Echoes of Us (20 page)

I stifled laughter.

Ryan shot his sister a suspicious look. “What?”

“Nothing, brother dearest,” she said primly. Then winked at me.

T
he hotel where they were staying was in a quieter sector of the city. The buildings here weren’t quite as shining, the streets more meandering than bustling. Dr. Lyanne dropped us off, then went to find parking.

I glanced at Jackson as we walked into the lobby. He was subdued, fading into the background despite his height. Hally filled up the silence, chattering away as we headed for the rooms. They were on the first floor—Dr. Lyanne didn’t want us trapped upstairs if anything went wrong.

Hally looped her arm around mine. “You’ll stay with Ryan and me. Dr. Lyanne and Marion have been taking the other room.”

“Does that leave me with them?” Jackson said it jokingly, but not quite jokingly enough.

“Of course not,” she said, a little too quickly. “You can fit with us, too. There’s an armchair and everything—not that you have to sleep there, I mean. I could. There’re only two beds. We’d have to—”

“I can sleep anywhere,” Jackson said, smile crooked. “It doesn’t matter.”

Ryan stopped us in front of a room before anyone could say anything else. He was just about to unlock it when the door swung open.

And there was Marion, looking just as I remembered with her pale brown hair and stark features. She tried to smile at me and nearly succeeded, the delicate lines of her face almost comical in their uneasy rearrangement. “I heard you all talking. Come in.”

I’d expected to be furious when I came face-to-face with Marion again, but instead, I just felt sick. We filed inside, awkward and quiet. I missed the easy exuberance at the bus station.

“There was food,” Marion said, looking everywhere now but me. Or Jackson, for that matter. “I can’t remember where—”

“It’s in our room,” Ryan said. “I’ll get it.”

“I’ll come with you,” I said quickly, and thankfully, no one else offered to help as well.

We slipped out the door, Ryan leading the way down the hall until we found the second room. He shut the door behind us, and I was just about to joke that Hally and Lissa hadn’t gotten any neater over the months, when he spun to face me.

“I didn’t know she was going to do it, Eva.” He spoke with such urgency I stopped in my tracks. “I had no idea. I wouldn’t have let her—”

“I believe you,” I said.

He fell quiet. The takeout bag was on the dresser, but neither of us reached for it. “Did they hurt you?”

Did they hurt me?

I tried to answer, but couldn’t. It was like a rubber stopper had slammed into my throat.

Yes. Yes, they hurt me. They hurt me in the worst possible way. They stole the most precious thing I had.

Ryan was immediately concerned. “Eva? What is it—what did they do?”

“Do you remember what Emalia told us?” I whispered. We’d sat down on one of the beds. “About how hybrids could only go under for a few hours—half a day at most?”

He nodded, his confusion palpable.

The blankets rumpled in my fists. “Addie’s been gone for more than a week.”

I told him, haltingly, about the medication and the delirium and the loneliness that had greeted me upon waking. I had to force the words out—because the words led to memories, the memories to the aftershocks of pain and confused terror.

Ryan stood. Pushed his hand through his hair and paced to the dresser and back again and then just stared down at me like he didn’t know what else to do.

“God, Eva,” he said hoarsely.

“I didn’t tell them what they’d done,” I whispered. “They don’t know. So they won’t do it again to someone else.”

“She’ll come back—”

“It’s been more than a
week
.” I’d started to shake. “What if she’s just gone? What if I’m alone for the rest of my life—”

He sat down next to me. Cupped my face. “I can’t say for certain that Addie’s going to come back. But I can tell you right now: you’re not going to be alone.”

When he kissed me, I believed it. I wanted to believe it. More than anything.

I closed my eyes. “I love you. You know that?”

At first I was afraid he wouldn’t say it back. I was afraid, and I was afraid, and then he did. He said it with such clarity and such certainty that I didn’t understand how I could ever have feared at all.

By the time Ryan and I rejoined the others, Dr. Lyanne had returned from parking the car. Her eyes lingered on me as the takeout boxes went around. It was the same way she’d studied Addie and me during the days after the explosion at Powatt, as the aftereffects of our injuries slowly made themselves known.

She wasn’t the only one whose gaze I felt too strongly. Jackson looked away when I tried to meet his eyes. “Dr. Lyanne was just telling us about how Henri got them another phone,” he said.

I looked to Ryan. We’d hurried back with the food before someone came to check on us, and now I had a feeling we were both acting suspiciously overcasual. “How did he contact you?”

“With much hassle,” Ryan said wryly. He explained how Henri had panicked when he’d returned overseas and found he could no longer call them through the satphone. It had taken weeks, but eventually, he’d managed to track down their whereabouts through mutual connections and send another phone.

After that, it had been a matter of letting me know the new number. I imagined revealing our overseas connection to Marion had been a hard decision to make, but the woman seemed more thrilled and excited about it than anything else.

“We had to find some way to hide it in a broadcast,” Marion said. “The others assured me you knew Morse code, so we snuck it into a video of Henri. The footage from overseas was a bit of a rush job.” She sounded genuinely regretful about it, like it had been a piece of art that could, with more time, be refined and edited into a more powerful work. “But it did what it was meant to do.”

She turned to me, and her smile faded a little. Her eyes, though, were unnervingly sincere. “It was your recordings from Hahns that helped Henri solicit footage. So in a way, you aided in your own rescue.”

I stared at her in disbelief. “None of that had anything to do with my rescue.”

She didn’t even know the girls who’d made my escape possible. Who’d put themselves in danger for me. The room fell silent. We regarded each other, Marion and I.

“Henri’s footage is already causing an uproar,” Dr. Lyanne said. “And it’s not going to get calmer anytime soon. If Ty’s connected to the group making trouble here in Brindt, he’s going to find himself in jail, if he isn’t careful.”

“We’ll find him before anything happens,” Hally said, but I could read the discomfort on her face. “Kitty, too.”

“It was bound to get complicated.” Marion broke our eye contact. “It’s revolution.”

Back in the attic above the photography shop, Addie and I had dreamed about revolution. It had always seemed like a frightening thing. Like a wave that picked up speed until it went utterly out of control, smashing everything in its way into bits. There was nothing but the fervent prayer that what rose from the rubble would be better than what stood there before.

It wasn’t, always. That much I knew for sure.

After all, once upon a time, the single-souled rebelled against the hybrid, and formed the Americas.

In the wake of Henri’s recent broadcast, the furor over hybrids took a sharp, foreign turn. The news filled with “proof” that Henri’s footage had been faked—everything from the fact that parts of the backdrops were
clearly
two-dimensional, to the idea that the video had actually been taken here, in the Americas. I wasn’t sure how anybody was supposed to believe that, since I’d seen technology in that footage that was far beyond anything I’d glimpsed in our homes or streets. But it was a big country, and most people lived relatively isolated, regional lives. I supposed they could be convinced.

Sometimes, I feared we’d just strengthened antiforeign sentiment. Or fear, anyway, when fear and hatred went so smoothly hand in hand. But we were trying to inject the truth into a country that had buried it for so long. I supposed there was bound to be an uncomfortable reaction, like a fever that had to burn out before recovery.

For now, though, it meant that keeping a low profile was paramount, and any attempt to reach out to Ty had to be done carefully. Another wave of vandalism cropped up. Stores had their windows smashed and their walls covered in graffiti. Now, in addition to railing against the government, the hybrid institutionalization, and the cure, the dripping, spray-painted words talked about Henri’s footage, blaring:

WHY WERE WE KEPT FROM THE TRUTH?

WHAT ELSE DON’T WE KNOW?

Marion figured at least one member of the group was familiar with the area. They’d targeted stores without security cameras. Only they’d made a mistake about one, and it had caught blurry footage of a girl and boy, no more than twenty or twenty-one.

“Not enough to see their faces,” Marion said, “but it’s something. It’s a lead.”

I could feel Ryan’s hostility toward her enthusiasm. He’d explained to me how Marion had hijacked the television channels by feeding the footage to a man she knew who worked at the station. But they couldn’t keep it up forever; loopholes in the system were patched up as quickly as they could find them, and security grew ever tighter.

“She’s obsessed with the idea of getting one last big story,” he said bitterly, and I knew he was thinking of Kitty and Nina.

I wished I could assure him we wouldn’t let Marion take advantage of them. But whatever Marion’s motivations, neither Ryan nor I could argue against the fact that we benefited from her help in finding Ty.

Jackson and Vince were strangely absent from a lot of our meetings. If the others noticed, they didn’t mention it. But finally, one afternoon, I slipped from Marion’s room and went down the hall to ours.

Jackson looked up as I came in. He’d taken to sleeping on the armchair, after all, but he wasn’t sitting there now. Instead, he was on the ground, back against the wall.

I sat down beside him, and he smiled faintly. “Where are the others?”

“In Marion’s room. Deciding what to do next.”

He nodded. “You should join them. They’ll wonder where you are.” I didn’t imagine the meaning in his eyes. “Especially Ryan. Especially since he knows about Addie being gone.”

“It’s complicated,” I said. “He knows that, too.”

“Only logically.” Jackson laughed. “Which barely counts for anything.”

“You should join us, too,” I said.

“Yeah. I will.”

But he didn’t get up, and neither did I.

“Addie told me about the sailing,” I said finally. I wasn’t sure why I said it, except that I didn’t want to leave him alone here. I realized I’d never known Jackson to be alone. Not really. When we’d first met him at Nornand, he’d been the one reaching out to us—extending the hand of Peter’s underground. At Anchoit, he’d spent weeks telling us all about the others, then finally introduced us to Sabine and her group.

Jackson had always been the one inviting us into a circle of friends, and now he had none.

When Jackson replied, I heard in his voice the echoes of how Addie had sounded when she told me about the trip. “I miss the beach. I miss Anchoit. I hadn’t thought I would so much.”

“You miss the way things were,” I said. “I understand that.”

His grin was like a shrug. “I’m the one who keeps talking about change.”

I looked away. “Well—”

Something inside me—part of me but not part of me—shuddered. Trembled.

I froze.

I whispered.

The edges of my mind quivered again. Like the walls that had been up since I woke still half-delirious and alone in Hahns had suddenly gone soft.

Then I heard her. A flutter of a sound. A whisper that seemed half imagination—and half insane hope.

She said

H
er voice reached me like an echo. Like words rippling through water. I breathed in sharply.

I said.

She cut me off:

Her confusion crashed into me. Her anxiety beat against the wall separating us. Knocked it down piece by piece.

I felt the moment she realized what our eyes were seeing: the sparsely decorated hotel room; the paisley-printed wallpaper. Relief, first. A stab of it like light. Then her dread bloomed like a heavy flower.

she said softly.

I hesitated.

Her gasp didn’t come from the lungs, or through the lips. It was shaped from pure emotion. And it knocked into me like a wrecking ball.

I told her what the woman at Hahns had told me. About the medication they’d used on us. How we’d reacted in unexpected ways.

She protested

I whispered.

“Eva?”

Addie flinched at the sound of Jackson’s voice. Not physically, of course—not when I was in control—but I felt it all the same. I realized that as far as Jackson could see, I’d fallen silent in the middle of a sentence. Slowly, I turned to face him. Addie was nameless, wordless emotion.

“What is it?” Jackson said, frowning.

Addie said.

So I lied, because Addie asked me to. And in my heart, she’d always come first.

“I just remembered something,” I said to Jackson. “I’m—I’m sorry. I have to go find Ryan.”

I hurried from the room, trying not to focus on the way he watched me—
us
—go.

I didn’t go find Ryan, of course. I ran to a quiet nook of the hotel and sank into the corner, anchoring Addie as her terror grew—until I could almost taste it, sour and acrid, on the back of our tongue.

she said.