Echoes of Us

by Kat Zhang

  “I’m sure your family is all right,” Jackson said quietly.

  I nodded, staring out beyond the fence, watching the way the moonlight glinted off the snow.

  “Are the others with Marion?” he asked. “Peter and them, I mean. You know, I can’t believe Peter agreed to let you—”

  “Peter’s dead,” I whispered. I was already keeping one huge secret from Jackson; I couldn’t handle another. Then I turned to face him, and regretted I hadn’t been more gentle with the news.

  Devastation marred every line of Jackson’s face. Froze his limbs as the cold wind blew between us. Softly, I told him everything he’d missed after that night in Anchoit. The traveling and hiding we’d done with Peter and the others. Marion’s arrival. Henri’s leaving. The news of Emalia’s disappearance. The car chase, then accident as we tried to run.

  Peter’s death. Jaime’s capture.

  By the time I finished, Jackson’s eyes had gone blank. He’d clenched his hands into fists, and without thinking, I reached out and put my hand over his.

  He didn’t speak. Neither did I. But in that moment, we understood each other perfectly.

  Ben arrived. A middle-aged man with a sun-leathered face, he had a mouth so intensely flattened I felt a little jolt of surprise every time he opened it to speak.

  “You’re sure about her?” he said to Jackson, as if I weren’t right there.

  Jackson nodded. “I’m sure.”

  Ben didn’t relax. But he nodded and unlocked the doors of his beat-up old van, and I supposed that was about as much of a get in as we were going to receive.

  The backseat was already piled with stuff. I shoved aside a pile of clothes—jackets, pants, wrinkled shirts—and tried to find room for our feet. Jackson unrolled a sleeve of cheese-flavored crackers as if it were his and offered it to me. I glanced at Ben, but he didn’t say anything, so I accepted it.

  Eating crackers, jostled in beside Jackson and what looked to be the pieces of Ben’s life, I started my journey back to the rest of the world.

  Ben’s van shuddered to a stop, pulling me from the lull of the road and the staticky music on the radio. The car’s headlights revealed an old, colonial-style house with a yellow face. Snow patched a dark, sloped roof. I sat up blearily.

  “We’re here,” Vince said.

  I’d spent most of the drive staring out the window, but the last time I’d glanced over, it had still been Jackson sitting beside me. The switch startled me. Back at Hahns, many of the girls rarely switched control from one soul to the other. Most of them I didn’t know well enough to distinguish between souls, anyway.

  “The place used to be a bed-and-breakfast,” Vince said as we approached the front door. He grabbed the brass knocker and pounded it twice.

  A little boy, maybe nine or ten years old, answered. He grinned up at Vince, then at me. “Are you the one he went to rescue? Nobody thought he could do it.”

  “And I didn’t.” Vince’s smile was fainter than it might have been, but he tried. I was cataloging all the ways he was different from Jackson: he walked faster; his smile was sharper; his eyes didn’t linger on me. “You don’t have to tell anyone, though.”

  The boy stepped aside, letting the three of us come in after stomping the snow from our shoes. “This guy from all the way on the other side of the country came,” he said. “He heard his brother was at Hahns. Did you see Hahns?”

  Vince nodded toward me. “I didn’t. She did.”

  The little boy looked at me, intent and solemn. “Did you see a David Birnes?”

  “I—I didn’t,” I said. “I didn’t see any of the boys. Only the girls.”

  The boy’s mouth twisted in disappointment, but his expression quickly cleared again. “I think there’s a man and a woman on the second floor who’re looking for a girl who might be at Hahns. I can’t remember her name, but I can go ask—”

  “Whoa there,” Vince said. “You can do us a favor first, Aiden.”

  The younger boy brightened. Straightened.

  Vince glanced at me, then back at Aiden. “Remember the people I described to you? Go see if the newcomers know anything about them.”

  The little boy nodded, flashed a grin at me, and ran off. He rounded the corner, then disappeared up a flight of stairs.

  “Everyone who comes here,” Vince said as he showed me down the hall, “is looking for someone.”

  It wasn’t a large crowd at the bed-and-breakfast. Most introduced themselves by first name only. Some didn’t bother introducing themselves at all, only naming the person or people they were looking for. An elderly couple from two states over was following a lead about a granddaughter who’d been taken three years ago. A woman around my mother’s age was searching for a daughter who shared her same brilliantly orange hair.

  There were a few on the other side of the search. The hybrids, like Vince and me. They didn’t say if they’d escaped from institutions, or had been in hiding. They were quieter.

  Some, I had a feeling, recognized me. Eyes trailed after me. Gazes lingered just a little too long. I had no idea if they’d continued showing our picture on the news.

  Then again, after our time at Hahns, maybe Addie and I didn’t even look that much like our picture anymore. Our hair had grown out a bit, the darker roots showing through. We’d always been pale, but never as pale as this—a sickly, sallow hue that made us look ghostlike. Our limbs looked funny, the muscles atrophied. There was a darkness around our eyes.

  “Probably better if you don’t drop your real name,” Jackson whispered in our ear. It was Jackson again now, and I almost wished it weren’t. I wasn’t reminded of Addie’s absence every time Vince looked at me. “What did you go by at Hahns?”

  But I didn’t want to use Darcie’s name. Darcie was a real girl, with a real family, all of whom could be hurt. So I stole the first name of a girl Addie and I had been friends with in second grade, and the last name of a boy I’d had a crush on when I was eight. For the time being, I was Morgan Shelly.

  I listened to the descriptions of these missing people and tried to describe my own. Marion. Ryan. Hally. Dr. Lyanne. Henri. Emalia. I didn’t actually drop any of their names, though. I doubted they were using their real ones, either. And I didn’t want to run the risk of someone recognizing a name from the news alerts.

  These people were supposed to be on our side. But it didn’t hurt to be safe.

  In the end, no one had heard any news of them. It was disappointing, but unsurprising. I hadn’t heard of any of their lost loved ones, either.

  I murmured to Addie.

  There was nothing but silence for a reply.

  Perhaps, whispered a part of me that refused to be shoved aside, perhaps from now on, there will only be silence.

  I swallowed. Fought against the sudden buzz in my ears drowning out the rest of the world. Jackson and I were in the kitchen, along with what seemed to be the rest of the house. Dinners were communal here, and people accidentally jostled one another in their search for plates and forks, or for a helping of the barbecue chicken laid out on enormous ceramic plates. Mrs. Shay, the owner of the B and B, hustled everyone along.

  “Be right back,” I muttered to Jackson. Or hoped I did. The words blurred a little in my mouth.

  I stumbled away from him, away from the heat—the overwhelming human shove—of the kitchen and into the family room. Collapsed on the couch and drew my legs against my stomach. Covered my face with my hands. Screamed as hard as I could into the darkness where Addie was gone.

  Gone.

  “Hey,” Jackson said. “It’s all right.”

  My head snapped up. He must have followed me from the kitchen. He shut the glass doors behind him, sealing away the dinnertime chatter, then hovered by the couch for a second before sitting down next to me.

  “Sabine used to have panic attacks, did you know?” He didn’t wait for a reply, and I was tha
nkful for it. “Christoph told me, once. They started when she was still locked away, and they lasted for months and months after she got out. But she—”

  “She’s gone,” I whispered.

  He frowned. “Sabine?”

  I shook my head. Closed my eyes, but that only made things worse. I stared at the fireplace instead. It was cold, the logs blackened and dead. I focused on the whirls and crevices in the wood, the scattering of the ash.

  “Addie’s gone.”

  “What’re you saying?” His voice had gone flat. It was so unlike him it was frightening.

  My first instinct was to match his coldness. To bind my own emotions. Turn my insides to concrete.

  “Back at Hahns,” I said, “they drugged us. I don’t know what with. A cocktail of things. Addie and I . . . we reacted badly. I—I was hallucinating, and . . . when I became lucid again, she was gone.” I took a deep breath. Let it out. “I thought she would come back, at first. I—I thought whatever effect the medications were having, they would wear off. But the days kept passing, and now I—I don’t think—”

  I turned to face Jackson. Stared him right in the eye like it was the only thing in the world that could keep me steady. Here, at least, was someone who could understand a fraction of my pain. My loss.

  “I don’t think she’s coming back,” I whispered.

  TWENTY-SIX

  My words froze the moment. Crystallized us.

  It hadn’t seemed real until I said it out loud. Until I admitted it to someone else. And to myself.

  I could feel my throat closing again. The rapid thrum of our heart—my heart.

  It was only my heart now.

  I didn’t realize I was crying until the room began to blur. Until Jackson snapped out of his daze. For a moment, he looked nothing but helpless.

  That, that of all things, I understood the most.

  “You don’t know for sure,” Jackson said quietly, but fiercely. “You can’t know for sure.”

  I didn’t tell him how it felt in my head. How it wasn’t the same at all as when Addie went under by herself.

  He was Jackson. He had to keep hoping. I couldn’t take that away from him.

  Someone opened the door to the kitchen. People drifted out, carrying plates and looking for places to sit. Jackson turned away. Stared at nothing. Was he speaking with Vince?

  Vince would know the best things to say to him. Things no one else would know, because no one else knew him so well. No one else had spent a lifetime sharing his body, seeing through shared eyes.

  Addie and I had shared a life. Now, like Jaime’s second soul, she was gone.

  The thought of it shattered through me.

  I escaped upstairs to the room Mrs. Shay had allotted us. Crawled into bed and turned off the light and lay there in the darkness feeling more alone than I ever had in my life.

  Was I still hybrid?

  Was I still hybrid, with Addie gone like this?

  Hunger woke me. Hunger and some wide-jawed nightmare that disintegrated into confused flashes as soon as I woke, but left me trembling.

  The room was dark. My bedside clock read a little after midnight. I heard the quiet rasp of Jackson’s breathing. Saw the shadow of his body in the bed next to mine.

  I slipped from the room and down the stairs, moving slowly in the darkness. The kitchen light was already lit. I peeked around the doorway. I must not have been as quiet as I thought I’d been, because Ben was looking right back at me. He sat at the wraparound counter, picking at a plate of leftover barbecue chicken.

  “You hungry, too?” he said. When I nodded, he motioned toward the fridge. “I can’t eat with all those people running around. All the fuss.”

  I managed something that was not quite a smile. “You must not like restaurants.”

  “Not really, no,” he said. “I also hate hotels, so this is an all-around pain in the ass.” He stabbed a bite of chicken and waved it at me in a vaguely beckoning manner. I drifted closer, climbing on the stool next to him.

  In the flurry of last night, I hadn’t thought to question Jackson about the man who’d driven, with such short notice, all the way up the mountain to pick up a boy he barely knew and a girl he didn’t know at all. Was he hybrid himself? Did he have family who was?

  “Go ahead and ask,” he said. I looked at him in surprise, and he shifted in his chair. “It’s a strange change of pace, isn’t it? You get it ingrained into you—Don’t mention your missing son. Don’t tell people what happened to him. Then, all of a sudden, you’re surrounded by people blathering on about their own lost children, or siblings, or what-have-you, and you’re expected to just . . . share.” He snorted. “But I won’t find what I need to know by keeping silent. So ask.”

  “You had a son,” I said cautiously.

  “I had a son,” he echoed. He took another bite of chicken. Chewed ponderously for a moment. “I’m hoping I have a son, but I’m realizing it’s more and more possible that yes, I had a son and don’t anymore.”

  “I—I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean—What’s his name?”

  “William,” he said around a mouthful of chicken. “He’d be eighteen now. I’d describe to you what he looks like, but I haven’t seen him since he was eleven years old, so all I can say is that he has brown eyes and brown hair and a scar on his chin from when he fell while helping me out on the ranch.”

  I didn’t tell him how the older children disappeared at Hahns. I wasn’t sure if it was the case elsewhere, and besides, he probably already knew. Perhaps William had escaped years ago. Perhaps he was roaming the shadowy parts of the country, looking for lost family.

  Perhaps they’d find each other again, someday.

  “From what I’ve overheard”—Ben gestured at me with his fork—“you’re looking for two foreign-looking siblings, about your age, and some doctor lady.”

  I nodded. I’d mentioned everyone, but Ryan, Hally, and Dr. Lyanne were the ones I’d best been able to describe.

  “I noticed you never mentioned anything about parents. Unless your mother’s the doctor lady.”

  I shook my head. He sobered. “Already know where they are? Or just not interested in finding them?”

  I hesitated. “I guess . . . I’ve got other things I have to do first. Before I can think about going home.”

  Ben shook his head. “Things to do. I should laugh at a girl your age who says that so seriously. But things have been different these past couple months. Those people who blew up the Powatt institution were only kids, too.”

  I kept my expression neutral.

  “Place I was staying before here,” Ben continued, “there was a little girl, barely older than that Aiden kid, running around by herself. Said she was trying to find her family. Find her brother.” He gave a low laugh. “How many of us do you think will actually find who we’re looking for? What will happen to that girl, if she doesn’t? Who will take her in? Even a pretty little fairy-looking child like her.”

  I froze. “What was her name? The girl?”

  Ben frowned. “You think you know her brother?”

  “I—” I grabbed the counter to steady myself. “Just—what was her name?”

  “I wouldn’t normally remember,” Ben said. “But it was easy enough—Kitty.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  I spent the rest of the night pestering Ben for everything he remembered about Kitty and Nina. He promised me she’d seemed fine. Quiet, mostly, but determined. She’d arrived shortly after he did, riding in with a woman she didn’t seem to know. The woman had left again soon after, but Kitty stayed, asking for news of her brother. Ben got the impression that the man used to live nearby, but perhaps didn’t anymore, prompting Kitty’s search.

  He had no idea why she was alone.

  After Ben went to bed, I stayed in the kitchen a little longer, just thinking. I grabbed the phone off the counter and dialed Henri’s satphone number again, echoing the beep of every digit with Please, Please, Please.


  Please work.

  It didn’t.

  You were supposed to fix it, Ryan, I thought desperately. Why haven’t you fixed it?

  I was back in our room when Jackson woke hours later, rocketing up with a gasp and a shudder. He recovered quickly. Closed his eyes and fell back against his pillow.

  It wasn’t until he opened his eyes the second time that he noticed me sitting cross-legged on the other bed.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Hey,” he replied, just as softly. “You were already asleep when I came up last night.”

  “I guess I was tired,” I said, and he nodded. “I was talking to Ben, and he mentioned Kitty.”

  Jackson sat up. “He’s seen her? He didn’t say anything to me. Where were—”

  “She was at the safe house in Grental Plains,” I said. “And she was alone. But that was weeks ago. He doesn’t know where the others could be—or why she isn’t with them. I called the satphone again, but it’s still not working.”

  “It’s still a better lead than I’ve been able to come up with,” Jackson said, just as I said, “Everything’s in pieces.”

  My voice shook, but I had to say it—had to tell someone, and there was no one else. “Sometimes, I wonder . . . if we hadn’t done what we did at Lankster and Powatt. Then, well—things wouldn’t be like they are now. We’d all still be in Anchoit. We’d all be together. Peter would still be—”

  “Don’t, Eva,” Jackson said softly. “You can’t go back and analyze everything. We couldn’t have known any of it would lead to any of this.” I tried to interrupt, but he continued over me in a rush. “Besides, if we hadn’t done what we did, maybe none of the rest of it would have happened, either. All this change—all this talk about hybrids that was buried before. People are speaking out like they haven’t in decades. That’s good, isn’t it? It might all be a mess right now, but at least when things are messy, it means they aren’t sure. And that means they might change. I—I’m not saying it was worth it, or that it all balances out, or anything like that. Just . . .” I felt his agitation as keenly as if it were mine. “It’s happened. There’s no regretting it now.”