to them. “You can enter the side door and show your credentials.”
Lucy swore under her breath. She kept her eyes glued to the screens.
“I’ll stall,” Grant said. “You keep looking.”
“There are hundreds of cameras.” Lucy took a step forward.
“I’m Ethan King,” Grant said to them.
At the mention of her brother’s name, Lucy looked over to Grant, her eyes wide. “What are you doing?” she hissed. “That’s not stalling!”
The observers were silent. Someone leaned over and talked to someone else. There was a flurry of activity. Someone shook his head and snapped to an operator at a desk near the front. The woman punched in a code and pushed a camera button and zoomed in. There was Ethan. The camera said “North Tower: Floor Sixty-Two” and he was sitting on a stool at a sports bar. Lucy didn’t know exactly where it was, but that would get them close.
“We can confirm you are not Ethan King. Want to try that again?”
Someone nodded toward the deck and a larger man began walking up a small staircase toward the back of the room.
“That’s ridiculous,” Lucy said. “I can’t believe that worked—”
Grant tugged her toward the door. “It only works if they don’t send someone to this room after us,” he said.
With their hearts pumping and the adrenaline coursing, Grant and Lucy booked it down the hallway and caught the elevator at the exact moment one of the observers popped out into the hallway after them, his walkie-talkie squawking. When the doors had shut, Lucy leaned into Grant, and grabbed his hand. She felt like they could conquer anything.
The elevator hit the surface and kept soaring upward. She couldn’t calm herself. It felt like the time she had been caught toilet papering a teacher’s house. Mid-throw, the lights had flipped on and her eighth-grade math teacher stormed out of his house with a water gun. It had been a sleepover idea gone wrong, but once they were back at their house, the girls had giggled under the covers until they couldn’t breathe. Excitement, mischief, and the exhilaration of getting away had kept them from sleeping until the wee hours of the morning.
Their teacher hadn’t identified them, but the girl’s parents, who had been hosting the sleepover, made the girls all pay for the missing toilet paper. It was a story Lucy told with pride.
“This isn’t how I imagined your first night back,” Lucy said. “Can you tell me what this is all about? Why are we running around like this?”
“I’m supposed to be dead,” Grant replied matter-of-factly. “If it weren’t for Blair, I would be.”
Lucy froze. She couldn’t find the words to reply. “I don’t...don’t...understand. But Copia...”
“Doesn’t exist,” Grant replied.
“All those people?”
“Dead.”
“Dead?”
“Your father created a secondary virus. It was unleashed it on the Copia crowd while they watched a video from Huck.” His eyes went glassy and he stared at Kymberlin whooshing past them. “That’s what he had been working on…why he never told me what we had been doing in the lab. He knew, Lucy. Your dad knew everything.”
“No,” she whispered. “Grant…”
“I can’t think about it too much…if I think about it too much…” he trailed off.
The elevator started to slow. Their destination approached.
“Why do you need Ethan?” Lucy asked next. She never broke her gaze from Grant. She held tightly on to his hand and refused to let go.
“Because I promised someone I’d deliver a letter. And honestly Lucy...I don’t know how many lives I have left.”
Ethan was right where the cameras had shown him to be—sitting and watching a screen imbedded into a bar-top. It was the World Series game seven between the Yankees and the Diamondbacks. Lucy wondered if Huck had managed to save any professional athletes. She hadn’t heard of anyone famous making Huck’s list. But maybe someday the Islands would boast competitive games with their own teams. Maybe when people grew tired of watching prerecorded history they would demand some sports of their own. The Island Games. It had a nice ring to it.
Ethan’s leg was stretched out to the side, and he glanced at Lucy and Grant as they entered the bar and pulled up the stools on either side of him. He took a sip of a beer and managed to say hello. Lucy and Ethan hadn’t seen much of each other in the past few days, and their brief encounters had left Lucy feeling wounded. But she didn’t feel like she had much time to dedicate to her brother’s moodiness, and so she let his frosty hello roll right off her back.
“Hey yourself,” Lucy said. “I didn’t know about this place. I’m learning about new places every day.”
“Nostalgia Sports,” Ethan replied, nodding toward the marquee outside. “Just another place to remind you of all the things that aren’t the same.” He took a drink.
“Ethan...” Lucy started. She picked up a napkin and began unfolding it, playing with the corners. “Grant...”
“Stop,” Ethan said. “I can tell that tone. You’re here for a favor?” Immediately, he took Lucy’s hand and placed it against the rough exterior of his fake leg. He held her hand there, his palm covering her hand entirely, and didn’t break eye contact, even after she started to squirm and pull away. “This happened to me. You want to hear about it?”
Lucy didn’t answer. She looked back at him, unblinking. He had never offered to tell her about his leg or his time in Portland without her; all of that had remained unspoken. She assumed that he had told Cass, but Lucy didn’t know for sure. While he seemed hostile, or maybe just drunk, Lucy didn’t want him to slip away; she could feel Grant’s impatience on her other side, and she felt torn.