Echoes

by Alice Reeds

  We continued toward the cockpit, watching everything around us, until I thought I saw something off to our left between the trees. I stopped walking and, looking harder, could make out some kind of wooden structure, maybe, though I wasn’t sure.

  “Fiona?” Miles asked, his voice tainted by confusion.

  “What the hell is that?” I asked.

  He looked where I pointed, and then slowly turned back toward me. “Maybe it belongs to the people who put us here?”

  There was, of course, the chance that it could belong to the enemy, but I still thought it could be worth checking out. Maybe we’d find some clues there, anything that could help us figure out why we were here, why there was a pit with dead people, and just what the hell was going on. “Let’s check it out.”

  Slowly we approached it, avoiding making any noise at all, which wasn’t nearly as easy in the wild as it was indoors. The ground was littered with things that made noises, like dry leaves and twigs.

  “Is that a camp?” Miles asked, half surprised and half confused, and frowned.

  The wooden structure looked like a small wooden tent like thing made of logs and twigs, leaves and stones. Inside it stood two airplane seats, and a small circle of stones rested a couple feet away from it. A bonfire maybe?

  “Maybe the people before us lived here?” Miles asked and looked around. Considering the plane seats, that seemed likely, since they were like ours, just with dark brown leather instead of light. There were no traces of life around, no footprints, no fresh wood or supplies. Whichever pair lived here before us, it had definitely been a good while since they stopped and moved into the pit.

  “I think you were right about the cave being our best option, since it doesn’t seem like hiding in the jungle worked out particularly well for them.”

  I peeked into the wooden tent. A couple of plastic bottles lay farther in the back, all empty and dirty. Looking around some more, I hoped I’d find something, anything, that could help us, give us a clue about any of what was happening to us or what happened to them, but there was nothing. Whoever took them out had done a good job of erasing all their traces and leaving behind nothing useful.

  “I think someone burned their clothes once they killed them.”

  “What?” I asked and crawled back out of the wooden tent to find Miles crouching next to the bonfire.

  “There are pieces of burned fabric in here.” He pulled a piece from the ashes. It looked like a black sleeve, or something that once used to be one. Now this was really starting to creep me out. Goose bumps appeared all over my arms, and I felt strangely cold, despite it being easily ninety degrees or more.

  “The tent is empty,” I said with a sigh.

  “Nothing besides the burned clothes around outside, either,” Miles said and stood up again.

  “So much for finding some clues or actual answers.”

  I tried not to feel disappointed. This was far better than accidentally running right into the arms of the enemy, but it still wasn’t what we needed. All we knew now was that the jungle, and any obvious place, wasn’t a good enough spot to hide from the enemy. The cave really was our only option, a place they wouldn’t easily find us. And even if they knew we were there, we’d notice them as they approached, and could try and get away.

  “I wonder if this means they searched and found them, or if they were watching them and, by extension, watching us.” A shiver ran down my spine at the mere thought of that, my skin crawling. It was one thing to know that people watched my fights, took countless pictures and videos, material they could analyze to criticize me later, but the thought of strangers secretly watching us after dumping us on this island…it was far worse. A whole universe of worse.

  “Let’s get out of here. This place is creeping me out,” Miles said, but before we retreated, we looked around one more time, just to be sure that we hadn’t missed anything. I was surprised they didn’t rip down the camp so we wouldn’t even find that. But maybe their plan was different. Maybe they thought we wouldn’t even make it this far or something, the bear ripping us to pieces before we could discover this.

  Leaving the camp behind, we returned to our previous route and continued toward the cockpit. Soon enough, we were close to the clearing, now too-familiar territory. We needed to focus on our next task, finding that stupid lighter or some matches, so I pushed all my thoughts, wondering, and worries about the camp, pit, and our enemies aside.

  Slowly and as quietly as possible, we snuck the remaining distance toward the cockpit, listening to and watching everything around us, ready to bolt at any moment. I’d left my tote behind at the edge of the clearing to make an escape easier, plus I doubted the beast would care for it much anyway. There was only water in it, after all.

  Thankfully, it seemed like the bear was taking a day off, maybe sleeping somewhere and relaxing after chasing us again and again the previous days. All I wished for was to find a lighter in the cockpit and get away without it noticing us.

  “I’ll look through the drawers and you the actual cockpit, okay?” I offered. Splitting the work seemed like a wise idea, one that would get us a result quicker than staying together to search.

  “If you hear something, let me know, please.”

  “Don’t worry, I remember my own rules,” I joked, trying to lighten the mood. But I knew there was no way of achieving that as long as we were there. He shook his head and then walked off to get to the window to climb into the cockpit.

  Quickly I moved over to the drawers, located to the right and left of the cockpit door from the side that led into where our part of the plane used to be, opened one after the other. I knew that usually those drawers would hold all sorts of things that planes needed, along with the food and drink supplies, maybe something useful for first aid or other emergencies, but the farther I went, the more I came to realize that there was nothing. Considering the fact that the entire plane, the cockpit and our part, were fake, I shouldn’t have been so surprised. Why should they have bothered filling the drawers with useful things if they hoped the beast would kill us during an attempt at getting to the cockpit?

  I cursed, and then cursed some more. This couldn’t be happening. We’d been so close, had found a steady water source and a possible storm-appropriate shelter (though, of course, there had to be the snakes), but the plane was useless in our quest to win against them. We’d taken a step forward and then seven backward again.

  “Did you find anything?” Miles asked a little while later. Looking at how empty his hands were, I knew that he hadn’t found anything, either.

  I shook my head no and sighed, my shoulders sagging. “Where else are we supposed to find a lighter?”

  I knew the answer as soon as Miles looked at the ground behind me. The spot marked by a shallow grave.

  “The pilot,” I said, my heart sinking. “We need to check his pockets.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Berlin

  I’d considered many options for what Joe could’ve meant by they are watching, thought that maybe it was Briola just trying to mess with us somehow, but I never would’ve even come up with the idea that the police could be involved in this. I’d hoped those men were just two random guys, that maybe we just imagined that they were following us, just a funny coincidence and nothing more. But this was far bigger than I anticipated if it reached as far as the cops, who were supposed to protect and not stalk us.

  “I’ve been trying to find an explanation for why the airport security guys had done what they did,” Miles said. “Maybe that’s the answer? Maybe they were somehow involved in all of this as well?”

  “Since when is airport security connected to the actual police?”

  “It isn’t, but if the cops, then why not also the airport guys? Maybe they were just a small part of something far bigger that we can’t see yet.”

  I laughed, not a big, loud laugh, just a small one, the absurdity of everything hitting me.

  “You know, Joe is one of those
people who love conspiracy theories, eats them up like crazy. It’s ironic that it literally seems like we’ve landed in the middle of one happening as we speak. It’s the most bizarre conspiracy possible. I mean, who and why would anyone do something like this, go through all this bullshit just to get us here? But Joe had somehow known things weren’t right, had smelled it.”

  If we’d ever make it back home and I got the chance to talk to Joe again, I was sure he would listen to me when I told him about this. It was the sort of truly unbelievable story he was usually all about, every detail making it sound crazier. Yet it was all true this time. There was no trickery, no witty TV script guiding us, and no way for us to redo a scene or simply ask someone how this story would end.

  Who knew, maybe this case would one day end up as material for a BuzzFeed Unsolved episode. Two teens flying to Berlin and never returning, a grand conspiracy, the police playing stalkers and airports trying to keep them from leaving. If this hadn’t happened to me, I definitely would’ve loved that episode, but right now I hated everything about this.

  There was literally an unconscious undercover police officer lying on the ground between us, for fuck’s sake. How did we end up here, and why the two of us? Why was any of this happening? A grand plan or simply misfortune?

  “At least now we know that Joe was right,” I said and took a step back. “We really cannot trust anyone, not even the one type of authority that was designed to be trustworthy, to be your helper in need.”

  “Great kind of helpers,” Miles said, his words dry and sarcastic. “But maybe this puts us at an advantage now. We know they’re watching us, we know who they are and how they look, their names and everything. We know who we can’t trust. Something about all of this has to be useful, help us somehow, give us the edge we’ve been missing so far.”

  “Maybe the reason why all of this is happening isn’t important, just that we’ll figure out a way through it.”

  Did we even stand any sort of chance, realistically? If the police were involved, could the two of us be smarter and stronger than them? Did we have another choice but to try, keep on trying even if our options were slowly but surely running out and I wasn’t sure anymore how we could keep going? But we had to. We would make it through this.

  “We should leave before someone notices us, or rather, before anyone sees us with him,” Miles said.

  “Let’s go back to the motel and get our things. At least this time they can’t follow, though who knows where the other dude is.”

  “Guess we’ll see if he shows up again as we move through the city. Or maybe he’ll come here, instead, to check on his partner and will lose us.”

  That seemed like too good of an option; I barely even wanted to consider it. But as we made our way back, moved from one public transport to the other, crossed streets and walked past shops, the second police guy never showed up. We’d looked, probably freaked out everyone around us with how we watched everything, but he wasn’t there.

  A tiny bit of hope bloomed in my chest. Maybe we’d gotten rid of them, both of them. Maybe we’d scared them, got them to retreat at least for a while, leave us alone. Maybe we finally showed them that we weren’t as defenseless as they hoped. Surely they hadn’t expected me to be able to K.O. a dude way taller and like twice as heavy as I was.

  Then again, they were the police. They could access all kinds of info sources, knew all about who we were and where we came from. But still I’d proven that I was capable of exactly what the internet claimed I was, and that they shouldn’t mess with us.

  By the time we reached our motel, I almost felt like I could breathe a little easier now that this crawling, nasty feeling of being watched was gone, at least for now. At the same time, I was mildly crushed by the discovery we’d made, but I didn’t want to focus on it, wanted to just enjoy this tiny break we were getting.

  But I should’ve known that it was all just false hope, a false feeling of security, possibly exactly what they’d hoped I’d feel.

  Just as we walked through the first set of doors that led into the motel, Miles grabbed my arm, and we stopped dead in our tracks. I looked at him, confused. But he didn’t say anything, just continued looking ahead, his expression focused.

  “…die zwei sind siebzehn Jahre alt und werden seit ein paar Tagen vermisst. Das Mädchen hat blaue Haare, recht einfach zu entdecken. Haben Sie sie vielleicht gesehen?” said a voice from farther into the lobby. I had no idea what that man was saying, but judging by Miles’s abrupt halt and the frown on his face, it couldn’t be anything good.

  “It’s him,” Miles finally said, his voice nothing more than a whisper, before he started to slowly walk back toward the door, pulling me along with him. “The second guy.”

  My blood immediately ran cold. Why was he here?

  “What did he say?” I asked once we were outside again, hiding behind a delivery van.

  “He was asking the receptionist if he’d seen us. I heard him mention your hair.” Self-consciously I touched my hair. I’d loved the color ever since I first decided to go for blue, but now that decision had turned into a giant disadvantage. We definitely would’ve been harder to spot if my hair were its natural color. “It’s pretty, but not ideal for our current situation.”

  I just looked at him, caught off guard by his comment. I wanted to say something snarky, ask how long he’d thought that way about it, since he never said anything positive or not teasing about it before, but now wasn’t the time.

  “The guy is blocking our way in, and even if he leaves, we can’t go back in there,” Miles said, and then took a calming breath. “We have to go to plan B.”

  “All our things,” I said, a bit too whiny for my own liking.

  “You have all your important things, no?” I nodded. I hadn’t taken much with me to Berlin to begin with, at least in terms of electronics and important things. The few valuables we had, we’d put into the tote on my shoulder. “Then it’s just clothes, replaceable things.”

  For him most things were probably replaceable ones, clothes just meaningless things. I was sure he could’ve easily taken no luggage with him and just bought an entire new wardrobe upon arrival, but for me, things were different. But he was right, we had no other choice. Even if Miles had gone in alone, the receptionist still would’ve recognized him, and we had no idea what would happen in that case. We couldn’t afford him calling even more cops on us. And compared to our passports, this was a loss we could live with. It certainly made us more mobile and quicker, harder to spot even with my hair.

  Plan B it was, then.

  Peeking around the van, we checked if the area was clear—it was—and then made our way back to the nearest bus station we could find, two streets over. Inside, we looked at the public transport map of Berlin and tried to figure out the most convoluted route possible from the motel to the S-Bahnhof Neukölln on the other side of the city. There was a much easier way to get there than the one we took, but we hoped that this way the chances of those bastards tracking us down would be diminished at least a bit. There was a chance they could access the CCTV cameras across all the S- and U-Bahn stations, but moving around this much, and switching to buses where possible, would make their job definitely harder.

  Sure, we could’ve made it even harder by leaving the city altogether—we’d actually briefly considered it—but if our parents or school got suspicious because we didn’t call or text, why we didn’t return home, they’d only look for us in Berlin. If we left the city, no one would ever be able to find us.

  After what seemed like the longest hour and a half of my life, we’d made it to Neukölln. Together with a sea of strangers, we were swept out of the train and up a set of stairs into a bigger hall. There was a store and two bakeries in it, a big set of doors to our left, a tunnel opposite to us, and another exit toward the right. We chose to go left through the doors and into the traffic of Berlin. The intersection was buzzing with pedestrians, cars, delivery vans, and buses. The smell of Chi
nese and Arabic food mixed with a distinct note of McDonald’s floated through the air.

  We found the hostel, which we’d previously seen advertised in one of the buses we’d taken, located in a relatively new building with a wine store next door. The hostel wasn’t very big, looked like a three- or four-story high rectangular box quite close to the rails and the station.

  Our idea was that maybe the police guys had found us because we’d kept close to the airport, relatively, and that maybe if we went to a district like Neukölln, which was practically halfway between both airports, they wouldn’t figure it out nearly as fast. Maybe they never would. We started out in a luxury hotel—who would think to look for us in a cheap, shitty hostel? Berlin was a giant city with millions of citizens and thousands of tourists. There had to be tens or hundreds of girls of a similar build with colorful hair, some surely also blue. So good luck to those bastards finding us now.

  Inside, we were met with the stench of alcohol, and laughter coming from a group of twenty-somethings. The reception area was small, with a middle-aged man sitting behind the desk. We quickly received a key to a room for four with the info that most likely we would have strangers staying with us in it. Sharing a room with strangers, even if they were just something like backpackers, was probably the least desirable thing I could think of, but we had no other choice. Who knew who those people would be, if they weren’t more undercover cops or other stalking strangers sent out to look for us?

  No, I couldn’t even think that way or I would drive myself insane, not like I wasn’t doing that already, but it would’ve only made it worse. I wasn’t sure how our situation could’ve been any worse, but I certainly didn’t want to find out.