But she doesn’t even blink. She swipes her wrist over the sensor and keys in the right floor. “Go. Have fun. Give him a big kiss for me.”
“I will. Thank you.”
My legs shaky, I climb into the capsule and strap myself in. The doors slide closed, and a huge grin spreads across my face. I can’t believe it. The plan worked!
“I’m in,” I murmur to Ryder. Before he can respond, the capsule is propelled through a series of tunnels. I can tell the moment we’re underground because my earpiece cuts out. It’s part of the security of the subterranean levels—no communication via the normal channels. Like it or not, I’m on my own.
The capsule lurches to a stop, and the doors open. I can’t see anything at first but black stars and bright lights, and then my vision clears.
I step into a corridor with pale-green tiles and a darker green stripe bisecting the walls.
Just like in my vision.
11
The moment I step into the hallway, something clicks. The vision rushes over me, layered on top of my reality, and I’m flooded with a feeling of rightness. A magnetic force pulls me forward, sucking me into this path. I must run this maze. Not because the vision tells me, not because it’s in my genes. But because sometime in the future, I already did.
Callie felt this way. On the last day of her life, Logan told me how she talked about Fate’s invisible hand, urging her forward.
She may have changed the future. She may have proved that an infinite number of parallel universes exist, and it’s up to us to determine which world we live in. But she had to walk into my room, with a syringe in her hand. Because this was her Fixed.
Mikey posited—and I believe—that some moments are lived more strongly than others. These sequences of actions happen in every world. The Fixed, he called these moments. You can change your future all you want, but you will never get away from walking certain paths.
The blood roars in my ears. My heart attempts to lap itself in beats. Somewhere inside my soul, too honest for artifice, too deep for excuses, I know this is my Fixed. However I choose to live my life, in whatever world parallel to this one, I will always end up here, at this moment.
Metal clatters down the hall, and I snap to attention. I scan the corridor and duck into a relief room, heart pounding in an entirely different way.
I take a deep breath, count to one hundred, and then slip back into the corridor. Nobody. Good.
Of their own volition, my feet start moving. There’s no question which way to go. Even if I hadn’t dreamed about the purple and green corridor every night, there’s that invisible hand, tugging me in the right direction.
I’m not going quickly enough. Something pushes between my shoulders, urging me faster, faster. I start trotting and then break into a full-out run, holding the picnic basket tightly. My sneakered feet slap loudly against the pale-green tile, but I’ll risk the extra noise. I have to. The hand of Fate won’t allow otherwise.
The wait lounges flash by, and sure enough, I see emerald carpets and purple amethyst couches.
Green and purple. Purple and green.
By now, it no longer seems strange that the combination of colors feels so familiar. That it resonates so deeply inside me. Sweat drenches my back, making my shirt cling to my skin. I make a left, go through the double swinging doors, bypass another set of elevator capsules, open the emergency exit, and descend down, down, down an endless set of stairs.
And then, I enter a hallway and stop dead in my tracks. Stretchers line the wall, holding people. No, not people. Bodies. Corpses, with their hands clasped across their chests. All lying perfectly, deadly still.
The hair stands on my neck, and my bones melt into fluid. Where am I? Did I stumble into a morgue?
I rub my arms. The air is chilly, at least ten degrees cooler than above ground, and smells too clean, too sterile. Like the entire hallway was doused with sanitizer.
This isn’t right. I must’ve taken a wrong turn because these corpses weren’t in my vision. And yet, I continue walking down the hallway. Because that unseen force is still here, still tugging me down the path.
I see it. A door. Just like the one in my vision.
It is metal, locked up tighter than a tomb with its blinking-purple-light security system, its pale green box of personal identity scans. Two long strips of green and purple, twisted together, bisect the walls on either side of the door. The exit signs flash purple; the grating over the lights is green.
The message couldn’t be clearer. This is where the colors lead. This is where you’re meant to be. This is the place to which you’ve been called.
I’m here. I found it. Now what?
I look up the corridor, my breath erupting in pants. I don’t know what I expected. Fireworks, a symphony orchestra? Instead, it’s just a hallway. Just a door. Locked, with no way for me to get inside.
Clearly I’m not going to turn around and go back. My only choice is to find a spot and hide. Stake out the door and wait for something to happen. But where?
There’s nothing else in the hallway. No twisted metal plant, no laundry carts, no trash chutes. Could I conceal myself underneath the stretchers? I crouch down and examine the crisscrossing metal rods. It wouldn’t hide a three-legged mouse, much less a person.
Frustrated, I stand. That’s when I notice some of the stretchers hold more than one corpse. The bodies are crammed together, side-by-side on the narrow mattresses, as if the administration ran out of beds and thought the corpses wouldn’t mind.
I shiver. A sick feeling starts in my stomach and climbs into my throat, all acidic and sharp and burning. Not just because of the cavalier treatment of the dead bodies. But also because I’ve realized there’s only one spot for me to hide. One spot where I can stake out the door and remain concealed.
On one of the stretchers, snuggled against a dead body.
12
I breathe too fast. I gulp the air as if I’m storing up for a famine, and it’s still not enough. Faster and faster. Pant, pant, pant.
Slow down, my brain screams. I can’t hyperventilate, not now. I have a mission to accomplish.
I focus on a single detail—the hourglass insignia edging the white sheets. The old symbol of the Future Memory Agency. Weird. I thought FuMA didn’t exist anymore. I thought all of their old equipment was stowed away or trashed. So what are their sheets doing here?
I don’t know the answer, but thinking about the anomaly slows my breathing enough for me to scan the faces of the corpses closest to the locked door. In the third stretcher, I see a girl about my age, with black hair arranged in a tidy braid. She looks like she has a mixed heritage, like me, with a smattering of freckles across her nose and cheeks.
For some reason, these details are important in choosing which corpse to share a bed with.
Taking a deep breath, I pull a stun gun from the picnic basket—something else I swiped from Mikey’s office—and stow the basket under the stretcher. Then, I close my eyes and jump. Only I launch myself too hard and sprawl across the stretcher. Skin touching the corpse’s skin.
Ew. I leap off her, and my foot smacks into the wall, sending the stretcher careening across the corridor and disrupting the precise line of hospital beds.
At that moment, I hear a loud swoosh of air rushing through a tunnel, signaling the arrival of the elevator capsule. Hurriedly, I push the stretcher back into line and lie down on the mattress, pulling the sheet over my body. My shoulder brushes against the girl’s. Even through our shirts, I can feel her coldness. The smell of formaldehyde winds into my nostrils.