Echoes of Us (15 page)
Authors: Kat Zhang
I kept running. Adrenaline was friend and enemy, angel and demon. It shoved me off the institution grounds. Into the woods, the copses of barren trees.
I ran, and it snowed. It snowed, and I ran.
I ran, ran, ran.
Until I collapsed.
I couldn’t breathe. The cold air knifed up our lungs, tearing them to ribbons. They couldn’t expand.
I struggled onto our knees, gasping.
I did.
Eventually, it stopped snowing. The wind stilled. The ground was clear in patches, here under the skeletal canopy of the trees. I tried to keep to the barer parts, hoping the snowfall earlier had buried our footprints.
It was so cold. Our palms and cheeks burned. Our feet went numb.
I pushed onward. Through the trees. Downhill. That was the only direction I knew to go.
The moon was half-full, egg-yolk yellow in a dark sky.
I walked until our legs gave out. There was no way to know how far I was from civilization. If I was even headed in the right direction. Down was down, but population was sparse here around Hahns.
I remembered the story Peter had told us about the attempted rescue in July. Diane and the six children she’d tried to save had crashed off the side of the road. Only four kids had made it to the town below, and it had taken them what, ten hours? Ten hours, and it had been summer.
I collapsed underneath a tree. Our eyes were closed before I could think anything about it. I forced them open again. I knew enough about hypothermia to know falling asleep didn’t help.
But I had to rest. At the very least, I had to wait until daylight. I’d been walking for hours already, moving on autopilot, which worked well enough when the only thing I had to do was
run, run away
. But now I needed to plot a course. I had to figure out which direction to go, where I could find the nearest town.
I needed sleep. But to sleep, I needed warmth. I couldn’t risk lying down and never getting up again.
I gathered branches from the trees, as dry as I could find, then cleared a bit of the ground, digging until I hit dry dirt. I relied half on memories of Dad’s hands on our camping trips, and half on more recent recollections of Lyle’s novels, on his overeager explanations of fire building while Addie and I tried to do our homework.
Joy was seeing the first sparks fly off the end of the spindle. Feeding the fire until it crackled and flickered, until I could tug the damp slippers from our feet and lay them out to dry. Joy was slowly regaining feeling in our toes, seeing the color bleed back into them, and to our fingers. I thawed in the glow of the flames.
I
found the main road in the morning, mostly through luck. That, and the almost unearthly silence that muffled the woods. It was so quiet that when the cars did start passing by, I heard them long before I saw them.
I needed to stay by the road. It was my best shot at finding civilization before night fell again. But staying close to the road meant a higher chance of being spotted.
I trekked on. Soon, our face was completely numb again, our legs itching with the cold. Our slippers, made for smooth institution floors, started to wear through. I walked with a limp, trying to avoid the growing hole near the heel of the left slipper. Our right ankle, the one we’d injured at Powatt, ached deep in the bone.
Each time I heard a car coming, I melted deeper into the woods until the vehicle passed. Most seemed to be headed downhill, but a few were going up, toward the institution. Had the woman finally alerted Jenson?
For the first time in a long time, I was hungry. Compared to the cold and the exhaustion, it was the least of my worries. But as the hours wore on, the hunger manifested itself as a sharp pain right under our breastbone, as a weakness in our legs, a cloudiness in our head.
I walked until I heard the most beautiful sound in the world.
Traffic.
I recognized the town. We’d passed through it when we first drove to Hahns. Addie and I had wondered if this was the same place those four kids had shown up after the July breakout, bloody and wild-eyed.
I wasn’t bloody, but I was freezing. And I had no money, no way to make so much as a phone call. I couldn’t walk into a store and ask to borrow their phone. People here undoubtedly remembered what had happened in the summer. They might recognize Hahns’s uniform.
The sun was low again, dyeing the snow a rich yellow as it sank over the rooftops. I lingered at the edge of the trees. Hesitant, despite everything, to leave the woods behind.
I muttered. Then laughed.
The laughter disappeared as swiftly as it had come. I’d be even more a criminal by the time this was all over. I needed clothes, and food. That was just to start.
Luckily, it was too cold for most people to just be hanging around. I waited until there weren’t any cars passing, then darted out from the trees and ducked behind a building. A restaurant. I breathed in the heady smell of food like it could actually fill our stomach.
The restaurant’s back door creaked open.
I dove behind the trash bins. A steady stream of noise came from inside the restaurant: the low roar of voices, the clink of glasses. A television blared some kind of sports game.
Slowly, I peeked around the side of the bins. The girl in the doorway buttoned up her coat over her waitressing uniform and shivered, setting out across the parking lot.
I let our blanket fall to the ground. Caught the door just before it closed.
If I was going to steal food without being noticed, a darkened, noisy restaurant might be the best place to do it.
The place was large enough for no one to notice as I snuck in the back door. A large bar took up the front, and a crowd had gathered there to watch a football game. The dining area was emptier, with a few tables, and fewer booths. Despite the setting sun, it was still a little early for the dinner crowd.
A table near the back was deserted, but hadn’t been cleared yet. A good quarter of a sandwich remained, oozing half-solidified cheese. I wrapped it up in the red-and-white checkered wax paper and held it by our side before swiping the quarters that had been left as a tip.
One of the teams scored a goal. The group gathered around the bar exploded in cheers. Emboldened by their lack of attention, I snuck a little farther from the back of the restaurant.
Someone had left their coat hanging on their chair. I looked around. Everyone who wasn’t deep in conversation seemed fixated on the football game, or on their meal. I grabbed the coat, retreating quickly to the shadows.
It was far too large, but better than nothing. I’d rather look like a girl who’d borrowed her boyfriend’s jacket than one escaped from a mental institution.
There was more leftover food on the tables, but I didn’t want to risk it. The coat’s owner might come back at any moment. I hurried for the back door, slipped through, and didn’t stop moving until I’d left the restaurant far behind.
It didn’t take long to find a pay phone, even in such a tiny town. It was near a main square, though, and I hesitated before approaching.
A man near the pay phone complained about snow getting into his boots. Two women chattered excitedly about a trail they’d skied earlier today. A little boy begged his mother for spending money. Christmas trimmings had already gone up, the storefronts festooned with loops of evergreen and bright red bows.
Sitting in the institution, I’d forgotten about things like Christmas decorations.
I wrapped the coat tighter around our shoulders and hurried into the phone booth. My stolen quarters clinked into the slot.
The digits to Henri’s satphone had run through my mind so many times, it felt almost dreamlike to actually input them.
We’re coming
, Ryan had carved on the new ring. But he would think me still at Hahns. I couldn’t stay anywhere near the institution—not when police could canvass this entire town in a matter of hours.
I had to contact him. But the phone blared an error noise that slashed apart all my hopes. The satphone wasn’t connected, or wasn’t working. Ryan still hadn’t fixed it.
Doubt crept cold fingers up my insides. Maybe I’d gotten the number wrong. It had been so long, and it wasn’t impossible that some night at Hahns, I’d switched a number around in my mind.
If Addie were here, I could ask her. Could double-check.
But she wasn’t.
I started to hang up.
Heard the crunch of shoes against snow.
And whirled around, fingers tight around the phone, to face whoever had snuck up behind us.
H
is pale eyes widened.
We stared at each other. I gripped the phone like a weapon.
I was dreaming. I was still freezing up in the woods, or back in the cell at Hahns, dreaming about the impossibility of this moment.
Then he grinned. A match strike in the snow. It lit me from the inside out. I dropped the phone and threw our arms around him.
Because I wasn’t dreaming. And it was Jackson.
“Eva,” he said quietly. It wasn’t a question but an acknowledgment. He pulled back, held me at arm’s length so he could study me. “Where’s Marion? Did she get you out? I—”
I shook our head, filled to bursting with questions of my own. “The other girls at the institution helped me. It’s a long story. But we can’t stay here. The woman who runs Hahns—she’s going to come looking for me.” I glanced at the evening crowd outside the phone booth. “I have to leave town.”
“Lucky you, then,” Jackson said with a grin, “running into me.”
I lingered near the phone booth while Jackson called someone named Ben. Their conversation was brief: “Yes, I found her—no, you need to come right now—we’ll be by the ball field.”
He hung up and turned back to me. His hair was even longer now. Almost to his shoulders, and darker than I remembered it. His skin, on the other hand, looked paler. There was a fatigue that hung about him, even when he was smiling.
“Who’s Ben?” I asked.
“Also a long story. Come on. Let’s go someplace more secluded.”
I followed him to a chained-up baseball field at the edge of town. Someone—Jackson himself?—had smashed the padlock on the abandoned bathroom door.
Jackson hesitated as I walked in after him. “It’s gross, I know.”
I looked around. A ratty blanket covered most of the space between the stalls and the sink. A sleeping bag lay on top. “Actually, as far as public bathrooms go, this is pretty good.”
“Yeah, the real five-star establishment of the toilet world.” He grinned. “There’s no heating, of course. But the walls and roof are nice.”
The initial overwhelming relief at seeing Jackson had faded enough to allow other emotions to bleed through. For me to remember how our lives had been the last time we’d seen each other.
During those early days in Anchoit, Jackson had been one of our few connections with the outside world. But that was all
before
. Now I couldn’t disentangle Jackson from Addie’s feelings for him, and Sabine’s betrayal, and Powatt.
“Eva?”
Our head snapped up. I’d forgotten the intensity of his stare. The way he’d used to study us. Or Addie, I suppose. I fought not to look away.
“Who brought you here?” I asked.
“No one,” he said. “Vince and I shook off Marion’s friends about a week ago. They wouldn’t come here. They said they were bringing me to her, and they wouldn’t consider anything else.”
“You knew I was at Hahns.”
“Only because I overheard Marion’s friends talking about it.” Jackson made sure I was looking at him before continuing. His eyes were solemn. “When she told me she wanted to help me, she didn’t say anything about a deal. I had no idea about her sending you into Hahns—about the whole deal with the footage—until I got out.”
I fidgeted with the ring around our finger. Felt the scratch of the engraving underneath the band. In dealing with the aftermath, I hadn’t had time to properly think about Marion’s betrayal. Because that was what it was, wasn’t it? She had to have realized what she was doing when she released that footage.
And Ryan? The others?
My silence must have made Jackson uncomfortable. As always, when he was uncomfortable, he started talking. “I haven’t been here long. They didn’t even get me out until ten days ago—then I had to get
here
, and—”
I made myself smile. “What was your plan? Come barging into the institution by yourself and save me?”
When he smiled, too, I realized why my own had felt so familiar—it was the kind of smile Jackson and Vince wore so often. The unflinching smile that didn’t care for propriety, or circumstance. The kind that said,
Given the choice to sink or swim, we chose to swim
.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “are you making fun of my plans? You, the one who ran into a building you
knew
was going to blow up?”
God, it felt good to laugh. It felt strange to laugh. I almost pointed it out to Addie, and then I remembered, and my laughter turned rancid in our throat.
“There was no real plan,” he admitted. “All I knew was I had to come find you and Addie.” It was the first time he’d spoken her name. The syllables seemed to crackle in the cold air. He cleared his throat. “But it seems like you did fine all by yourself.”
“Hardly,” I said quietly. I told him about Bridget and the other girls. What they’d done, and what I’d done in leaving them behind. I told him about the Plum-blouse Lady who came to our room day after day to demand information. About the experiments she was running, and the threats she made.
I didn’t tell him about the effects of our drug-induced delirium. Addie’s absence.
I couldn’t.
Jackson filled me in on the world outside Hahns’s walls. He hadn’t been free yet when Marion’s first two broadcasts hit the waves, but he’d seen and heard enough since then to know the impact they’d made.
