Echoes of Us

by Kat Zhang

  I’d dropped our ring.

  Panic shot ice under our skin, blasted frost in our lungs. I let go of Viola, who’d wavered back onto her feet, and spun around.

  I cried.

  Addie’s silent delirium was answer enough. A burst of heat replaced the first flush of cold, ravaging our thoughts. Our eyes raked the floor. It couldn’t have gone far. But there were so many pairs of feet—

  The caretaker behind us had noticed the holdup. She approached—

  Bridget darted from our side. Snatched something bright off the floor.

  “Keep moving, girls,” the caretaker said. “You’re clogging up the hallway.”

  We kept moving. Even Viola, with her clouded eyes.

  “Here,” Bridget whispered when she’d caught up with us. Her hand bumped against ours, transferring the ring from her fingers to ours with a touch.

  I gave our thank-you with a glance. I didn’t dare open our hand until we were shepherded into our new ward. There were fewer girls this time. Only about fifteen. Just a trick of the numbering system? Or had Hahns really lost that many girls in the weeks since the last rotation? How many other girls had been stolen in the night like Hannah? Or taken away today?

  This ward looked almost identical to the last. The only differences lay in the unique wear and tear of the walls—the murals of bleak destruction, boredom, and the erosion of time. A caretaker stood with a pair of heavy scissors, snapping the hospital bracelets from wrists. Some of the girls were already headed toward beds, studying the chains of braided string wrapped around the metal bars. Laying claim.

  Ruth hesitated, then left our side to do the same. Only Bridget remained. But she didn’t follow us when we hurried to the bathroom. There, hidden inside a stall, I finally opened our hand.

  The ring looked normal. At first.

  Then I noticed the crack along the side of the gemstone. When I gingerly pressed down on it, it didn’t click into place the way it had before. Instead, it ground against the band in a way that frightened me so much I didn’t try it again—what if the stone popped off entirely?

  There was a hollowness to Addie’s voice.

  I didn’t reply.

  There was nothing to say.

  FIFTEEN

  We couldn’t be positive the camera embedded in the ring was broken. No more than we could know if everything we’d filmed over the past few weeks had been erased.

  If it was all gone . . .

  This rotation was supposed to grant us our freedom. Instead, it might become the reason for an extended sentence.

  I said.

  Addie took the better part of the morning to braid together a rope that would reach the ground, then jimmied the window lock open. The blast of frigid air made us shiver. She knotted the end of our string around the ring, our fingers growing numb in the chill.

  We peered out onto the grounds below us. The snow was so thick that even the bushes growing snug against the institution walls were half-buried under a white coat.

  We’ll send someone, Marion had said. Get the ring out the window, and someone will come pick it up.

  Hahns had increased background checks on all their caretakers after Peter’s last breakout attempt. They were less strict, though, with the people who trimmed the lawns. Picked up the trash. Shoveled the snow.

  Addie set the ring on the sill and pushed it over the edge. It hung against the side of the building, a glimmering thing in the morning light.

  I said.

  Addie unraveled the string from around our wrist. Lowered the ring, bit by bit, until it disappeared into the bushes. She tied our end of the string to one of the nails screwing the window frame in place. Thin and gray, it was all but invisible.

  She shut the window and shivered again, squeezing our fingers to warm them up.

  I said.

  That night, after lights out, Addie and I were just about to close our eyes when a shadowy figure appeared by our bed. It was Ruth. Her hands wrung at each other. Bridget, in the bed next to ours, sat up.

  “Aren’t you going to do it?” The softness of Ruth’s voice reminded me of Kitty and Nina—how much we missed them.

  “Do what?” Addie said wearily. We wanted to do nothing but sleep away the hours until someone collected the broken ring. Until we knew our fate.

  Ruth bit her lip. “I thought you might gather everyone up again. For the stories.”

  Bridget waited, too, for our response. But the last thing Addie and I wanted tonight was to talk.

  “I don’t know if I can think of anything,” Addie said. “I—”

  “It doesn’t have to be anything new,” Ruth said earnestly. “None of them have heard any of your stories. They wouldn’t know if you told an old one.”

  “I don’t feel well,” Addie said. “Maybe tomorrow, okay?”

  Ruth was quiet. So was Bridget. We couldn’t stand their silent disappointment; we slipped out of bed and fled to the bathroom. There, Addie shoved open the window and put our forehead to the cold glass, closing our eyes. The night wind whipped in from outside. We looked down at the string around the nail. The string connected to the ring that no one had come to collect.

  Addie whispered.

 

  It was a harsh truth I hadn’t let myself dwell on before. Our life was in Marion Prytt’s hands. I’d put it there, against all warning, against Ryan’s anger, and Hally’s frustration, and my own misgivings.

  Addie said.

  I hesitated.

  We’d also come into Hahns because I wanted to make up for past wrongs.

  Addie ran our finger along the window glass. The light shining outside the bathroom doorway just barely illuminated the cramped space. The darkness beyond the window was complete. A new moon, maybe.

  I repeated Henri’s satphone number in my mind, a mantra of comfort.

  “Addie,” Bridget said, and Addie turned. Then we both realized what had happened, and Bridget quickly corrected herself. “Darcie.” She stood in the bathroom doorway, without even a blanket wrapped around her shoulders. “I think you should come see this.”

  The first thing we noticed was that the beds nearer the bathroom were vacant. They’d been filled before. Addie turned to Bridget, alarmed. But Bridget motioned for her to stay quiet. She pointed to the other end of the ward. We squinted, but it was too dark and too far to see anything clearly.

  Then we heard a girl’s voice. It wasn’t until we’d almost reached her, moving carefully among the beds in the darkness, that I realized who the speaker was. And where the missing girls had gone.

  Ruth Tarvie, eleven years old, sat on her bed in the darkest corner of the ward, telling the story of the time she won division championship in horseback riding. We’d heard the story before, back when we were both part of Class 6. Ruth was a good storyteller—knew how to spin a story so it looped around her listeners and entangled them, drew them closer to her with every word.

  Girls crowded by her bed, some sharing the mattresses closest by, others sitting on the floor.

  Ruth glanced up when she noticed us approaching. She faltered, and the other girls faltered with her. Even in the almost pitch-darkness, we felt the strength of their eyes. Bridget had already sat down, taking the edge of another girl’s bed. The girl didn’t say anything. In fact, she shifted so Bridget would have more room.

  Addie folded ourself up on the ground, our legs crossed.

  “Go on,” she said quietly. “What happened then?”

  Ruth cleared her throat and told us.

  And so it started up again. Each night, more girls joined in. Each day, it got colde
r. We woke some mornings and saw our breath under the fluorescent lights. It usually warmed up a bit by lunchtime, but not much. I found myself relieved for only fifteen girls and more than thirty beds—it meant we could double up on blankets. Everyone spent both waking and sleeping hours huddled under them.

  But more and more girls fell ill, too. So far, none seemed as bad off as Hannah had been in the beginning. But Addie and I shared the ward with girls flushed with fever, and girls pale with cold, and we could do so little to help.

  I asked Addie one night as we sat next to a girl whose breaths wheezed from her lungs.

  They’d had a way, however imperfect, of keeping themselves as safe as possible. We’d broken that. We’d thought we were doing something good, and back in Class 6, when fewer of the girls were sick, it hadn’t seemed to come at any cost. But our actions had grown beyond us. The other girls not only gathered after lights-out, they started flocking together in smaller groups during the day.

  One morning, someone laughed, and it was like lightning jolted every soul in the ward. The room silenced. Heads turned.

  It was Lilac Helms, and she pressed her fingers to her lips like she’d just said something wrong. For a moment, I thought she might apologize. Instead, she just looked away. After a moment, everyone else did, too.

  But the echoes of her laughter remained.

  Addie and I checked the string as often as we could. Each time, we felt a jolt of excitement as the glimmer of gold lifted from the ground. And each time, the anticipation flattened into disappointment. A week passed. No one came to collect the ring or leave us any kind of message—any sign that we had friends on the outside, ready to help if something went wrong.

  Perhaps Marion had been caught. Perhaps she had made a wrong move, gotten someone suspicious, and now had to lie low. Perhaps she’d decided this whole thing was too dangerous, and given up.

  She could do that, after all. It wasn’t really her fight.

  You are too trusting, Eva Tamsyn. It’ll hurt you one day.

  Fear and despair were vultures, whirling and waiting for us to give up. But I refused to let myself fall again. If I doubted, how could I expect anyone else in this ward to keep their hopes alive?

  One morning, the ring still hanging untouched outside the window, I walked out of the bathroom to find Bridget sitting with her back against the wall. Her eyes were stony, her mouth an unhappy slash.

  Addie said. Despite her earlier hesitance at calling Bridget our friend, she’d softened toward her.

  I joined Bridget on the ground. We sat right in the path where Viola used to make her rounds in the old ward. Her constant circling had been like white noise in the flow of our days, comforting, in a way, because of its regularity. We’d counted on it.

  From here, we had a view of the lower half of the room: the maze of metal bed legs, the blankets dragging on the floor, the legs and slippered feet of the other girls.

  I glanced at Bridget, then at our hands. Our finger still felt naked without the ring. “Is something wrong?”

  She gave us a look. “Besides the obvious things?”

  I’d learned the art of dry smiles. “Yes.”

  She glanced away. Shrugged one shoulder. “I was just thinking about Viola. If she’s . . . if she’s still in Class Four, or—”

  If she’d been taken away. Like Hannah and Millie.

  What happened to Viola is not going to happen to you, I wanted to say, but didn’t.

  By all accounts, what happened to Viola shouldn’t have happened to Viola.

  “Do you know what her other name was?” I asked. “Viola, I mean. The other soul.”

  Bridget looked down at the ground. “What does it matter?”

  “It matters,” I said. “When I tell other people about her—about them—I want to use their names.”

  “Tell who?” Bridget demanded.

  I looked at her fiercely. “We’re going to get out of here. You have to believe that, Bridget.”

  She seemed to fight her emotions under control. “What does it matter what I believe?”

  “It does,” I insisted. The girl in the closest bed glanced over, then away again. For a long moment, neither Bridget nor I said anything.

  “It was Viola and Karen Fairlow.” She finally met our eyes, and there was something naked there, in that look.

  There was something different.

  “You’re not Bridget,” I whispered.

  She tensed. Turned her face away again.

  Said, so quietly I almost didn’t hear: “Grace. You can call me Grace, if you’d like.”

  SIXTEEN

  The snow fell even thicker now. Each day, a new layer covered the last, making the world anew. There were never any footprints. Addie and I tried to convince each other that there might not be, even if someone came to replace the ring. The snow swallowed everything.

  There was always only the smallest resistance as we reeled the string in, the gold band glinting. The string was always damp with melted snow. The ring, when it finally fell into our hand, was always bitterly cold.

  Then, one morning, it wasn’t the same ring.

  For a moment, I thought our eyes were playing tricks on us. That wanting had morphed into reality. But no, the crack in the gemstone had disappeared. When I pressed the stone, it sank into the band just the way it was supposed to.

  Relief made us forget the cold. I untied the string and pulled the window shut, sitting heavily on the edge of the sink. I said, and felt more than heard Addie echo the sentiment.

  We weren’t abandoned.

  It wasn’t until I slipped the ring on our finger that I realized the inside of the band wasn’t perfectly smooth, like it had been before. Instead, something scratched against our skin.

  I slid the ring off again and held it up to the light, tilting it so we could see the inside of the band. There, engraved into the metal, were the rough makings of a tiny bird. Wings spread. Head high.

  And two words, followed by a pair of initials.

  We’re coming.

  R. M.

  Ryan Mullan.

  “Where did you hide the ring?” Bridget asked a few days later. Automatically, Addie pressed our hand into our lap.

  “What do you mean?”

  Bridget shrugged. “You stopped wearing it for a while. That’s all.”

  Now it was Addie’s turn to shrug. She started to turn away, but Bridget halted us with a blurted, “Does it mean you really think we’re going to get out of here again?” She pressed her lips together. When she spoke again, the words came more calmly, but with an uncomfortable rigidness. “When you stopped wearing it . . . well, you kept it because it reminded you of the outside, right? And if you’d really given up hope of ever getting out of here, maybe you wouldn’t wear it, because it would just make everything worse. Being reminded. But for the last few days, you’ve been wearing it again.”

  Addie glanced down at the ring. she admitted.

  So I said and she did, sliding aside so I could take control.

  Before I could think too much about it, I removed the ring and dropped it in Bridget’s hands. She startled. And as her eyes searched ours, I wondered if she knew about the switch. If she could tell between Addie and me. I’d known her for weeks, and right now I couldn’t say for sure if the girl sitting in front of me was Bridget or Grace.

  “It reminds me,” I said quietly, “of Ryan.”

  His name caught a little in our throat. I hadn’t wanted to talk about him before. Not here, as if speaking his name among the peeling walls and dirty floor might tarnish it.

  But I’d learned that the opposite was true. Bringing happy memories into an awful place didn’t make the memories any dimmer. The memories made the surroundings brighter.

  Bridget’s head was bowed, her fingers clutching the ring
gingerly. “Lucky,” she said. “You’ve always been lucky. I—”

  Then she froze. Looked up at us.

  “It’s engraved.” Her eyes had gone wide. “It’s engraved. It wasn’t before.”

  The ward door banged open.

  I almost jumped up. Bridget stuffed the ring under her pillow.

  The woman who stepped inside wasn’t a caretaker, but we recognized her. The Plum-blouse Lady. She’d come the first time Addie and I opened the window in the other ward, when we’d pretended we’d fallen. She’d asked me my name.

  Now she stared at us, and everyone stared back.

  I fought a shiver as the woman’s gaze landed on us. But it passed, and we breathed again. A caretaker joined the woman.

  Addie said.

  I never got the chance to reply. The Plum-blouse Lady said, “Her,” and pointed.

  At Bridget.

  Bridget’s voice broke free of her lips, tiny and confused. “What?”

  She dodged the caretaker when he grabbed for her. I clutched her hands as the man latched on to her shoulders. The other girls sat or stood frozen in place, eyes wide open, mouths sealed shut.

  “No!” I yelled as the man tore Bridget from our grasp.

  Bridget’s cry reverberated through the ward. It tore at our ears, stole the breath from our lungs. She clawed at him. He grabbed her wrists as she tried to pound a fist into his chest. Her shirt bunched up, tangling her limbs. She kept screaming, screaming, screaming.

  And her screaming focused. Took on a word in the madness.

  Took on a name.

  “Addie!”

  I faltered. Bridget froze. The man took advantage of the moment and grabbed her more securely around the middle. Hauled her to the door.

  It all happened so fast.

  She was there. She was gone.

  The door shut.

  Silence.

  Then, from behind, the clack of shoes. Footsteps approaching. A hand closed, viselike, around our arm.

  The Plum-blouse Lady swam into view. Our mind was blurry, but her face was somehow crystal clear. We saw everything. The faint lines on her forehead. The wisps of dark hair escaping from her bobby pins. The pasty look of the foundation right under her eyes. Her mouth sat in a grim, unhappy line.