Echoes

by Alice Reeds

  “What?”

  “Changed my mind, don’t think opening them is a good idea,” I said and looked closer at the four signs embossed on one end of my capsule.

  “Why?”

  I leaned over and showed him. They were tiny, barely visible, and just readable enough for me to decipher what they said. Immediately he looked at his, looked for the signs and found them a moment later in almost the exact same place. “Do you know what it means?” he asked.

  I nodded. “These four signs are hànzì, Chinese characters for biohazard.”

  “If these things have a biohazard warning on them, and the instructions Ji had with him had a danger warning, what the fuck is in them and why were they implanted into our necks?” Miles asked.

  These were the crucial questions: what was in these implants? “Maybe it’s some kind of virus? I mean, they do tests with new diseases or mutated ones all the time in places of this world no one seems to care about, so why not take us as lab rats?”

  It was such a bizarre thought. I’d seen myself as many things across my life, but I’d never thought I’d end up in a place like this. I knew that sometimes people volunteered for human trials of new medication in exchange for money, but this, us on the island, it was something entirely different. There had to be something we didn’t see, or maybe there wasn’t, and we were simply screwed.

  The latter seemed way too likely.

  “Maybe.” Miles looked away. “Or maybe, if there really is a virus involved, we took them out before the virus, or whatever it is, could spread and hook itself into every inch of us.”

  I wanted to believe his words, wanted to make myself believe that maybe we were not as good as dead just yet, that there was a chance for us to survive all this, but the grim reality was that we would probably die out here.

  “Either way, we should put them into those vials just to be sure,” I said and reached into the backpack. Seeing the label with my name on it took my breath away even the second time around, showed the gravity of this entire thing only more.

  After we put the implants away, we packed our things and slowly made our way back toward the cliff. It was only a question of time until the sun set and it would likely start raining again. We had to get back to the cave before our way down would be too dangerous.

  “As crazy as all of this is, I’m strangely intrigued by the whole bear aspect,” Miles said, his words catching me by surprise. “I don’t know about you, but I’ve never heard of any kind of implants or pills or whatever that would cause that realistic of a hallucination.”

  “I’m not a drug person—I mean my father would kill me if I’d even get close to any—but I’m sure some of them could cause something like this. You hear it in the news sometimes, someone having so intense a drug trip that they thought they were being chased by something or had an imaginary friend telling them what to do.”

  “Maybe, but I don’t think those trips work quite like this. And also, if it were so, what would be the chances of us seeing the exact same thing at the same time?”

  “Basically none.” That was another thing I couldn’t understand. I could buy into the idea of the implants containing some kind of drugs, but us experiencing the same things at the same time, that seemed impossible. Yet it had happened somehow.

  “So maybe it is some kind of really freaky virus type of thing that’s causing vivid hallucinations, both visual and auditory, after all.”

  “What if these also had something to do with the fact that I can remember the moment we crashed, yet we know that didn’t actually happen. If they could conjure up the bear, maybe they could also fake that memory?” I’d never heard of any kind of virus or technology or anything that would be able to do something like that. Faking memories—it sounded like some kind of freaky futuristic idea scientists loved to theorize and Hollywood made movies about, but could it happen in real life? “Is something like that even possible?”

  This wasn’t the Matrix, wasn’t some kind of VR simulation we were involuntarily participating in—the graphics would be way too good for it to be true—it was real life, or some truly, strangely morphed version of real life.

  “Before this I would’ve said no, but now…” He shrugged, but then something washed over his face, some kind of idea or realization maybe. “Speaking of which, if the crash didn’t happen, and the memory really was fake, why did I feel so awful after we woke up?”

  “Maybe it was some kind of side effect, your body struggling to adjust to the implant and virus while mine was okay. Maybe it’s also why we were fine with the food we found, the relatively small amount of it, and how we were never that hungry or thirsty.” Even as I said it, it sounded absurd, the entire thing did. “Also, remember your notebook and the key card? What was that about? Did the implant make you sleepwalk and write that entry yourself or something?

  “At this point I wouldn’t put it past Briola’s abilities.”

  “Or, who knows, maybe we were in Berlin, but they erased our memory of it, replaced it with the crash?”

  “I don’t think so,” he said and shook his head. “When I tried to get the computer board to work, I was on my laptop and I looked at the date. It was the day after we took off in Miami, so how would we take a trip to Berlin in that short a time?”

  “Like they wouldn’t be smart enough to simply set the date back on your laptop.”

  “It’s password protected.”

  “So is our school’s system and your father’s bank account, and you didn’t seem to have issues with getting past those,” I pointed out. “So, if you can do that, I’m sure a bio tech company can crack your password with ease.”

  “Touché,” he said and huffed a little laugh. “I’ve always liked watching documentaries about crazy cases and conspiracies like this, but I never actually wanted to be part of one.”

  “Ditto. But, I think there is one overarching thing in all of this that’s even more important than the implants, what they do, and how they work,” I finally said as a weight settled onto my shoulders, one I’d been aware of for a while but had tried my best to ignore.

  “Being?”

  “This wasn’t all just some kind of accident. They know our names, our ages. Everything that happened, the bear, the helicopter flying Ji in, the instructions, the damn implants, it’s all been done deliberately, following some kind of plan. What kind of bullshit is this, seriously? Why would Briola do any of this, and what is this for?”

  Even as I spoke, the thoughts arranging themselves in my mind accordingly, I could barely comprehend the things I said. We’d known something was off the moment Miles said the plane wasn’t real, but this was so much bigger than I ever dared consider. Before us, Briola had four other people here, killed them, then they took us, implanted us with whatever, and hired someone to come and kill us as well. They were the force steering this entire thing, the one that chose us, a force we stood no chance against.

  “That means it was them who killed our pilot, no?” Miles said with a sigh. “And we never found the flight attendant…what was her name—”

  “Stephany?”

  “Yes. We never found her, either, so she was probably in on the entire thing.”

  “I knew something about this entire thing was off when I arrived at the airport, and even more when she led us to that damn private jet. That didn’t make any sense to me from the start. Guess it’s easier to take us from a jet than a commercial plane under the watchful eyes of like six hundred other passengers.”

  All of it had been planned, painstakingly so. Every time we’d felt like we had the upper hand, it’d all just been fake safety. We’d never been in control of anything since we landed on the island, since we got onto that plane, maybe even before that. Who knew how big and far reaching this was.

  “If they’ve gone this far, is there anything that’ll stop them from going even further, finding a way to kill us despite Ji failing to do so?”

  “Looking at the other four, chances are none at
all.”

  It was as though a giant rock sat on my chest, squeezed the air out of my lungs, squished my heart hard enough that every beat seemed to hurt, take more effort than it should. We’d fought so hard to stay alive, to figure out what was happening, and now we had, but it was nothing like what I expected it would be.

  “This is so much worse than I thought or imagined,” Miles continued. “Every possible escape or outcome I can think of just leads to a dead end or the two of us dead. Who knows, maybe those implants had some virus in them after all, and that shit will end us, or Briola will do it, or, I don’t know, they’ll just leave us here and we’ll die sooner or later.”

  It was such a tempting little thing, reaching out and taking the cold hand that hopelessness was holding out toward us, toward me. It would’ve been so easy to give in to this void slowly opening up before us, dive into the darkness and get swallowed by nothingness, fall into this state of “nothing matters anymore and no matter what we do it’s all useless anyway.” But just because it was easy, because it was so tempting, did that mean it was the right thing to do? Was the easy solution always, ever, the right one?

  The other solution was much harder; believing and holding on to it seemed as impossible as climbing Mount Everest without any expertise and equipment, but just because it was hard, did it mean it wasn’t worth a try? Just because my opponents had won whatever competition bouts came before me, seemed like the favorites for the titles, had it ever meant I shouldn’t try?

  No.

  I always tried, wanted to stand my ground, wanted to prove that I could do it regardless of how unlikely it seemed. And so many times I’d managed to succeed—I’d won State even though my opponent had stood unbeaten for two years in a row, was seemingly stronger and better than me. Yet, I’d taken that title from her. Coming from nothing and aiming for everything had been basically my entire life, working toward something I knew I could do if I tried hard enough, if I followed my father’s training regimen and believed in my own abilities.

  So, if I could do all that, why shouldn’t the two of us be able to do this, survive somehow?

  “If you believe you might lose,” I said, recalling my father’s words, “it will happen. You’ll psyche yourself out. If we give in to this idea, this thought that we are screwed and stand no chance, the same will happen. We can’t do that.”

  “What are you suggesting we do instead?” Miles asked.

  “The next time they show up—and I’m sure they will, since we’re still very much alive—I suggest we show them they’ve chosen the wrong teens to fuck with.”

  Chapter Thirty

  The Island

  The next morning, we decided to go back into the jungle to see if maybe there was something in the area where Ji landed that we hadn’t noticed yesterday.

  I wasn’t quite sure how I felt about going there again, about getting close to Ji’s dead body even after Miles had moved him, but I knew it was a good idea. Maybe there was something we’d missed that would help us, maybe something that fell from his pocket or had fallen out of the helicopter along with him. I didn’t know what I hoped we’d find—no, that was a lie. I hoped we’d maybe find another radio or whatever to try to contact the outside world. Actually, I hoped we’d find anything at all.

  Even though I’d seen the beast vanish, I still slipped back into listening to the jungle around us, still somehow expected to hear it roar in the distance, rush toward us. But it never happened. It hadn’t been real, not even for a second. It was still hard to just accept that, to walk around the jungle without a bit of worry on my mind, without my body on high alert, ready to bolt.

  We’d been on the island for nine days, yet every time I was still surprised by how much easier it seemed to navigate the area. There were no street signs, no paths, nothing really there to help us, yet somehow I recognized certain things, could find places we’d been to previously. I never thought I’d be able to do it in real life, despite being able to do it with ease in video games. Maybe those had been helpful in a way.

  “This is where the bear chased us yesterday, no?” Miles asked, pulling me out of my thoughts. I looked around and I remembered those trees; one of them had the strangest crooked branch I’d seen in the jungle so far, so it had to be the right one.

  “There should be traces here—of the bear, I mean, if it were real,” I said, my eyes cast toward the ground as I took a few steps.

  “But there’s nothing.”

  We looked around for a while, walked along the way where I was pretty sure I’d seen the bear come through, but, just as Miles said, there was nothing at all. No claw marks, no broken branches, no footprints in the dirt. Absolutely nothing.

  “How didn’t we notice this before?” I wondered.

  “We didn’t have a reason to.” Miles shrugged. “Also, we were too freaked out to even consider it, or at least I was.”

  “To be honest I’m still freaked out.”

  It wasn’t the same freaked out as before. Now that the bear was gone, what I truly feared and was freaked out by were the forces that stood behind all of this, the power they held, and the fact that this was their island. I tried to fight against this fear for so long, but after what happened yesterday, I wanted to allow myself to feel it at least a little. Maybe it was useful somehow; maybe I needed to feel fear to be brave? Also, who knew if Briola had any other surprises hidden on the island, which honestly seemed like a good enough argument to me to feel some degree of fear.

  “At least now we have a gun, so we’re not as defenseless as they hoped we’d be,” Miles said, a cocky smile on his face, and took my hand.

  “Because we’re both such good shooters, hmm?” I pointed out. “And if you tell me you actually know how to handle a gun because your father took you hunting or to a shooting range or something, I’ll smack your gorgeous, rich face.”

  “Well, thank you,” Miles said, clearly trying not to laugh, and squeezed my hand. “As much as my father is a firm believer in the value of expensive steaks and meats, he isn’t into hunting. And even if he were, he’d never take me along, not that I would’ve wanted him to.”

  It took us another couple of minutes to find our way back to Ji’s landing site, his parachute still tangled in the branches of some trees, the strings dangling from it like thin vines, a few broken off branches littering the ground beneath it. I pointedly avoided looking toward the bushes where I knew Miles had hidden Ji’s body. Instead, we split off and searched the area in a wide circle. But no matter how well I looked, how many times I walked across the same patches of dirt and searched through the clusters of bushes and tall grass nearby, I didn’t find anything at all.

  “Nothing,” Miles said, to which I just nodded. “What a waste of time.”

  “At least we know for sure,” I offered. “We can say we tried everything.”

  “I guess so.”

  I’d always done a good enough job at not getting my hopes up, but this time I failed, could see that both our moods took a plunge after this. We’d figured out so much, but we were still in the same place we were before we knew all of it, still didn’t have a way to get away, to contact the outside world. All we had was the knowledge of who was using us but no idea how to stop them or escape from them.

  Since the weather was better than it had been yesterday, the storm having turned out not nearly as bad as we expected it to be, we decided to stop and eat. Maybe given enough time we’d come up with something. We had to.

  We’d found a clearing somewhere halfway between our cliff and Ji’s spot. It wasn’t much, just a few feet by a few feet of tree-free space covered by grass and moss, soft and nice enough for us to sit on. Thanks to Ji’s hunting knife, we could cut the mangos we’d found on the way into neat slices, much nicer than anything we’d managed to do with what we had before.

  At some point Miles reached for our backpack and, to my surprise, pulled out his notebook. “I didn’t even realize you brought that along,” I said and watched h
im flip through it.

  “I don’t know, I thought we could look at the entry again, look through the whole thing,” he said with a shrug. “Maybe I missed something the first time around, maybe there is something else in there, some kind of clue, perhaps.”

  “Can I?” I nodded toward it. I doubted he’d let me look through it, hand over something as valuable and personal as that, but asking never hurt anyone. Without saying anything, he actually handed it to me, a tiny, almost shy smile on his lips.

  Carefully I opened it to the first page, which didn’t have much on it besides Property of Miles E. B. Echo written in his neat handwriting in the middle of it. “What does E. B. stand for?”

  “Edward Bahir. I can understand why they chose the Arabic one, since my father is three quarters Lebanese and all, but my mother wasn’t British. She was French.” He shrugged.

  “Miles Edward Bahir Echo,” I said marveling over how it all rolled off my tongue. I couldn’t get over the gorgeous smile that spread across his face as I did. He leaned in for a quick kiss.

  Even though I would’ve gladly spent the next hour just making out, I forced my attention back to the notebook in my lap. I flipped through the pages, all of them almost entirely covered in his handwriting, some passages crossed out, others circled in or marked with big exclamation marks. Only a handful of pages had dates on them, mostly from anywhere between last week and two years ago. As much as I wanted to, I didn’t stop to properly read any of them, just a sentence or two at most. From what I could gather he wrote about everything and anything, some passages going on about some teacher, others about soccer practice, his friends, some parties, rants about bad songs or albums, relatively mundane things.

  None of it stood out. None of it was connected to our situation, nothing besides the Berlin entry.

  But then my eyes landed on a passage, just a few lines, written in a different handwriting with a purple glitter gel pen that stood out amid the sea of royal blue and black. The first few words were written in Cyrillic, and just below the entry itself were two initials, N. I.