She caught his sleeve. “No, you were right to help him. Scatter hurt him as much as they hurt us. I just wish that helping Garrick didn’t mean screwing us over.”
“We’ll get those codes.”
“And then what?”
“And then we go back, pretend like nothing happened. Let Scatter pay us. Then we run. With those codes we’ll be free from them. I can go back to my mom and you…”
Bryn squinted into the sunlight. “And I don’t have anyone to go back to.”
“Your boyfriend.”
“Don’t you remember what I told you?”
The pain in her voice sparked some memory. “About your boyfriend?” Rett looked away. “How you wouldn’t give him any of those things you stole.”
“I…” She made a quiet sound low in her throat. “I was scared to. I thought he might take everything and disappear.”
“Maybe he would have.”
Bryn didn’t seem to hear him. “I’ve been telling myself that I’ll find him, and that he’ll be happy to see me. But the money won’t be enough, will it? He probably feels the same way I do: it’s better to be on your own.”
“Is that really what you think? That you’d rather be on your own?” Rett reached to touch her arm, but she leaned away.
Bryn dropped her face into her hands. “I keep getting this feeling,” she said, voice muffled. “A premonition. That something is going to happen to one of us, and the other won’t be able to get back.”
Rett started to speak, but Bryn cut him off.
“The mechanisms in our heads are synced.” Bryn lifted her face, her eyes dark with worry. “If one of us dies, the other might be trapped here.”
“We don’t know that.” Rett’s mouth went dry. “And neither of us is going to—”
“We have to get that device turned on. Before something happens that gets us stuck here for good. I might not have anyone to go back to, but your mother’s waiting for you.”
Rett sank away from the bunk. The photo he’d left on the bed caught his eye and his throat went tight.
“Rett?” Bryn slid to the edge of the upper bunk and leaned over him. “She is waiting for you, isn’t she?”
Rett flicked his head to the side, brushing off her question. The air in the close space was stifling. Rett imagined he could still smell the putrid debris downstairs, even with the panel closed over the ladder. “She doesn’t know I’m trying to meet up with her,” he admitted. “She told me I shouldn’t come for her, that I should take care of myself and not think of her.”
He’d sent her those emails—he’d written terrible things: I’m better off without you anyway. Because he’d been angry that she wouldn’t come for him. But after that, he’d told her he was sorry. He’d said he would come for her, no matter how many times she told him not to. He’d said it over and over.
But she’d stopped responding.
Rett moved his hand over his chest, tried to will his heart to calm. His bitterness was like a crazy food for it. The smell of the abandoned eggs below was like the smell of rotting corpses. Rett put a hand over his nose. You’re imagining it, he told himself.
“Rett!” Bryn’s sharp voice pulled Rett out of his thoughts. “Garrick’s out there!”
Rett pulled himself up onto the bunk with shaking arms to look through the broken roof.
“He’s near those boulders,” Bryn said, pointing. “He’s got the device.”
Rett’s heart jumped. He’s here—Bryn’s plan worked.
“He’s stashing it behind some rocks,” Bryn went on. “He’s heading for the depot now.”
“He’s not stupid. He knows we’ll try to take it from him if he brings it in here.”
Bryn lowered the binoculars. “I’m going to go out and get it.” She jumped down from the bunk, and the thump of her boots hitting the floor sent another jolt to Rett’s fluttering heart.
“Bryn…”
Bryn ignored him and kneeled to pull open the trapdoor. “He doesn’t know we’ve seen him hiding it. I’ll go around that ridge while he’s heading here. Just keep him distracted until I can turn on the device and memorize our codes. Then I’ll say the passphrase that will take us out of here.”
“Bryn.”
She paused. “You have a better plan?”
The open trapdoor gave Rett a keyhole glimpse of the chaos below: littered bones and splintered wood. All he could think was, What if we don’t both make it out of here?
I don’t want to go back alone.
Bryn interpreted his silence her own way. She dropped down through the opening and vanished from sight.
Rett grabbed the box with the flare and followed Bryn down. He’d get the gun from Garrick. Then he’d go after Bryn and make sure nothing hurt her.
The sound of Bryn’s boots crunching over bones gave way to scrape of the depot’s door as she headed out into the wasteland. Rett flew to the other end of the depot, where the wall was wrenched upward. Garrick was a dark figure in the distance. If he turned as Bryn ran out to the ridge, he’d see her.
“Garrick!” Rett screamed.
It worked. Garrick turned all his attention to Rett standing under the wretched awning of misshapen metal. He quickened his pace.
Rett drew back into the ruined depot, searching for something to put between himself and the man with the gun. The tilted floor gave him the feeling he was staggering through a demented funhouse.
“No tricks,” Garrick barked as he came close to the opened back of the depot. “I just came for water.”
“There isn’t any.” Rett eased out from behind the rotting orbs, holding the case with the flare out before him. “But I’ve got another flare.”
Garrick stood in the office doorway, gun held out like a talisman more than a threat. His troubled gaze moved over the towering eggs, the debris covering the floor, the smashed furniture. “You can give that flare to me. It’s no use to you without the gun.”
Rett stood close to the cluster of eggs, even as he doubted they’d provide much protection against a flare. “It’d be dangerous to try to get out of this wasteland with only one flare in your gun.”
The gun dipped uncertainly.
“Or maybe you already used a flare,” Rett said. “I bet you ran into a bug at the dig site.”
Garrick didn’t answer, only lowered the gun to his side.
“So that gun’s useless to you now.” Rett stepped away from the eggs, the case holding the last flare still clutched in front of him like a shield. “Might as well give it to me.”
Garrick gave a short laugh. “Why would I do that?”
“Because by now Bryn is at the rocks where you hid the device.” Or anyway, she’s close to there.
Garrick jerked toward the open back of the depot.
“If you want the device back, you better give me the gun,” Rett said. “And you better do it before any bugs get close, or we’re all screwed.”
Garrick swiveled and lunged for Rett. For a moment, Rett was a scrawny kid bracing for a blow he knew he couldn’t fend off.
And then he felt the power in his flexing muscles as he swung his fist. His knuckles glanced off Garrick’s jaw, sending Garrick reeling out of surprise as much as pain. Garrick steadied himself against the wall, hand to his jaw, testing for injury. The crooked joints of his fingers sent a stab of guilt to Rett’s gut.
The distraction was all Garrick needed. He lunged again. Rett stumbled toward the broken cabinets and snatched up a jagged piece of wood for a weapon.
Too late. Garrick had the case, snatched from Rett’s hand.
He opened it and took out the flare. Loaded it into the flare gun while he frowned at the wooden stake Rett held out like a weapon. “I need that device,” Garrick said.
“You can have it when Bryn’s finished with it.” Rett tried to judge whether the end of the wooden stake was sharp enough to cause serious injury. “We just need some information from the display. Then you can have it. Take it out of here and sell i
t, or whatever you’re going to do.”
“I’m not going to sell it.” Garrick seemed to forget the stake. “You think that’s why I came out here? I heard rumors Scatter’s precious device was buried somewhere in this wasteland. I came to get it. To make a trade.”
A trade?
“Your sister,” Rett said. “She grew up in Walling, too?”
Garrick glared at him. But then he gave a short nod.
Direct recruitment, Rett thought, remembering what Garrick had told him earlier. “And now she’s an operative.”
“I need that device to exchange for my sister. I have to get Cassie away from Scatter.”
Rett looked at the stake in his hand and suddenly felt sick. The crack of breaking knuckles went through his mind, and he felt even sicker. We all just want to get away from Scatter.
Garrick watched Rett drop the stake. He slid the flare gun into his pocket. “We’ll go out there together. You’ll tell Bryn to give me the device. No one’s going to give anyone trouble.”
“Fine.” But we’re going to get our codes from it first.
He edged around Garrick, making for the open back of the depot. “Might want to get that gun out, though. In case there are any bugs around.” He couldn’t believe he was saying it, considering how relieved he’d felt when Garrick had stopped waving the gun at him. But he was more afraid of bugs than of Garrick at this point.
“Wait.” Garrick’s voice trembled.
Rett turned back to find Garrick’s face shadowed with misery. “I saw something on the device’s display. My sister’s name.”
The phrase rang through Rett’s head again: Direct recruitment. His heart sank. Scatter had put Garrick’s sister through the same program he and Bryn had suffered through.
“What does it mean?” Garrick asked. “Why is her name on the screen of Scatter’s device?”
“It means she’s traveling in time. Just like me and Bryn.”
“She…” His face twitched. Rett couldn’t stand to watch him realize the horror of what Scatter had done to his sister. Garrick must have seen, over the past six years, what Rett and Bryn had gone through. At the very least, he had a full view of the scar running along the side of Rett’s head. “She can’t be…” Garrick’s voice hung in the air for a moment, and then he said, “I have to get her out. I promised her.”
His desperation made Rett think of another girl locked in Scatter’s grip, the new operative he’d met in the rec room at Scatter Labs. Bryn and I aren’t the only ones who need to get free.
“I can’t take care of her, I’m too sick,” Garrick said. “I’m—I’m not going to get better. But she has a mother to go back to. Not my mother—Cassie’s my half-sister. It’s too late for me, but Cassie could still go home.”
Rett wrestled with what Garrick had said—He’s sick? He’s not going to get better? An image flashed through his mind, but he couldn’t hold on to it long enough to understand it.
“Some of the names on the screen disappeared while I was looking at it,” Garrick said. “That’s why I turned off the device. I wasn’t sure if—” His face crumpled.
“It doesn’t mean they’re dead,” Rett said quickly. Not necessarily. He couldn’t help but feel pity for Garrick. “It just means they’ve returned back to their origin time.”
Garrick’s eyes flashed. He turned toward the open back of the depot, face lined in thought. “So if I wait until her name disappears from the screen and then destroy the device, she won’t be traveling. She won’t ever travel again.”
Rett jerked forward and grabbed Garrick’s arm. “You can’t do that. Bryn and I will be trapped here.”
Garrick looked at Rett’s hand on his arm, moved his shadowed gaze up to Rett’s face. “Trapped? Like my sister’s trapped now?”
“We can figure out how to—”
“Scatter’s taken everything from me,” Garrick snarled. “For once, I’m taking something back from them.”
Then he yanked free from Rett’s grasp and hurtled through the ruined back of the depot.
Rett ran after him.
The sloping landscape was an ocean of dirt, the ridges colliding at angles like storm-tossed waves. The glare of sunlight on the pale rocks blinded him as he staggered for the boulders where Bryn was hiding with the device.
She has to have gotten the codes by now, he thought. Say the words that’ll get us out of here, Bryn!
Would she even be able to do it? It seemed to them both that Rett had been the one pulling them through time when they did so. He was the one who could grab on to that starry hollow, those thoughts of home, and of wishing things better.
Could Bryn do it? By now, could she figure out how on her own? If so, she only has to say the words and pull us both out of here.
But as he drew close to hiding spot, he saw why she hadn’t yet finished the job.
Bryn stood atop the largest boulder, staring down at a monstrous bug picking its way up the side of the rock.
“Garrick, shoot it!” Rett cried.
Garrick stood still as a stone just a few meters ahead of Rett, transfixed by the sight of the bug.
“Shoot!” Rett cried again, and this time his voice called Garrick out of his shock.
Garrick aimed the gun—
A second dark mass darted out from behind another boulder and eclipsed Garrick before Rett could call out.
Garrick screamed as giant mandibles locked around him. His shot went high, the blue flare exploding in the air over their heads.
He screamed again.
Rett scrambled away, searching madly for some rock large enough to fight off the bug that was attacking Garrick. But then Garrick was silent, and Rett knew it was too late to help him.
Bryn! Rett picked up a rock—too small, he knew, but there was nothing else. He hurled it at the bug climbing Bryn’s boulder.
But Bryn had done better. He saw that she had pried a piece of the boulder away from its crumbling top, and now she dropped it onto the creature. There was a wet crack, and then the bug lay shuddering in the dirt, a spiky black mass soon veiled by a cloud of dust.
The second bug scuttled away from the reverberations, heavy with the blood it had feasted on, and crept toward the depot in the distance. Garrick lay sprawled in the dirt, dead. Rett scrambled away from the gruesome sight, his stomach lurching, his chest caving under the weight of pity and regret.
“Bryn.”
She stumbled toward him, scraped and bloody from climbing down from the rocks, and he wrapped his arms around her.
“The device is over here,” she said, and broke away to pull him into the shelter of the towering boulders.
Rett knelt near the bulky block of Scatter’s device. The brittle hinges creaked as he opened the lid. The screen underneath was dark, powered off. Rett fumbled for a power button and finally found a slide-away panel covering a switch. “Here goes.” He flipped the switch and the box seemed to hum under his fingers as the screen glowed to life.
Bryn, crouching in the dirt next to him, put a hand over her stomach.
“You okay?” Rett asked her, but he realized that underneath the shock and pain and adrenaline, he also felt a pang of nausea that hadn’t been there a moment ago. “It’s the device—I felt this way last time, when we were digging it up.”
“I did, too. Maybe it’s the signal this thing is giving out?” The list of names and numbers on the screen claimed all of Rett’s attention now. “So many Wards.” He ran his finger over the list. “All kids who went straight from Walling to working on assignments for Scatter.”
A fresh wave of nausea seized Rett. “Because of us,” he realized. “Because I gave Scatter the coordinates that proved I could travel through time. And then they had six years to study my brain and work out how I’d done it.”
Bryn touched his shoulder. “It’s not your fault. You didn’t know what you were doing when you gave them those coordinates.”
Rett scanned the list again. “One of these is Garrick�
��s sister. That’s why he came out here—to try to use this device to bargain with Scatter. Scatter’s using her for an assignment.”
“I think I’m going to be sick,” Bryn said, and her hand on Rett’s shoulder trembled.
Rett put his arm around her waist. “Let’s move away from the device for a minute.”
“We need our codes. We have to memorize them.”
Rett found his and Bryn’s names on the list and read the codes silently, trying to score them into his mind. The nausea made it hard to concentrate. “I wish we had some water.”
Bryn turned and lifted something from the dirt: Garrick’s hydration backpack. “There’s a little in here. Not much.”
Rett reached for the pack—and then stopped with his hand halfway to it.
Garrick had used a chalky rock to draw a map on the pack, complete with the skull and crossbones marking the former location of the device.
“Skull and crossbones,” Rett murmured to himself. “Poison.”
“Rett?”
Rett’s hand shook as he traced the symbol. This is what I thought of back there in Scatter 2 and couldn’t quite grasp. “What if the workers Scatter hired to find the meteorites drew that map in the Scatter 3 depot after all? They drew this symbol because they realized that this certain spot in the wasteland was making them sick. They didn’t know about Scatter’s device; they didn’t know it was sending signals through time. They only knew something was making them sick, and they wanted to warn each other.”
Bryn was silent. She leaned against the side of a boulder as if she needed to steady herself.
Rett turned to her, his head full of lightning-hot ideas. “Garrick said he got sick working out here.”
“But that was from whatever went wrong with government’s experiment. Whatever made this wasteland. Not from the device’s signals.”
The lightning spread through Rett’s veins. “Bryn…” The whole of the surrounding wasteland seemed to press in on him, the weight of crumbling canyons, the stench of poisoned rivers. Is it true…? Is it possible it wasn’t some experiment that caused all of this after all?
Rett finally managed to say the words: “The signals from the device created the wasteland.”
The Echo Room Page 24