Echoes of Us (26 page)
Authors: Kat Zhang
We wrenched off our own coat and tried to smother the fire with it.
Please, please,
I thought.
Oh, God, please
.
The flames died out. It was several more seconds before we could breathe again. Lyle stood panting, his eyes wide.
“You all right?” I managed to say. When he didn’t answer, I started to ask him again, louder—but then I realized he was staring behind us in shock. He was staring at something. Someone.
I whirled around.
There were three officers. They wore helmets. Dark suits that made them look all the same. Faceless and uniform.
I wrapped our arms around Lyle. Pulled him closer to us. He didn’t struggle. He’d gone silent, his limbs stony.
“You can’t take him,” I whispered. Then I screamed it.
“You can’t take him.”
They took him anyway.
They took us, too.
W
e weren’t the only ones they rounded up. Everywhere around us, officers herded people toward vans and police cars. There were too many to fit. Some groups stood motionless, watched over by officers who didn’t seem to know what to do with them.
The ground lay strewn with extinguished candles and trampled orchids.
“It’s going to be okay,” I whispered to Lyle. The officers were taking us to one of the vans—we’d almost reached it when we were intercepted by another man, who frowned at us and murmured something to one of the officers.
We exchanged hands. The new policemen didn’t take Addie and me and Lyle to the van, but to a police car.
I was too tense to guess. Where were Hally and Lissa? We hadn’t seen them at all after the initial wave of panic. Had they been captured, too?
Please be safe,
I thought desperately.
They’d only wanted to mourn.
The drive lasted little more than half an hour. Instead of bringing us to a jail, they parked us in front of a house. It stood two stories, imposing with an immaculate lawn and a flag hanging from the front porch. Fixtures set into the lawn cast a low, white light, brightening our legs as the officers urged us from the car.
Lyle looked at Addie and me as if we were supposed to know what was going on, but I could only shake our head in reply.
One of the officers raised his fist to knock. He didn’t need to. The door opened. The officer quickly dropped his fist.
“Come in,” said Mark Jenson.
The officers stayed just long enough for Jenson to make a show of offering them something to drink. They both said they were needed back at the scene. Jenson said, “Of course, I understand. Thank you.”
“The mob’s taking up a lot of resources right now,” one of the policemen said. “But I’ll see who’s available and send some more men down to secure the house.”
Then they were gone.
I made sure Lyle stayed by our side. Jenson looked at both of us, calculating.
“Is this yours?” I said quietly. “The house.”
Jenson walked away, toward the kitchen counter. He wasn’t even looking at us anymore. Despite the fact that it was three in the morning, he was fully dressed, black, formal shoes and everything. There was something severe about the arrangement of his dark hair.
Neither of us said it, but we both understood. If we’d been alone, maybe we’d have risked it. But not when we had Lyle here. Lyle, who never should have been here at all. Who only was because of our mistake.
Sometimes, it seemed like all our decisions turned out to be mistakes.
“In a way,” Jenson said in answer to my question. “It’s owned by the government, but I live here when I’m in the city.”
He seemed so calm. So unsurprised.
“You knew, didn’t you?” I whispered. “About the vigil. You knew who we were. What we were gathering for.”
Jenson picked up the pitcher of water he’d offered the officers. Poured himself a glass. “I’d hoped you might show up. There were rumors you were in the area—not all of those hybrid safe houses are as safe as you people imagine. But it’s better, sometimes, to let smaller criminals continue, so we can catch the important ones. We were close, in Brindt. Very close, the city police tell me.”
“It doesn’t matter, you know,” I said. “I’m not important. None of this depends on
me—
you won’t have stopped anything—”
“You are important.” Jenson headed for the sleek sofas. Sat carefully, unbuttoning his suit jacket. “You are important because I made you important. I crafted a story around you. You helped, of course, with all your reckless behavior. I couldn’t have done it with just anyone.”
He sipped from his glass of water. He looked, I thought, like he did behind the podium on television. Giving yet another speech. “From the day you escaped from Nornand and attacked that man in the hallway, you’ve been involved in one act of violence after another: targeting the rally at Lankster Square with explosives—”
“Fireworks,” I protested, but Jenson went on as if I hadn’t interrupted.
“—bombing the institution at Powatt. With materials, I might add, you stole from a hospital.” His eyes were steady. I struggled to keep steady, too. Because he wasn’t lying. “We would have captured you eventually. But I’m glad it happened tonight. It makes for a better ending to your story.”
I tightened our hold on Lyle. “A better ending?”
Jenson set down his glass. “You’re welcome to sit down.”
We didn’t move.
He glanced up at the clock, then turned back to us.
What’s going to happen to us?
I wanted to ask. But I was afraid to know. Afraid for Lyle to know.
“Violent tendencies often escalate,” Jenson said. The sofas were angled to face a television. He reached for the remote control. “It’s understandable how everything culminated in the attack tonight. Things would have still worked if we blamed someone else. But now people will have a clear narrative thread to follow.”
Despite myself, I took a step forward. “What attack?”
Jenson flipped on the television. It was already on a news channel.
“The one that just assassinated the president,” he said.
A
ddie and I watched dumbly. Somehow, without realizing it, we drifted closer to the television until we bumped up against the back of Jenson’s couch. We didn’t notice until Lyle came to join us.
The president was dead. The man had been in office longer than we’d been alive, and his uncle before him. We’d seen him during Independence Day speeches, and in our school textbooks, and on stamps. We’d watched him age. Most days, of course, we hadn’t thought much about him. He was the president. He and his world seemed so far away. Untouchable.
We’d loved him, though, in a way. As the face of a country we’d been taught to love. Of a country we did love, despite everything it had done to us, because it was home.
The president was dead, and though the news anchors claimed nothing was certain, they talked about the hybrid gathering around the White House. Talked about the rumors that it had all been nothing more than a distraction. A plot to create an opening for an assassination.
“That isn’t true,” I cried.
Jenson glanced at us. “Don’t worry. We won’t put all the blame on you. You are a bit young to organize an assassination on the highest office in the country. We’ll say there was a whole team of people working with you. That they were the masterminds. You were only the weapon. They pointed you and pulled the trigger. Took advantage of your youth and instability. You might come out of this whole thing looking like a tragic victim.”
I shook our head. “No one—there was never any plan to kill the president. Why would anyone do that?”
“Because now, we’re going to need another president,” Jenson said.
“The vice president—”
“The vice president will take over,” Jenson agreed. “But who knows if that will last? Do you know how this regime first came into power, with the president’s uncle? The Great Wars had started, and the American public was afraid. The man campaigned with the promise of safety. He and his nephew understood that if you make people fear something, then assure them you’re the only one keeping them safe, you’ll have them in the palm of your hand.” Jenson stared up at us, almost languid. “The people are more afraid than they’ve been in a long time. And it’s the hybrids that are the villains. They’re not going to want a vice president who was chosen two decades ago, who has never been virulent about hybrids. They’ll search for someone who knows hybrids. Who has been working for years to protect the people from them. Who has even been developing a cure, to eradicate them forever.”
He smiled.
Jenson called in two guards to usher us into a bedroom upstairs. At least one of them was still stationed out in the hall, just beyond the closed door.
I couldn’t stay still. The bedroom, despite the lushness of the furnishings, was almost worse than the tiny cell Addie and I had been locked away in at Hahns. Then, at least, we’d thought our friends and family were safe.
The clock on the wall read half past four. It might be hours before anyone woke and realized we were missing. Until someone heard what had happened on the news.
When they did, Ryan would realize both his sisters and we were missing.
Lyle sat on the bed, watching us. He’d been silent since we arrived at Jenson’s house—since we’d been captured back at the Capitol mall. But now, softly, he said, “Are we going to escape?”
I smiled at him. Said, with all the conviction I had, and some I didn’t, “Yes.”
I continued pacing, but slowed my steps. The bedroom was larger than most I’d ever seen. There were two windows, but a house like this probably had an alarm system. I didn’t want to trigger anything—at least not until I knew exactly what we were doing.
We peered out the glass, trying to see in the darkness. There weren’t any nearby trees to climb onto. There was a drainage pipe, though, and the side of the house was stucco. Maybe,
maybe
we’d get enough traction to be able to make our way down.
Beyond that, there was just darkness and uncertainty.
“Are we going to jump?” Lyle said. He’d slipped off the bed.
I smiled at him grimly. “It might be the only way out.”
“What about the guards?” he said. “Is it like the Secret Service out there?”
Despite everything, I felt a laugh in the back of our throat. “The Secret Service protect the president. You know that from your books.”
“Yes,” Lyle said. “But they think you killed the president.”
That quickly sobered me again. I shook our head. “Jenson’s trying to make other people believe that. I don’t think he’d let a lot of people know where we are right now. Or that they grabbed us in the middle of the vigil and not in the Capitol building. I don’t think there will be a lot of police out there.” I turned back to the window and the night. “We just need a distraction.”
“Like a fire?” Lyle said.
This time, I did laugh, because why not? Laughing wouldn’t make our situation worse. “Yeah, that would probably work. I wish I’d thought to bring a lighter.”
“You don’t need a lighter.” Lyle climbed onto the dresser so he could reach the clock, then brought it down and flipped it over, removing the batteries.
“Don’t tell me,” I said. “You’ve read about this.” He smiled. I couldn’t help smiling back. “I don’t find it weird at all that we’re related.”
“I need a knife. And some kind of tinder . . .”
I held out our hand until he passed us the clock. Then I grabbed a pillow from the bed and shucked the cover off. Pressing the cloth over the clockface, I smashed it as quietly as I could. Both Lyle and I froze, listening, but no one seemed to have heard.
A sliver of the clockface served nicely to rip open the pillow.
“There,” I said, pulling out the soft fluff inside. “There’s your tinder.” I held up the sliver of glass. “And here’s your knife. What? You don’t think you’re the only one who can be handy?”
Despite my protests that he was going to cut himself, Lyle insisted on being the one to carefully cut open the back of one of the batteries. We scoured the room for something small and metal to fit into the battery and settled on a paper clip I found in the nightstand drawer.
Addie eventually persuaded me to leave him to his fiddling while we started shifting the dresser in front of the door. It was even heavier than it looked. Even after Lyle came to help, it took forever to slide it into place—especially since we were trying to be as quiet as possible.
I frowned at him as he turned back to the tinder. “Lyle, you haven’t tried this at home, have you?”
“Never,” he said, a bit too quickly. “Look, it’s working—” The bit of pillow fluff had started to glow. Lyle blew on it and said, with what was probably more excitement than necessary or normal, “Come on, give me more to feed it.”
In a few minutes, the bed was aflame.
And the smoke alarm started to shriek.
Lyle seemed a little stunned by the sudden size and intensity of the fire. I grabbed his hand, pulling him toward the window. The table lamp was heavy and sturdy—more than strong enough to smash though the glass.
I’d been right. The house was alarmed. A second shrieking joined the first, so loud that Lyle clapped his hands to his ears. I was too busy trying to clear the glass from the window.
