Echoes of Us (16 page)

“The broadcast of my arrest . . .” he said with a wry smile. “Not how I expected to have my fifteen minutes of fame, you know?”

“Kitty filmed it by accident,” I said. “And Marion was never supposed to get her hands on it—”

He nodded. “Well, broadcasting it served her purpose. And I guess it served ours.”

Hybrids were already the topic of the day before—but now, no one talked about anything else.

“Things were just starting to calm down when the Hahns footage released,” Jackson said. “Those girls? The sick one—”

“Hannah and Millie,” I said softly, and his eyes dulled a bit. He nodded.

“Jenson’s probably going mad trying to figure out who’s responsible for it all.”

I shrugged. How long until the Plum-blouse Lady caved and told Jenson the truth? Until Addie and I were once again centered in his crosshairs?

“It isn’t all just talk, either,” Jackson said. He told me how some people who’d lost kids to the institutionalization system had started looking for them—even ones they’d given up years ago. The government wasn’t any help, so they banded together.

Sometimes, they had to travel great distances. Not everyone could afford places to stay, and people began opening their homes to these travelers—secretly, of course, but news traveled among hybrid sympathizers, until a network of sorts was set up.

“It’s like a safe-house system,” Jackson said. “That’s how I got by after getting away from Marion’s friends.”

Safe house
made me think of Peter.

Jackson didn’t know about Peter.

I tried not to let our face betray my sudden pain.

“Sabine said it would happen,” I said quietly. “She always believed hybrids just needed to know they weren’t alone. You haven’t . . . you don’t know where she is, do you? Or Christoph and Cordelia?”

Jackson shook his head. “Not captured, as far as I know.” He looked like he might say something more, but swallowed it.

“What?” I said.

He hesitated, then blurted out the words like he needed to speak them before he lost the nerve. “Your whole family—apparently they’ve disappeared. No one knows where they are. That’s what I’ve heard, anyway.”

My family was missing. Had been missing.

“For how long?” I demanded.

“I don’t know,” he said. “At least—at least a month or two.”

“A month or two?”

He rushed to explain: “I can’t be sure—I’ve heard it all secondhand, and honestly, I think it’s more like fifth- or sixth- or seventhhand. Everything’s a tangle of rumors and hearsay right now—”

The Plum-blouse Lady must have known. Had she been lying when she said she could get my mother?

Or had she been telling the truth?

Could she get my mother, because they already had her locked up? A prisoner, along with my father. And Lyle. Lyle needed medical care—dialysis if he hadn’t gotten the transplant, medication if he had, to keep his body from rejecting the new kidney. I knew all the facts—had long memorized our little brother’s needs.

Suddenly all I could think about was Lyle—Lyle pounding up and down the stairs; Lyle tapping Morse code to us through the walls; Lyle reading; Lyle sick and Lyle healthy.

My guilt was old and familiar. It knew just where to press to hurt the most. How to cripple me without killing me. How to draw out the pain.

“I—I need some fresh air.” I stood. Jackson stood, too, but I warded him away, our head and heart pounding. “I’ll just—I’ll just go walk around the baseball field. I’ll be fine.”

He hesitated. “Eva, can I speak with Addie?”

Addie’s gone
, I could have said.

I don’t know what’s happened to her
, I could have said.

I don’t know when she’s coming back.

I don’t know if—

“She gone under right now,” I said. “I—later, when she’s back.”

After a long moment, he nodded.

I turned and fled outside.

I
walked five slow circles around the edge of the baseball field. It was already fully dark, though it couldn’t have been later than six. The sky was cloudy, the moon half-obscured. I trailed our fingers along the bleacher seats, the way Viola had along the walls of the ward room.

What had happened to the girls I’d left behind? Maybe the caretakers had drugged them all into a stupor. Maybe they’d decided it was too dangerous to keep any of them anymore, now that they’d had a taste of rebellion. Maybe they were all gone. Shipped off to be used as test subjects. Nobody would care. Anything could happen, because nobody was watching.

I should have come up with some way to save everyone. If I’d only given it more thought, or tried harder, or—

Now I was free again, and they were not.

I said bitterly.
lucky,
Addie.>

But thinking about the girls we’d abandoned at Hahns paled compared to thinking about Mom, Dad, and Lyle. I could hardly go near the thought of their disappearance—could only circle around it. Try to shield myself from it.

By the time Jackson came to find me, I was standing by the chain-link fence, fingers digging into the rusted metal, fighting the urge to shake it until the whole thing came crashing down.

He didn’t ask if I was all right. Ryan would have. Addie hated that. She thought it was a sign of his lack of confidence in us—a sign of our perceived weakness.

I liked knowing someone cared enough to ask.

I missed him so badly I couldn’t think straight. Not just Ryan, but Devon. I missed his steadiness. The assured way he approached everything. The dry humor he pulled out from time to time. I missed the way Hally was always ready with a smile. Lissa’s unwavering loyalty. Nina’s chatter about nonessential things and the way Kitty sometimes hummed the songs her brother used to play on the guitar.

“I’m sure your family is all right,” Jackson said quietly.

I nodded, staring out beyond the fence, watching the way the moonlight glinted off the snow.

“Are the others with Marion?” he asked. “Peter and them, I mean. You know, I can’t believe Peter agreed to let you—”

“Peter’s dead,” I whispered. I was already keeping one huge secret from Jackson; I couldn’t handle another. Then I turned to face him, and regretted I hadn’t been more gentle with the news.

Devastation marred every line of Jackson’s face. Froze his limbs as the cold wind blew between us. Softly, I told him everything he’d missed after that night in Anchoit. The traveling and hiding we’d done with Peter and the others. Marion’s arrival. Henri’s leaving. The news of Emalia’s disappearance. The car chase, then accident as we tried to run.

Peter’s death. Jaime’s capture.

By the time I finished, Jackson’s eyes had gone blank. He’d clenched his hands into fists, and without thinking, I reached out and put my hand over his.

He didn’t speak. Neither did I. But in that moment, we understood each other perfectly.

Ben arrived. A middle-aged man with a sun-leathered face, he had a mouth so intensely flattened I felt a little jolt of surprise every time he opened it to speak.

“You’re sure about her?” he said to Jackson, as if I weren’t right there.

Jackson nodded. “I’m sure.”

Ben didn’t relax. But he nodded and unlocked the doors of his beat-up old van, and I supposed that was about as much of a
get in
as we were going to receive.

The backseat was already piled with stuff. I shoved aside a pile of clothes—jackets, pants, wrinkled shirts—and tried to find room for our feet. Jackson unrolled a sleeve of cheese-flavored crackers as if it were his and offered it to me. I glanced at Ben, but he didn’t say anything, so I accepted it.

Eating crackers, jostled in beside Jackson and what looked to be the pieces of Ben’s life, I started my journey back to the rest of the world.

Ben’s van shuddered to a stop, pulling me from the lull of the road and the staticky music on the radio. The car’s headlights revealed an old, colonial-style house with a yellow face. Snow patched a dark, sloped roof. I sat up blearily.

“We’re here,” Vince said.

I’d spent most of the drive staring out the window, but the last time I’d glanced over, it had still been Jackson sitting beside me. The switch startled me. Back at Hahns, many of the girls rarely switched control from one soul to the other. Most of them I didn’t know well enough to distinguish between souls, anyway.

“The place used to be a bed-and-breakfast,” Vince said as we approached the front door. He grabbed the brass knocker and pounded it twice.

A little boy, maybe nine or ten years old, answered. He grinned up at Vince, then at me. “Are you the one he went to rescue? Nobody thought he could do it.”

“And I didn’t.” Vince’s smile was fainter than it might have been, but he tried. I was cataloging all the ways he was different from Jackson: he walked faster; his smile was sharper; his eyes didn’t linger on me. “You don’t have to tell anyone, though.”

The boy stepped aside, letting the three of us come in after stomping the snow from our shoes. “This guy from all the way on the other side of the country came,” he said. “He heard his brother was at Hahns. Did you see Hahns?”

Vince nodded toward me. “I didn’t. She did.”

The little boy looked at me, intent and solemn. “Did you see a David Birnes?”

“I—I didn’t,” I said. “I didn’t see any of the boys. Only the girls.”

The boy’s mouth twisted in disappointment, but his expression quickly cleared again. “I think there’s a man and a woman on the second floor who’re looking for a girl who might be at Hahns. I can’t remember her name, but I can go ask—”

“Whoa there,” Vince said. “You can do us a favor first, Aiden.”

The younger boy brightened. Straightened.

Vince glanced at me, then back at Aiden. “Remember the people I described to you? Go see if the newcomers know anything about them.”

The little boy nodded, flashed a grin at me, and ran off. He rounded the corner, then disappeared up a flight of stairs.

“Everyone who comes here,” Vince said as he showed me down the hall, “is looking for someone.”

It wasn’t a large crowd at the bed-and-breakfast. Most introduced themselves by first name only. Some didn’t bother introducing themselves at all, only naming the person or people they were looking for. An elderly couple from two states over was following a lead about a granddaughter who’d been taken three years ago. A woman around my mother’s age was searching for a daughter who shared her same brilliantly orange hair.

There were a few on the other side of the search. The hybrids, like Vince and me. They didn’t say if they’d escaped from institutions, or had been in hiding. They were quieter.

Some, I had a feeling, recognized me. Eyes trailed after me. Gazes lingered just a little too long. I had no idea if they’d continued showing our picture on the news.

Then again, after our time at Hahns, maybe Addie and I didn’t even look that much like our picture anymore. Our hair had grown out a bit, the darker roots showing through. We’d always been pale, but never as pale as this—a sickly, sallow hue that made us look ghostlike. Our limbs looked funny, the muscles atrophied. There was a darkness around our eyes.

“Probably better if you don’t drop your real name,” Jackson whispered in our ear. It was Jackson again now, and I almost wished it weren’t. I wasn’t reminded of Addie’s absence every time Vince looked at me. “What did you go by at Hahns?”

But I didn’t want to use Darcie’s name. Darcie was a real girl, with a real family, all of whom could be hurt. So I stole the first name of a girl Addie and I had been friends with in second grade, and the last name of a boy I’d had a crush on when I was eight. For the time being, I was Morgan Shelly.

I listened to the descriptions of these missing people and tried to describe my own. Marion. Ryan. Hally. Dr. Lyanne. Henri. Emalia. I didn’t actually drop any of their names, though. I doubted they were using their real ones, either. And I didn’t want to run the risk of someone recognizing a name from the news alerts.

These people were supposed to be on our side. But it didn’t hurt to be safe.

In the end, no one had heard any news of them. It was disappointing, but unsurprising. I hadn’t heard of any of their lost loved ones, either.

I murmured to Addie.

There was nothing but silence for a reply.

Perhaps
, whispered a part of me that refused to be shoved aside,
perhaps from now on, there will only be silence.

I swallowed. Fought against the sudden buzz in my ears drowning out the rest of the world. Jackson and I were in the kitchen, along with what seemed to be the rest of the house. Dinners were communal here, and people accidentally jostled one another in their search for plates and forks, or for a helping of the barbecue chicken laid out on enormous ceramic plates. Mrs. Shay, the owner of the B and B, hustled everyone along.

“Be right back,” I muttered to Jackson. Or hoped I did. The words blurred a little in my mouth.

I stumbled away from him, away from the heat—the overwhelming human shove—of the kitchen and into the family room. Collapsed on the couch and drew my legs against my stomach. Covered my face with my hands. Screamed as hard as I could into the darkness where Addie was gone.

Gone.

“Hey,” Jackson said. “It’s all right.”

My head snapped up. He must have followed me from the kitchen. He shut the glass doors behind him, sealing away the dinnertime chatter, then hovered by the couch for a second before sitting down next to me.

“Sabine used to have panic attacks, did you know?” He didn’t wait for a reply, and I was thankful for it. “Christoph told me, once. They started when she was still locked away, and they lasted for months and months after she got out. But she—”

“She’s gone,” I whispered.

He frowned. “Sabine?”

I shook my head. Closed my eyes, but that only made things worse. I stared at the fireplace instead. It was cold, the logs blackened and dead. I focused on the whirls and crevices in the wood, the scattering of the ash.