by Kat Zhang
I said, “I appreciate the ability to speak.”
After a long moment, he nodded. He stood, and we remained seated, staring up at him. What did this mean? What had any of this meant?
“So what’s going to happen?” I said, and for the first time, he laughed. A low, quiet laugh, but a laugh all the same.
“I don’t know,” he said. “But something different. Something like nothing that’s happened before.”
I didn’t know what to do with my sudden hope. How to control it.
“You’ll have to stay with us for a little while, I’m afraid,” he said. “But I’ll have you and Jaime put together. So you won’t be alone.”
“I’d like that,” I said. “I’d like that a lot—thank you. But . . . I’m not alone.”
“No, I suppose you never are.” His brows knit, then softened again. Something like a smile touched his lips. “Right now, I wonder if I’m jealous.”
He turned, as if to make for the door, but I called out, “Wait—how did the old president die? It wasn’t hybrids.”
“Two days before your vigil, he had a stroke,” President Loyde said. “He was in a coma—recovery uncertain. Only a few people knew. It was bad timing for a weakened president. The story within the administration was that he’d simply gotten a bad case of the flu. After he died, the planned story was that a hybrid had poisoned him through his saline drip.” He seemed lost in thought a moment. “What did he really die of? Stress. Age. Life.”
“Is that what you were going to tell the crowd today?” I said.
He was quiet a moment. Then shook his head. “No,” he said slowly. “It wasn’t.”
He turned, once again, to go. I stopped him a second time. “Are we in the Capitol building?”
His eyebrows raised. “Yes, we are. This is a corner of the eastern wing. I suppose no one really pays much attention to it. Not much historical significance.” He suddenly smiled a little. “Until now.”
FORTY-EIGHT
He kept his promise about Jaime, and for a while, that was enough to keep us happy. We were housed somewhere in the city—the van they piled us into didn’t allow much in the way of sightseeing, but we didn’t drive very long.
There, we were allowed to live in what basically amounted to the world’s most comfortable prison. Jaime told us he’d been kept under similar circumstances for the past few months. Only they’d moved him from place to place, surrounded him with specialists who worked him through physical therapy, tried to coach his speech. We were relieved there’d been no more surgeries.
They let us know nothing about the outside world. We were allowed no television, no radio, no telephones. We weren’t even allowed on the first floor, and all the windows on the second were made with reinforced glass, in addition to being alarmed.
We stayed there a little more than two weeks. Later, the others would fill us in on the missing days. How the uproar about the attackers took up most of the public consciousness at first—who they were, what they’d wanted. Eventually, they’d been tied back to Jenson. Blaming Jenson for the attempted attack gave the people someone to hate and fear other than the hybrids. And it paved the way for the president to start blaming him for other things as well—the overblown reports of hybrid crime. The exaggerated stories about Addie and me, and Peter’s underground.
Public belief is at once a powerful and delicate thing. From what we heard, the president knew it. He worked carefully, but quickly in this liminal time when his administration was still new, and could be separated from the previous one.
A few weeks into the new year, he told the country the truth about the rest of the world. We were released on the same day. In the chaos, no one noticed a girl and boy ushered back into the city streets. They sent a guard with us. For our own protection, they said, however obvious their true intentions were. For the moment, it hardly mattered. All we cared about were the looks on our family’s faces when they met us at the door. The way Hally hugged us and wouldn’t let go.
The way Ryan kissed me later, when we were alone, and it was night, and the stars looked like a map of possibilities above us.
Emalia contacted us on a still Saturday morning, tripping over words in her rush to say she was in Renwert, a few hours away—yes, she and Sophie were fine, no, she didn’t want us to come get her; she’d meet us someplace in the middle.
She sounded different than when we’d last known her. I wondered if I’d still recognize in her the willowy woman who’d dressed in pastels and looked like the dawn. Perhaps Addie and I had never given her enough credit beneath the appearances, and the woman who returned to us, months after she left that day to send Henri off, would be the same person. Just peeled back to her core.
Dr. Lyanne brought her back to us, and we greeted them with bone-crushing hugs. She seemed a little distant, a little lost. Dr. Lyanne must have told her about Peter and Warren’s passing during the drive here.
“Go upstairs,” Dr. Lyanne said, extracting her from the rabble of people who wanted to see her. “When was the last time you properly slept?”
Emalia gave a faint, trilling laugh. “Ages.”
By the time the biggest changes came, though, Addie and I had left what we hoped was the last safe house we’d ever have to live in. Our family hadn’t decided where we wanted to stay yet, though we knew we didn’t want to return to Lupside. We’d just gotten back in touch with Mr. and Mrs. Mullan, and were waiting for them to fly in to meet us, when the news broke.
We’d known it was coming. The news had covered little else but the talks leading up to the decision. But now, finally, it was official.
Tomorrow, the hybrid institutionalization system in the Americas would be obsolete.
“It won’t change everything,” Devon said. We’d gathered in front of the television to watch President Loyde announce it in front of the Capitol. It felt utterly right to be here, the six of us together, for this moment. Ryan and Devon. Hally and Lissa. A year ago, it had been the six of us together, too. “But—”
“It’s a start,” Hally said.
And Devon smiled.
I could imagine it. The first steps out into a warming world. The children who’d been locked away for months, and the ones who’d managed, through sheer tenacity, to survive for years.
What was more, I could imagine the simultaneous sigh of relief from the hundreds—thousands—of children around the country who were approaching their tenth birthday and hadn’t yet settled. The dissolution of the institutionalization system wouldn’t save them from the fear and contempt of their peers, the sideways looks from their teachers, maybe even the growing hesitance of their own parents. But at the very least, it would save them from being ripped from home and shut up in concrete boxes, to languish like refuse until expiration.
The other things—the tolerance, the fading of the hatred and the fear—would come later. I believed in that.
EPILOGUE
There were traces of our old house in our new one. Our parents hadn’t taken much when they left Lupside, but some of what wasn’t sold had been put in storage, so the strawberry-patterned curtains went up in the kitchen windows, the mantelpiece filled up again with our old pictures, and Lyle, digging through the cardboard boxes, unearthed a few of his favorite books.
I liked the new house, with its small but neat lawn. The worn stones of the walkway. The way our room faced east and lit up in the morning.
I liked how the Mullans didn’t live too far away to visit. That Jackson and Vince knew where they’d be able to find us, when they were finished traveling the country a bit—enjoying their new freedom. That Dr. Lyanne and Jaime and Emalia and Kitty and Henri all knew our number. That speaking with them was as easy as picking up the phone.
I liked the fact that we were only a few miles from the coast. Some mornings, we spent hours at the edge of the water, waiting for it to get warm enough for swimming. Our parents had bought us a paint set, a sort of late birthday and Christmas present bundled together. Addie took the kit to the beach, and filled our bedroom wall with canvasses of the waves. Of squawking seagulls, and abandoned sand castles, and children digging for shells.
I wondered, sometimes, about Sabine. Cordelia. Christoph. If they’d managed to find peace, wherever they’d ended up. If they’d ever found home again.
It was a while before Addie and I returned to school, but by then, we’d managed to catch up with the rest of our class, so we started junior year in the fall with a school full of people who at once knew and didn’t know who we were.
President Loyde made history as the first American president to make an official trip overseas since the start of the Great Wars nearly a century ago.
Addie and I made a few new friends at school.
There was talk that we might travel one day, too. Henri wanted us to come visit him, and it was no secret that Addie and I going overseas would be seen as more than just a private affair. But for the moment, nothing was certain, and we were happy to stay where we were. There would be time for traveling in the future. There would be time for so many things. Anything we wanted.
“Eva?” Mom said one afternoon as Addie and I arrived home. Lyle, who’d just started middle school, wouldn’t be home for another few hours.
“Yeah?” I called back, and she appeared in the hall with the cordless phone.
“It’s for you.” She looked hesitant. Ryan or Hally called frequently enough, asking for me. But judging from her expression, it was neither of them.
Who is it? I mouthed as she handed us the phone.
We still got calls, relatively frequently, from reporters wanting to interview us, or people furious at everything we’d done, everything we stood for. Our parents tried to shield us from those calls, when they could. Our number was supposed to be unlisted, but people were diligent and relentless.
“Someone named Bridget?” Mom said, and I immediately pressed the receiver to our ear.
“Hello?” I said, as Addie whispered
We hadn’t spoken to Bridget since the night we escaped from Hahns. Had never known what had become of her.
Bridget’s voice was quiet, but steady. “For someone who was so famous, you’re hard to get ahold of, you know?”
I laughed, and saw Mom’s shoulders relax. She gave us a hesitant smile, and I smiled back.
“How are you?” I said. “Where are you?”
“Home,” Bridget said. “It took a while, but I’m home.”
I looked around at the new house, the rougher edges of it beginning to wear away after months of our living here. At the crisp autumn world beyond the windowpanes. At our mother as she motioned she was headed back upstairs.
“Yeah,” I said softly. “So are we.”
And I answer
Because I am. And I always will be.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It is insanity to think that we have come to the end of the Hybrid Chronicles—the story I first began in my last year of high school and am now completing months after graduating from college. Writing this series is inextricably linked with my college years, and the people who have mentored and aided me during this process have also been my mentors in life.
I am forever grateful to my editor, Kari Sutherland, and my agent, Emmanuelle Morgen. Kari, for your incredible notes and suggestions, which guided me through each revision. The series is so much stronger because of you. Emmanuelle, for teaching me things I didn’t even know I needed to learn about publishing, and for always being only an email or phone call away when I needed help.
I owe the biggest thanks to everyone at HarperTeen, who received these stories as words on a screen and transformed them into (and I might be a little biased here) the most beautifully bound books. Special mention, of course, to the lovely Alison Lisnow, who rocks my world as my publicist.
Thank you to Whitney Lee and all my other foreign agents. I’ve always loved to travel, and seeing my books on shelves in new countries continues to be the biggest thrill. I am very grateful, also, to my film agents, Jon and Michelle at CAA.
Savannah Foley and JJ, I owe you both infinite amounts of baked goods for setting other work aside to read through drafts of Echoes of Us. Amie Kaufman, even being on different continents and in utterly different time zones didn’t keep you from helping me brainstorm the first outline for book three. You’re awesome like that. :)
It’s been a fantastic journey, guys, and I am grateful to everyone who has helped give me the opportunity to take it.
BACK ADS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo by Mandy Whitley Photography
KAT ZHANG is an avid traveler, and after a childhood spent living in one book after another, she now builds stories for other people to visit, including What’s Left of Me, her first novel, and its sequel, Once We Were. You can read about her travels, literary and otherwise, online at www.katzhangwriter.com.
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BOOKS BY KAT ZHANG
What’s Left of Me
Once We Were
CREDITS
Cover art © 2014 by MAXIME QUOILIN
Cover photo © 2014 by JAKE GARN/ARCANGEL IMAGES
COPYRIGHT
ECHOES OF US: THE HYBRID CHRONICLES, BOOK THREE. Copyright © 2014 by Kat Zhang. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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ISBN 978-0-06-211493-8
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EPub Edition July 2014 ISBN 9780062114952
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