Echoes of Us

by Kat Zhang

  What we did hear was the door open. Then a woman’s voice, rough with irritated concern. “What’s going on?”

  Bridget and I looked at each other. I held our breath. For a long time, no one said anything. Footsteps approached—the clack of real shoes against the tile.

  Addie and I grasped each other, silent.

  Then a small voice we didn’t recognize said, “Someone fell.”

  A woman appeared in the bathroom doorway. She didn’t wear the caretaker uniform of tan shirt and dark pants. She had a nice blouse instead, deep plum purple. Our eyes drank it in—this new color that wasn’t rust, or paint-chipped walls, or off-white uniforms.

  “Who fell?” She was trying to look stern, sharp, confident. I could feel it. But all I could think was, You’re not nearly as good at it as Dr. Lyanne.

  “I slipped,” I said. And then, because it seemed like something this woman might want to hear, I added, “I’m sorry.”

  I tried to look contrite. I tried to look nervous, and small, and unassuming. Plum-blouse Lady glanced around the bathroom, at the window, the stalls. Everything seemed in order.

  “You’re all right?” she said brusquely.

  I nodded. Suddenly, the woman’s eyes narrowed. She frowned. Looked at us a little closer and our heart—our heart—our heart stopped.

  Addie whispered.

 

  I stayed absolutely still, willing myself to betray nothing.

  “What’s your name?” the woman said.

  “Darcie,” I replied softly. “Darcie Grey.”

  She stared at us a moment longer. Then nodded and left.

  I leaned against the wall, just under the window. Drenched in a cold sweat.

  Addie and I sat on our bed, stiff with terror and fighting not to show it. We had to playact for the security cameras. Hide the fact that with every passing second, we feared Plum-blouse Lady might come back, jab her finger at us, and tell us to go with her.

  Bridget came up to us, her face solemn.

  “A—” she started to whisper, then caught herself. “Darcie. Are you going to tell me what’s going on this time? Before things start going crazy? You weren’t just opening that window for fresh air. You didn’t just learn how to lockpick with plastic slivers for fun. And you’re terrified of that woman for a reason.”

  Our eyes met.

  Addie’s agitation fluttered, though I could feel her straining to stamp it down.

  I said.

  “Is there a plan?” Bridget leaned toward us hesitantly, like she feared we might jerk away. “Is there going to be another rescue? Is that why you’re here?”

  She said rescue like it was a jewel of a word. Something so precious she could barely let it past her lips. Her eyes, gray like winter storm clouds, caught ours and refused to look away.

  “I didn’t think you wanted to be rescued,” I said, and regretted it as soon as I did. Bridget’s gaze hardened. I couldn’t stand the pain lurking behind her shuttered expression, but I didn’t know what to say.

  I was still running through possibilities, each one sounding worse in my mind than the last, when Bridget sank back onto our bed.

  “I want to go home,” she said quietly. “It’s the same thing I’ve always wanted.”

  That, I believed.

  “It’s just that before, I hoped I could be fixed first. At Nornand, they said they could help us. Here, they’re not even trying. So if I can choose between going insane here, or going insane at home, then I’d rather be home.”

  “Bridget,” I said. “You’re not going to go insane.”

  Viola passed a few feet from our bed, and we both quieted as her slippered feet whispered against the ground, her fingers tapping slowly against the wall. Her lips mouthed words we couldn’t hear. Viola and who? Who did this girl speak to? Where was she, in her head?

  Somewhere better, I hoped, than here.

  Bridget stared at her retreating back. “When I first met Viola, she was a little distant. Like the others. Quiet, sometimes. She’d look at you like you weren’t really there. But she’d get over it. She’d be normal again—or as normal as we get, anyway. Then she got worse. She stopped talking to us. She started drifting around. I asked her what she was doing, and she told me she was trying to keep track—of what, I don’t know.” Bridget picked at our blanket, unraveling a frayed edge. “For a while, she used to wake up from time to time. Be completely lucid, you know? Just for a little while. And she’d look so terrified. She’d lie there, making noises like she was dying. Saying she couldn’t think straight anymore. Couldn’t function anymore. They cut her hair short because she got it so tangled up, pulling at it all the time.”

  Viola was all the way across the room now. Two younger girls shifted out of her path.

  “I’m the oldest one here now,” Bridget said. “Before you came, anyway. It’s always the older ones. That’s what Viola told me. The older ones lose their minds. And then they’re taken away.” She paused. “So. If there’s any chance I might get out of here before that happens to me, I’d like to know.”

  I asked Addie.

  She hesitated.

  She was right.

  she said softly

 

  About how we weren’t alone, and we weren’t crazy, and we didn’t deserve to be locked away like this.

  Addie sighed.

  Not when she was the one who’d ruined our last escape plan. If Bridget hadn’t screwed that up, maybe she would have ended up in Anchoit, like Addie and me. Maybe Eli and Cal and all those other children at Nornand would have escaped along with us in Peter’s vans.

  But that was useless to think about. And it wasn’t as if Bridget didn’t regret it.

  I said.

  I took a deep breath. Heard the echo of Dr. Lyanne’s voice in our mind: You are too trusting, Eva Tamsyn. It’ll hurt you one day.

  But maybe not today. Not now, with this girl waiting for our reply, her life and her hopes in the balance.

  I scooted closer to her on the bed, and she leaned toward us like she was expecting a secret. I didn’t think she was breathing.

  “After Nornand,” I said softly, the way Addie and I had shared stories in the quiet of the safe houses, “I met a man who’d come from overseas. And he told me that so much of what we know of the rest of the world isn’t true.”

  The Plum-blouse Lady hadn’t recognized us, it seemed. She didn’t come back, and our days at Hahns sank back into their old routine.

  But not exactly. Because now, Addie and I gave Bridget our stories. We told her of Henri’s world across an ocean, where so much was the same, and so much was different. Where in many places, it was common knowledge that people had been to the moon. That the Great Wars we’d heard so much about had been devastating, but not annihilating. That hybrids were not destined to go mad.

  We didn’t tell her the specifics of why we were here. Didn’t tell her the truth about the ring.

  I hoped we were doing the right thing. Keep hope, Jackson had told us, and hope was good. Hope helped us survive. But hope could be painful, too. Hope could be dangerous, if it grew too large and then shattered.

  One day, I looked up while telling Bridget about cloning—how across the ocean, they’d come up with the ability to duplicate animal bodies, and it might be applicable to humans one day—and realized the girl I’d
thought was lingering by our bed wasn’t just lingering. She was listening. Her eyes caught ours, then darted away again.

  For a moment, I was terrified. But the look on her face hadn’t been suspicion. It had been curiosity. Hunger.

  So I pretended like I didn’t notice her eavesdropping. And when the next girl came, I did the same. Until the group gathered around our bed was too obvious, and we had to say something before whoever was watching the security tapes got suspicious.

  The storytelling moved to after lights-out. The bulb set above the bathroom doorway and the one above the main ward door never went out. Probably more for the benefit of the security camera than for ours. But when the main lights clanged off, most of the ward was dark, and the corner of the room near our bed was darkest of all.

  Girls drifted here and sat for hours, eager in a way Addie and I hadn’t seen since we arrived.

  I finally started learning the other girls’ names. During the day, I matched voices to faces. There was Janice, tall and bird-limbed at thirteen, with milk-white skin and thin lips and thick, dark slashes of eyebrows. Ruth, eleven, had freckles and eyes that reminded us of Jackson, palest blue. There was Jeanie and Lauren and Alexandra and Brooke and more.

  Some latched on to us after breaking that initial barrier. Others fluttered at the edges, never speaking more than a few words, but showing up night after night to listen. And some, as the days passed and nothing happened to Addie and me, started telling stories, too.

  We heard about mothers and fathers and family dogs. About siblings who weren’t hybrid, and ones who were, but had been sent elsewhere, never to be seen again. About friends who’d stopped being friends as they got older, and it became obvious one of them wasn’t settling, wasn’t normal.

  We didn’t record anything, at first. We didn’t even think to do it, especially since it was too dark for a camera to catch anything. But by the time the nights were more than half-filled with stories that weren’t ours, Addie and I taped everything. It wasn’t even for Marion. It was for us, and for the storytellers themselves, even if they didn’t know it. I wanted to capture this little piece of them. Save these whispered fragments of their lives.

  I said to Addie one night.

  Addie said.

 

  We spent our nights spinning tales. During the days, we kept our promise to teach Bridget how to lockpick. She was a fast learner, easily frustrated with herself, but diligent with a narrow-minded sense of purpose.

  When Addie and I weren’t with her, we spent as much time as possible with Hannah—or Millie, as her other soul was named. They couldn’t make it near our bed at night, so we whispered to them during the day. But they continued fading. They no longer coughed. They didn’t seem to have the strength.

  I said desperately.

  Addie’s voice was as tense as mine.

  I stared at the pallor of Hannah’s skin. The pink of her eyelids. The blue tinge of her lips. Her bed stank, and the smell permeated the rest of the ward. Some of the other girls had started falling sick, too, their coughing and sneezing making up for Hannah and Millie’s silence. But thank God, none of them seemed to have anything worse than a cold.

  I hadn’t let myself believe that. Not truly. Not until this moment, when I let the word slip from my mind to Addie’s, crossing the at once infinitesimal and infinite space between her and me.

  So Addie didn’t protest when, at dinnertime, I stopped the caretaker as he handed us our tray. “Hannah needs help,” I said.

  Every girl in the ward stopped what she was doing and stared at us. Every girl, that is, except Hannah and Viola. The former was utterly still. The latter hadn’t stopped moving, her mind someplace beyond the reach of my words.

  “Sorry?” The caretaker seemed more confused than anything.

  “Hannah.” I pointed to the corner where her bed remained all alone. “She’s been sick for . . .” I realized I didn’t know how long we’d been at Hahns. “For weeks. And she’s gotten worse. I don’t think she’s going to recover without medicine.”

  The room was silent.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” the caretaker said finally. He even smiled, just a little. Like he meant it to be a comfort.

  We ate. He left. The lights went out.

  Everyone gathered, as usual, for the storytelling. But Addie and I didn’t share. We could think of nothing but the girl in the bed in the corner, and how we couldn’t hear her breathe.

  We were one of the first to wake up the next morning. The other girls lay huddled in their beds, cocooned inside layers of blankets. Bridget’s eyes fluttered open, then shut again.

  Blearily, I sat up.

  And saw.

  Hannah’s bed had been stripped clean. No pillow. No blanket. Not even the mattress remained. Only the cold metal frame. A skeleton.

  Hannah and Millie were gone.

  FOURTEEN

  One missing girl shouldn’t have made the ward seem so different, especially one who’d barely spoken, hardly ever moved. But Hannah’s absence ripped a hole in the fabric of the room. The other girls were quieter than normal, and they gave the bed in the corner an even wider berth, like it was haunted or cursed.

  When the ward’s main door clanged open, I didn’t even bother looking over. It was getting to be breakfast time, and I was too focused on the carcass of Hannah’s stripped bed. But Addie said and that was enough for me to notice Bridget stiffen. Our eyes went to the door. The caretaker standing in the threshold had no cart of food.

  “What’s going on?” I said.

  Bridget didn’t look at me. Just stared down at her blanket and finished braiding her hair. Her voice was tight. “We’re being rotated.”

  Our chest squeezed.

  Rotation. This was what we’d been waiting for since the day we arrived. We’d promised ourselves to stay this long before signaling for rescue, and now our sentence was up.

  But the rest of these girls—the ones Addie and I had just started getting to know—they had no such promise of freedom.

  The caretaker called everyone out of bed. We gathered in a clump in the middle of the ward—all except Viola, who continued in her circling. No one went to grab her.

  “Bridget,” I whispered, drawing up next to her. “If we get separated, I just wanted to say—”

  She was suddenly impatient, shoving us away and warning us to keep our distance with a sharp look. I ended up next to Jeanie and Caitlin instead—until they hurried away from us, too.

  Addie’s confusion mirrored mine.

  I said.

  “Stand still,” the caretaker barked, and started counting us off, pulling each girl aside as she assigned her a number—two, four, six, eight, ten, twelve . . .—and snapped a plastic bracelet around her wrist. Hospital bracelets, impossible to get out of without scissors or a knife.

  The caretaker didn’t go in any particular order, but two girls standing next to each other never got the same number.

  I said slowly.

  It was a foreign concept. Addie and I had never been the one other people sought out. If anything, we’d been the one nobody wanted.

  “Twelve,” the caretaker said when she got to Addie and me, and snapped the corresponding bracelet around our wrist. We went to stand with Ruth, the only other twelve so far.

  I could practically see Bridget’s mind whirring. Trying to figure
out where she should stand to get the same number, and if she could move without the caretaker noticing. The remaining group wasn’t large.

  “Fourteen,” the caretaker said to the girl who’d stood next to me. Mayree. Then, “Sixteen” to the girl next to her. Claire. Then back to “Two . . . four . . . six . . . eight . . . ten . . .”

  “Twelve,” she said to Bridget.

  Bridget betrayed no emotion at all as she came to join us.

  Viola was last to be sorted, labeled a number four. But there were still two girls remaining: Coreena and Iris. They did not get numbers. Or bracelets.

  I remembered, suddenly, what Bridget had said about girls disappearing during rotation. Marion hadn’t told us about the possibility of being siphoned off—to where? For what purpose?

  Coreena and Iris stared wide-eyed after us as the caretaker ushered them away from the group.

  For the first time in weeks, we emerged beyond the confines of the ward into the hallways. We noticed everything. The pattern of cracks along the molding. The scuff marks and little indentations on the ground.

  The caretakers weren’t releasing all the classes at once. There weren’t enough girls in the hall for that. But there were at least two other classes out here, being separated into new wards. The girls in our class stared at them. Some of them stared back, but most seemed too deadened to care. Their hands hung limply at their sides, the weak overhead light glinting off plastic bracelets.

  The ring was hidden in our hand, though I let the gem peek through. I filmed as much as I could of this quiet, solemn migration of children. There were only ten doors on this floor. Were the boys’ wards mixed in with ours? It seemed more likely they were on the third floor, or the fourth.

  “Oh—”

  It was the only warning we got—Bridget’s startled cry—before Viola fell.

  I reached out and grabbed her just before she hit the ground.

  It was the first time we’d ever touched her, and her shoulders were frail in our hands. She didn’t make eye contact.