Echoes of Us
Page 16
“I’ll come with you,” I said quickly, and thankfully, no one else offered to help as well.
We slipped out the door, Ryan leading the way down the hall until we found the second room. He shut the door behind us, and I was just about to joke that Hally and Lissa hadn’t gotten any neater over the months, when he spun to face me.
“I didn’t know she was going to do it, Eva.” He spoke with such urgency I stopped in my tracks. “I had no idea. I wouldn’t have let her—”
“I believe you,” I said.
He fell quiet. The takeout bag was on the dresser, but neither of us reached for it. “Did they hurt you?”
Did they hurt me?
I tried to answer, but couldn’t. It was like a rubber stopper had slammed into my throat.
Yes. Yes, they hurt me. They hurt me in the worst possible way. They stole the most precious thing I had.
Ryan was immediately concerned. “Eva? What is it—what did they do?”
“Do you remember what Emalia told us?” I whispered. We’d sat down on one of the beds. “About how hybrids could only go under for a few hours—half a day at most?”
He nodded, his confusion palpable.
The blankets rumpled in my fists. “Addie’s been gone for more than a week.”
I told him, haltingly, about the medication and the delirium and the loneliness that had greeted me upon waking. I had to force the words out—because the words led to memories, the memories to the aftershocks of pain and confused terror.
Ryan stood. Pushed his hand through his hair and paced to the dresser and back again and then just stared down at me like he didn’t know what else to do.
“God, Eva,” he said hoarsely.
“I didn’t tell them what they’d done,” I whispered. “They don’t know. So they won’t do it again to someone else.”
“She’ll come back—”
“It’s been more than a week.” I’d started to shake. “What if she’s just gone? What if I’m alone for the rest of my life—”
He sat down next to me. Cupped my face. “I can’t say for certain that Addie’s going to come back. But I can tell you right now: you’re not going to be alone.”
When he kissed me, I believed it. I wanted to believe it. More than anything.
I closed my eyes. “I love you. You know that?”
At first I was afraid he wouldn’t say it back. I was afraid, and I was afraid, and then he did. He said it with such clarity and such certainty that I didn’t understand how I could ever have feared at all.
By the time Ryan and I rejoined the others, Dr. Lyanne had returned from parking the car. Her eyes lingered on me as the takeout boxes went around. It was the same way she’d studied Addie and me during the days after the explosion at Powatt, as the aftereffects of our injuries slowly made themselves known.
She wasn’t the only one whose gaze I felt too strongly. Jackson looked away when I tried to meet his eyes. “Dr. Lyanne was just telling us about how Henri got them another phone,” he said.
I looked to Ryan. We’d hurried back with the food before someone came to check on us, and now I had a feeling we were both acting suspiciously overcasual. “How did he contact you?”
“With much hassle,” Ryan said wryly. He explained how Henri had panicked when he’d returned overseas and found he could no longer call them through the satphone. It had taken weeks, but eventually, he’d managed to track down their whereabouts through mutual connections and send another phone.
After that, it had been a matter of letting me know the new number. I imagined revealing our overseas connection to Marion had been a hard decision to make, but the woman seemed more thrilled and excited about it than anything else.
“We had to find some way to hide it in a broadcast,” Marion said. “The others assured me you knew Morse code, so we snuck it into a video of Henri. The footage from overseas was a bit of a rush job.” She sounded genuinely regretful about it, like it had been a piece of art that could, with more time, be refined and edited into a more powerful work. “But it did what it was meant to do.”
She turned to me, and her smile faded a little. Her eyes, though, were unnervingly sincere. “It was your recordings from Hahns that helped Henri solicit footage. So in a way, you aided in your own rescue.”
I stared at her in disbelief. “None of that had anything to do with my rescue.”
She didn’t even know the girls who’d made my escape possible. Who’d put themselves in danger for me. The room fell silent. We regarded each other, Marion and I.
“Henri’s footage is already causing an uproar,” Dr. Lyanne said. “And it’s not going to get calmer anytime soon. If Ty’s connected to the group making trouble here in Brindt, he’s going to find himself in jail, if he isn’t careful.”
“We’ll find him before anything happens,” Hally said, but I could read the discomfort on her face. “Kitty, too.”
“It was bound to get complicated.” Marion broke our eye contact. “It’s revolution.”
Back in the attic above the photography shop, Addie and I had dreamed about revolution. It had always seemed like a frightening thing. Like a wave that picked up speed until it went utterly out of control, smashing everything in its way into bits. There was nothing but the fervent prayer that what rose from the rubble would be better than what stood there before.
It wasn’t, always. That much I knew for sure.
After all, once upon a time, the single-souled rebelled against the hybrid, and formed the Americas.
In the wake of Henri’s recent broadcast, the furor over hybrids took a sharp, foreign turn. The news filled with “proof” that Henri’s footage had been faked—everything from the fact that parts of the backdrops were clearly two-dimensional, to the idea that the video had actually been taken here, in the Americas. I wasn’t sure how anybody was supposed to believe that, since I’d seen technology in that footage that was far beyond anything I’d glimpsed in our homes or streets. But it was a big country, and most people lived relatively isolated, regional lives. I supposed they could be convinced.
Sometimes, I feared we’d just strengthened antiforeign sentiment. Or fear, anyway, when fear and hatred went so smoothly hand in hand. But we were trying to inject the truth into a country that had buried it for so long. I supposed there was bound to be an uncomfortable reaction, like a fever that had to burn out before recovery.
For now, though, it meant that keeping a low profile was paramount, and any attempt to reach out to Ty had to be done carefully. Another wave of vandalism cropped up. Stores had their windows smashed and their walls covered in graffiti. Now, in addition to railing against the government, the hybrid institutionalization, and the cure, the dripping, spray-painted words talked about Henri’s footage, blaring:
WHY WERE WE KEPT FROM THE TRUTH?
WHAT ELSE DON’T WE KNOW?
Marion figured at least one member of the group was familiar with the area. They’d targeted stores without security cameras. Only they’d made a mistake about one, and it had caught blurry footage of a girl and boy, no more than twenty or twenty-one.
“Not enough to see their faces,” Marion said, “but it’s something. It’s a lead.”
I could feel Ryan’s hostility toward her enthusiasm. He’d explained to me how Marion had hijacked the television channels by feeding the footage to a man she knew who worked at the station. But they couldn’t keep it up forever; loopholes in the system were patched up as quickly as they could find them, and security grew ever tighter.
“She’s obsessed with the idea of getting one last big story,” he said bitterly, and I knew he was thinking of Kitty and Nina.
I wished I could assure him we wouldn’t let Marion take advantage of them. But whatever Marion’s motivations, neither Ryan nor I could argue against the fact that we benefited from her help in finding Ty.
Jackson and Vince were strangely absent from a lot of our meetings. If the others noticed, they didn’t mention it. But
finally, one afternoon, I slipped from Marion’s room and went down the hall to ours.
Jackson looked up as I came in. He’d taken to sleeping on the armchair, after all, but he wasn’t sitting there now. Instead, he was on the ground, back against the wall.
I sat down beside him, and he smiled faintly. “Where are the others?”
“In Marion’s room. Deciding what to do next.”
He nodded. “You should join them. They’ll wonder where you are.” I didn’t imagine the meaning in his eyes. “Especially Ryan. Especially since he knows about Addie being gone.”
“It’s complicated,” I said. “He knows that, too.”
“Only logically.” Jackson laughed. “Which barely counts for anything.”
“You should join us, too,” I said.
“Yeah. I will.”
But he didn’t get up, and neither did I.
“Addie told me about the sailing,” I said finally. I wasn’t sure why I said it, except that I didn’t want to leave him alone here. I realized I’d never known Jackson to be alone. Not really. When we’d first met him at Nornand, he’d been the one reaching out to us—extending the hand of Peter’s underground. At Anchoit, he’d spent weeks telling us all about the others, then finally introduced us to Sabine and her group.
Jackson had always been the one inviting us into a circle of friends, and now he had none.
When Jackson replied, I heard in his voice the echoes of how Addie had sounded when she told me about the trip. “I miss the beach. I miss Anchoit. I hadn’t thought I would so much.”
“You miss the way things were,” I said. “I understand that.”
His grin was like a shrug. “I’m the one who keeps talking about change.”
I looked away. “Well—”
Something inside me—part of me but not part of me—shuddered. Trembled.
I froze.
The edges of my mind quivered again. Like the walls that had been up since I woke still half-delirious and alone in Hahns had suddenly gone soft.
Then I heard her. A flutter of a sound. A whisper that seemed half imagination—and half insane hope.
She said
THIRTY-TWO
Her voice reached me like an echo. Like words rippling through water. I breathed in sharply.
She cut me off:
I felt the moment she realized what our eyes were seeing: the sparsely decorated hotel room; the paisley-printed wallpaper. Relief, first. A stab of it like light. Then her dread bloomed like a heavy flower.
I hesitated.
Her gasp didn’t come from the lungs, or through the lips. It was shaped from pure emotion. And it knocked into me like a wrecking ball.
I told her what the woman at Hahns had told me. About the medication they’d used on us. How we’d reacted in unexpected ways.
She protested
“Eva?”
Addie flinched at the sound of Jackson’s voice. Not physically, of course—not when I was in control—but I felt it all the same. I realized that as far as Jackson could see, I’d fallen silent in the middle of a sentence. Slowly, I turned to face him. Addie was nameless, wordless emotion.
“What is it?” Jackson said, frowning.
So I lied, because Addie asked me to. And in my heart, she’d always come first.
“I just remembered something,” I said to Jackson. “I’m—I’m sorry. I have to go find Ryan.”
I hurried from the room, trying not to focus on the way he watched me—us—go.
I didn’t go find Ryan, of course. I ran to a quiet nook of the hotel and sank into the corner, anchoring Addie as her terror grew—until I could almost taste it, sour and acrid, on the back of our tongue.
she said.
I filled her in as gently as I could. She remembered being locked up in our cell. She remembered the pierce of the needle. The delirious dreams.
Only for her, the dreams had never ended. Not until now.
I told her about our escape. Bridget’s help. The harrowing journey down the mountain. And, of course, how I’d met up again with Jackson.
Addie was still dazed. I could feel it. After so many days of being subjected only to my own emotions—my own presence—it was at once disconcerting and comforting to feel the edges of hers.
I hesitated.
I had no way of knowing what Addie was thinking. What she’d had with Jackson had always been separate from the life she shared with me. She’d wanted to keep it that way, even after he’d been arrested.
I’d felt utterly betrayed that day in the photography-store attic, when Sabine and the others revealed they’d all known about the plan to murder the visiting officials at Powatt. When they—initiated by a rageful Christoph—knocked us to the ground and tied us up. But it had been worse for Addie.
They’d been my friends. Jackson had been more than that, to her. And even if he’d come back to help us save the officials in the end, he and Addie had never spoken since then.
It was the last thing I wanted right now, but I’d do it, if she needed me to.
I didn’t know what she was talking about, and my silence was answer enough.
It was a dizzying concept. I’d been born the recessive soul—it was something unchangeable that I’d learned to accept, even if I refused to let it signal my death.
But for the first time in our lives, I was stronger than Addie.
“Eva?” Lissa approached hesitantly in the hotel hallway, her brow furrowed. “Are you all right? Did something happen?”
I managed a smile and a shake of our head. She seemed like she was going to say something. But instead, she just threw her arms around us. The strength of it squeezed the air from our lungs.
“It’s going to be all right, you know,” she said quietly.
I’d told her about Addie’s disappearance, but no one else. It was a carefully kept secret, shared only between her, Ryan, Jackson, and us. Not even Dr. Lyanne knew.
But Lissa spoke first, her face uneasy. “Jenson’s found out about the Hahns footage. How it came from you.”
The news report was almost over by the time Lissa and I reached the hotel room, but we saw enough. Our picture was up on the television screen again. It was the one Addie had taken for our driver’s learning permit, only a few months before we went to Nornand. The woman at the office had told us not to smile, so the flash had caught us frozen in a serious look. It had washed us out, too, so we looked unnaturally pale.
We’d never liked that picture. Addie had reasoned we�
��d get a new one once we tested for our real license. But here we were, almost a year later. The idea of getting a driver’s license was laughable. And that hated picture was being broadcasted to every corner of the Americas.
So was our name. Both our names. Addie and Eva Tamsyn.
All my life, I’d yearned for recognition. But not like this.
Sharing the screen with our picture, of course, was Jenson. Impeccably dressed, as usual. We’d never seen him in anything less than a suit jacket. He always carried with him an air of cold formality. And a will that crushed any that dared oppose it.
Addie and I were dangerous, he said. Dangerous, violent, and disturbed. During our escape from an institution, we’d brutally attacked a man. During our time in Anchoit, we’d caused chaos at Lankster Square, and suffering at Powatt—the destruction of tens of thousands of dollars in government property, not to mention the endangerment of lives. And now we were trying to tear the country apart with these illegal broadcasts. These lies and accusations.
He acknowledged that we were young.
That perhaps we were being manipulated.
He said, even, that part of him pitied us, struggling with the insanity and instability of two souls crammed into one body. But it didn’t negate the fact that we were dangerous. And it was all proof of the necessity of the cure. The cure that would not only bring peace back to our country, but save other hybrid children from themselves.
Jenson’s cold eyes told me he didn’t pity us for our supposedly unstable hybrid brain. He pitied us for what he’d do to us, once he had us in custody.
He paused. And then, quietly—as if he knew that somewhere, Addie and I were listening—he said, “The Tamsyn family is under government protection and is fully cooperating with our efforts. They understand, as do all of us, that Addie and Eva need to be caught before they do any more harm.”
The report ended. The image flickered back to the anchor, who went on about a phone number to call if anyone had information or leads.