As with the door, the walls are paneled with natural wood, slightly curved as if to mimic the undulations of stacked logs. Vividly grained boards show when I swipe my foot over the dusty floor too.
The room’s been stripped down, leaving only the largest furnishings—the items I guess it’d have been most difficult to quickly and discreetly remove—but even those are totally different from anything else we’ve seen in the place.
A suede sofa, so plump my limbs twinge with the urge to sink down into it and discover how comfy it’d be, stands along one wall. It faces a stone-lined fireplace that’s empty other than streaks of black that confirm it was used at some time. Or maybe those were painted on for aesthetic effect.
Built-in bookcases line the wall to one side of the sofa. Next to us, near the door, stands a wooden chest large enough that Zian could have curled up inside and the lid would still have shut.
A strange sense of recognition quivers through my mind. I sink down in front of the chest, getting a whiff of its dry but sweet cedar scent, and brace my hands against the lid to lift it.
There’s an image in the back of my head, a sense of what Ishouldsee when I push it open. I can’t quite get a firm grasp on the impression, but when I shove upward and reveal only an empty hollow inside, inexplicable disappointment sweeps through me.
No. There was, before—
“We’ve been in here,” I say slowly, testing out the words to make sure I agree with them before I continue. “There used to be—I feel like this chest should have something in it.”
“That’s what chests are usually for,” Jacob snarks. “Holding things.” But his tone is milder than usual, a hint of uncertainty and confusion touching his face as he scans the room.
“That’s not what I mean. Something specific.”
I shut the lid and stand up, gesturing for the guys to come over. Only Dominic responds.
He gazes down at the chest with an oddly dreamy expression and kneels down in front of it like I did. As he pushes the lid up with a squeak of its hinges, his eyes flicker.
“Yeah,” he says, almost a whisper. “I can almost see—I think there were toys in here.”
The second he says the word, the impressions floating in my mind sharpen. “Yes! A stuffed blue bear. And a wooden helicopter with a metal propeller that spun.”
Dom runs his hands over the rim of the chest, his gaze going even more distant. “A set of puzzle blocks you could fit together into different shapes.”
The other guys have gathered around us. “You remember all that?” Andreas asks.
I bite my lip. “It’s not like remembering. I don’t have a clear image of it. Just kind of a hazy sense of what’s missing.”
I turn and walk deeper into the room. Other tingles of recognition and dissonance ripple through me.
The sensations guide me to the dusty floor near the fireplace. I sit down and rest my hands on either side of me, opening myself to the fragments of memory tickling at the edges of my awareness.
“I think there used to be a fur rug here. I can almostfeelit, coarse but soft—running my fingers into it…”
Zian crouches down next to me and runs his hands tentatively over the space. “Yeah,” he murmurs.
Jacob crosses his arms over his chest. “The guardians would bring us in here, then? Run some of their tests in this room?”
“Maybe.” That doesn’t sound quite right.
I scoot backward and lean against the sofa, still trying to sort through the jumble of hazy impressions. “I don’t get the sense that we did anything I didn’t like in here. It was somewhere just to relax. I looked forward to those times.”
Dominic nods. “It was just us. Us and… her, I think. Like it was a special thing when she’d bring us in here to play.”
Andreas’s eyes light up. “Yeah. I can almost catch that feeling. Holy shit.”
Looking around the space, I realize that while it’s furnished very differently from most of the facility, there is one room it resembles a little. “She had wooden and leather furniture like this in her personal office. And she had that picture of the cabin in the woods at her old office. Maybe this is what makes her feel at home.”
“And she wanted to share that with us,” Dominic says softly.
I ignore Jacob’s light scoff. Dom is right. She brought us in here, her little charges, and watched us simply play and soak up the warmer atmosphere.
It’s hard for me to wrap my head around that kind of motherliness compared to all the interactions with the guardians I recall so much more clearly.