Magic Cries

by Miriam Greystone

  Table of Contents

  Molly

  Jake

  Bea

  Evie

  Epilogue: Molly

  Untitled

  Acknowledgments

  Magic Cries

  Echoes Book 2

  Miriam Greystone

  Copyright © 2018 by Miriam Greystone

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  1. Molly

  2. Jake

  3. Bea

  4. Jake

  5. Evie

  6. Molly

  7. Molly

  8. Bea

  9. Evie

  10. Molly

  11. Evie

  12. Evie

  13. Jake

  14. Molly

  15. Evie

  16. Molly

  17. Bea

  18. Jake

  19. Molly

  20. Jake

  21. Bea

  22. Molly

  23. Bea

  24. Molly

  25. Evie

  26. Bea

  27. Molly

  Epilogue: Molly

  Untitled

  Acknowledgments

  For Yocheved

  “Friendship . . . is born at the moment when one man says to another ‘What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .’”

  - C.S. Lewis

  “the moon understands dark places.

  the moon has secrets of her own.

  she holds what light she can.”

  - Lucille Clifton

  Moonchild

  Molly

  The metro hurtled by, sleek, silver, and deadly. Molly pressed her cheek against the tunnel wall, her fingernails scraping against the grime-caked stone, and held her breath as the train thundered past. Air pressure slammed against her, the train so close that she could have touched it with the tips of her fingers. Somehow, the idea of closing her eyes made it worse, so she watched as the lights and metal screamed by, her hair whipping in her face, the blood pounding in her ears.

  “When I said that I would help you,” she yelled hoarsely in Matt and Thia’s direction, “I had no idea that this kind of near-death experience would be involved!”

  “You’re perfectly safe!” Matt hollered back, though the fact that he had his eyes squeezed shut and his face pressed tightly against the filthy concrete made his words less than reassuring. “These ledges are built so that metro workers can take shelter if they’re accidentally in the wrong place and a train comes by! You’ll be fine!”

  “If Lena is an Echo,” Molly yelled back over the train’s chaotic din, “why would she live in a place that you can only access by going through here?”

  “Because she fucking hates us!” Matt shouted, smiling broadly with his eyes still closed.

  The last car clattered thunderously as it passed, and then the train was gone.

  For a second, no one moved. Molly pushed away from the wall, wishing her legs didn’t feel so damn shaky. Bits of grit and dirt clung to the side of her face and her palms. She looked down at her watch glowing dimly in the darkness. They only had about six minutes before the next train came.

  Matt came to stand beside her, looking a bit wobbly himself. The entire back of his shirt and pants were black with soot and filth.

  Thia, who had been a few feet further down the tunnel, uncurled from the crevice where she had wedged herself.

  “Lena likes solitude,” she told Molly, as she tried to brush a little of the soot from her shirt. Mostly her efforts just distributed the grime more evenly. Some of her long blonde hair had escaped from its ponytail, and she pushed it hurriedly back behind her ears. “She and the old guy she calls her teacher live in the most remote parts of the tunnel system. It’s their not-so-subtle way of telling us they don’t like visitors.”

  “One has to wonder what exactly that guy is ‘teaching’ her,” Matt muttered as he began to pick his way over the track.

  Thia laughed as she followed him, though it sounded a little forced. “Knock it off, Matt, you know that’s ridiculous. People say that he’s the oldest living Echo. He’s way too old for her.”

  “People say a lot of things,” Matt grunted, as he checked the battered map he clutched in his hand. “It doesn’t make them true. Come on,” he encouraged them, his voice unbearably chipper, “if the map is right, then we’ve got just enough time to make it through the opening before the next train comes by.”

  That was enough to motivate all three of them, and they ran as fast as the semi-darkness and uneven ground under their feet would allow. Molly asked herself for the one-thousandth time why she had agreed to come along on this . . . what was it, anyway? A mission? An excursion? A passive-aggressive death wish expressed by snuggling up with one hundred-ton trains traveling at fifty miles per hour?

  “Remind me why am I doing this?” she said, asking the question out loud when she found that she really couldn’t answer it herself. “Because I’m questioning all of my life choices right now.”

  “You’re here because we need you,” Matt grinned, glancing over his shoulder toward her as he ran. “Lena probably won’t talk to me or Thia, and she definitely wouldn’t talk to Andrew. But you’re a fresh face. A new person who she won’t spit at on sight. Which makes your presence super helpful.”

  “Here it is,” Thia interrupted them, stopping in the center of the track and kneeling down next to what looked like a round sewer cover emblazoned with the metro logo. Immediately businesslike, Matt pulled out the crowbar that he had strapped to his back and bent down to help her pry the cover off.

  Molly stood behind them, shifting her weight from one foot to the other and glancing over her shoulder every other second. She hated the idea of hugging the tunnel wall as another train rushed past. But being caught standing squarely in the center of the tunnel when the train arrived would definitely be worse. “Maybe we should wait till after the next train goes by?” she suggested reluctantly after rechecking her watch.

  “Too late,” Matt grunted without looking back at her. He had managed to pry the round, iron cover part way off. His shoulders strained with effort. “Can’t have the cover half off when the train passes. Might cause it to derail. At this point, we’re all-in.”

  “Shit,” Molly responded, her heart rate picking up even more. “How can I help?”

  “Lift . . . here . . .” Thia groaned, and Molly hurried to join them, wrapping her fingers around the cover’s rough edges, and pulling as hard as she could. Together, the three of them slid the heavy cover to the side, revealing the opening beneath it. Molly peered down and saw nothing but blackness.

  “We’re sure this is the right place?” Molly breathed, trying not to imagine what would happen if she jumped into the pitch-black shaft and it wasn’t the entryway Andrew had promised. How accurate could his maps even be? He’d been evasive when she asked where he had gotten them. And what else might be down there in the dark that Andrew didn’t know about?

  “No time for second guessing now!” Matt announced, the cheerfulness in his voice so forced that it grated on Molly’s ears. “The next train is coming. Everybody in!” Molly could feel the vibrations in the ground mounting as the train got closer. She hesitated, looking down into the hole, trying to see something . . . anything . . . through the blackness. But the gloom was too thick, and there were no other options.

  She paused just long enough to glare at Matt, “If I die doing this I will absolutely kill you,” she hissed at him. Then, one foo
t after the other, she lowered herself into the darkness, and let herself fall.

  She rolled as soon as she hit the bottom, feeling the air rush out of her on impact. She heard Matt and Thia drop just seconds later, softly cursing as they landed. Weak, mottled, yellow light streamed through the opening above them, and Molly stumbled back toward it on unsteady feet to help Matt and Thia tug the iron cover back into place.

  No one spoke as they worked, all three of them straining furiously as the noise of the train’s approach got closer and closer. Molly’s arms burned, her breath coming in quick, desperate gasps. It wasn’t so much that the cover was too heavy to move, but it was hard to get a good enough hold on it to be able to pull it back into place. Molly had to stand on her tiptoes just to reach it. Finally, the iron disk gave in, settling into its place with a harsh grating sound.

  The train roared above their heads. They stood, breathing heavily, silent and blind in the darkness, and listened to it pass.

  Unlike the metro tunnel, there were no emergency lights here to break up the blackness. When the train above them had passed, Thia pulled a flashlight from her pocket and switched it on.

  “Holy shit,” she gasped, rotating so the light panned across the tunnel walls. “Looks like we found the right place.”

  Molly had seen some of Lena’s paintings before. On the night that they had fled from Steele’s invasion of the Refuge, they had passed some artwork, plastered on the deserted tunnel walls. But still, she wasn’t prepared for what she was looking at now.

  The images were painted right onto the wall in colors so bright that Molly was surprised they hadn’t shined through the darkness. Lena’s other paintings had been haunting, but these were more intimate. Raw, somehow. As though Lena had never intended any eyes but her own to see them. As though the paintings were the diary of a deeply disturbed mind, left with the pages open, staring at them from every inch of those walls.

  A hundred faces, contorted with pain and sorrow, mouths screaming with no sound, stared out at them. Their gazes seemed to ask Molly a hundred questions she could never hope to answer. Grasping hands, bloody fingers, painted with so much detail and raw talent that they seemed ready to break through the cement and catch hold of Molly’s arm as she passed. Even the tunnel’s ceiling was covered with the images of at least a dozen moons, painted wide and white and somehow mournful. At the very center of the wall was a painting of a man, standing with his face upturned toward those moons, a knife clasped in his fist, his hands and arms soaked and dripping with blood. He reached toward the sky in heartbroken supplication.

  They stared, speechless. For once, even Matt didn’t have anything funny to say. Then, still silent, they began to walk slowly down the tunnel. There were more images, crowded together, sometimes one on top of the other, covering every inch of the tunnel wall from ceiling to floor. Lena had painted hundreds of eyes, all wide and staring, that seemed to watch them as they passed. Images of children, drawn with round, wailing mouths, their hands lifted as though to press against the wall, as if they were somehow trapped on the other side. Near the ceiling, huge black birds with curved beaks and featherless heads were circling, locked in an endless search for carrion.

  “You said that Andrew found Lena in a psych ward?” Molly asked in a whisper.

  “That’s right,” Thia nodded. “He used his voice to convince the doctors to let him walk her right out. He brought her back to the Refuge with him, but she disappeared into the tunnels after just a few days.”

  “It’s strange,” Matt added in an undertone. “Why does she hate him so much if he’s the one who got her out of there?”

  The beam of Thia’s flashlight reached a new patch of tunnel wall, and Molly’s feet froze.

  “Might make sense, actually,” Molly whispered hoarsely, “if the hospital was where she needed to be.”

  Images of countless bodies lying motionless on a beach, moonlight streaming down on them as a light rain fell. Hundreds of feathers floated in the air. The sand ran red with blood.

  For a long moment, none of them spoke.

  “We’d better keep moving,” Molly said at last, and Matt and Thia both shook themselves and nodded in agreement. They moved carefully in the darkness. The tunnel sloped downward, and it was hard not to slip. Molly’s eyes kept drawing back to the walls. The murals changed as they moved further down the passage, each image more troubling and haunting than the last. After a few minutes of walking, she saw most of the paintings they were passing now were obscured by thick black letters. “THIS ISN’T RIGHT,” Lena had written over and over again, until the pictures were almost obliterated by her angry scrawl, with only a flash of color or a single, staring eye visible at the margins of the words. In another place, she had written the word “NO” at least a hundred times with a dark red substance that Molly sincerely hoped was paint.

  “How much farther is it?” Molly asked, not realizing until she spoke that her voice had dropped to a whisper.

  Matt’s response seemed unnaturally loud, his voice jarring in the gloom. “There’s no way to really know,” he told her, glancing down at the crumpled map in his hand. “No one’s seen her for at least six months. We used to catch glimpses of her pretty regularly in the tunnels, and sometimes she would just show up in the Refuge. She’d come and sit in the Tavern—not eating, but just watching the people. It creeped a lot of people out, honestly. But then she stopped coming. People thought that maybe her ‘training’ got too intensive.” Matt raised his eyebrows suggestively, but Molly could tell that his heart wasn’t in the joke. He was just trying to break up the weight of the darkness that seemed to grow heavier on their shoulders with every step.

  “It just got too hard for me,” a low voice answered. Molly spun to face the sound.

  Lena held a small jar in her hand that glowed and bathed her face in green and yellow light. Slight and so short that her head wouldn’t have come up even to Molly’s shoulder, she stood just off to the right of them, in front of a curved, metal doorway they had walked right past but hadn’t even seen. Her lips curved upward into a smile so tentative it looked like it pained her. Her skin was pale and seemed to almost glow in the darkness. She wore her black, thickly curled hair parted in the middle; it hung down past her shoulders, some of it braided in the front to keep it out of her eyes. The loose-fitting sweatshirt she wore seemed to practically swallow her up, and where the sleeves were pushed up from her wrists, Molly could see that both of her arms were covered in a complicated tangle of black tattoos. Her fingers were stained with every color of paint, it was sunk deep into her skin and caked under her fingernails. Her stature was so slight that Molly might have guessed her to be no more than fifteen or sixteen years old if it hadn’t been for her eyes.

  Her eyes looked older.

  The girl stepped closer, dirty bare feet visible beneath her tattered jeans.

  “I wanted to come,” she told them, as though they were in the middle of a long conversation, “and Malcolm said that it was better for me to be with people. At least sometimes. But it hurt too much. People smiled at me. But all I could see was corpses with dead eyes staring.”

  For a second they all just stared. Matt’s mouth hung open a little, and Molly could see him struggling to figure out how on earth to respond to that.

  “We understand,” he stammered at last, though Molly could see clearly he didn’t. She saw Lena’s eyes narrow a little, as though she had also heard the lie that bordered on condescension in his voice. “We don’t mean to bother you. We just have a few questions to ask you, and then we’ll go away and leave you to your important work.” Matt didn’t really think her painting was important, and he sounded like he was talking to a child.

  Lena took a small step back.

  “What questions do you have?” she asked, her eyes turning to Thia. “I remember you,” she tilted her head a little. “You’re the one who swam in the darkness until it washed the worst parts of her memories away. Have they resurfaced yet?” Lena
asked. “Or can you still not remember?”

  Thia’s eyes were as round as saucers. She tried to respond, but at first, no sound came out. She swallowed hard and tried again. “I . . . I still don’t remember most of it,” she admitted, her tone one of mild surprise. “But I think it’s for the best, really. Those memories weren’t doing anything but ripping me apart inside. And it’s all over anyway. What good would thinking about it do?”

  Lena frowned and looked down thoughtfully at the glowing jar she grasped in her hands. “Unseen is not the same as gone. Sometimes threats are greatest when they swim beneath the surface of our sight. When we feel pain, we know we are sick, and we need treatment. But if we silence the pain, while the sickness still grows, how can we know what ails us? And how can we ever hope to heal?”

  Thia had gone white while Lena spoke. Molly was used to Thia’s easy smile, the teasing light in her eyes, the laughter that always seemed so eager to bubble to her lips. There was no laughter in her now.

  “I don’t want to remember,” Thia said at last, her voice a whisper that Molly had to strain to hear. “I couldn’t bear it. I’m not ready.”

  Lena nodded deeply. “When the time is right then,” she agreed and turned her eyes toward Molly.

  “I don’t know you,” she commented, and stepped closer to Molly, staring at her intently. Lena’s laser-sharp gaze ran over her. She studied the brown and red streaked thick hair hanging down to Molly’s shoulders, and the black short sleeve shirt, stained with soot, that she wore. Her eyes ran over the thick bracelets Molly wore on her wrist and upper arm, the skeleton key tattoo on her shoulder. Molly felt naked, as though Lena could see through her, could see the scars on her arms that her bracelets and tattoos hid, and even deeper, to the scars inside of her that she had never willingly shown to any living soul.