Echoes of Us

by Kat Zhang

  “Well,” she said. “You’d better come along, too.”

  SEVENTEEN

  Unlike Bridget, Addie and I didn’t struggle. Two caretakers waited at the door by the time we reached it, and neither looked like they could be taken by a fifteen-year-old girl.

  So we went quietly. But our mind did not.

  I said. I battled panic—not just mine, but Addie’s where it beat against me, frenzied like a limed bird struggling for flight.

  Addie’s voice was strained, but clear.

  If we knew where they were taking us, we had a better chance of escape. At least I told myself we did.

  The elevator came. They did not take us down, as I’d expected, but up to the fourth floor.

  Our breathing came rougher now. We couldn’t help it. I tried to focus on our surroundings—tried to memorize where we were going and block out everything else. ran through my mind. I didn’t know what I wanted by it. I just needed to say it. Needed the reassurance that she was here with me.

  That we would be all right.

  The caretakers shoved us into a room. A cell. Four white walls, maybe eighty square feet. A toilet in the corner. A bed pushed against the far wall.

  Then we were alone.

  Going step-by-step helped keep me calm. I had to keep the panic at bay, dammed up so it couldn’t sweep us off our feet.

  There was nothing obvious, at first. Then I caught something tiny mounted in the far corner, opposite the door. It might have been a camera.

  We sat, back against the wall.

  What next?

  Addie said.

  I forced a shaky optimism I didn’t feel.

  Addie said.

  My mind buzzed, a frenzy of half-completed thoughts. About the ring. About Bridget and what would happen to her. To us. I kept having to shut them down. I focused on breathing. On keeping calm.

  I told Addie. I tried to laugh and failed.

  We had to, didn’t we? How could we get past everything else and get caught like this? End like this? We’d learned so much, come so far. It wouldn’t be fair. The world couldn’t allow it.

  But the world had allowed Viola and Karen to lose their sanity. Had killed Wendy’s sister, and Peter. Had cut a soul from Jaime Cortae’s body and eradicated it from the earth.

  It was stupid to expect anything like fairness.

  We waited hours before the door opened again. We jumped from the bed. Backed up so we had room to maneuver—to run, or fight back.

  “You can sit back down,” the Plum-blouse Lady said. She shut the door behind her.

  I didn’t sit. The woman did, though, right on the bed like it was hers. Addie and I shivered from the cold. This room wasn’t heated any better than the ward.

  “Here.” The woman shrugged out of her jacket. It was fitted, mauve. I didn’t take it. After a moment, she retracted her hand. “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “Darcie Grey.”

  “That’s not what Bridget called you.”

  “Where is she?” I said. “What did you do to her?”

  “You’re shaking,” the woman said. “Are you sure you don’t want my jacket?”

  “Where’s Bridget?” I repeated, louder.

  “You care about her an awful lot.”

  I gave a strangled laugh. “I’ve been in the same room with her for—for—weeks.”

  The woman carefully pulled her jacket back on and studied the buttons at the cuffs. “More than a month now. But you’ve known her longer than that, haven’t you? I looked into Bridget’s files. Before she came here, she was at Nornand Clinic. So was a girl named Addie Tamsyn.”

  I stayed silent.

  She looked up. “The Addie Tamsyn, who helped bomb the Powatt institution. They say Mark Jenson had a particular interest in her, but now that he has Jaime Cortae back, he isn’t nearly as concerned anymore.”

  Jaime. I struggled to quash the flash of pain across our face. Judging from the way the woman watched us, I wasn’t entirely successful.

  “Jenson has the boy, and all his plans for a cure.” The woman spoke slowly now, half to herself. “But I have you.”

  “I’m not Addie,” I said quietly. It was truer than this woman knew.

  She just smiled. Addie and I had heard somewhere that you could judge a true smile from a fake one by looking at a person’s eyes. Her mouth stretched, and her eyes crinkled, but it was still the fakest smile we’d ever seen.

  “Who sent you here?” she said. “How’re they getting the footage?”

  “The footage?” Our voice didn’t reflect the havoc the words wreaked on our insides. They shredded our lungs. Mashed our stomach. Our heart ran limping marathons, barreling and halting in our chest, our blood roaring in response.

  “For the broadcast hijacking,” the woman said. When I just stared at her, unable to respond, her smile faded. “You really don’t know.”

  It didn’t take long for them to wheel in a small television. The woman popped in the first tape. Pressed play.

  An image of the president of the Americas appeared. And beside him, Jenson. The volume was too low, at first, to hear what he was saying. The woman bent to turn it up. Then we made out the words.

  He talked about the hybrid danger, and about uprisings on the eastern coast that were being dealt with. About the cure. He mentioned Jaime—

  The image cut out. Reduced to snow and static for a second.

  Then there, on the screen, was Wendy Howard. Little Wendy Howard, who’d joined up with Marion for the sake of her dead sister.

  Marion hadn’t even tried to hide her face. We saw every uneasy twitch of her eyebrows and tremble of her lip as she talked about Anna. About what it had been like to have a sibling torn away, and never know her fate.

  She cried in the middle of it, with that camera trained right on her face. Then we did look away, because the rawness was too much to stand.

  In those few seconds, the footage of Wendy disappeared. But we didn’t return to the president and Jenson. We returned, instead, to that night in the dark streets of Anchoit, when Jackson Montgomery was arrested, and Kitty captured the footage with shaking hands.

  We’d never seen the film before. We’d never developed it—had left it behind in that hotel room along with the rest of our purse’s contents. Someone must have given it to Marion. Or she’d stolen it.

  Addie whispered.

  The screen could only show us a sliver of what had happened. My memory filled in the rest. The arc of the policemen’s flashlights. The way the officers had tackled Jackson to the ground.

  The sick fear.

  Addie was an earthquake of anger. I held on to her. Tried to steady her. But I was shaking, too.

  Jackson disappeared into a police car.

  The screen jumped back to static.

  The Plum-blouse Lady pressed pause. Then eject. “That was broadcasted two weeks ago.”

  She put in another tape. This time, it was only Jenson speaking before the feed cut out, replaced by a blurry, but oddly familiar recording. We squinted.

  Realized why the image looked familiar.

  We’d recorded it.

  “This,” the woman said, her eyes hard, “was shown yesterday.”

  We could only stare. Here was Class 6 again, broadcasted
in snippets. The peeling walls. The metal beds. Hannah’s coughing. Viola’s blank-eyed wandering.

  Then darkness, and the whispered stories of the girls.

  Marion knew we were still in Hahns, and she’d released the footage anyway.

  We couldn’t think about what that meant. Not now. Not with this woman watching us so closely. We had to keep calm. Play innocent.

  Betray nothing.

  We had no other choice. Not until we’d had time to figure things out.

  “I thought it might be Bridget, at first, since she was connected to Nornand,” the woman said. “But now that I know who you really are, it does make a lot more sense.”

  We swallowed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  That was the last thing we said aloud.

  The woman stayed another twenty or thirty minutes, getting more and more frustrated. Her voice sharpened. Her eyes flashed. She vacillated between whispering and shouting, threatening and cajoling.

  We stayed silent.

  Finally, she left.

  I said.

  They tried to feed us. We flung the tray at the man who brought it, and tried to barrel past him. He threw us back inside.

  When we tried the same thing hours later, the next caretaker they sent came bearing a needle.

  Now we really fought. Now we screamed, and spat, and hit, and kicked.

  We felt a stab of pride that it took three people to hold us still.

  Then the needle went in, the pain blossomed as they injected the drugs, and the world went black.

  EIGHTEEN

  Time spiraled into itself.

  I woke to Ryan standing at my bedside. So perfectly real. So perfectly there. But when I reached out our fingers went right through him.

  Ryan, I said. Ryan, I—

  Shhh. He put a finger to his lips. Started flashing red like the disks we used to share. Flashing meant they were close. Meant—

  He melted. Collapsed into ash that spread like a living thing across the floor, setting the ground on fire. I screamed. The flames crackled. The ceiling rained soot into our eyes. I rubbed at them and rubbed at them, but it wouldn’t come out.

  Somebody grabbed at our hands. Pulled them from our face. Someone screamed something, and I screamed back—I couldn’t stop screaming—

  Pyxis, our father said

  Pointing at the sky, the wide

  Dark blue of it

  His arm circled around us

  Blocking us from the wind

  There are ghosts in our clothes, I told them.

  A needle glinted.

  No, I moaned. I shoved. I shouted. No, no, please—

  Pain. Pain and pressure. Our heart. Hot.

  It had been so cold, and now it was so hot—

  Pyxis, named after a mariner’s compass

  Three faint stars in the southern sky

  Tell me the story, I said

  Four years old, and sleepy

  And falling asleep.

  Addie?

  Addie. Addie. Addie. Addie—

  Too much, they said.

  Stupid, they whispered.

  Why do you walk? I asked Viola. Viola by our bedside with her finger on our cheek. What did you see?

  You have to count the days, she said.

  1

  2

  3

  Then she burned, and I burned with her.

  There is no story for Pyxis.

  Lyle tapped Morse-code messages through the walls.

  I tapped them back. The world was black with smoke, and in the darkness lurked things with moist, sucking breaths, and I could no longer see, but my little brother was tapping messages to me through our bedroom wall, and he wouldn’t go to sleep until I tapped something back. He had to go to sleep.

  Sleep.

  S

  L

  E

  E

  —

  NINETEEN

  I am not a ghost.

  I woke as if through water. Through smoke and haze and fog. My thoughts pressed through cotton, trying to surface. Things got lost on their way from our eyes to our brain, from our brain to our mouth. I spoke and heard nothing. Heard nothing and something all at once—

  I saw Ryan again. He didn’t look at us. He was focused on something in his hands, his brow furrowed the way it did when he was concentrating on a problem, on a bit of machinery that wasn’t going the way he wanted it to.

  He wasn’t really there, but I watched him, anyway.

  There was something buried in the skin on the back of our hand. A thin, clear tube that snaked up, up, up, until it connected to a small, clear bag. There was fluid in the bag. Fluid that, I supposed, was going into us.

  Some mornings, I still burned. I made incoherent sounds, and no one came, and then someone did. A woman with a low, gravelly voice who spoke softly.

  “You had a bad reaction,” she said and ran her finger over our cheek, where the skin was damp.

  “They gave you too much,” she said. She reminded me of the nurses back at Nornand. “They aren’t used to being careful.”

  She pressed our eyelids closed.

  “They don’t usually have to worry about the subjects surviving.”

  TWENTY

  I ripped the tube out.

  And almost screamed.

  It hurt. Blood beaded at the wound, dripped down our wrist. The end of the tube was dripping, too—clear liquid that sank into our covers.

  The door banged open. A man rushed in. Grabbed our hand. I tried to struggle, but our limbs felt like noodles.

  “Don’t,” I cried. “I don’t want it.”

  He hesitated, but relented, pasting a bandage on our hand to staunch the bleeding. He collected the dripping tube and the rest of the IV apparatus. Then he was gone again.

  I could barely sit up. Our skin felt raw. Our eyes. Our throat.

  I whispered.

  A sudden wave of nausea made me close our eyes. When I opened them again, the room was clearer. The lights less blinding. Our eyes focused. I breathed through our mouth.

  My mind was still cottony. I reached for her, trying to grasp her and drag her up, with me, to clarity.

  I found nothing.

  There wasn’t the hole there usually was when Addie went under, whether through the use of Refcon or through her own means. There was no gaping chasm, no utter nothingness.

  There was just the fog. And that was slowly disappearing, too. My head, my thoughts grew clearer.

  And Addie simply wasn’t there.

  I gulped down panic. Our hands fisted on the blanket. I reached out again, in my mind, but there was nowhere to reach. There was no space. No extra room. No connection.

  Just me.

  The door opened. The Plum-blouse Lady was back, though she wore a red blouse today, with a loose turtleneck. She came toward us. Me.

  I cried. Her name echoed in the singular chamber of my mind. My thoughts—my emotions—the space in our head—it felt so closed. Like I’d spent my entire life living in a house, and now half the rooms had disappeared, leaving me scrambling at walls that used to be doors.

  “If you don’t want the IV,” the woman said, “you’re going to have to be agreeable and eat.”

  I stared at her uncomprehendingly.

  “Addie.” She leaned toward us. I would have shrunk away, if I could. But I was already huddled against the wall. “Are you lucid?”

  I hoped I wasn’t. That this was just another nightmare.

  Our voice was cracked. Our throat still hurt. But I spoke. “If I weren’t lucid, would I know it?”

  Her lips pursed. “Addie—”

  “I’m not Addie,” I whispered.

  Now it was the woman’s turn to laugh. “Bit late to say that. Especially after all the things you’ve been shouting in your dreams.”

  Our mouth snapped shut.

  “The drug was supposed
to do that,” the woman said. “Help you tell the truth. Loosen inhibitions. Things like that. It’s had better trials. Some of the other girls, they tell us everything.”

  I could only stare at her. She was lying. She had to be.

  “You had a bad reaction to it, though,” the woman said. “Hybrid brains . . . they’re all a little different, I’ve found, depending on the division of strength between the two minds. It’s tricky finding something that will have predictable results. But I suppose the difficulty will work in my favor once I succeed.”

  “Refcon,” I whispered. “Did you give me Refcon?”

  Her eyebrows raised. “Why would I do that?”

  I swallowed. “To try and cure us.”

  She smiled pityingly. “You’re thinking of Nornand, Addie, and Powatt. Here at Hahns, we don’t bother with curing.”

  I waited for Addie to come back. I counted seconds in my mind. Seconds that turned into minutes that turned into hours. They brought in food. A bowl of something like porridge. Breakfast? Lunch? Dinner?

  The longest I’ve ever heard of anyone being out is half a day, Emalia told me once. Had Addie still been with me during the delirium? I couldn’t know for sure. If she’d already disappeared then . . .

  But I couldn’t think like that.

  I refused to eat, at first. I felt too sick. But they brought the IV back in, and threatened me with it, so I choked down what I could. It was ashes and sandpaper in our throat, motor oil in our stomach.

  I didn’t dare tell them Addie was gone. No one mentioned it. Was it on purpose? Had they tried to make Addie go away, thinking the recessive soul was easier to control? Easier to manipulate? Or was this just an unforeseen side effect of their experimental drugs? Of the unreliable reactions of our hybrid mind?

  Was this where the chosen girls went? To be used as lab rats? It couldn’t be legal, but what did that mean up here in the middle of nowhere, with children already lost to the world?

  They cleared away the tray. Left me in my solitude and the ticking time.