Echoes of Us

To the readers who sneak books under desks and stay up long after dark. Our lives are all stories, in the end.

Dedication

Prologue

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Thirty-One

Thirty-Two

Thirty-Three

Thirty-Four

Thirty-Five

Thirty-Six

Thirty-Seven

Thirty-Eight

Thirty-Nine

Forty

Forty-One

Forty-Two

Forty-Three

Forty-Four

Forty-Five

Forty-Six

Forty-Seven

Forty-Eight

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Back Ads

About the Author

Books by Kat Zhang

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

I
remember my childhood better than most. Usually, people gain freedom as they grow older; I lost it.

As the recessive soul, I was born weaker than Addie. She triumphed whenever we fought for control of our shared body. She was fated to win and I to lose, the promise of it written into our genes.

By the time we were twelve, I seemed ready to fulfill a recessive soul’s other destiny: to disappear. I never did. But I did lose all my freedoms—the ability to speak, the power to move, the right to be acknowledged by anyone other than Addie, whose body I haunted.

So I remember my childhood well. Because however limited it was, for a long time, those were the only memories I had of liberty.

It wasn’t until I met Lissa and Hally, Ryan and Devon, that I started thinking about my future, and not my past. They were hybrids, too. They knew what it meant to live in secret, and taught me how to regain control over my body.

But now, as we were all forced on the run again, moving from safe house to safe house, I returned to my childhood memories, seeking comfort in the worn softness of their edges.

Addie asked one night. We were all stuffed in a van, Peter driving, Dr. Lyanne beside him. The rest of us sat cramped, shoulder-to-shoulder in the back two rows, the windows rolled up tight against the autumn chill.

I said.

All my memories of childhood were Addie’s memories, too. We lived cleaved to each other, hybrids in a country where our very existence was outlawed.

The memory of pyxis came from before we understood all that, which made it all the more precious. Addie and I were three or four years old. Our family had gone camping. Our little brother, Lyle, hadn’t been born yet, so it was just the four of us—Mom, Dad, Addie, and me.

I remembered that first sight of the stars in the crisp mountain air. We’d been a child accustomed to city nights and city lights. The enormity of all those stars had awed us.

I said.

Addie said. Her smile wasn’t just a physical thing, a curve of our lips. It was a warmth at the edge of my mind, where I felt her presence with the same assurance I felt our heartbeat.

We fell into the memory, calming each other with the past as the road raced by.

All too quickly, a week passed. Then another and another. Addie and I started walking again, the pain in our ankle and the bruises on our body fading along with the sharpest recollections of our last few days in Anchoit. The bombing of Powatt’s hybrid institution—the police raid—the frenzied escape through darkened streets—they’d never stop haunting us completely. But we tried to bury their pain with happier memories.

Addie and I drew everyone into the storytelling. Living at safe houses in the middle of nowhere, there was little else to do. We’d watched the news religiously at first. But the screen spit images of our faces and names, blaring our crimes: the “explosions” at Lankster Square, the Powatt bombing. After a while, the fear and upset crept into our insides and rotted them. Emalia said,
They’re just saying the same things, over and over. Can we please turn it off?

So we did. We gathered, instead, in the upstairs hallway, or around the dining table, or on the threadbare couch. If Ryan and I were in control, we sought the warmth of each other’s touch, the press of my cheek against his shoulder, the comfort of having somebody there.

I told them about the day Lyle and Nathaniel were born. Addie and I had only been four, but I hadn’t forgotten the happy, nervous chaos. The baby wrapped in blue and the momentary disappointment I’d felt that it wasn’t a girl.

I didn’t tell them about the day Nathaniel faded away, and it was considered normal, because he was the recessive soul. Or the day Lyle fell sick, and they rushed him to the hospital—a pale little boy too frightened to speak.

That was one of our unspoken rules. No sad stories.

There was too much of that already.

I knew a lot about Ryan’s past, but it was nice to hear it again. The enormous old house in the country, where the Mullans lived before moving to Lupside. The creak of the ancient floorboards, the ever-dusty library, the stretch of field where the grass grew waist-high, perfect cover for war games at dusk. Hally or Lissa interrupted when they had something to add, or a complaint that he wasn’t being entirely truthful. Ryan protested, but he smiled, and I knew he didn’t really mind. His sisters’ interruptions made us laugh, and laughter was a rare commodity now.

Dr. Lyanne had to be coaxed into the storytelling. At first, she talked only about her youth—snippets of a lace-and-satin childhood. I watched the sharp lines of her face and tried to imagine her two decades younger: not a woman, but a little girl named Rebecca who made the adults laugh with her grown-up sensibilities and too-serious face. Who knew the secret her brother, Peter, carried, but protected it fiercely.

Eventually, we wheedled out anecdotes about medical school. But we had to be careful. Dr. Lyanne’s studies in medicine linked too closely to her specialization and interest in neurology. In hybridity. It all led to her work at Nornand Clinic of Psychiatric Health, where she’d met Jaime, then the rest of us. Where Addie and I had convinced her to betray her fellow doctors and help us escape.

Everyone liked Henri’s stories best, because he’d seen the world. Jaime, especially, pored over Henri’s remaining maps as he described the places he’d been, the things he’d experienced and written about.

“Have you written about us?” Kitty asked in the middle of a story about the Middle East. Henri had spent two months there, following a border war between two countries we’d never heard of—that hadn’t even existed on the outdated maps taught in our schools. “About
us
, specifically, I mean.”

Henri smiled. “Not by name. It’s safer that way, in case anything gets intercepted.”

Somehow, the notion hadn’t struck me before. I’d known Henri had traveled here to cover the hybrid plight in the Americas, sending back articles and information through his satellite phone—more miniature computer than phone, in my mind. But I hadn’t imagined his stories would be anything but general.

The thought of it didn’t leave me. Somewhere out there, someone might hear our story, and it might just be that—a story over morning coffee, or playing in the background during dinner. Nothing more.

I said to Addie.

she replied.

But I couldn’t help it. For years, before I regained control of our body, I’d done nothing but think and imagine. Now, I imagined what life might have been like if Addie and I had been born in one of those countries across the ocean, where hybridity was accepted, and normal.

Or what if Addie and I had settled when we were five years old, right on schedule? I would be gone, and Addie would have lived so differently. No doctor’s appointments, no therapists, no medication. No sideways looks in the playground. No whispering teachers. No Nornand Clinic of Psychiatric Health.

No Hally and Lissa, or Ryan and Devon, or any of the people we’d met since then.

It had been less than a year since Addie and I had left our home for Nornand, but already, it was hard to imagine what our life would have been like if we’d kept the secret of my existence. Addie’s ghost-in-the-head, who shouted too loudly to be contained.

We had a lot of time to sit and think now. But it was sweeter to focus on the good times. To remember the people I cared about at their best.

My mother and father, who I was convinced still loved me.

My brother, Lyle, who I told myself had gotten the kidney transplant our family had been promised.

I chose to remember Sabine and Josie for the steadiness of their eyes, the confidence they’d instilled in me with a look. I pictured Cordelia and Katy when they’d laughed, head thrown back, their short, bleached-blond hair feathery in the light. I decided to think of Christoph only in his softer moments, when a crack in his angry armor revealed the broken fragments of his past, still digging into his insides.

Jackson—Jackson and Vince I saw as the delivery boy at Nornand Clinic who told us there was hope of escape.

I wasn’t supposed to be thinking about the things we’d done with Sabine’s group. The chaos we’d inflicted on Lankster Square with our homemade firecrackers. The plan we’d aided to bomb the institution at Powatt—not knowing Sabine wanted to rip apart not just steel and concrete, but the lives of the officials touring that night.

The fight among us when we’d found out, and tried to stop everything.

The price we’d paid.

No sad stories. That was the rule.