Echoes of Us (2 page)

Devon and Ryan were early wakers, but four a.m. was a bit extreme to just get up on a whim.

“Here—” Henri reached into his pocket and took out his satellite phone. He handed it to Devon. “You remember how to use it, right?”

Devon was already turning the phone around in his hands, checking the nearly palm-size screen, the miniature keyboard, the port where it could connect to a computer. He nodded as he fiddled with the antennae, then looked back up at Henri. “You won’t need it?”

Henri shrugged. “It shouldn’t take me more than a few days to get home. I’ve let my people know to expect no calls until I arrive. Besides, I need a way to stay in contact with all of you.” He smiled a little. “Be careful, though. These things aren’t impossible to track, if the government starts getting suspicious. Limit call times. And don’t let Ryan take it apart. He might not be able to put it back together.”

Devon—
Devon
—almost grinned. “I could put it back together.”

I laughed silently in the corner of my mind and wondered what Ryan had said to that.

The back door opened, revealing Emalia and Peter. Emalia didn’t seem surprised to see Addie and me up, though Peter raised his eyebrows.

“Are we ready to go?” Emalia said, pulling her jacket tighter around her. She and her twin soul, Sophie, had volunteered to drive Henri to his contact in the next state, arguing that they were the best choice since the news broadcasts lacked their face. Only Kitty and Nina had likewise escaped exposure.

Jaime’s information, of course, had been circulating in the media for months. Out of all of us, he was the one Jenson most desperately sought—the one child to survive the operation when Nornand’s doctors stripped away his second soul.

But Jenson had also seen Ryan and Dr. Lyanne at Powatt, when they came to rescue Addie and me after we’d tried to stop the explosion. He must have intuited that Hally would be with her brother, and the police raids would have found enough incriminating information about Henri and Peter to label them as suspects.

It pained me to have them all share blame for the bombing.

“Be careful on the road,” Peter said. He and Dr. Lyanne would stay here at the safe house with us in case anything went wrong. That was the phrase hanging over every second of our lives now:
in case anything goes wrong.

Henri looked at us and Devon one last time, like he wanted to memorize our faces.

“Stay safe,” he said, finally, and joined Emalia at the door.

They left, leaving the rest of us watching after them.

“I can’t believe you didn’t wake me up,” Hally said hours later. She sat next to Addie and me on the indoor balcony, overlooking the living room and the foyer. Our legs swung over the edge.

Ryan, on our other side, reached through the balcony rungs to steal half of Hally’s peanut butter sandwich. She snatched her hand away a second too late and settled for looking aggrieved.

“It was four in the morning.” Ryan offered me a bite of the sandwich. Peanut butter oozed onto his finger, and he put it in his mouth, muffling his next words. “You don’t like to get up before ten.”

“I would have gotten up if the rest of you were up,” she complained.

I could hardly believe that once, Addie and I had passed Devon or Ryan in the hall at school and barely noticed. That we’d gone out of our way to avoid Hally, because we feared her foreign looks might bring us more trouble.

Now, they counted among the most important people in my life.

Ryan’s eyebrow quirked up when I stared at him just a little too long, his mouth softening into a smile.
What?
it said, and I shook our head with a smile of my own.

We’d gotten good at communicating through glances—through a touch, and the slant of the mouth. Small gestures were all we had. The safe houses were rarely large. Even if both of us weren’t sharing bodies, we’d have trouble finding time and space to be alone together.

Sometimes, Addie would offer to temporarily disappear. But guilt usually made me turn her down. Addie’s thoughts were filled with a boy, too. One who wasn’t even there to steal kisses with her at the end of darkened hallways, laughing and ignoring the knowing way Emalia looked at us when she passed.

Hally finished off her sandwich and stood, brushing crumbs from her blouse. “Well, if—”

The doorbell rang.

Hally’s mouth snapped shut. Addie whispered

No one rang the doorbell. This house was a little less remote than the first two we’d lived in, but it was still almost an hour from the nearest major town. People didn’t just stumble onto our doorstep.

Dr. Lyanne emerged from her downstairs room, her hair damp and braided after her shower. There was something naked about her expression as she looked up and motioned for us to be quiet.

Peter joined his sister in the foyer. The windows were all curtained. Our remaining van was in the driveway, so we couldn’t pretend the house was abandoned, but we could pretend there was nobody home.

For a long moment, no one spoke. No one made to open the door.

The doorbell rang again.

Then the knocking started. Sharp raps against the door.

A woman’s voice rang out.

“Excuse me,” she said. “My name is Marion Prytt, and I would like to speak with Addie Tamsyn.”

D
r. Lyanne gestured for us to clear out, and we retreated to our bedroom with the others, our heart thudding. I sank onto a bed, hands fisting around the worn patchwork quilt.

Hally was the last one in. “Who do you think it is?” she whispered as she shut the door. Ryan stood beside us, his body tense with confused worry.

Of course, no one had any idea. With our pictures circulating, anybody might know about us now.
Keep calm,
I told myself fiercely. I focused on our breathing.
Don’t freak out.

Addie and I were no strangers to panic attacks—hadn’t been since we were seven years old and learned the fear of small spaces. But in the weeks since Powatt, other things had begun to set us off—sudden noises; flashes of heat.

Sometimes, just the thought of the darkness, pain, and fear of oblivion under a fallen chunk of wall, our remains eaten through by flames.

I said to Addie

Hally set her hands on the windowsill.

“She’s got a nice car.” She squinted, brushing her black curls away from her face. “Can’t see the license plate—
oh
, there’s a girl in the backseat—”

Ryan hurried to the window with us. As we watched, the girl opened the car door and climbed out. She looked maybe twelve, a little older than Kitty and Nina. Her overcoat flapped in the wind as she hurried toward the house, her shoulders hunched against the cold.

I said with slightly more conviction

“Do you think they’re hybrid?” Hally said. Before everything had gone to pieces at Anchoit, people had often come to Peter for help. They’d hear about him from a friend of a friend—whispers of a man at the head of a network of hybrids and hybrid sympathizers who might be able to steal a child away to safety, or even break him out of an institution. Who was proof that there was hope out there, somewhere.

The girl outside the window looked straight up at us.

There was something familiar about her face.

She, certainly, recognized ours. Her eyes went big, and her mouth dropped open. The wind had whipped a blush to her cheeks.

I whispered to Addie.

Ryan twined his fingers through ours. “What is it?”

“I’ve seen her before, I think.” Automatically, I squeezed his hand. “I—I can’t remember where.”

Peter walked into view, beckoning the girl toward him. Then his gaze followed hers, focusing on us before turning back to the child. She kept trying to steal glances upward, but he ushered her inside.

I flipped frantically through my memory.

Addie said. I hadn’t bothered to think that far back. Our memory of this girl’s face was more recent.

“From Anchoit?” Ryan asked, but he sounded doubtful, and I shook our head. The memory hovered at the edge of my mind—

“She wasn’t at Nornand.” There was a certainty in Hally’s voice, and no one argued with it. I remembered the face of every patient we’d known at Nornand, even if the finer details had blurred after so many months. This girl hadn’t worn a blue uniform with us.

A quiet knock sounded on the bedroom door.

“It’s me,” Peter said, and only waited a second before coming inside.

He looked much as he always looked now. Like he was trying to hold the world together in his fists. Sometimes I wished I could still see him the way I had the night he’d rescued us from Nornand. When he and Jackson had materialized in the darkness of the clinic hallway like heroes in a fairy tale, guiding us toward moonlight and freedom.

I knew him better now. He was only one man—who wanted so much, but could only do so much.

“Eva,” Peter said. “Can I speak with you?”

Ryan was reluctant to release our hand. I gave him a reassuring look as I followed Peter. We only went across the hall, to the room he shared with Emalia. Like much of the house, it bore the smell of sawdust and wood varnish.

“I’ve seen that girl before,” I said as soon as Peter shut the door. “I can’t remember where, but—”

“Her name is Wendy Howard,” Peter said, and I frowned. The name rang no bells in our memory. “I don’t think you’ve met her before.”

“I have,” I insisted. “I recognize her face—”

Peter reached into his pocket and drew out a folded sheet of paper. He smoothed it open on his desk. “You’re sure you’re not just remembering this?”

I stiffened. Addie’s reaction was more visceral, but she wasn’t the one in control, and it didn’t show. But I felt it—icy knife-edge sharp—against me.

The paper was a flyer. That’s what we’d called them when we were making them. When we cast them over the edge of the buildings around Lankster Square.

Peter was right. We’d never met Wendy Howard. Just drawn a likeness that was so similar it sent a chill dancing down our spine.

“Wendy brought it with her,” Peter said. “It’s yours, isn’t it?”

I nodded. I was still staring at the flyer, at the drawing of the girl our hands had painstakingly sketched.

“We made them for . . . for Lankster Square,” I said quietly. We’d already told Peter and the others about it. How Sabine had recruited us to help her create a distraction during the rally so she and Devon could sneak into Metro Council Hall and uncover the government’s plans for the Powatt institution. “All the flyers had hybrid kids on them . . .”

I ran our fingers over the words printed across the face of Anna H., 15.

HOW MANY CHILDREN HAVE DIED FOR THIS CURE?

It was strange to remember how hopeful we’d been then. How desperately relieved and happy I’d been to be a part of something. To be a force of change.

I whispered. Addie hadn’t had anything to go on but Cordelia’s description. Anna and Cordelia had been in an institution together.

Addie shuddered.

Anna H. was dead.

We’d only chosen dead children for our flyers.

Peter folded the flyer back up. Maybe he’d caught the way I was staring at it—knew that as long as it was splayed out on the desk, I could think of nothing but the hours Addie and I had spent in that attic above Sabine and Cordelia’s photography shop. The day we’d snuck from Emalia’s apartment and took, with such a dizzying sense of responsibility, a sheaf of these flyers and a homemade firework to a rooftop overlooking the Square.

How had one of those flyers made it into Wendy Howard’s hands? Had she been there that morning? Or had the flyer passed from hand to hand, until it reached hers?

“Wendy claims she’s Anna’s sister,” Peter said.

“Hybrid?”

He shook his head. I struggled to shed the memories of Lankster Square. The thunder of the fireworks when they went off. The terrified roar of the crowd. There wasn’t time for sad stories. Not even in my own mind. “The woman with her? Marion?”

“A reporter,” Peter said. “She says she wants to do a
human-interest
story about Anna and Wendy. About hybrids in general. She wants to help our cause.”

A
human-interest story
. The words lost meaning in my mind, shattering into fragments that didn’t collect into a comprehensible whole. Human interest. Did that mean she thought our story would be interesting? Or did she mean it was a story about the human interest? Our interests? Our need for the gifts of freedom and safety that for so many others were not just
interests
but rights?

Addie said. If the last few months had proved anything, it was that so few people could be trusted.

“Why did she come to us?” I asked.

“Because she knows the risks she’s taking.” Peter stared at the musty shelves lining the bedroom walls. His palms were flat against the desk, his muscles tensed. “If she’s discovered, the government’s going to be after her. She’s going to need people to hide her, and protect her.”

“You think she really wants to help us?”

He hesitated. “Perhaps. Or she just wants to help herself. If things . . . if things end well for us, she’ll have the story of a lifetime.”

“Can we trust them? I mean, Wendy . . . Wendy might really be Anna’s sister, but . . .”

“But that doesn’t mean much,” Peter said. “Just because Wendy’s sister was hybrid doesn’t mean she’s beyond using that fact to help persecute other hybrids.”

He said it so blandly, so simply. Wendy Howard barely looked old enough to be a teenager, but perhaps that just meant she could be easier to manipulate.