Echoes of Us (30 page)

“It’s Eva,” I said quietly.

Unlike Jenson, he did react to my correction. But he suppressed it to just the slightest tightening of his mouth.

Addie and I had been conditioned to find the sight of him comforting. Assuring. Even as I looked at him now, I saw a certain grandfatherly quality to his face. He had a son, I knew, a young man who was probably looking to join politics himself.

If things went well, he might even become the next president. The role had passed from uncle to nephew the last time.

“Eva,” he amended.

“Where’s Jaime?” I said. My interruption seemed to surprise him, but like his reaction to my name, he bit it down. I supposed when you’d been in such a public office for so long, you got good at remaining outwardly calm.

“He’s fine,” he said. “You don’t need to worry about him.”

I couldn’t help my laughter. “Someone tried to kill him today.”

“That’s been taken care of.” But for the first time, he seemed uncomfortable.

I found myself saying, “But next time? You can’t be sure there won’t be a next time. Jenson had his secrets. Who else in this administration has an agenda they’re not telling you about?”

“Everyone,” he said with a slight smile. “I’m not naive, I assure you. This administration wasn’t built out of loyalty to me.”

His ready admittance surprised us.

Addie said hesitantly. I wasn’t sure what that meant for us. For this conversation.

President Loyde settled into one of the chairs across from us. I fought the urge to back away.

“I’ve been hearing about you for a while, Eva,” he said. “Ever since that stunt you pulled at Powatt.”

“It wasn’t a stunt,” I said automatically. “And we didn’t mean to hurt anyone. We just—”

“I meant how you ran into the building to warn everyone.” His voice was surprisingly gentle. I didn’t trust it. I couldn’t. “It was a brave thing to do. Especially for people you don’t even like.”

I wasn’t sure how to respond to that. “That’s not what all the broadcasts said. On the news, I was just a monster.”

“I wasn’t in control of the news.” He shrugged, an almost cavalier motion. Then he grew serious again. “If I had been, perhaps I would have made the same decision. We need villains, Eva. Especially when the country is already in turmoil. Especially when you’re trying to keep control.”

“But it’s all lies.” I couldn’t keep the fierceness from our voice, however much I recognized that I should be careful. I could feel Addie biting back a warning. “You can’t support a country on lies. Jenson fell because he was caught in one. And right now, this whole government is full of them. The truth behind the vaccinations—all this about the rest of the world being shattered and ashes . . . about hybrids being mentally unstable . . . maybe it’s lasted for this many decades, but it won’t last forever. With the way things are going, it might not last another year.” I’d run out of breath. Had to pause to inhale.

And realized that he was actually listening to me. Actually looking at me and taking in my words, and maybe they were nothing new to him—certainly nothing he hadn’t considered himself. But he was still listening.

It was a strange feeling. A year ago, I’d been utterly voiceless. Invisible. A ghost.

My words, which once echoed no further than the space between my mind and Addie’s, now had the ear of the most powerful man in the country.

“I only have so many choices.” He spoke slowly, calmly. “And all of them come with consequences.”

“Help us,” I whispered. “Help the hybrids, and you’ll have our loyalty forever. And maybe we’re not a huge part of the population, but we’re not insignificant, either—”

He smiled wryly. “I’ve come to see that.”

“And you’ll earn the respect of the foreign countries, too,” I said. “They’ll see you as an ally, not an enemy.”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” he mused. “But I can believe they’ll like me better than my predecessor.”

I straightened in our chair. Made sure to look him right in the eye. “You’ll go down in history as the man who brought truth to the American people. Not just another liar. Another puppet who might, one day, trip over his own lines.”

He was still smiling by the time I finished. “You have a way with words, you know. And certainly, a passion behind them.”

I said, “I appreciate the ability to speak.”

After a long moment, he nodded. He stood, and we remained seated, staring up at him. What did this mean? What had any of this meant?

“So what’s going to happen?” I said, and for the first time, he laughed. A low, quiet laugh, but a laugh all the same.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But something different. Something like nothing that’s happened before.”

I didn’t know what to do with my sudden hope. How to control it.

“You’ll have to stay with us for a little while, I’m afraid,” he said. “But I’ll have you and Jaime put together. So you won’t be alone.”

“I’d like that,” I said. “I’d like that a lot—thank you. But . . . I’m not alone.”

“No, I suppose you never are.” His brows knit, then softened again. Something like a smile touched his lips. “Right now, I wonder if I’m jealous.”

He turned, as if to make for the door, but I called out, “Wait—how did the old president die? It wasn’t hybrids.”

“Two days before your vigil, he had a stroke,” President Loyde said. “He was in a coma—recovery uncertain. Only a few people knew. It was bad timing for a weakened president. The story within the administration was that he’d simply gotten a bad case of the flu. After he died, the planned story was that a hybrid had poisoned him through his saline drip.” He seemed lost in thought a moment. “What did he really die of? Stress. Age. Life.”

“Is that what you were going to tell the crowd today?” I said.

He was quiet a moment. Then shook his head. “No,” he said slowly. “It wasn’t.”

He turned, once again, to go. I stopped him a second time. “Are we in the Capitol building?”

His eyebrows raised. “Yes, we are. This is a corner of the eastern wing. I suppose no one really pays much attention to it. Not much historical significance.” He suddenly smiled a little. “Until now.”

H
e kept his promise about Jaime, and for a while, that was enough to keep us happy. We were housed somewhere in the city—the van they piled us into didn’t allow much in the way of sightseeing, but we didn’t drive very long.

There, we were allowed to live in what basically amounted to the world’s most comfortable prison. Jaime told us he’d been kept under similar circumstances for the past few months. Only they’d moved him from place to place, surrounded him with specialists who worked him through physical therapy, tried to coach his speech. We were relieved there’d been no more surgeries.

They let us know nothing about the outside world. We were allowed no television, no radio, no telephones. We weren’t even allowed on the first floor, and all the windows on the second were made with reinforced glass, in addition to being alarmed.

We stayed there a little more than two weeks. Later, the others would fill us in on the missing days. How the uproar about the attackers took up most of the public consciousness at first—who they were, what they’d wanted. Eventually, they’d been tied back to Jenson. Blaming Jenson for the attempted attack gave the people someone to hate and fear other than the hybrids. And it paved the way for the president to start blaming him for other things as well—the overblown reports of hybrid crime. The exaggerated stories about Addie and me, and Peter’s underground.

Public belief is at once a powerful and delicate thing. From what we heard, the president knew it. He worked carefully, but quickly in this liminal time when his administration was still new, and could be separated from the previous one.

A few weeks into the new year, he told the country the truth about the rest of the world. We were released on the same day. In the chaos, no one noticed a girl and boy ushered back into the city streets. They sent a guard with us. For our own protection, they said, however obvious their true intentions were. For the moment, it hardly mattered. All we cared about were the looks on our family’s faces when they met us at the door. The way Hally hugged us and wouldn’t let go.

The way Ryan kissed me later, when we were alone, and it was night, and the stars looked like a map of possibilities above us.

Emalia contacted us on a still Saturday morning, tripping over words in her rush to say she was in Renwert, a few hours away—yes, she and Sophie were fine, no, she didn’t want us to come get her; she’d meet us someplace in the middle.

She sounded different than when we’d last known her. I wondered if I’d still recognize in her the willowy woman who’d dressed in pastels and looked like the dawn. Perhaps Addie and I had never given her enough credit beneath the appearances, and the woman who returned to us, months after she left that day to send Henri off, would be the same person. Just peeled back to her core.

Dr. Lyanne brought her back to us, and we greeted them with bone-crushing hugs. She seemed a little distant, a little lost. Dr. Lyanne must have told her about Peter and Warren’s passing during the drive here.

“Go upstairs,” Dr. Lyanne said, extracting her from the rabble of people who wanted to see her. “When was the last time you properly slept?”

Emalia gave a faint, trilling laugh. “Ages.”

By the time the biggest changes came, though, Addie and I had left what we hoped was the last safe house we’d ever have to live in. Our family hadn’t decided where we wanted to stay yet, though we knew we didn’t want to return to Lupside. We’d just gotten back in touch with Mr. and Mrs. Mullan, and were waiting for them to fly in to meet us, when the news broke.

We’d known it was coming. The news had covered little else but the talks leading up to the decision. But now, finally, it was official.

Tomorrow, the hybrid institutionalization system in the Americas would be obsolete.

“It won’t change everything,” Devon said. We’d gathered in front of the television to watch President Loyde announce it in front of the Capitol. It felt utterly
right
to be here, the six of us together, for this moment. Ryan and Devon. Hally and Lissa. A year ago, it had been the six of us together, too. “But—”

“It’s a start,” Hally said.

And Devon smiled.

Addie said. There was a note of something like wonder in her voice.

I could imagine it. The first steps out into a warming world. The children who’d been locked away for months, and the ones who’d managed, through sheer tenacity, to survive for years.

What was more, I could imagine the simultaneous sigh of relief from the hundreds—thousands—of children around the country who were approaching their tenth birthday and hadn’t yet settled. The dissolution of the institutionalization system wouldn’t save them from the fear and contempt of their peers, the sideways looks from their teachers, maybe even the growing hesitance of their own parents. But at the very least, it would save them from being ripped from home and shut up in concrete boxes, to languish like refuse until expiration.

The other things—the tolerance, the fading of the hatred and the fear—would come later. I believed in that.

T
here were traces of our old house in our new one. Our parents hadn’t taken much when they left Lupside, but some of what wasn’t sold had been put in storage, so the strawberry-patterned curtains went up in the kitchen windows, the mantelpiece filled up again with our old pictures, and Lyle, digging through the cardboard boxes, unearthed a few of his favorite books.

Addie said once, when we were still moving in.

I liked the new house, with its small but neat lawn. The worn stones of the walkway. The way our room faced east and lit up in the morning.

I liked how the Mullans didn’t live too far away to visit. That Jackson and Vince knew where they’d be able to find us, when they were finished traveling the country a bit—enjoying their new freedom. That Dr. Lyanne and Jaime and Emalia and Kitty and Henri all knew our number. That speaking with them was as easy as picking up the phone.

I liked the fact that we were only a few miles from the coast. Some mornings, we spent hours at the edge of the water, waiting for it to get warm enough for swimming. Our parents had bought us a paint set, a sort of late birthday and Christmas present bundled together. Addie took the kit to the beach, and filled our bedroom wall with canvasses of the waves. Of squawking seagulls, and abandoned sand castles, and children digging for shells.

I wondered, sometimes, about Sabine. Cordelia. Christoph. If they’d managed to find peace, wherever they’d ended up. If they’d ever found home again.

It was a while before Addie and I returned to school, but by then, we’d managed to catch up with the rest of our class, so we started junior year in the fall with a school full of people who at once knew and didn’t know who we were.

President Loyde made history as the first American president to make an official trip overseas since the start of the Great Wars nearly a century ago.

Addie and I made a few new friends at school.

There was talk that we might travel one day, too. Henri wanted us to come visit him, and it was no secret that Addie and I going overseas would be seen as more than just a private affair. But for the moment, nothing was certain, and we were happy to stay where we were. There would be time for traveling in the future. There would be time for so many things. Anything we wanted.

“Eva?” Mom said one afternoon as Addie and I arrived home. Lyle, who’d just started middle school, wouldn’t be home for another few hours.

“Yeah?” I called back, and she appeared in the hall with the cordless phone.

“It’s for you.” She looked hesitant. Ryan or Hally called frequently enough, asking for me. But judging from her expression, it was neither of them.

Who is it?
I mouthed as she handed us the phone.