The Echo Room Read online

  Rett agonized: Clean drinking water, or shelter and supplies? “Wait—there’s rope in the room with all the supplies. What if one of us waits up here, and the other goes down to get the rope? We throw the rope up here, tie it off, and then we can go down to the river and still have a way to climb back into the shelter.”

  Bryn squinted at the falling water level and then at the rungs, calculating. “Fine.” She eased herself down onto the ledge inside the shelter.

  Rett stiffened. He’d been planning to be the one to go back into the shelter. He didn’t like the idea of being stuck up here with no way to get back inside. What if Bryn didn’t come back with a rope?

  But Bryn jumped down into the water before he could protest. He had a feeling she knew what he was thinking and didn’t want to wait to argue it out with him.

  “You’ll get the rope?” he called down after she surfaced.

  She swiped water off her face. After a moment in which Rett wondered if she’d heard him, she finally nodded.

  Rett watched the water line sink lower. Can I really trust her?

  He thought of how she edged away from him every time he came near. How the only emotion she didn’t bother masking from him was suspicion.

  He shivered in the cold rain. The pale wasteland stretched out in all directions, a graveyard of dust.

  How am I supposed to trust someone who doesn’t trust me?

  His wet boots squelched as he scrambled down onto the ledge, and before he could think better of it, he slid into the water.

  Bryn gave him her hollow stare when he surfaced. He looked away, and they tread water in silence.

  When the water had gotten down to just a few feet, Bryn wasted no time in finding the pack.

  “The drinking water’s still okay, at least,” Rett said. “But there’s only a few pouches of it.”

  Bryn didn’t seem interested in the Mylar pouches. She fished out one of the waterlogged phones and turned without a word to dive under the half-lifted wall into the supply room.

  “What’re you doing?” Rett followed her. When he came up, she was considering plugging a power cord into a wall socket. “Are you crazy?” He grabbed the cord out of her hand. “That phone won’t work anyway. It’s not worth getting fried.”

  She spun to face him. “You don’t want them to work. You ruined them on purpose and now there’s no way to call for help.”

  Rett gaped at her. “Why would I do that? I don’t want to be stuck here any more than you do.”

  The water had vanished through drains along the baseboards. Rett felt he’d never get the stink of sulfur out of his nose. The taste of it lingered in his mouth.

  “I swear, Bryn. I didn’t do it on purpose. I’m not trying to keep us trapped here.”

  Bryn slumped against the cabinet. The sound of rain hitting the metal floor of the main area filled up the room. Rett hunched over the cabinet, listening. It could have been the sound of his nerves drumming.

  “You don’t remember anything?” Bryn asked. “About how we got here?”

  Rett was about to say no. But then the strangest thing happened. He did remember something.

  He remembered Bryn.

  Sunlight behind her, his name on her lips. Something spilling out of her pockets. Daisies?

  He remembered holding her hand.

  Impossible. They’d been at Walling together, but they hadn’t been friends, hadn’t really known each other.

  And yet he remembered the feel of her palm against his. A line of freckles along the back of her hand like a dusting of cinnamon.

  He reached for her hand now, to see if the memory could be true, if he would find a familiar speckling across her skin.

  He saw only the bandage she had used to bind her cut palm.

  She pulled her hand out of his grip, frowning in confusion.

  “I … I don’t remember anything,” Rett said, and hoped she didn’t take his strained voice as evidence that he was lying.

  Bryn’s gaze went to the scar over his ear. She reached as if to touch it, but her fingers only brushed his hair. “Would you tell me if you did remember?” she asked him.

  Rett’s scalp tingled. He could think only of Bryn’s hand hovering near his ear, and then she stepped away. “Yes,” he said. “I’d tell you.”

  Bryn’s arm twitched like she might reach for him again. But she turned away instead.

  “Would you tell me?” Rett asked.

  She kept her back to him. A coldness settled around Rett’s spine. “We have to help each other. We’re all alone out here.”

  “Is that why you didn’t wait up on the roof for me to get the rope?” Bryn spun to face him, eyes flashing. “Is that why you’ve been hiding something from me since we woke up in this place?”

  Rett’s mouth went dry. He looked down at his sodden boots.

  “Whose boots are those?” Bryn asked. “Who did you take them from?”

  His thoughts raced. He tried to think of some way to explain it all to her. But he could only think of how she was inching away from him even now, ready to bolt. Ready to believe he had done something terrible and would again. “They were in the closet. I swear. I didn’t take them from anyone.” It wasn’t a lie, at least. “There’s no one else here.” His throat tightened at that last bit. Did she hear it in his voice?

  They stood for a long moment, considering each other.

  And then: a sound like thunder.

  Someone was banging on the door.

  6:51 A.M.

  Rett stood frozen, his heart hammering. The room swayed. His vision narrowed …

  “What’s that?” Bryn asked, calling Rett back to the moment.

  The banging came again. Bam-bam-bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Someone was pounding on the main door.

  “Someone else is here,” Bryn said in a low voice. She ducked out of the supply room.

  “Wait, Bryn.” Rett tried not to slip on the wet floor as he followed her out.

  The banging had stopped. But fearful thoughts lingered in Rett’s mind: blood on his clothes, and someone waiting outside with a plot for retribution.

  Bryn crept toward the bolted door.

  “Bryn…” Rett whispered.

  “It could be someone here to help us.”

  All of Rett’s muscles were tight with alarm. “I don’t think it is.”

  She went to the door, and Rett told himself, It’s not going to open anyway.

  He was right. Bryn tugged at the bolt, but it seemed as stuck as ever.

  Bam-bam-bam.

  Bryn jumped back from the door as the banging sounded again. “Someone wants in here,” she said to Rett.

  Rett glanced up at the skylight. They had left it open. Rain fell in to patter on the wet floor. He thought of those rungs bolted to the side of the building.

  Bryn seemed to read his mind. She came to stand under the skylight, lifted her face to the rain. “We’re in here!” she shouted.

  “Bryn, no!” Rett pulled at her arm, but she jerked away.

  “Come up to the roof!” she called.

  Rett backed away on shaking legs, gaze trained on the skylight. He tried to reassure himself: Whoever’s out there can get in, but they can’t get down. It was a long drop without any water to break the fall.

  Still, they might have some rope. Like the coils of it stashed in the storage room.

  Or a gun. Rett turned toward the office.

  “Where are you going?” Bryn asked.

  Rett slipped through the doorway and went to the desk. Just in case, he told himself as he pulled open the drawer where he’d left the gun.

  The drawer was empty.

  He pulled open the other drawer. Empty.

  He turned slowly toward the main room. “Where’s the gun, Bryn?”

  The banging on the bolted door stopped abruptly. From outside came a scream that shattered Rett’s nerves.

  Bryn whirled to face the door. Rett turned into stone. Fear coursed through him as he strained to hear what was
going on outside.

  Then, a curious noise: a tapping on the walls. Scritch scratch … Something scraped over the building’s metal shell. Rett looked up to the open skylight. The rungs, he thought. Someone’s climbing them.

  “Bryn, move!” he shouted.

  A black shadow bloomed into sight, blocking the light from above. It squirmed through the opening, a huge glistening bulb bristling with antennae. Rett could hardly make sense of what he saw: the swing of a jointed leg, the swipe of a claw. The creature shrieked—

  No, it was Bryn, screaming as the writhing creature pulled its segmented body through the skylight and crashed onto the wet floor between her and Rett.

  “Bryn!” Rett screamed, hot panic coursing through his veins.

  The creature lurched to its feet, an impossibly enormous insect with long serrated mandibles the length of Rett’s arm. It swiped at the slippery floor with black talons and lunged for Bryn.

  Something inside of Rett flailed for escape. His mind seemed to be reaching, reaching for invisible rescue. And then, before Rett could make sense of it, he was pulled into blackness.

  4

  4:38 A.M.

  Rett stumbled forward and fell to his knees in cold dirt. A strangled noise escaped from his throat. Bryn—

  He scrambled to his feet. He was alone in a dark hollow. Above him in the sky a green flame flexed.

  Bryn—

  The green light shimmered over the dark angles of buttes and canyons. All was silent.

  But Rett remembered: he and Bryn had been inside a shelter, and something had come down through the skylight. Rett still heard in his mind the sound of its scythe-like feet scratching over the metal floor, Bryn screaming.

  The humped silhouette of the metal shelter loomed at the top of a slope. Rett hurried toward it, picturing Bryn on the rain-slicked floor, the creature over her …

  Rett stopped. Something didn’t make sense. Why is it so dark out here? It had been morning. Now it was night. What happened to my boots? Grit clung to his bare feet.

  He peered up at the shelter again. Scatter 3, he thought, remembering the marking he’d found on the inside of the door. Is Bryn really in there?

  Then he remembered something else: while he and Bryn had been inside, someone had been outside, pounding on the door. Rett whipped around, but there was only a lonely boulder interrupting the empty landscape. Still, someone might be out there, at the edge of the darkness.

  Get inside, he told himself. He turned back for Scatter 3.

  5:37 A.M.

  Someone is calling to me …

  Someone is …

  Screaming.

  Rett woke to a crushing headache and a strange string of thoughts. He had the faint impression he had been outside—his hands were cold and grimy. But he couldn’t remember much beyond that except … Someone was screaming.

  A swell of fear overtook him and he scrambled to his feet. For a moment, the room before him was slick with rain, and a dark form fell from the ceiling—

  He looked up. Blue morning light filtered in through a skylight.

  A nightmare, he decided. That was just a nightmare.

  The metal room glowed faintly in the morning light, underwater-blue. From another room came the sound of singing. Rett closed his eyes, drinking in the hypnotic tune. The words brought a strange scene to mind: a lighthouse topped by a tattered flag, a piece of metal hidden in a boat, fleshy black bulbs circling overhead …

  Whatever you do, don’t open that skylight, Rett told himself. He shook away the nightmare images.

  Then he looked down and saw the blood on his clothes.

  5:47 A.M.

  He emerged from a changing room, dressed in a clean jumpsuit and a pair of boots, shaking with nerves and thirst and pain. What am I doing here? He glanced again at the bolted door. Locked, trapped. The logo on the door caught his eye. Jagged strokes like an uneven skyline. He had a sudden vision of ragged cliffs raked over by the massive hand of weather. Where? A place seen in a dream—no place he had been.

  He turned back to the room he had first awakened in and was surprised to find a wall had been lifted away. And sitting on a long couch, like a figure in a diorama, was a girl. Slender frame inside a baggy jumpsuit, large hazel eyes bright against a dirt-streaked face. She folded herself even smaller in the tight space. Rett agreed with the sentiment. “It’s not safe here,” he said, his voice an unfamiliar croak. “We need to get out.”

  She nodded slowly and moved from the couch to the middle of the main room. Blue light from above tinted her suit, her skin, so that she seemed to be surfacing from a darker place. Rett thought, Take me with you.

  The girl dragged her gaze to the glowing skylight overhead. “Something’s coming for us.”

  Rett tensed as he pictured again a black, fleshy form falling from above. “Do you know what it is—what’s out there?”

  “No.” The girl moved her gaze to an open doorway. “But there’s a gun.”

  Rett’s scalp prickled. “A gun?”

  He crept to the doorway. The gun lay on the floor, a faint gleam of gray in the dim light. Rett regarded it for a long moment, thinking he was the wrong person to be here, to be expected to do anything like shoot a gun. But the girl was right—something was coming for them. He picked up the gun. It was cold against his palm and not as reassuring as he needed it to be. “We might need this later,” he said as she came into the room behind him. He spotted a desk against the wall and shut the gun in a drawer.

  As the drawer slid shut, he realized something: he had known about the gun even before he had seen it, even before the girl had told him. A lighthouse topped by a tattered flag, a piece of metal hidden in a boat …

  “What’s wrong?” the girl asked, her voice echoing faintly in the small space so that the question seemed to reverberate in Rett’s head. What’s wrong, what’s wrong?

  Something’s very wrong here, Rett thought.

  He turned to study her, still frowning in thought. He’d known about the gun because of the song she’d been singing. One lonely lighthouse, two in a boat …

  A memory tickled at the back of his mind. “I know you from somewhere,” he said to the girl. “What’s your name?”

  She tipped her head to one side, curious, or trying to take him in from a new angle to study him better.

  And what do you see? Rett asked silently. Someone familiar? Or just a scrawny stranger trying not to shake with fear at the visions in his head?

  Finally she said, “I’m Bryn.”

  “Bryn…?”

  “Bryn Ward,” she said quietly.

  “Are you a ward at Walling Home?”

  Surprise flickered in her eyes. “Is that a lucky guess, or have we met before?”

  “I’m … not sure. I’m from Walling, too. We must have been sent here together.” It wasn’t exactly comforting to know she was from Walling. Some of the boarders helped each other—played lookout, warned each other about moldy food and the moods of the staff. But sometimes, perfectly nice kids ratted you out for skipping chore rotation, or cleared out your stash of pilfered food. And the not-so-nice ones, the ones you thought might be useful to have around, decided your face was the perfect canvas for their sudden, violent art.

  Rett had figured it out a long time ago: you couldn’t really know who to trust. He’d learned that at age ten, when an older boy, Garrick, told him about a disused firewood box on the edge of Walling’s property that made the perfect place to watch shooting stars in secret. And then Garrick had come along and shut the lid with Rett inside. The stars had trailed above, unseen, while Rett imagined them behind his eyelids and tried not to waste his breath on pleading.

  You choose who to trust. And sometimes you choose wrong.

  What if I choose wrong again?

  “Do you think…” Bryn frowned in thought. “I asked to leave Walling early. I think I might have graduated out.”

  In his mind, Rett heard the click of the director’s door shutting, th
e wheeze of the man’s impatient sigh, the uneven scratch of his own broken voice: She’s sick, I need to go to her. “I think I did, too—graduated out.”

  They turned to look around at the scuffed metal walls, the dour gray gleam of the place. “Congratulations,” Bryn said wryly.

  This can’t be right, Rett thought. I’m not supposed to be here. His mother needed him. Without treatment she couldn’t hope for more than a few months. And how long ago was that? Rett wondered, eyeing the thick layer of dust coating the walls. How long have I been here?

  “You don’t know what this place is?” he asked Bryn, trying to keep desperation out of his voice.

  “I don’t even know how I got here.”

  Rett cataloged the details around him: scratched metal, dirty footprints, a ladder mounted over a couch, a wall with a rusty plate where a handle should have been. “Do you feel like—somehow, this has happened before?”

  Bryn looked from the ladder to the rusty plate, like Rett had done.

  “This place feels familiar, this situation,” Rett said. “And … you. You seem familiar.”

  “I don’t even know your name.”

  Her words stabbed at him in a way he didn’t understand. “It’s Rett.”

  “Rett…” Bryn seemed to be testing the name for familiarity. “You recognized me from Walling Home?”

  “I guess, but—somewhere else, too.” Rett pictured her suit sun-dappled instead of tinted by muted morning light. He imagined a long stalk of grass twined through her fingers. “I knew you somewhere else.”

  Bryn’s wondering gaze swept over him. It made Rett feel more vulnerable than any piercing stare ever could.

  “Can you sing that song again?” he asked her. “Maybe it will help me remember.”

  “What song?”

  “The one you were singing a few minutes ago.” Rett moved to the wall that wanted lifting and kicked at the rusty plate.

  “Was I singing? That’s a weird thing to do in a quarantine tank.”

  “You were singing about a lighthouse,” Rett said, turning as he lifted the wall. “A boat…”