Authors: Kat Zhang
Echoes of Us (12 page)
She could do that, after all. It wasn’t really her fight.
You are too trusting, Eva Tamsyn. It’ll hurt you one day
.
Fear and despair were vultures, whirling and waiting for us to give up. But I refused to let myself fall again. If
I
doubted, how could I expect anyone else in this ward to keep their hopes alive?
One morning, the ring still hanging untouched outside the window, I walked out of the bathroom to find Bridget sitting with her back against the wall. Her eyes were stony, her mouth an unhappy slash.
I joined Bridget on the ground. We sat right in the path where Viola used to make her rounds in the old ward. Her constant circling had been like white noise in the flow of our days, comforting, in a way, because of its regularity. We’d counted on it.
From here, we had a view of the lower half of the room: the maze of metal bed legs, the blankets dragging on the floor, the legs and slippered feet of the other girls.
I glanced at Bridget, then at our hands. Our finger still felt naked without the ring. “Is something wrong?”
She gave us a look. “Besides the obvious things?”
I’d learned the art of dry smiles. “Yes.”
She glanced away. Shrugged one shoulder. “I was just thinking about Viola. If she’s . . . if she’s still in Class Four, or—”
If she’d been taken away. Like Hannah and Millie.
What happened to Viola is not going to happen to you
, I wanted to say, but didn’t.
By all accounts, what happened to Viola shouldn’t have happened to Viola.
“Do you know what her other name was?” I asked. “Viola, I mean. The other soul.”
Bridget looked down at the ground. “What does it matter?”
“It matters,” I said. “When I tell other people about her—about them—I want to use their names.”
“Tell who?” Bridget demanded.
I looked at her fiercely. “We’re going to get out of here. You have to believe that, Bridget.”
She seemed to fight her emotions under control. “What does it matter what I believe?”
“It does,” I insisted. The girl in the closest bed glanced over, then away again. For a long moment, neither Bridget nor I said anything.
“It was Viola and Karen Fairlow.” She finally met our eyes, and there was something naked there, in that look.
There was something different.
“You’re not Bridget,” I whispered.
She tensed. Turned her face away again.
Said, so quietly I almost didn’t hear: “Grace. You can call me Grace, if you’d like.”
T
he snow fell even thicker now. Each day, a new layer covered the last, making the world anew. There were never any footprints. Addie and I tried to convince each other that there might not be, even if someone came to replace the ring. The snow swallowed everything.
There was always only the smallest resistance as we reeled the string in, the gold band glinting. The string was always damp with melted snow. The ring, when it finally fell into our hand, was always bitterly cold.
Then, one morning, it wasn’t the same ring.
For a moment, I thought our eyes were playing tricks on us. That wanting had morphed into reality. But no, the crack in the gemstone had disappeared. When I pressed the stone, it sank into the band just the way it was supposed to.
Relief made us forget the cold. I untied the string and pulled the window shut, sitting heavily on the edge of the sink.
We weren’t abandoned.
It wasn’t until I slipped the ring on our finger that I realized the inside of the band wasn’t perfectly smooth, like it had been before. Instead, something scratched against our skin.
I slid the ring off again and held it up to the light, tilting it so we could see the inside of the band. There, engraved into the metal, were the rough makings of a tiny bird. Wings spread. Head high.
And two words, followed by a pair of initials.
We’re coming
.
R. M.
Ryan Mullan.
“Where did you hide the ring?” Bridget asked a few days later. Automatically, Addie pressed our hand into our lap.
“What do you mean?”
Bridget shrugged. “You stopped wearing it for a while. That’s all.”
Now it was Addie’s turn to shrug. She started to turn away, but Bridget halted us with a blurted, “Does it mean you really think we’re going to get out of here again?” She pressed her lips together. When she spoke again, the words came more calmly, but with an uncomfortable rigidness. “When you stopped wearing it . . . well, you kept it because it reminded you of the outside, right? And if you’d really given up hope of ever getting out of here, maybe you wouldn’t wear it, because it would just make everything worse. Being reminded. But for the last few days, you’ve been wearing it again.”
Addie glanced down at the ring.
she admitted.
So I said
Before I could think too much about it, I removed the ring and dropped it in Bridget’s hands. She startled. And as her eyes searched ours, I wondered if she knew about the switch. If she could tell between Addie and me. I’d known her for weeks, and right now I couldn’t say for sure if the girl sitting in front of me was Bridget or Grace.
“It reminds me,” I said quietly, “of Ryan.”
His name caught a little in our throat. I hadn’t wanted to talk about him before. Not here, as if speaking his name among the peeling walls and dirty floor might tarnish it.
But I’d learned that the opposite was true. Bringing happy memories into an awful place didn’t make the memories any dimmer. The memories made the surroundings brighter.
Bridget’s head was bowed, her fingers clutching the ring gingerly. “Lucky,” she said. “You’ve always been lucky. I—”
Then she froze. Looked up at us.
“It’s engraved.” Her eyes had gone wide. “It’s engraved. It wasn’t before.”
The ward door banged open.
I almost jumped up. Bridget stuffed the ring under her pillow.
The woman who stepped inside wasn’t a caretaker, but we recognized her. The Plum-blouse Lady. She’d come the first time Addie and I opened the window in the other ward, when we’d pretended we’d fallen. She’d asked me my name.
Now she stared at us, and everyone stared back.
I fought a shiver as the woman’s gaze landed on us. But it passed, and we breathed again. A caretaker joined the woman.
I never got the chance to reply. The Plum-blouse Lady said, “Her,” and pointed.
At Bridget.
Bridget’s voice broke free of her lips, tiny and confused. “What?”
She dodged the caretaker when he grabbed for her. I clutched her hands as the man latched on to her shoulders. The other girls sat or stood frozen in place, eyes wide open, mouths sealed shut.
“No!” I yelled as the man tore Bridget from our grasp.
Bridget’s cry reverberated through the ward. It tore at our ears, stole the breath from our lungs. She clawed at him. He grabbed her wrists as she tried to pound a fist into his chest. Her shirt bunched up, tangling her limbs. She kept screaming, screaming,
screaming
.
And her screaming focused. Took on a word in the madness.
Took on a name.
“Addie!”
I faltered. Bridget froze. The man took advantage of the moment and grabbed her more securely around the middle. Hauled her to the door.
It all happened so fast.
She was there. She was gone.
The door shut.
Silence.
Then, from behind, the clack of shoes. Footsteps approaching. A hand closed, viselike, around our arm.
The Plum-blouse Lady swam into view. Our mind was blurry, but her face was somehow crystal clear. We saw everything. The faint lines on her forehead. The wisps of dark hair escaping from her bobby pins. The pasty look of the foundation right under her eyes. Her mouth sat in a grim, unhappy line.
“Well,” she said. “You’d better come along, too.”
U
nlike Bridget, Addie and I didn’t struggle. Two caretakers waited at the door by the time we reached it, and neither looked like they could be taken by a fifteen-year-old girl.
So we went quietly. But our mind did not.
Addie’s voice was strained, but clear.
If we knew where they were taking us, we had a better chance of escape. At least I told myself we did.
The elevator came. They did not take us down, as I’d expected, but up to the fourth floor.
Our breathing came rougher now. We couldn’t help it. I tried to focus on our surroundings—tried to memorize where we were going and block out everything else.
That we would be all right.
The caretakers shoved us into a room. A cell. Four white walls, maybe eighty square feet. A toilet in the corner. A bed pushed against the far wall.
Then we were alone.
There was nothing obvious, at first. Then I caught something tiny mounted in the far corner, opposite the door. It might have been a camera.
We sat, back against the wall.
What next?
My mind buzzed, a frenzy of half-completed thoughts. About the ring. About Bridget and what would happen to her. To us. I kept having to shut them down. I focused on breathing. On keeping calm.
We had to, didn’t we? How could we get past everything else and get caught like this? End like this? We’d learned so much, come so far. It wouldn’t be fair. The world couldn’t allow it.
But the world had allowed Viola and Karen to lose their sanity. Had killed Wendy’s sister, and Peter. Had cut a soul from Jaime Cortae’s body and eradicated it from the earth.
It was stupid to expect anything like fairness.
We waited hours before the door opened again. We jumped from the bed. Backed up so we had room to maneuver—to run, or fight back.
“You can sit back down,” the Plum-blouse Lady said. She shut the door behind her.
I didn’t sit. The woman did, though, right on the bed like it was hers. Addie and I shivered from the cold. This room wasn’t heated any better than the ward.
“Here.” The woman shrugged out of her jacket. It was fitted, mauve. I didn’t take it. After a moment, she retracted her hand. “What’s your name?” she asked.
“Darcie Grey.”
“That’s not what Bridget called you.”
“Where is she?” I said. “What did you do to her?”
“You’re shaking,” the woman said. “Are you sure you don’t want my jacket?”
“Where’s Bridget?” I repeated, louder.
“You care about her an awful lot.”
I gave a strangled laugh. “I’ve been in the same room with her for—for—weeks.”
The woman carefully pulled her jacket back on and studied the buttons at the cuffs. “More than a month now. But you’ve known her longer than that, haven’t you? I looked into Bridget’s files. Before she came here, she was at Nornand Clinic. So was a girl named Addie Tamsyn.”
I stayed silent.
She looked up. “
The
Addie Tamsyn, who helped bomb the Powatt institution. They say Mark Jenson had a particular interest in her, but now that he has Jaime Cortae back, he isn’t nearly as concerned anymore.”
Jaime. I struggled to quash the flash of pain across our face. Judging from the way the woman watched us, I wasn’t entirely successful.
“Jenson has the boy, and all his plans for a cure.” The woman spoke slowly now, half to herself. “But I have you.”
“I’m not Addie,” I said quietly. It was truer than this woman knew.
She just smiled. Addie and I had heard somewhere that you could judge a true smile from a fake one by looking at a person’s eyes. Her mouth stretched, and her eyes crinkled, but it was still the fakest smile we’d ever seen.
“Who sent you here?” she said. “How’re they getting the footage?”
“The footage?” Our voice didn’t reflect the havoc the words wreaked on our insides. They shredded our lungs. Mashed our stomach. Our heart ran limping marathons, barreling and halting in our chest, our blood roaring in response.
“For the broadcast hijacking,” the woman said. When I just stared at her, unable to respond, her smile faded. “You really don’t know.”
It didn’t take long for them to wheel in a small television. The woman popped in the first tape. Pressed
play.
An image of the president of the Americas appeared. And beside him, Jenson. The volume was too low, at first, to hear what he was saying. The woman bent to turn it up. Then we made out the words.
He talked about the
hybrid danger,
and about uprisings on the eastern coast that were being dealt with. About the cure. He mentioned Jaime—