Echoes of Us (13 page)

The image cut out. Reduced to snow and static for a second.

Then there, on the screen, was Wendy Howard. Little Wendy Howard, who’d joined up with Marion for the sake of her dead sister.

Marion hadn’t even tried to hide her face. We saw every uneasy twitch of her eyebrows and tremble of her lip as she talked about Anna. About what it had been like to have a sibling torn away, and never know her fate.

She cried in the middle of it, with that camera trained right on her face. Then we did look away, because the rawness was too much to stand.

In those few seconds, the footage of Wendy disappeared. But we didn’t return to the president and Jenson. We returned, instead, to that night in the dark streets of Anchoit, when Jackson Montgomery was arrested, and Kitty captured the footage with shaking hands.

We’d never seen the film before. We’d never developed it—had left it behind in that hotel room along with the rest of our purse’s contents. Someone must have given it to Marion. Or she’d stolen it.

Addie whispered.

The screen could only show us a sliver of what had happened. My memory filled in the rest. The arc of the policemen’s flashlights. The way the officers had tackled Jackson to the ground.

The sick fear.

Addie was an earthquake of anger. I held on to her. Tried to steady her. But I was shaking, too.

Jackson disappeared into a police car.

The screen jumped back to static.

The Plum-blouse Lady pressed
pause
. Then
eject
. “That was broadcasted two weeks ago.”

She put in another tape. This time, it was only Jenson speaking before the feed cut out, replaced by a blurry, but oddly familiar recording. We squinted.

Realized why the image looked familiar.

We’d recorded it.

“This,” the woman said, her eyes hard, “was shown yesterday.”

We could only stare. Here was Class 6 again, broadcasted in snippets. The peeling walls. The metal beds. Hannah’s coughing. Viola’s blank-eyed wandering.

Then darkness, and the whispered stories of the girls.

Marion knew we were still in Hahns, and she’d released the footage anyway.

We couldn’t think about what that meant. Not now. Not with this woman watching us so closely. We had to keep calm. Play innocent.

Betray nothing.

We had no other choice. Not until we’d had time to figure things out.

“I thought it might be Bridget, at first, since she was connected to Nornand,” the woman said. “But now that I know who you really are, it does make a lot more sense.”

We swallowed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

That was the last thing we said aloud.

The woman stayed another twenty or thirty minutes, getting more and more frustrated. Her voice sharpened. Her eyes flashed. She vacillated between whispering and shouting, threatening and cajoling.

We stayed silent.

Finally, she left.

I said.

They tried to feed us. We flung the tray at the man who brought it, and tried to barrel past him. He threw us back inside.

When we tried the same thing hours later, the next caretaker they sent came bearing a needle.

Now we really fought. Now we screamed, and spat, and hit, and kicked.

We felt a stab of pride that it took three people to hold us still.

Then the needle went in, the pain blossomed as they injected the drugs, and the world went black.

T
ime spiraled into itself.

I woke to Ryan standing at my bedside. So perfectly real. So perfectly there. But when I reached out our fingers went right through him.

Ryan
, I said.
Ryan, I—

Shhh
. He put a finger to his lips. Started flashing red like the disks we used to share. Flashing meant they were close. Meant—

He melted. Collapsed into ash that spread like a living thing across the floor, setting the ground on fire. I screamed. The flames crackled. The ceiling rained soot into our eyes. I rubbed at them and rubbed at them, but it wouldn’t come out.

Somebody grabbed at our hands. Pulled them from our face. Someone screamed something, and I screamed back—I couldn’t stop
screaming—

                        
Pyxis
, our father said

                        
Pointing at the sky, the wide

                        
Dark blue of it

                        
His arm circled around us

                        
Blocking us from the wind

There are ghosts in our clothes
, I told them.

A needle glinted.

No
, I moaned. I shoved. I shouted.
No, no, please—

Pain. Pain and pressure. Our heart. Hot.

It had been so cold, and now it was
so hot
—

                        
Pyxis,
named after a mariner’s compass

                        
Three faint stars in the southern sky

                        
Tell me the story
, I said

                        
Four years old, and sleepy

                        
And falling asleep.

Addie?

Addie. Addie. Addie. Addie—

Too much
, they said.

Stupid
, they whispered.

Why do you walk?
I asked Viola. Viola by our bedside with her finger on our cheek.
What did you see?

You have to count the days,
she said.

1

2

3

Then she burned, and I burned with her.

There is no story for Pyxis.

Lyle tapped Morse-code messages through the walls.

I tapped them back. The world was black with smoke, and in the darkness lurked things with moist, sucking breaths, and I could no longer see, but my little brother was tapping messages to me through our bedroom wall, and he wouldn’t go to sleep until I tapped something back. He had to go to sleep.

Sleep.

S

L

E

E

—

I
am not a ghost.

I woke as if through water. Through smoke and haze and fog. My thoughts pressed through cotton, trying to surface. Things got lost on their way from our eyes to our brain, from our brain to our mouth. I spoke and heard nothing. Heard nothing and something all at once—

I saw Ryan again. He didn’t look at us. He was focused on something in his hands, his brow furrowed the way it did when he was concentrating on a problem, on a bit of machinery that wasn’t going the way he wanted it to.

He wasn’t really there, but I watched him, anyway.

There was something buried in the skin on the back of our hand. A thin, clear tube that snaked up, up, up, until it connected to a small, clear bag. There was fluid in the bag. Fluid that, I supposed, was going into us.

Some mornings, I still burned. I made incoherent sounds, and no one came, and then someone did. A woman with a low, gravelly voice who spoke softly.

“You had a bad reaction,” she said and ran her finger over our cheek, where the skin was damp.

“They gave you too much,” she said. She reminded me of the nurses back at Nornand. “They aren’t used to being careful.”

She pressed our eyelids closed.

“They don’t usually have to worry about the subjects surviving.”

I
ripped the tube out.

And almost screamed.

It
hurt
. Blood beaded at the wound, dripped down our wrist. The end of the tube was dripping, too—clear liquid that sank into our covers.

The door banged open. A man rushed in. Grabbed our hand. I tried to struggle, but our limbs felt like noodles.

“Don’t,” I cried. “I don’t want it.”

He hesitated, but relented, pasting a bandage on our hand to staunch the bleeding. He collected the dripping tube and the rest of the IV apparatus. Then he was gone again.

I could barely sit up. Our skin felt raw. Our eyes. Our throat.

I whispered.

A sudden wave of nausea made me close our eyes. When I opened them again, the room was clearer. The lights less blinding. Our eyes focused. I breathed through our mouth.

My mind was still cottony. I reached for her, trying to grasp her and drag her up, with me, to clarity.

I found nothing.

There wasn’t the hole there usually was when Addie went under, whether through the use of Refcon or through her own means. There was no gaping chasm, no utter nothingness.

There was just the fog. And that was slowly disappearing, too. My head, my thoughts grew clearer.

And Addie simply wasn’t there.

I gulped down panic. Our hands fisted on the blanket. I reached out again, in my mind, but there was nowhere to reach. There was no space. No extra room. No connection.

Just me.

The door opened. The Plum-blouse Lady was back, though she wore a red blouse today, with a loose turtleneck. She came toward us. Me.

I cried. Her name echoed in the singular chamber of my mind. My thoughts—my emotions—the space in our head—it felt so
closed
. Like I’d spent my entire life living in a house, and now half the rooms had disappeared, leaving me scrambling at walls that used to be doors.

“If you don’t want the IV,” the woman said, “you’re going to have to be agreeable and eat.”

I stared at her uncomprehendingly.

“Addie.” She leaned toward us. I would have shrunk away, if I could. But I was already huddled against the wall. “Are you lucid?”

I hoped I wasn’t. That this was just another nightmare.

Our voice was cracked. Our throat still hurt. But I spoke. “If I weren’t lucid, would I know it?”

Her lips pursed. “Addie—”

“I’m not Addie,” I whispered.

Now it was the woman’s turn to laugh. “Bit late to say that. Especially after all the things you’ve been shouting in your dreams.”

Our mouth snapped shut.

“The drug was supposed to do that,” the woman said. “Help you tell the truth. Loosen inhibitions. Things like that. It’s had better trials. Some of the other girls, they tell us everything.”

I could only stare at her. She was lying. She had to be.

“You had a bad reaction to it, though,” the woman said. “Hybrid brains . . . they’re all a little different, I’ve found, depending on the division of strength between the two minds. It’s tricky finding something that will have predictable results. But I suppose the difficulty will work in my favor once I succeed.”

“Refcon,” I whispered. “Did you give me Refcon?”

Her eyebrows raised. “Why would I do that?”

I swallowed. “To try and cure us.”

She smiled pityingly. “You’re thinking of Nornand, Addie, and Powatt. Here at Hahns, we don’t bother with curing.”

I waited for Addie to come back. I counted seconds in my mind. Seconds that turned into minutes that turned into hours. They brought in food. A bowl of something like porridge. Breakfast? Lunch? Dinner?

The longest I’ve ever heard of anyone being out is half a day
, Emalia told me once. Had Addie still been with me during the delirium? I couldn’t know for sure. If she’d already disappeared then . . .

But I couldn’t think like that.

I refused to eat, at first. I felt too sick. But they brought the IV back in, and threatened me with it, so I choked down what I could. It was ashes and sandpaper in our throat, motor oil in our stomach.

I didn’t dare tell them Addie was gone. No one mentioned it. Was it on purpose? Had they tried to make Addie go away, thinking the recessive soul was easier to control? Easier to manipulate? Or was this just an unforeseen side effect of their experimental drugs? Of the
unreliable reactions
of our hybrid mind?

Was this where the chosen girls went? To be used as lab rats? It couldn’t be legal, but what did that mean up here in the middle of nowhere, with children already lost to the world?

They cleared away the tray. Left me in my solitude and the ticking time.

I receded into myself. Clawed at the walls of my own mind. Left fingernail gashes in my thoughts.

Half a day
, Emalia had said. But that was only what she’d heard about, right? There was a whole world out there she’d never seen before. Mankind had reached space. Henri’s satphone could transport information in seconds across the vastness of an ocean.

Perhaps Emalia had been wrong.

What frightened me most was how I couldn’t feel the space where Addie should have been. Parts of me had shut down. Disappeared.

A caretaker brought in more food.

“They just fed me,” I told him.

“That was hours ago,” he said.

I threw up in the toilet, acid burning all the way up our throat. He grabbed our shoulders. Asked me what was wrong. I hadn’t thought he’d care. But the Plum-blouse Lady wasn’t finished with me, so I guess they needed me alive.

Everything was wrong.
How couldn’t he see that?

Addie was gone, and that meant—

I tried to speak, but I couldn’t pull enough air into our lungs. Our chest burned.

The man was yelling something. The food tray flipped over, splashing porridge all over the ground.

More people came. It was so loud.

So loud. And crowded, and—

Still so silent in my mind.

I can’t breathe
, I tried to tell them.

I can’t breathe.

I can’t breathe alone.

O
nce, when Addie and I were four years old, we saw the stars together on a grassy hill and tried to count them, one by one.

Once, when Addie and I were seven years old, a boy tricked us into climbing into a trunk, then locked us inside. We lay curled in the sweltering darkness for hours, and Addie repeated

until I started believing it.