Peter stopped beside one of the security gates and pulled an ID card suspended from a lanyard from under his jacket. He swiped it over the reader, which beeped and flashed green. The gates swept back, and Peter ushered them through before they closed again.
“You have power?” Clare asked.
“A generator. I’ve been restricting what it feeds juice to. No matter what I tried, I couldn’t turn off the security system, so it’s been leeching power. The elevators are out of service, though, so we need to take the stairs. Sorry.” His smile was apologetic. “You’ve probably already done a lot of walking today. Do you think you could manage another twelve floors?”
“Just as long as we’re not being chased,” Clare said.
Peter laughed. “I like your spirit.”
Dorran ran his fingertips across the marble walls as they started climbing. The stairwell was wide and elegant, an echo of the foyer. Every second landing opened into a new corridor with its own set of doors, each with a little plaque set beside it.
“Best to stay away from rooms you don’t know,” Peter said. “Some of them contain hollows. You can usually tell which ones because of the noise, but sometimes they’re silent, and that can be an unpleasant surprise. I’ve locked all of their doors, though.”
Clare gave a slow nod. She was feeling faintly dizzy, and not because of the stairs.
Is he telling the truth? Is this where the stillness spread from? She tried to swallow, but her throat was too dry. She already knew the disease wasn’t infectious—if it was, she would have felt its effects weeks before—but she still felt itchy just touching the bronze railing.
She’d listened to all of the wild theories being bantered across the radio, but Clare had never believed she would find out the cause of the world’s destruction. It had felt like something that was meant to be abstruse. Like black matter; it was a concept that wasn’t ever supposed to be in the hands of average people.
Though… in this stillness, is anyone average? We all survived the end of the world. We’re all remarkable in some way or another.
A hundred questions crammed themselves into her brain, but strangely, she was reluctant to pull any of them out. The idea of knowing more about the disease was frightening. She dreaded what the answers might mean for humanity’s future.
As they passed the fourth floor, she began to shiver. Outside had been cold, but inside the building was worse. It didn’t have heating and still clung to the chill from the snows. The exercise kept her core warm but didn’t do much for her numb fingers.
The higher she climbed, the more she began to dislike the tower. It was too clinical, bordering on hostile. In some ways, it felt like Winterbourne’s opposite. Winterbourne had never been welcoming, but it had held an excess of hostile emotions and passions. Helexis held none.
“Here we are!” Peter skipped as he came off the twelfth floor’s landing. He nodded to the passageway ahead of them. “I’ve been living here. We have food and water, and the heater’s running. It’s not exactly homely, but, uh, I hope you’ll make yourselves at home, anyway.”
Clare read the plaque by the stairs as she passed it. Aspect Laboratories. “You said you were a doctor?”
“I have a doctorate in molecular sciences. My dissertation caught the attention of Aspect—the company that owns this part of the tower—and I was given a grant to explore surgical advancements for eighteen months. Basically, they gave me office space, equipment, and money to live off. In return, they owned part of anything I created here and would theoretically make bank if I developed anything impressive.” He laughed.
Clare felt faintly nauseated. She forced the words out. “Did your team…?”
“The stillness? No. I wasn’t involved in it.” He stopped beside a thick metal door and rested his hand on it. “But I know how it happened. It’s a long story. Let’s get you dry and fed first, all right?”
Clare nodded mutely.
The ID badge came out again, and Peter swiped over the black box beside the handle. After a quiet beep and a green light, Peter shoved open the door and stood back for them to enter. “Well, here we are. The closest thing I have to home now.”
The room was larger than Clare had expected. It wrapped along that half of the tower in a rectangular shape, with close to twenty windows overlooking the city. Most of the blinds had been closed or angled so that light could come in but the occupants couldn’t look out. She could guess why. Spending weeks staring down at the mass of hollows surrounding him would be a poor way to live.
Furniture had been arranged in the area haphazardly. Desks were propped against walls or standing free in the room’s centre. Most held dead laptops, stacks of binders, and reams of notepaper. A jumble of mismatched couches were arranged into a circle near a kitchenette against the back wall. Bookcases had been stacked anywhere there was room. Most held textbooks and hefty nonfiction titles, but Clare was surprised to see an odd assortment of fiction novels and board games mixed into them. Evidence that the room had been lived in was everywhere. Jackets and scarves hung over the backs of chairs. A pillow had been unceremoniously stuffed between a computer monitor and the painted brick wall. Chip packets and candy wrappers—the kind she expected to come out of vending machines—lay across the floor.
“Sorry,” Peter mumbled as he kicked an empty chip packet under a desk. “Bit messy…”
Clare tucked a strand of wet hair behind her ear. “It’s not what I expected. For a lab, I mean.”
“Oh, yeah, this is just our work area. The actual labs are in the floor above us. It’s much more, eh, official up there. This is just where we developed our ideas. Or came to relax.” Peter opened a cupboard near the door. “Aspect was pretty accommodating. They believed that the best ideas
