Echoes of Us Read online

  DEDICATION

  To the readers who sneak books under desks and stay up long after dark. Our lives are all stories, in the end.

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  Forty-Six

  Forty-Seven

  Forty-Eight

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Back Ads

  About the Author

  Books by Kat Zhang

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PROLOGUE

  I remember my childhood better than most. Usually, people gain freedom as they grow older; I lost it.

  As the recessive soul, I was born weaker than Addie. She triumphed whenever we fought for control of our shared body. She was fated to win and I to lose, the promise of it written into our genes.

  By the time we were twelve, I seemed ready to fulfill a recessive soul’s other destiny: to disappear. I never did. But I did lose all my freedoms—the ability to speak, the power to move, the right to be acknowledged by anyone other than Addie, whose body I haunted.

  So I remember my childhood well. Because however limited it was, for a long time, those were the only memories I had of liberty.

  It wasn’t until I met Lissa and Hally, Ryan and Devon, that I started thinking about my future, and not my past. They were hybrids, too. They knew what it meant to live in secret, and taught me how to regain control over my body.

  But now, as we were all forced on the run again, moving from safe house to safe house, I returned to my childhood memories, seeking comfort in the worn softness of their edges.

  Addie asked one night. We were all stuffed in a van, Peter driving, Dr. Lyanne beside him. The rest of us sat cramped, shoulder-to-shoulder in the back two rows, the windows rolled up tight against the autumn chill.

  I said.

  All my memories of childhood were Addie’s memories, too. We lived cleaved to each other, hybrids in a country where our very existence was outlawed.

  The memory of pyxis came from before we understood all that, which made it all the more precious. Addie and I were three or four years old. Our family had gone camping. Our little brother, Lyle, hadn’t been born yet, so it was just the four of us—Mom, Dad, Addie, and me.

  I remembered that first sight of the stars in the crisp mountain air. We’d been a child accustomed to city nights and city lights. The enormity of all those stars had awed us.

  I said.

  Addie said. Her smile wasn’t just a physical thing, a curve of our lips. It was a warmth at the edge of my mind, where I felt her presence with the same assurance I felt our heartbeat.

  We fell into the memory, calming each other with the past as the road raced by.

  All too quickly, a week passed. Then another and another. Addie and I started walking again, the pain in our ankle and the bruises on our body fading along with the sharpest recollections of our last few days in Anchoit. The bombing of Powatt’s hybrid institution—the police raid—the frenzied escape through darkened streets—they’d never stop haunting us completely. But we tried to bury their pain with happier memories.

  Addie and I drew everyone into the storytelling. Living at safe houses in the middle of nowhere, there was little else to do. We’d watched the news religiously at first. But the screen spit images of our faces and names, blaring our crimes: the “explosions” at Lankster Square, the Powatt bombing. After a while, the fear and upset crept into our insides and rotted them. Emalia said, They’re just saying the same things, over and over. Can we please turn it off?

  So we did. We gathered, instead, in the upstairs hallway, or around the dining table, or on the threadbare couch. If Ryan and I were in control, we sought the warmth of each other’s touch, the press of my cheek against his shoulder, the comfort of having somebody there.

  I told them about the day Lyle and Nathaniel were born. Addie and I had only been four, but I hadn’t forgotten the happy, nervous chaos. The baby wrapped in blue and the momentary disappointment I’d felt that it wasn’t a girl.

  I didn’t tell them about the day Nathaniel faded away, and it was considered normal, because he was the recessive soul. Or the day Lyle fell sick, and they rushed him to the hospital—a pale little boy too frightened to speak.

  That was one of our unspoken rules. No sad stories.

  There was too much of that already.

  I knew a lot about Ryan’s past, but it was nice to hear it again. The enormous old house in the country, where the Mullans lived before moving to Lupside. The creak of the ancient floorboards, the ever-dusty library, the stretch of field where the grass grew waist-high, perfect cover for war games at dusk. Hally or Lissa interrupted when they had something to add, or a complaint that he wasn’t being entirely truthful. Ryan protested, but he smiled, and I knew he didn’t really mind. His sisters’ interruptions made us laugh, and laughter was a rare commodity now.

  Dr. Lyanne had to be coaxed into the storytelling. At first, she talked only about her youth—snippets of a lace-and-satin childhood. I watched the sharp lines of her face and tried to imagine her two decades younger: not a woman, but a little girl named Rebecca who made the adults laugh with her grown-up sensibilities and too-serious face. Who knew the secret her brother, Peter, carried, but protected it fiercely.

  Eventually, we wheedled out anecdotes about medical school. But we had to be careful. Dr. Lyanne’s studies in medicine linked too closely to her specialization and interest in neurology. In hybridity. It all led to her work at Nornand Clinic of Psychiatric Health, where she’d met Jaime, then the rest of us. Where Addie and I had convinced her to betray her fellow doctors and help us escape.

  Everyone liked Henri’s stories best, because he’d seen the world. Jaime, especially, pored over Henri’s remaining maps as he described the places he’d been, the things he’d experienced and written about.

  “Have you written about us?” Kitty asked in the middle of a story about the Middle East. Henri had spent two months there, following a border war between two countries we’d never heard of—that hadn’t even existed on the outdated maps taught in our schools. “About us, specifically, I mean.”

  Henri smiled. “Not by name. It’s safer that way, in case anything gets intercepted.”

  Somehow, the notion hadn’t struck me before. I’d known Henri had traveled here to cover the hybrid plight in the Americas, sending back articles and information through his satellite
phone—more miniature computer than phone, in my mind. But I hadn’t imagined his stories would be anything but general.

  The thought of it didn’t leave me. Somewhere out there, someone might hear our story, and it might just be that—a story over morning coffee, or playing in the background during dinner. Nothing more.

  I said to Addie.

  she replied.

  But I couldn’t help it. For years, before I regained control of our body, I’d done nothing but think and imagine. Now, I imagined what life might have been like if Addie and I had been born in one of those countries across the ocean, where hybridity was accepted, and normal.

  Or what if Addie and I had settled when we were five years old, right on schedule? I would be gone, and Addie would have lived so differently. No doctor’s appointments, no therapists, no medication. No sideways looks in the playground. No whispering teachers. No Nornand Clinic of Psychiatric Health.

  No Hally and Lissa, or Ryan and Devon, or any of the people we’d met since then.

  It had been less than a year since Addie and I had left our home for Nornand, but already, it was hard to imagine what our life would have been like if we’d kept the secret of my existence. Addie’s ghost-in-the-head, who shouted too loudly to be contained.

  We had a lot of time to sit and think now. But it was sweeter to focus on the good times. To remember the people I cared about at their best.

  My mother and father, who I was convinced still loved me.

  My brother, Lyle, who I told myself had gotten the kidney transplant our family had been promised.

  I chose to remember Sabine and Josie for the steadiness of their eyes, the confidence they’d instilled in me with a look. I pictured Cordelia and Katy when they’d laughed, head thrown back, their short, bleached-blond hair feathery in the light. I decided to think of Christoph only in his softer moments, when a crack in his angry armor revealed the broken fragments of his past, still digging into his insides.

  Jackson—Jackson and Vince I saw as the delivery boy at Nornand Clinic who told us there was hope of escape.

  I wasn’t supposed to be thinking about the things we’d done with Sabine’s group. The chaos we’d inflicted on Lankster Square with our homemade firecrackers. The plan we’d aided to bomb the institution at Powatt—not knowing Sabine wanted to rip apart not just steel and concrete, but the lives of the officials touring that night.

  The fight among us when we’d found out, and tried to stop everything.

  The price we’d paid.

  No sad stories. That was the rule.

  ONE

  On the day Henri was supposed to leave us, Addie and I woke to a news anchor’s quiet murmuring. We crept past Kitty and Hally, both still asleep, and slipped from our shared bedroom.

  Devon sat downstairs in the semidarkness of just-before-dawn, his eyes fixated on the tiny television. The screen cast strange, flickering shadows in the living room. There was no one else in sight.

  “They haven’t left yet, have they?” Addie whispered as she joined Devon on the lumpy couch. He didn’t take his eyes from the television, but shook his head.

  I asked, and Addie was about to repeat my question aloud when Henri’s bedroom door opened. That was answer enough.

  Henri smiled at us, his teeth a flash of white against the darkness of his skin. “I thought we said our good-byes last night so you wouldn’t have to get up this early.”

  He carried only a small suitcase with him. Most of his things had been abandoned when we fled Anchoit. I imagined the police stumbling onto them, rifling through his notes and half-written articles. They’d know to be on the lookout for him now. A foreign reporter living in the Americas was in a lot of danger, and Henri had finally given in to pressure from friends and family overseas to fly home while he still could.

  He leaned over the back of the couch to get a better look at the television. “Jenson again?”

  Devon nodded. It was an old clip. Mark Jenson had given so many speeches and interviews over the past few weeks. About hybrids. About Powatt. About the safety of the country at large.

  It was hard to reconcile the presence he broadcasted to the world—calm, sleek confidence—with the man who’d tried to carry Addie and me from Powatt after we sprained our ankle. The man who’d dug us from the wreckage after the explosion, his eyes frenzied, his shirt bloodied.

  Every time I saw him, I felt a phantom pain in our shoulder—his nails digging into the bruised skin. Where’s the boy? he’d shouted at us. Where is Jaime Cortae?

  “He’s trying to take control of the situation.” To someone who didn’t know him, Devon might have seemed bored by the whole thing. But I caught the sharp way his eyes followed Jenson’s movements. Devon was often the most perceptive of us, for all he acted like the world was only a vaguely interesting shadow play.

  “Doesn’t seem like it would be Jenson’s job to control things. But I guess he is supposed to be an expert on the hybrid issue.” Henri straightened, and Devon finally looked away from the television. His face held its usual lake-water placidity, but something rippled through it as Henri said, “Well, I guess it’s time to go.”

  Devon and Ryan were early wakers, but four a.m. was a bit extreme to just get up on a whim.

  “Here—” Henri reached into his pocket and took out his satellite phone. He handed it to Devon. “You remember how to use it, right?”

  Devon was already turning the phone around in his hands, checking the nearly palm-size screen, the miniature keyboard, the port where it could connect to a computer. He nodded as he fiddled with the antennae, then looked back up at Henri. “You won’t need it?”

  Henri shrugged. “It shouldn’t take me more than a few days to get home. I’ve let my people know to expect no calls until I arrive. Besides, I need a way to stay in contact with all of you.” He smiled a little. “Be careful, though. These things aren’t impossible to track, if the government starts getting suspicious. Limit call times. And don’t let Ryan take it apart. He might not be able to put it back together.”

  Devon—Devon—almost grinned. “I could put it back together.”

  I laughed silently in the corner of my mind and wondered what Ryan had said to that.

  The back door opened, revealing Emalia and Peter. Emalia didn’t seem surprised to see Addie and me up, though Peter raised his eyebrows.

  “Are we ready to go?” Emalia said, pulling her jacket tighter around her. She and her twin soul, Sophie, had volunteered to drive Henri to his contact in the next state, arguing that they were the best choice since the news broadcasts lacked their face. Only Kitty and Nina had likewise escaped exposure.

  Jaime’s information, of course, had been circulating in the media for months. Out of all of us, he was the one Jenson most desperately sought—the one child to survive the operation when Nornand’s doctors stripped away his second soul.

  But Jenson had also seen Ryan and Dr. Lyanne at Powatt, when they came to rescue Addie and me after we’d tried to stop the explosion. He must have intuited that Hally would be with her brother, and the police raids would have found enough incriminating information about Henri and Peter to label them as suspects.

  It pained me to have them all share blame for the bombing.

  “Be careful on the road,” Peter said. He and Dr. Lyanne would stay here at the safe house with us in case anything went wrong. That was the phrase hanging over every second of our lives now: in case anything goes wrong.

  Henri looked at us and Devon one last time, like he wanted to memorize our faces.

  “Stay safe,” he said, finally, and joined Emalia at the door.

  They left, leaving the rest of us watching after them.

  “I can’t believe you didn’t wake me up,” Hally said hours later. She sat next to Addie and me on the indoor balcony, overlooking the living room and the foyer. Our legs swung over the edge.

  Ryan, on our other side, reached t
hrough the balcony rungs to steal half of Hally’s peanut butter sandwich. She snatched her hand away a second too late and settled for looking aggrieved.

  “It was four in the morning.” Ryan offered me a bite of the sandwich. Peanut butter oozed onto his finger, and he put it in his mouth, muffling his next words. “You don’t like to get up before ten.”

  “I would have gotten up if the rest of you were up,” she complained.

  I could hardly believe that once, Addie and I had passed Devon or Ryan in the hall at school and barely noticed. That we’d gone out of our way to avoid Hally, because we feared her foreign looks might bring us more trouble.

  Now, they counted among the most important people in my life.

  Ryan’s eyebrow quirked up when I stared at him just a little too long, his mouth softening into a smile. What? it said, and I shook our head with a smile of my own.

  We’d gotten good at communicating through glances—through a touch, and the slant of the mouth. Small gestures were all we had. The safe houses were rarely large. Even if both of us weren’t sharing bodies, we’d have trouble finding time and space to be alone together.

  Sometimes, Addie would offer to temporarily disappear. But guilt usually made me turn her down. Addie’s thoughts were filled with a boy, too. One who wasn’t even there to steal kisses with her at the end of darkened hallways, laughing and ignoring the knowing way Emalia looked at us when she passed.

  Hally finished off her sandwich and stood, brushing crumbs from her blouse. “Well, if—”

  The doorbell rang.

  Hally’s mouth snapped shut. Addie whispered

  No one rang the doorbell. This house was a little less remote than the first two we’d lived in, but it was still almost an hour from the nearest major town. People didn’t just stumble onto our doorstep.

  Dr. Lyanne emerged from her downstairs room, her hair damp and braided after her shower. There was something naked about her expression as she looked up and motioned for us to be quiet.

  Peter joined his sister in the foyer. The windows were all curtained. Our remaining van was in the driveway, so we couldn’t pretend the house was abandoned, but we could pretend there was nobody home.