The Echo Room Read online

  He couldn’t very well hang back now and ruin the impression he’d given her, so he steeled himself and ducked under the wall.

  Three banks of cabinets greeted him and then all Rett’s attention went to the floor.

  “There’s a bunch of supplies in here,” he called.

  Nylon ropes and tinted goggles and compasses spilled out of overturned bins. Rett crouched to examine a tangle of nylon backpacks. All empty. He wondered what he should be looking for. Anything, anything. He grabbed at the nearest bin, suddenly seized with a familiar fear. Just grab anything! But this wasn’t Walling Home, and he and Bryn weren’t going to have to fight over the last pair of donated shoes, the last spare blanket.

  No, it’s worse, he thought. Or it might be. Trapped, and this was all they had.

  The bin held ponchos folded into their hoods. Useless, unless it was going to suddenly start raining inside. Which he actually wouldn’t mind, given how all he could think about was water. Rett pulled down a larger bin already sticking out from a cabinet. It held mysterious green tubes that he couldn’t puzzle out. And empty water bottles—a cruel joke.

  He opened another bin and cried out in surprise. The words DRINKING WATER were printed across a Mylar bag that he now realized was flat—empty. His spirits fell. He picked up the bag and was surprised to find it was wet.

  Someone just emptied this bag.

  Rett whirled around, half expecting to find another person crouching somewhere in the room with him.

  He was alone. Bryn hadn’t even followed him in.

  In fact, her muffled voice came from behind the half-lifted wall.

  Is she …

  … talking to someone?

  “Bryn?” he called.

  She went silent.

  Rett ducked back into the main room. Bryn wasn’t there.

  The light coming through the glass dome far overhead was brightening. He looked into the room where he’d first found Bryn. Only a desk with a pull-out stool, and an open door that gave a view of a toilet. No Bryn.

  She’s hiding from me, he decided, and something hard dropped into his stomach. Then he remembered the boot prints on the floor. Should I be hiding, too?

  He ducked back into the supply room and looked over the jumbled bins, the cabinet tops marked with boot prints …

  A ladder set over a bank of cabinets caught his eye. It led to a dark recess. Rett’s nerves tingled. Someone climbed up there, he thought, eyeing the boot prints at the ladder’s base. The darkness grew sentient, watchful.

  Rett grabbed the rungs with stiff fingers and forced himself to climb. He held his breath and eased his head through the opening in the ceiling, his heart pounding …

  Total darkness. The smell of old dust. A distant sound of … something sliding nearer? He froze, strained to hear better. His skin prickled.

  “Hello?” he said into the darkness, barely more than a whisper. He pulled himself up with shaking muscles and edged along the frame of a bed. “Is anyone here?” He wondered if the sound he’d heard before had been only the rasp of his own breathing.

  Would I be able to sense it? If someone were crouched in an inky corner, or unconscious on the floor—would he know? He jabbed a foot into the darkness, testing for any hidden forms.

  It touched something.

  The something gave.

  Rett yanked his foot back. His heartbeat thundered in his head.

  “Hello?” he croaked.

  He crept forward, reaching into the darkness.

  It was just another bed, a plastic mattress on a low frame. There’s no one here.

  No sooner had he thought it than the squeal of metal on metal rent the air.

  Someone was sliding a panel shut from below. The square of light that was the opening over the ladder disappeared.

  Rett’s heart flew into his throat. “Hey!” he called, his voice choked. He dropped to his knees and tugged on a metal handle attached to the sliding panel. The panel didn’t budge. “Hey!”

  He heaved at the handle. He was trapped inside a disused firewood box crawling with spiders. Pleading with the boy who’d shut him inside. “Hey, let me out!” He shrank back, caught in the cramped darkness, fearful of wasting the air he had left …

  Stop, he told himself, his breath coming in shuddering gasps. He made his muscles go loose, slowed his breathing. Then he tried the handle again, jerking it side-to-side, wriggling the panel free from whatever held it. He marveled again at the strength he seemed to have awakened within this strange place. At Walling, he was the skinny kid with more desperation than muscle, but here—one more wrenching tug, and he forced the panel open. Something clattered to the floor.

  Rett dropped onto the cabinet top and sucked in cool, dusty air. The thing that had been wedged against the panel lay on the floor: a long metal pole with a leather loop—a walking stick.

  Someone tried to trap me.

  Rett’s heart fluttered. He jumped down from the cabinet. Bent to pick up the metal pole—then froze with his hand locked around it. A smudge of green paint glowed on the metal.

  Glowing green paint. Rett’s gaze traveled to the bin of plastic tubes full of green liquid. Glow tubes? He picked one up and bent it until it cracked and its contents glowed.

  He imagined the tube breaking open, the liquid spilling, staining a pair of hands glowing green, like the branding of a comic-book villain.

  A thought sparked in Rett’s mind. It burned so hot he forgot to worry about who might lurk on the other side of the wall he now ducked under.

  At the end of the short hallway, the fire extinguisher still lay on the floor. Rett crouched to inspect what he had seen before but hadn’t registered: the extinguisher’s crown was covered in smudged green handprints. With Rett huddled over it, blocking most of the light, the handprints glowed.

  Rett stood and inspected the heavy bolt on the door. Red paint from the extinguisher marked its wrenched end.

  His pulse throbbed in his parched throat. Whoever had tried to trap him in the upper room had also jammed the only exit. Locked him in, as good as shutting a lid and clamping it down. But with no one to let him out when the air got stale.

  Or when the water ran out.

  He turned slowly, his mind buzzing.

  Then—a flash of white jumpsuit. Bryn darted across the main room and slipped through the open doorway at the far end of the place.

  Rett’s heart drummed. What is she doing?

  He looked back at the jammed lock on the heavy door behind him. What has she done?

  A new sound drifted out from the open doorway Bryn had gone through: the clatter of wood on metal, mixed with Bryn’s grunts of effort. Rett crept slowly toward it, drawn this time not by the hypnotic fascination he’d felt at the sound of her singing, but by dark curiosity.

  “Bryn,” he whispered, as if he were only saying it to himself, testing the idea that she might be the one who had trapped them in this strange prison. And then louder, “Bryn?”

  She appeared in the doorway, spectral in the white jumpsuit lit by the morning light.

  Rett’s heart stopped.

  At her sides, Bryn’s hands glowed green.

  Rett tried to swallow the lump rising in his throat, but his mouth was too dry. His mind raced. Why would she jam the door—why trap herself in here?

  “Did you—” Rett faltered. What had that clattering been? The sound of a door being forced open? “Did you find another way out?”

  Bryn slowly shook her head. “Another room.”

  Framed in the doorway, she seemed so slight, hardly large enough to fill out her jumpsuit. Rett remembered how startled she’d been when he’d first seen her, how ghostly and timid.

  She’s just scared, he told himself. That’s why she trapped me in that room. She’s not going to hurt me.

  But a long string of evidence from life in a boarding facility told him otherwise. Everyone in that place was the same—look out for yourself, even if it means hurting someone else.

>   It was what Rett had done, breaking that boy’s hand.

  “You found another room?” Rett could hardly grasp what she’d said. His heart was a jackhammer working on his rib cage. “Is there … anyone in there?”

  Bryn didn’t answer.

  “I think there’s someone else here,” Rett tried again. “And … I heard you talking to someone a minute ago.”

  Bryn tensed. “Someone else was here. That much is obvious.” Her hands curled at her sides. “What did you do to them?”

  Rett flinched. “I didn’t—” He’d been stupid to let her be scared of him, stupid not to try to explain that he hadn’t hurt anyone.

  But something didn’t make sense. “Who were you talking to?” he pressed. He took a step toward her. Her eyes widened with alarm.

  And then her gaze shot to the ladder in the open lounge to Rett’s right.

  Why?

  In Rett’s mind, he saw her standing in the dark room at the top of the ladder, the room that mirrored the one he’d been trapped in, and he remembered hearing the drawer snick shut.

  “What’s up there?” he asked Bryn. And then he thought of the muffled conversation he’d heard a few minutes ago, and he knew. “A phone?”

  Bryn’s wooden expression told him he was right.

  Rett went for the ladder.

  Flew up the rungs before she could make a move to stop him.

  Why would she hide this from me?

  Why did she trap us in here?

  The room above was so dark. A bed made a vague shape against one wall, a bunk bed against the other. Rett crept toward the bank of drawers, goaded on by a faintly glowing reflective strip on the floor. Already his eyes were adjusting to the low light.

  He slid open a drawer. Nothing. He felt inside to be sure.

  Opened another drawer. Empty.

  Maybe she didn’t hide anything. Maybe she’s just as harmless as I am.

  He yanked open a last drawer, expecting to find nothing.

  Instead: a gun.

  Gray against black darkness. His mind tried to reject the sight. The tube of the barrel, the angled lines of the grip and the guard. Strange proof that Bryn wasn’t harmless. He reached in to touch it, to know for sure that it was real, to calm the wild flutter in his chest—

  A voice ruptured the silence: “Rett.” Bryn’s voice—so sharp, so close behind him it pierced his skull and sent his mind spinning into blackness.

  2

  5:37 A.M.

  Someone is calling to me …

  Rett heard the voice now, calling his name. The boy who had him trapped in a wooden box. Rett … Rett … He heard jeering laughter as the boy sat on the lid. Rett couldn’t get out, no matter how hard he pounded—

  He woke with a gasp. His skull shrank around his throbbing brain. His eyes snapped open to find the rough walls of a firewood box replaced by scuffed metal glowing faintly in the morning light.

  Where am I? What happened to my head? A fog had settled over his brain.

  For a moment, he felt trapped inside his own comic-book creation, Epidemic X. He imagined the panel: Boy, seen from above through a skylight, curled on the floor of a metal room, blue with cold or early morning light. Alone.

  The grit on Rett’s skin told him he’d been outside. He stood, slowly. The pain only worsened, but he felt safer on his feet. I’m not alone, he thought, before he realized how he knew: in the next room, someone was singing.

  For a moment, it was his mother’s voice bringing him out of the fog of sleep, like when he was little and she’d sing about the trees outside the window, or the birds or the people passing, so that he’d finally get out of bed just to see what she saw.

  But of course it wasn’t his mother singing. The song was strange, eerie in this unfamiliar place:

  “One lonely lighthouse

  Two in a boat

  Three gulls circle

  Four clouds float…”

  Rett was sure he knew the song. Some playground rhyme the little kids at Walling sing? But there was only an empty space in his mind where the next line should have been, same as when he tried to remember what it felt like to be safe and warm in a place he could call home.

  The teasing familiarity of the song drew him toward an open doorway. Something told him the song was important, that he must listen to it. Two in a boat … he thought.

  Two in a boat, and one of them is hiding something.

  Ice slid down his spine. Where had that thought come from?

  “One lonely lighthouse

  Two in a boat—”

  The singing stopped.

  From where Rett leaned into the open doorway of a small office, he could make out the back of a figure in a white jumpsuit standing near a desk. For a moment it felt as if he were keeping an appointment with a ghost. He turned sideways to let in more of the faint light, and the figure turned. It wasn’t a ghost but a girl with short brown hair tucked behind her ears. At her feet was a gray shape, angular, a piece of discarded metal.

  “Who are you?” the girl asked sharply.

  Rett took half a step back. His head rang. He put a hand against the doorframe to steady himself and was surprised to find it lined with heavy rubber. “Do you know— What is this place?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I woke up and I was here. Although, I’m not actually convinced I’m awake.” The girl took an uncertain step toward him, closer to the light so that Rett could see pain etched on her face. “I’m Bryn. And now I feel like I’ve just introduced myself to a phantom in my own dream.”

  “I’m Rett. And I’ll take the role if you promise to wake up so we can get out of this.” He felt a twinge of concern at her pained movements. If her head hurts anywhere near as bad as mine does …

  Her gaze traveled to his abdomen. Rett looked down to see a wide smear of red-brown staining his jumpsuit.

  “Is that—blood?”

  5:45 A.M.

  Rett trembled in the cool darkness of what he guessed was a closet or a changing room and tried to fill the gaps in his memory. He’d been at Walling Home—where else?—and now he was here. It didn’t make any sense.

  He dumped his stained jumpsuit into a bin and kicked the bin out of sight. Blood. Someone else’s blood on his clothes. Not even his clothes, but the clothes he’d been wearing. His legs shook as he turned toward the doorway.

  He moved to where he could take another look at the heavy door just outside the closet. At the bolt jammed into the housing like it’d never come free again. At that weird logo painted onto the metal. Scatter 3. I’m in Scatter 3, whatever that means. He stood for a minute with his eyes closed, willing himself to remember what had happened.

  He hadn’t left the boarding facility in six years, since his mother had dropped him off with the hollow promise to return. Not her fault, he always told himself. She didn’t know how bad things would get.

  They’d watched the images together on the news, years ago: stunted stalks of wheat, shrunken ears of corn. Farmland in the heart of the country plagued by droughts and heat waves in turn.

  And then Rett’s mother had gotten sick, and she’d had to choose between doctors and food. Neither of which they could afford. Rett tried to be content with less to eat, tried not to notice his mother growing thinner, tried not to look at the images on TV of farm animals acting strangely, their eyes rolling as they twitched in their pens.

  And then it all got worse.

  Rett could still picture the moment his mother had told him she couldn’t take care of him anymore. They’d sat by the window near the trees she’d once sung about in early mornings to wake him, trees that had now gone black and stopped putting out leaves. She’d given him the last piece of bread for his toast and hadn’t eaten anything herself. When he finished, she’d said, For a little while, I need to go away to see the doctor. The clouds moved outside the window. Shadows passed over her blue dress and over her eyes, and he reached for her because he was afraid he was sinking into lightless ocean depths.
It was his fault, he’d done something wrong, had somehow made her sick, made her want to leave him. He wanted to tell her that he’d do better, but she said it for him: Soon everything will be better. And he vowed it would be, in his childish thoughts. Now he understood that better wasn’t something anyone could promise.

  His mother had gotten treatment at one of the government clinics, and the cancer had gone into remission. But she couldn’t come for him—she had no money left to take care of him. So she’d moved on to a government-funded workhouse. Same as so many other parents who’d gotten sick or gone hungry and had to send their kids off to places like Walling Home with false promises to return.

  Rett was still waiting.

  Because the cancer had returned—his mother needed more treatment.

  Needed it soon, and didn’t have the money to pay for it.

  She was sinking into ocean depths again, and the light grew dimmer every day.

  Rett wiped his sweaty palms on his new jumpsuit. Don’t think like that. He had a plan—he was going to help her.

  He just needed to figure out how to get out of here.

  Maybe there’s another door, or a phone, or—

  He licked his dry lips. I wish I had some water.

  First things first: he’d look around, figure out what this place was and if there was another way out.

  He went back to the main room. One of the striped walls had been lifted away to reveal a lounge filled by a sectional couch. The lounge was the last thing Rett had expected to see, unless he counted the terrified girl who’d come out of hiding and was now trying to pry up the wall at the other edge of the main room. “Here,” Rett said, moving to help her. “I use this trick to get into the shed after-hours, when my arms are full of food from the kitchen.”

  He popped the wall up with a kick and smiled at her, but she slinked away.

  “Maybe that’s why I’m here,” he said. “Punishment for nicking food.” The phrase experimental detention facility floated into his mind.

  “Are you some kind of thief?” she asked.

  “Only when I need to be.”

  He thought of other tight spots he’d gotten out of, into. Thought of things he’d stolen from closets, pantries, lockers: blankets, bread, clothes.