Echoes

by Alice Reeds

  “We found four dead bodies on this island,” I said. Something at the pit of my stomach told me that he’d been right, that just like Miles and me, Ivy had been on this island, but unlike the two of us, she hadn’t survived. “One of them was a girl with a heart necklace with an ‘I’ on it.”

  Something broke in his eyes at my words. Whatever lies he might be telling, his pain was real.

  “Can you take me to them?”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  The Island

  We made Joe walk in front of us as we slipped through the jungle toward the pit of death. No one spoke, though Miles took my hand. I wanted to ask him what he thought of the entire thing, what he thought of Joe and the story he told us, but the time wasn’t right yet.

  We stood watching as Joe crossed the last steps toward the pit. He fell to his knees and began to sob. My heart ached for him. That wasn’t acting, it wasn’t a show put on to trick us. His entire body shook while I felt cold. I’d seen the piece of hope in his eyes, the piece that hoped the dead girl wasn’t his daughter, that hoped she was still out there somewhere, alive and well. But that piece died like a flame, leaving behind nothing but pitch-black empty space.

  “We should talk,” Miles whispered, and I nodded.

  I turned around to look at Joe once more. He was still sobbing. His grieving would probably take a while.

  Miles led me away, not far so we could still see Joe, but enough that he wouldn’t be able to hear us. My mind was running haywire with everything Joe said.

  “What are you thinking?” I asked.

  “I don’t know if I believe him,” he said and leaned against a tree. Every once in a while, he looked toward Joe as though to make sure he was still there. I did the same. “I mean, that whole FBI story and the way he found you seems a bit dubious, doesn’t it?”

  “It does sound pretty crazy,” I admitted. “But then again, it wasn’t any crazier than the story of us being dumped on an island with a fake plane, bear hallucinations, a pit filled with dead teens, and a helicopter dropping off a killer.”

  “Still, I don’t know. Something about him is weird. Why didn’t his boss want to help him after his daughter disappeared if he worked for the FBI? I don’t know. I’m not sure if I trust this guy.”

  “He’s not lying. At least not about this. They murdered his daughter.” I looked at the figure hunched over next to the pit. “I mean, you heard him wailing. Do you really think he’d be that good?”

  “He did manage to convince you that he’s homeless.”

  “It can’t be hard to pretend that, easy to find some shitty clothes and sit on a bench every few weeks or so. But giving a performance like this… I really don’t think he’s making this up.”

  Miles looked at me and then at Joe. I could see the gears spinning in his mind.

  “What if you’re wrong?” he finally asked, turning his head back toward me, his eyes meeting mine.

  “Let’s just hope I’m not,” I said, not my strongest of answers, but it was all I had. I’d already been involved in the death of one man, even if it was an accident and self-defense, and I refused to be responsible for another. I couldn’t break my father’s rule.

  “After he allowed for you to end up here, you’re willing to believe him?”

  “He also didn’t stop them from taking you,” I reminded him. This wasn’t just about me. I wasn’t the only one that mattered. He did, too. “Besides, even if he’s lying, even if he’s not on our side, we need to get off this island. More than that, we need answers.”

  I sent a collective prayer to anyone I could think of, even some superheroes just to be sure, pleading for me not to be wrong. I had to be right because if I wasn’t, the stakes were too high against us. I hated this, all of it, but there was no escaping it, no way of postponing any of this. This wasn’t some school assignment I could talk myself out of.

  I raised my hands toward Miles’s face, put them lightly against his cheeks and looked him in the eyes. “Do you trust me?”

  His words coming out of my mouth.

  He put his hands on my waist and pulled me a little closer. “You’ll lead, I’ll follow. Besides, we need answers.”

  …

  Joe stood a few feet away from the pit as we returned. He’d stopped sobbing and shaking. He tried to smile, but it was really some sort of strangled grimace.

  “What have you decided? Do you believe me?” he asked.

  Please don’t let me be wrong.

  “Yes,” I said.

  I really hoped I wouldn’t have to kill him.

  “It seems like I’ve been right all along. The people that took you also took my daughter,” Joe said, half to us and half to himself. “I have no idea why they did it or who they are, but they are responsible for this.”

  I wanted to say “It’s okay,” because that was the reflex answer engrained in us, but it wasn’t okay. None of this was, would never be.

  Miles asked the most important question of all: “So, what now?”

  “I have a satellite phone in my backpack in my boat on the beach,” Joe said, and I felt my heart drop. A phone? A working phone? Why had I been so dumb and asked him to leave that backpack? “I have a friend who still works at the FBI. We made a deal that if I’m right about this, if I manage to find you, that friend will help me get you back home.”

  I turned my head to look at Miles, my mouth hanging open in shock. A light, unsure smile tugged up one corner of his mouth, and his eyes were wide.

  “Then what are we waiting for? Let’s go!” Freedom was so close.

  Miles held my hand as we walked back to the beach, a small smile on his face. If Joe would get us off the island it would be a miracle, a real-life wonder.

  “Since I never managed to find an answer, what does M.E. stand for?” Joe asked Miles with a genuine smile. He actually seemed curious. Maybe he was the man I knew after all, at least parts of him.

  “Miles Echo.”

  He nodded in understanding. “It’s good to finally meet you, and to see that the both of you are okay,” Joe said. He seemed to hold up pretty well. Maybe a part of him had always known that Ivy was dead, maybe he was happy he found us before the same could happen. We didn’t mean as much as Ivy, but maybe our lives still mattered to him. He used to be an FBI agent, after all.

  “As okay as can be.”

  “Right. I can’t imagine what you two have been through.”

  I squeezed Miles’s hand lightly and smiled. This was good, this would be good, it simply had to be. The world had to be on our side for once, after everything we’d been through.

  But just as we walked onto the beach, Joe cursed. It didn’t take me too long to see the reason why. The ship, the bigger one, was gone.

  “And what will we do now?” Miles asked while I still felt unable to.

  “We still have my boat; we can take that and try making it to the mainland. Kenya isn’t too far away,” Joe said while scratching his jaw. “I should’ve known that paid people cannot be trusted.”

  “Meaning what?” I asked. Also…Kenya?

  “Meaning that the men I hired to get me here were simple people, a bunch of fishermen I met at the port,” he explained. “When we disappeared into the jungle, they must’ve thought they could leave.”

  “Fantastic,” I said, sarcastically.

  Joe took a deep breath and then sighed. “Okay, how about this,” he said. “I’ll call my friend, then you can go and get whatever you want to take with you, and after that, we’ll leave. The weather is clear, and the ocean seems fine, so we should be okay.”

  That didn’t sound too reassuring, the fact that we should be fine, but it was light-years better than “we will die here, and everything sucks.”

  “Fine,” I said, and nodded.

  Joe nodded back and then walked over to his boat, fetched his backpack, and finally pulled his black satellite phone out of it.

  Miles and I sat down in the sand while we watched and listene
d to Joe call the person.

  Joe said, “I found them. They’re alive. They’re okay.” After a pause, he said, “Yeah. My daughter, too.” Another pause. “No.”

  “Speakerphone,” I said. “Now.”

  Joe glanced at us, then pressed a button that turned on the speakerphone.

  “Okay, listen,” the person on the other side of the line was saying. Whoever they were, their voice was distorted to a point where I couldn’t even make out if it was a woman or a guy talking. “Bring them to these coordinates. We can’t afford to come to the island. Not when the others could be watching.”

  “I don’t have enough fuel to get that far out,” Joe said. “What do you want us to do? Paddle?”

  “If you want to get back, then yes,” the other person said, “you’ll paddle.”

  Joe confirmed we would meet at those coordinates, then hung up and turned to us. “Get your things.”

  Miles and I exchanged a look.

  It was more than we could’ve ever hoped for.

  Good or bad, we were finally leaving the island.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Gone

  Armed with our backpack filled with the few things we wanted to take with us off of the island—our gun, a few pieces of clothing, Miles’s laptop and notebook, our phones, and even the implants in their vials—and a change of clothes and water, we helped Joe push the boat off of the beach and into the water.

  It felt almost odd to wear something more normal, something that was more me than everything I wore on the island. Sure, half-wet jeans were annoying, but wearing them still felt amazing. Seeing Miles in pants that weren’t ruined by my mediocre cutting skills and a shirt that wasn’t white or completely worn out was interesting, too.

  Joe was right; the ocean was fine while we sailed toward the horizon. Whoever those people were, they definitely went through a lot of hassle to get us onto that island, that much was clear.

  The sun began to set, the sky changing color from clear blue to flaming red and orange with streaks of pink and violet. I wasn’t too sure about the idea of being out on the open ocean in a boat at night, but I wasn’t about to complain. The fact that we were on a boat at all was already the event of the year for me.

  Before the island disappeared, I looked back at it one last time, told it just how much I wouldn’t miss it in my mind, and then flipped it off because I could. There was no place on earth that I hated more than that island.

  “Can you believe this?” Miles asked, his voice relatively quiet, though still loud enough so I could hear it over the sound of the engine. “We actually left the island.”

  “We did, didn’t we?” I said and smiled at him. I still couldn’t believe it. “One step closer to being home.”

  “It’ll be weird to not have you around twenty-four-seven.” Considering our history, both the recent and old one, it still seemed so impossible. Me from before the trip would’ve never believed me if I told her this would happen, ever.

  And there was a bigger problem. We’d turned to each other on the island because we had no one else. But if we were off the island? If we were back in the real world? Would Miles really choose me?

  “Don’t look forward to getting away from me too much,” I said and winked at him, hoping it showed the confidence I wanted to feel. Fake it till you make it.

  I’d never been out in the ocean before, never been on a cruise ship or anything like that, so it was an interesting feeling to do it now, especially in a relatively small boat like this, the three of us taking up most of the space. The thought of just how deep the water beneath us was made me a bit queasy. Even though I could swim perfectly fine, I had no idea what kind of sea creatures could be roaming the deep water below us.

  “Hey, Joe, I have a question,” Miles said a while later, moving a little closer toward him.

  “What is it?” Joe asked without taking his eyes off of the horizon.

  “You said you were tracking Fiona via that GPS thing, right?” Joe nodded. “Were we ever in Berlin before the island?”

  We’d theorized that maybe we’d been there and Briola simply erased our memories, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted Joe to say yes, to confirm what we thought. Then again, if he said no, that wouldn’t make any more sense, either, would still leave the entry and hotel key card a mystery we had no inkling how to solve.

  “No,” Joe said. “After the airport there was a break, and then you popped up across the map over on the island in the middle of the ocean. No other locations between that.”

  Even though it was the answer I honestly expected, it still left so many unanswered questions. If we’d never really been in Berlin, where did the key card and the diary entry come from? Did someone else write it, imitating Miles’s handwriting well enough that even he believed it was his? And what was the purpose of it? What did Briola hope to achieve with that? Confuse us? If so, they’d certainly managed to do that just fine.

  As Joe had said, we ran out of fuel shortly after the sun went down. So we switched to paddling, Joe on one side, and me and Miles taking turns on the other. The boat was much slower than cruising with the engine on full speed, but at least we were moving. It was tiring as hell, but after everything I much preferred this to being stuck on the island.

  Joe’s giant flashlight held up pretty well as our only means to see what was ahead of us, though there really wasn’t much to see besides an endless stretch of water and more water. Thankfully Joe had his satellite phone and its navigation feature to guide us. Without it, I had no idea how we would’ve blindly managed to get anywhere besides lost.

  But then, suddenly, there was something to see, a light quite a distance ahead of us, barely moving. At first I was convinced it was merely a star or the moonlight reflecting off of the waves, but the light was steady and soon joined by a second one.

  “Is that a ship up ahead?” I asked Joe and Miles, hoping I wasn’t seeing things that weren’t actually there.

  “Possibly,” Joe said. “This is much closer than the coordinates my contact gave me.”

  If movies have taught me anything, either that ship would shoot us on sight, kidnap one of us, or actually be what Joe said it might. We’d come this far, so getting shot now would be way too ironic.

  To our surprise, the two lights moved toward us after a while, like they noticed us coming in their direction and decided to make the process a bit quicker. The ship was much larger than our little boat. It looked like a fishing boat, though a relatively new one, similar to the ones I’d seen in some documentary Melany’s dad claimed we needed to watch.

  Someone on board turned on a bigger spotlight and directed it right at us. I raised my arm and tried to shield my eyes from the blindingly bright light. After our journey through the relative darkness, that spotlight almost felt like looking directly into the sun.

  “Carver?” someone from the ship called out, a deep male voice. It took me a moment to realize that it wasn’t some foreign word I didn’t know but simply Joe’s last name. Were these his people after all?

  “Lido?” Joe called back with a smile on his face while Miles and I exchanged a look.

  “It’s them,” the voice called out to someone we couldn’t see, his voice sounding friendly and almost a tiny bit cheerful. A moment later the spotlight was turned off while an array of much less aggressive lights was turned on aboard. Two people, a man and a woman, stood next to each other and waved us toward something a few feet away from them, a metal ladder, as it turned out.

  What devil rode me to go first was beyond me, but if this really was Joe’s people, which it very much seemed like it was, there was no reason for me to be afraid.

  The metal was cool against my hands, my arms and legs tired and barely able to heave me up, but I slowly climbed higher and higher. The man—Lido?—lent me a hand as I climbed over the railing. He was a big guy, definitely taller than Miles, with bulky muscles, a shaved head and dark eyes, his clothes all black, a button-up shirt with the sleeves
rolled up to his elbows and slacks. He seemed at least a decade or more older than us.

  The woman, on the other hand, had barely shoulder-length hair of a plain, dull shade of blond, silver-framed glasses rested on her nose, and her eyes were a deep shade of blue and her lips thin. A few wrinkles in the form of laugh lines marked her face, but she looked rather young, despite the fact that she was probably around the same age as Joe. Her clothes mirrored Lido’s, though hers were light gray and black instead of only black. All in all, she seemed small—her frame petite, though with a touch of chubbiness—was forgettable and plain, not quite what I imaged an FBI agent to look like.

  “Thanks,” I said, looking up at Lido. I didn’t really want to take my eyes off of them, but I still turned around and watched Miles climb up.

  Just like he’d done with me, Lido helped Miles come on board while the woman instructed Joe how to securely attach our boat to the ship. I didn’t listen much, though I did look down toward Joe every once in a while to make sure he was still there.

  “It’s going to be okay,” I said to Miles, quietly, stepping a little closer to him. He looked tense, nervous maybe, and I wasn’t surprised. I was nervous, too. I didn’t know what to think or what to expect. The thought that this was possibly the end of our struggle, our rescue party, was almost too good to be true.

  “Come on in then, no need to stand outside,” Lido said and waved us toward the door leading inside. Quietly, though exchanging a few brief words with Joe that I couldn’t hear, they led us into something that looked like a living room with two sofas and a table surrounded by chairs standing on the other end of the room. There was a small TV secured to the wall opposite the sofas and a simple lamp hung from the ceiling. It’d been so long since I’d last seen a sofa.

  “So, you are Fiona Wolf and Miles Echo?” Lido asked once we sat down on the sofas.

  “Yes,” I said, unsure what to expect.

  Lido and the woman reached into the pockets of their slacks, and I instinctively flinched. Whatever I expected them to pull out, it wasn’t what I assumed were their FBI badges. That hadn’t occurred to me, not even for a second. No matter how much I wanted to relax, to welcome the idea of everything being finally truly okay, our experience with Ji still made me wary.