Page 64 of 56 Days
He can become him, fully, finally, and leave all his other selves—with their other names, their dark mistakes—far, far behind.
29 Days Ago
In one moment Ciara is deep in a dreamless sleep and in the next she is wide awake and the world is on fire.
A siren is wailing.
So loud that the peak of each iteration feels like something has reached into her ear canal and pinched whatever’s at the very end of it, deep inside the center of her skull.
And it’shere, this ceaseless noise.
With her, in thispitch-blackroom.
But when she turns she sees that Oliver, for some reason, is not.
It takes a moment for Ciara’s brain to absorb the shock and put the pieces together: the building’s fire alarm has gone off in the middle of the night and Oliver isn’t in bed beside her. His half of the duvet is folded back onto her and when she touches a hand to the exposed sheet, she feels no warmth in it.
But the siren is louder than her thoughts, so she can’t think about that now. She can’t think about anything. She has only one objective and it’s to get to a place where she can’t hear this torturous noise.
She throws back the covers just as the door to the bedroom opens, the warm glow of the light in the hallway swiftly banishing the majority of the dark. Oliver stands in the doorway in silhouette, rendered a shadowman by the hall light.
She can see enough to see that he’s dressed. Sweatpants and aT-shirt—what he puts on when he gets up in the morning but before he gets actually dressed. He only wears his boxers to bed, so wherever he was, it was more than a sleepy trip to the bathroom.
What was he doing?
The open bedroom door has made the siren even louder; the alarms themselves must be in the hall. She reaches for the jeans she wore yesterday and hung from the back of the chair last night, and jams her bare feet into the sneakers she had neatly set on the floor.
She is dimly aware of Oliver not moving as she does this. He remains in the doorway, still, his facial expression blurred by the dark, seemingly unaffected by thisbrain-piercingnoise.
He holds this position even when she reaches him, making no effort to move out of her way.
She calls out his name but he doesn’t react. It crosses her mind that he could be sleepwalking, but now that her eyes have adjusted there’s enough light to see that he’s very much awake and alert.
Awake and alert and blocking her way out of the bedroom.
“Oliver,” she says again.
And then, as if coming out of a daze, he nods and steps aside.
She pushes past him into the hall and grabs her coat from the hook by the door. Her keys are on the hall table; she slips them into a pocket.My phone, she thinks then. This could be an actual fire and God knows how long they’ll be out there if it is. She should take that, too.Where is it?She doesn’t usually bring it into the bedroom with her, so she dashes into the living room—the lights are on in there—and scans for it.
It’s on the coffee table, next to Oliver’s phone.
Which just at that moment lights up with a notification.
She barely glances at it as she picks up her own phone, but she thinks it was a text message.
Touching the screen ofherphone makes it light up too—with the time: 4:01 a.m.
Why would someone be texting Oliver at four in the morning?
She turns back around.
“Where are you going?” Oliver shouts over the din.
She points at the door. “Out!”
The entire world is starting to feel as if it’s made of noise and Ciara can’t take much more of it. Whoever designed this alarm did their job extremely well. She needs to get away, to get outside. But as she starts down the hallway she feels a tug on her arm and then a pull, a force strong enough to spin her right around.
