Epitaphs (Echoes Book 2)

by Knite, Therin

  I recall every lesson from my echo-making class, the instructional texts, and all the tidbits told to me by echo maker agents with years more experience than I have. But as I dash toward the whirling vortex, sand spinning a hundred miles an hour at its edges, like sixteen layers of razor wire on a never-ending reel, every wise word evaporates. They all feel dry and cracked and empty in the face of a nightmare brought to life.

  So I go in on pure instinct.

  My boots squeak across the marble floor, and I shove my handgun into my holster, clipping it shut. I pick, at random, a nearby statue that must weigh a thousand pounds. Like I’ve done in Echo-Making 101 for the past six weeks, I picture an invisible hand grab my chosen object, haul it high into the air, and throw it with the force that the average pitcher slings a curveball. And in response, the statue lifts from the ground, like magic, and soars off in the direction of the red-coated murderer.

  The maker doesn’t expect a projectile so large. The spinning sand can stop bullets but not a fifteen-foot-tall statue moving at highway speeds. He, or she, is forced to drop to his knees and roll away as the statue flies over and slams into the wall behind him. It’s not a knockout on my part—but a distraction. The storm protecting his fragile human form falters while he tries to recover from the near fatality, the sand slowing enough to allow bullets to pass through. The agents in the hall, at least the EDPA agents, notice the change immediately and realign their trajectories, a dozen guns pointed at the bright red coat in the orange haze.

  But most are too far away to land a good shot. Two rounds skim the maker’s clothing, another his hair, another his shoes. Only one lands a true hit, lead to skin and muscle and bone. It eats into his elbow and sends him scrambling away with a high-pitched—

  The maker is a woman.

  Shrieking, she sets her sights on the agents she’d been ignoring since she decimated them in her first-wave attacks. In particular, she homes in on a person behind a pillar in the far corner, whom I quickly identify as Dynara, her white bun-head a dead giveaway. Naturally, Dynara was the one who made the perfect shot—six weeks ago, she nailed a man fifty feet away in total darkness, so I’m not surprised. At all.

  What does surprise me is how quickly the maker recovers from the pain of her mangled elbow. She clambers to her feet and shouts, incoherent, nothing but nonsense made up of shades of fury and sparks of rage and nasty words torn from pages of the heart. She revitalizes her sandstorm vortex, the sand shrieking louder, spinning faster, and its field begins to expand outward to encompass the entire room.

  From the left, around a corner, emerges one of her grotesque pets. This is not the beast that killed DuPont. It’s some sort of four-animal hybrid monster, with the head of a lion, the body and legs of a bull, and the tail of a scorpion, dripping green-tinted poison. Its hands, covered in black fur, are human in shape, but they bear razor-sharp claws instead of fingernails. All in all, the thing is ten feet tall and must weigh the better part of six hundred pounds, power in its pumped-up muscles, violence in its red-stained golden mane and yellow lion’s teeth stringed through with gore.

  It’s killed someone already. Maybe five people. Maybe ten.

  And if I don’t do something to stop it—normal bullets won’t, and there are too many people in close proximity to use the VERA rounds in my belt pouch—it’s going to bum rush the courageous agents facing down with fearless faces something many of them can barely comprehend. It will bite and claw and rip and tear and flay and gut and crush and grind, and in the end, all that will be left is a mush of federal agent mash and gummed-up sand on the floor. So I have to do something. Here. Now. With seconds to spare.

  The bull-scorpion monstrosity crouches into an offensive stance, muscles tense. The maker, now behind it, waves her hand like she’s giving a command, and the monster scrapes its feet across the marble flooring, the sound lost in the vortex roar. Some of the agents realize what’s coming, the horror evident in their jerking bodies, soundless gasps, hints of retreat in their backpedaling feet, but none of them have the speed to outmatch the bull legs of the monster gunning for their lives.

  I do though.

  The maker has noticed me, but she doesn’t know what to make of the redheaded boy with a bloody wound standing on the precipice of her deadly vortex. As the bull prepares to charge, she watches me, closely, the gears turning in her head as she moves to her right, toward Tanaka, who’s balled up in the fetal position at the foot of a statue of Venus.

  She watches me as I pass through her line of rapidly shifting sand like I’m a too-sharp knife cutting through soft butter, the sand wall parting before me with a gentle push of will. She watches me draw closer, her own sand at my command, while I take a defensive position in front of Tanaka, while I check on the rest of the GM Poly kids, all in a similar state of half-suffocated and white-faced panic. She watches me with her hidden eyes and angry face blurred unrecognizable by the sand around her. She watches me as her monster takes off, across the hall, with a mighty lion’s roar that shatters the constant din of the sandstorm, its claws and teeth and sheer and utter might aimed at Dynara and all in her immediate vicinity.

  She watches me.

  And so she doesn’t notice when the heavy chunks of the statue I threw a moment ago rise up from the ground where they bounced to a stop and boomerang back toward me. She doesn’t sense them, moving as fast as an intercontinental rail, brushing her sand aside like a puff of smoke, until the first piece skims her injured arm, the second knocks one knee from underneath her, and, as she’s falling, a third wallops her in the face so hard, four of her teeth go flying.

  Serves you right, I think, the moment her broken body hits the floor, the moment her monster goes off course and rams the wall instead of a person, the moment her illusions of winning this fight evaporate quicker than her sandstorm collapses. Serves you right for being so damn smug, you—

  That’s when the dream reverts to level two…

  …and takes me with it.

  * * *

  Dream sand tastes like salt and death.

  Facedown on a dune, buried to my knees, under a scorching sun, fine grains in strong winds whipping at my exposed skin—that’s how I arrive in the desert dream that decimated Day Team Four. I have the urge to rise slowly, dig my way out in time, and examine every inch of the maker’s dream content, her construction techniques, her level of creativity, how far she deviated from the laws that govern our universe, the way I did for a few solemn minutes in Brennian’s dragon dream. But I recall what happened to Geller, what was left of him (not much), and the fate of the currently legless Monica Wallis, and the haunted expressions on the two remaining members of that doomed team.

  There are monsters in this echo. Beasts far worse than hungry dragons.

  So I shut my eyes to block out the sun beaming down from a cloudless blue sky, taste the salt in the air, feel the microscopic cuts on my skin, listen to the roaring storm as it recedes into the distance. The maker is running away with the vortex around her, like a shield. But running where in her dream world? The fortress McLeod described in the first task room meeting? A place she can collect herself, buy time to reorganize her attack on the museum?

  If she manages to breach the echo again before the taskforce can get the GM Poly kids to safety…

  I grab two handfuls of scorching sand, suck in burning air, and push my mind into overdrive.

  Go, Adem.

  I ease my fists and press my palms against the sand.

  Go get that bitch. Bring justice to DuPont.

  A sharp exhale, and my body lifts out of the sand, three feet off the ground. Then I bring my boots down onto the shifting orange grains with a slow, telepathic descent.

  Go catch the bad guy. Force Dynara to respect you.

  Through the haze, thickest around a certain moving center point, the outline of the fortress juts up from the horizon. Gray stone and tall turrets and windows without glass. It’s a medieval-style castle in the middle of an imagina
ry Sahara. The defensive equivalent to the monsters...the monsters.

  Go fight. Go win. And for gods’ sakes, don’t die in the process.

  The shadows of the beasts aren’t visible in the storm, and they aren’t standing anywhere near me, not the scorpion hybrid or the humanoid figure that butchered DuPont. But there’s no way the maker erased them from the level two, not when they’re her favored weapons, not when she put so much effort into constructing them, unbeatable killing machines.

  So where are they?

  I glance down at the sand beneath my feet, my boots already sunken in three inches even though I just stood up. If I sink that fast…

  I dive forward the instant before the scorpion monster bursts out of the crown of the dune to my left with a mighty lion’s bellow. Sand blasts out in all directions, ten million tiny projectiles that eat at my skin like acid crystals. The monster’s colossal mass barrels toward the place where I was standing but only my shadow remains. Its tail strikes the air where my neck would have been, and its massive body follows through; it would’ve stung me, then crushed me into a flesh sack of bone shards and minced muscles. Instead, I land in a somersault, stumble to my feet, and take off.

  But my shoes sink into the sand with every step. If I don’t pick up the pace before the monster digs its now half-buried body out of the dune again, I’m a sitting duck. I stare down at the pesky sand, loose and fine and easy to slip through, toward the core of the Earth—it’ll swallow you whole. And that’s the point. The maker created the desert not for its sweltering heat or its natural high winds or its lack of obstacles for foes to hide behind but to create a tactical advantage for her malformed beasts. If the intruders in her domain can’t run away…

  I think, Solidify, at the sand beneath my feet, and several billion grains stick to each other like tiny magnets, forming the illusion of sandstone under the soles of my combat boots. I jump once to test its stability—the monster shrieks behind me as it wrenches its head free of the sand—and when I don’t fall through, I run. I form the steps one at a time, each coalescing as my next footstep sails toward the ground. Make the panels of my pathway wide enough and thick enough to hold my meager weight but too small and frail to give any sort of support to the monster that has now noticed my escape.

  The lion head roars in fury and lumbers toward me, but while it can leap ten feet in a single pounce and accelerate fine on a solid floor, it can’t match my increased, stable speed in this desert wasteland. So it leaps and sinks, leaps and sinks, scrambles to keep its footing when its limbs vanish into the orange dunes, and trips over its own scorpion tail when it tries to move too fast too soon after getting its legs trapped too deep in the shifting ground. The maker didn’t anticipate that anyone would figure out a way around her sand trap. Her monsters are invincible when her foes are handicapped here, but I am not so easily disabled. (Gunshot wounds to the crotch aside.)

  My lungs burn in the arid atmosphere, and I feel the pinprick grains tearing at the sensitive tissue of my lungs. The taste of blood creeps up my trachea, and I foresee myself on an infirmary bed coughing up red for a few hours after this fiasco ends. If I don’t die in the next ten minutes or so. I’m coming up on the maker and her sandstorm vortex shield. Moving as quick as I am, chest heaving, legs aching with each step, the maximum velocity of a pathetically out of shape young man, the rippling winds around the maker begin to push and shove me side to side, nearly throwing me off my makeshift sidewalk.

  My brain tracks the airflows, the pull, the push, the drafts, the steady undercurrent, until it’s mapped all the strings of air the woman is controlling to keep her primary defense intact. Hot air passes my lips, scrapes my raw, bloodied throat. With the hardest mental push I can manage, I exhale, sending my devastating breath into all the tiny, deadly cracks within the currents of the sandstorm vortex. Weak, curling threads of breath that, at first, do nothing—and I run forward on my sandstone sidewalk, and she runs forward with her winds to keep her feet gliding across the ground, and the two of us, we draw closer to the fortress rising high.

  But then, as the air swirls around and around, my breath, infecting like a virus, grows stronger and louder and wiser. It disrupts one draft here, another there, drives itself through the undercurrent that keeps the funnel tightly knit around the maker. And before the woman in the red coat realizes what’s happening, the entire vortex tears itself apart, a chain reaction.

  A split second of utter silence fills the desert dream.

  Then eight hundred pounds of sand rains down on its creator.

  She trips, falls, rolls off into a dune, screaming all the way, until she comes to a stop half buried. Her head is tilted toward me, but in the glare of the sun and with the layer of sandy blood congealed on her face, I can’t make out her features from twenty feet away. I close in, shielding my eyes from the raining sand with one arm, and squint to get a better look at her.

  Familiar. Definitely familiar. Her height and weight and build and hair color. I know her, and her identity skirts the edge of my mind, forming a half-decipherable mental image. Ten feet more. Ten more panes of my sandstone path. And I have her. The maker. The murderer. The one break we need to solve this case—

  There is a sound in the burgeoning silence of the dream. Something beyond the sand now falling. Something beyond the growling scorpion monster far behind me. Something from atop one of the turrets of the gray-stone fortress that casts its shadow over me in the perpetually midday sun. My eyes peel themselves off the fallen echo maker, who’s trying to crawl her way out of her partial sandy grave, and seek out the source of the noise.

  A laugh.

  A laugh from the mouth of a middle-aged modder woman peering over the edge of the turret. Chin resting on her palms. Elbows propped against the wide-cut stone. Bitter, victorious grin snaking across her face. In the ripple of the air caused by the unbearable heat, her lips appear to split her face in half and wind all the way around her poisonous orange head.

  Sally Castile.

  The lying bitch.

  She’s an echo maker, too. And she’s been watching me this entire time. From the shadows. As backup. In case the primary maker, the woman in red, failed to escape EDPA’s grasp in the museum. Failed to escape little old me, stupid, cocky Adem Adamend, liable to jump in way over his head to prove a point to his overbearing boss…

  How could I be so fucking blind? All this time? To even entertain the idea that the appearance of an echo maker in the midst of the programming competition could be a coincidence?

  Makers as strong and skilled as the red-coat woman are so rare that her involvement in the DuPont murder must be a function of the competition itself. She got her powers from someone involved in the competition. And she got instruction from someone involved in the competition. Instruction via texts and knowledge stolen from EDPA by Lana Carter months ago. Stolen and given to someone…someone involved in the competition with the power to control its dissemination.

  Not Castile herself. No, too low-ranking in this hierarchy of schemes. She was given the power, too. From the same source red-coat got hers from.

  And that source wasn’t Delacourt. He doesn’t have the clout to command an operation like the one Lana was involved in.

  Therefore, it can only be…

  Finn. The man who set up the competition in the first place. The man Delacourt mentioned in the billiard room.

  Finn has the intel Lana stole from EDPA.

  Finn could be the man behind Brennian.

  Finn—

  Castile whistles, up in her turret, a sharp, wicked sound in the air.

  The ground beneath my feet explodes. A hand wraps around my ankle. The monster that killed DuPont emerges from the sandy depths, hoists me into the sky, and throws me. Ten feet. Twenty. Thirty. Then I slam into the side of the fortress so hard the air evacuates my lungs, the pain from my head wound bursts into hell-born being once again, and my limbs lose feeling from the neck down. Paralyzed.

  My body r
ebounds off the wall and lands face down on the sand.

  Twitching. Boneless. Broken. Useless.

  The massive monster stomps toward me. This grotesque, misshapen thing with mottled, grayish skin and too many bones and too many joints jutting up in all the wrong places and eyes too wide like the sky polluted with the toxic smoke of a thousand factories—this is what Mark DuPont saw before he died. A demon hovering over him. A malformed hand reaching for him. His impending demise in the form of wormlike, wriggling fingers wrapping around his face.

  What kind of horror he must have—

  Rumbling.

  Not in the sand. Or in the fortress. Or in the reaching, nasty hand.

  Rumbling in the core of the dream itself.

  Deep and dark and ominous.

  Through every imagined atom and cell, every fiber of the dream world’s being.

  It’s the first sign of an impending dream collapse. The maker can’t hold it together anymore. I must’ve injured her to the point where she can no longer retain the amount of concentration necessary to keep her dream content stable. The desert and fortress and monsters and sky and everything else—it’s all about to come crashing down into nonexistence.

  Above me, Castile swears.

  In front of me, the monster reaching out to rip my head off freezes.

  Miles beyond me, the horizon of the sandstorm dream disintegrates into darkness.

  Wake up, Adem.

  I’ve practiced this.

  Wake up!

  After getting trapped in Brennian’s dream, I practiced this for hours, dragging myself out of echoes even when my sleep was unnatural.

  Wake your stupid fucking ass up before you fall into the abyss!

  I shut my eyes and picture myself walking through a door. Out of the dream. Into the real world. Out of the frying pan. Into the fire.

  There is a sensation of falling from a height human beings cannot fathom.