by Marissa Lete
I lead them up the staircase, then into the hall where smoke has created a thick, hazy cloud that’s hard to see through. We move toward the back door that Maverick and I had snuck through earlier, but it’s blocked by a metal door, too. I walk up to it, put my hands on it. It’s thick, unbreakable. Every possible exit is covered in one, metal sheets standing between the captives and their freedom.
I don’t know how to get through them. In minutes, the smoke is going to suffocate us, and I don’t know what to do.
Then, a finger taps my shoulder. I turn around and a boy is standing behind me, bright blue eyes wide and focused. It’s the boy I’d found in the padded room.
“I think I can help us get out,” he tells me. He can’t be older than thirteen—tall and lanky, but his voice hasn’t quite deepened yet.
“How?”
He looks past me at the metal door. “I’ll show you.” Then he walks up to it. He lifts one finger and a light shoots across the air onto the door. Electricity. A moment later, the door slides up. Then the fire alarms shut off.
I stare in awe. What did he just do? And how? For a moment, I wonder how many other anomalies are out in the world, what kinds of strange things they can do.
He turns around to look at me. “We can leave now.”
I nod. I understand why his room was rubberized now. “Let’s go,” I tell everyone. We slip through the door one by one into the cold night air. Once we’re outside, I realize that we have a problem. There’s no way all of these people will fit in Maverick’s car. And where will we take them?
I pull Maverick aside. “I don’t know what to do,” I tell him.
“What do you mean?”
“Your Corolla isn’t big enough to hold everyone.”
“Oh,” he replies. He didn’t even know his car was here, I realize. He glances around at the group. “A lot of these kids… don’t have families anymore,” he says. Because their families don’t remember they exist. “We’ll have to take them to my house.”
I nod. Maverick definitely has room. “But how do we get them there?”
Maverick doesn’t have to respond because someone is pointing. “Look!” a girl says. “We can escape in that!”
I follow her line of sight and there, parked along the edge of the parking lot, is the Suburban. What a convenient reunion.
“Alright. That fixes that. Maverick, your car is parked through the woods, back there,” I point. “Take my parents and whoever will fit with you. I’ll take the rest in the Suburban. We’ll meet at your house.”
He nods, then gathers Mom and Dad. The dark-haired girl—Veronica—goes with him, along with two younger boys. The rest of them follow me toward the Suburban. It’ll be a tight squeeze, but we’ll have to make do.
When I get to it, the boy who had opened the door earlier appears at my hip. “You might need my help with this, too,” he tells me. He strides up to the car and touches it. The doors unlock, and the car hums to life.
I stare at him. “What is your name?” I ask him. I think he’s someone I want to remember.
“Angelo.” He holds out a hand. I hesitate. “Don’t worry, I can’t hurt you,” he tells me. So I shake his hand.
Then we all pile into the car and I glance through the rearview mirror at Alice’s laboratory, up in flames, as I drive us away. She’d locked us inside and sent the entire place up in flames. Her own laboratory, gone just like that. Why would she do that? Was getting rid of me really worth the sacrifice of her entire building? And where is she now?
Wherever she is, we have to find her. And we have to stop her.
Maverick and his group beat us to his house. When we pull up next to the stone fountain, they’re already walking inside. I climb out and follow them. Inside the house, Maverick is already talking to Jacob. “Get them all rooms and tell Paula to start some food. Whatever they want, they can have. They’ve been through a lot.”
Jacob nods once, then gets to work, counting the people in the group. Then he takes a young girl and tells her to follow him up the stairs. I wonder if he has questions about who all these kids are and where they come from. But I guess if you get paid enough, you don’t really need to ask questions.
“We’ll have to explain to them why they’re here, once everyone gets settled in,” Maverick tells me. “Most of them don’t know that their families don’t remember them.”
“You’re right,” I reply. That’s not going to be an easy task. Then, looking across the room, I spot my parents. Dad looks intense, almost angry, and Mom just looks bewildered. They have no idea where they are, who any of these people are. At least the anomalies know why they were locked up and that they’ve been rescued. My parents are just blank slates.
What are we going to tell them?
And then, in one moment, I see the answer clearly: we can’t tell them anything.
I grab Maverick and pull him into the hallway. “I need to ask a favor,” I tell him.
Chapter 36
I drive through the darkness, the path from Maverick’s house to my own almost familiar now. Maverick sits in the passenger seat and my parents are in the back. Dad had questioned me relentlessly about what was going on, why they had been kidnapped, why we weren’t going to the police. I told him I was going to explain it all soon, and eventually, he had accepted it. Mom was just quiet, in shock.
Eventually, we reach my house. Maverick gives me a surprised look. “You live near my old house?”
I think of the echo I heard that first night when I originally met Maverick. How that was the moment this whole thing started. “It’s how we know each other,” I tell him. He looks thoughtful but doesn’t reply.
I push the car door open, and Dad stares at me, puzzled. “What does that mean? How do you know where we live?” he asks, and it squeezes my heart.
“I’ll explain inside,” I reply, knowing that it’s a lie. One I wish I didn’t have to tell.
When we get inside, I stare at the family photos on the walls. I don’t know if we’ll ever be that smiling family again.
I turn to Maverick and with all of the courage I can muster, I say, “It’s time.”
He nods to me, then he walks over to Mom and Dad, who have stopped in the entrance of the kitchen, confused. He places his hands on both of their arms, and I watch as the same look that had appeared in the receptionist’s eyes at Alice’s office crosses their own.
We lead them upstairs and my parents follow easily, not knowing what’s happening, too confused to protest. Maverick maintains his hold on their arms until they’re in their room, tucked in bed. He lets go, and they both fall asleep.
When they wake up, they won’t remember the past several hours. They won’t know I exist.
Alice has already taken away their memories of me. Trying to explain what had happened to them and why—when it had already taken years for me to convince them about my ability to hear the echoes—would be a difficult task. And then what? Would they ever be able to love me the same as they loved the daughter they knew they had raised, the one they remembered? It’s impossible to know.
If I just erase myself from their lives, maybe they’ll be able to live a happy, normal life. They won’t have to bear the weight of all of this craziness, of having a daughter that hears echoes of the past. And maybe they will be safe from Alice, too.
In that moment, I realize that this is probably how Maverick felt when he’d erased my own memories.
It hurts. A lot.
But through the pain, I get to work.
“We have to get rid of everything in the house that shows I exist,” I tell Maverick when we’re out in the hall.
“I know,” he replies. He knows. He’s done this before. For Alice. For me, too, though he doesn’t remember it.
I go to my room, slide a big box out of the closet. I tear things off the walls, out of drawers. I pack my suitcase, throwing all of my clothes into it in an unorganized, heaping mess. I’m afraid that if I slow down, if I take time to think
, I’ll lose it.
Maverick helps me, quietly and steadily. He still doesn’t know who I am, what we were to each other. I don’t know how I’m supposed to explain everything to him when I’m not even sure of it all myself. Before Alice erased his memories, there was barely something developing between us. Now he’s been cut out of my life again, and it’s impossible to know whether we’ll ever be able to rebuild a relationship, or even a friendship.
Within an hour, the house is stripped of me. It’s like I never existed here. We’ll still have to track down my parents’ co-workers, friends, and anyone else who knows about me, but cleaning out the house makes everything feel so final.
I stand in the doorway, holding one last pile of photos I’d torn off the walls. I can’t stop the tears now. I can’t control them.
“I’m sorry,” Maverick’s soft voice says from behind me, but he doesn’t move closer to hold me like I want him to. Like the Maverick that knew me would have. I don’t face him. I don’t want him to see my pain.
“I’m sorry, too,” I tell him. “You’re just as much of a victim as they are.”
“Yeah,” he says quietly. “I knew Alice was evil. I didn’t know how powerful she was, though.”
His words spark a thought in my mind. Alice is powerful because she can heal, making her basically indestructible. Untouchable, even to Maverick, whose ability is powerful enough. I finally turn to look at him, wiping my eyes on my sleeves. “You once told me that you couldn’t erase Alice’s memories,” I say.
He looks exactly like how I felt every time he told me something I didn’t remember doing. But he nods. “I can’t, it never works on her. I thought it was because she found a way to block it… ” His eyes grow wider, filled with a new light of understanding.
“But it’s not. It’s because she can heal.”
“Me erasing her memories is like inflicting little wounds in her brain, but she probably just heals them instantaneously,” he adds.
I nod. “And Alice found a way to replicate your ability. Which means—”
“—there must be some way to replicate her ability, too.”
We stare at each other, trying to figure out what to do with this information.
“If we can figure out how to get it, do you think it will restore my memories? And your parents?” he asks me, bright yellow eyes alive with hope. And mine, I add in my mind.
I shrug, but I feel the hope, too. “I think it’s definitely possible.”
When I walk to the car, a new surge of purpose courses through me. This isn’t the end. There’s still a way to fix this.
When Maverick gets inside the car, he turns to me, a strange expression crossing his face. “How exactly did we know each other? In what way?” he asks.
I try to squash the sting that comes with his use of the past tense. I ponder the question for a minute because I don’t really know the answer myself. “You came over to welcome us to the neighborhood the night we moved here, a little over a year ago. Then we got to know each other. We were… close,” I manage.
“Close?” he asks, his eyes boring into me questioningly.
I nod. “We were… together.” Is that the right word?
He blinks a few times before responding. “So Alice took my memories away to hurt you. Is that it?”
I’m on the verge of breaking down, but I blink the tears away fiercely. “It's a little more complicated. But essentially, yes,” I tell him. And someday, I’m determined to make Alice pay for it.
“Complicated how?”
I don’t know where to start. But as I pull the car out of the driveway, and as we’re driving through the streets, I try my best to explain it to him. How we’d dated for all those months. How once he realized I was in danger, he erased my memories of him. How I hear the echoes, and so I learned of his existence. I tell him about Alice kidnapping us, sneaking into her office, him getting shot, then how we ended up trapped in Alice’s laboratory. I leave certain things out—like how angry I’d been at him when I found out he’d taken my memories away, and the searing kiss we’d shared in his kitchen.
When I’m done, I’m breathing as hard. As my heart rate calms, I wait for him to respond. Glances over at him tell me he’s deep in thought, which makes sense. I remember how I felt when I heard the news. It’s difficult to decide how to feel.
When he finally opens his mouth, I expect him to say something about how he understands or he just needs time to process it all. That maybe we can fix all of this if we just figure out where Alice is and how she replicated his ability. But instead, all he does is ask me one, impossible question.
“What do we do now?”
What do we do about Alice? Or what do we do about us? Of course, there’s no easy answer to either one. But we have to do something. Life doesn’t ever solve problems for you. You’ve got to go and solve them yourself.
“We find her. We stop her. We make her fix this,” I tell him.
Maverick doesn’t look so sure. “I’m not sure if we can. I don’t even know where she would be now that her lab’s gone.”
“We have to try,” I reply.
He nods solemnly. “It’s weird, that there’s this whole part of my life that I don’t even remember.”
“I understand,” I tell him, letting out a short sound somewhere between a laugh and a sigh.
Then, unexpectedly, he asks me another question. “Did I love you?”
The words strangle me. I don’t know the answer. I know him better than he knows me right now, but there’s no way to know exactly how he felt about me. I know what I want the answer to be.
“I think so,” I finally tell him, feeling his yellow eyes boring into me even though I’m staring at the road. It’s the best I can do.
He doesn’t wait to ask me his next question. He doesn’t give me time to think about it. “Did you love me?”
There’s the past tense again. As if he and I aren’t sitting in the enclosed space of the car, together, right now. As if everything we had is just stuck somewhere in the echoes, never to be seen in the present again.
Do I love Maverick? Well, we’d dated for eight months. There’s definitely got to be some feelings that were lost in those memories. But what about now? We've been through a lot together, but I only remember knowing him for a few weeks. Is that enough time to know if you love someone?
I don’t know. All I know is that he had rescued me from danger more times than I could count. I know that when he kissed me, I felt a burning in my heart that was like nothing I’d ever experienced before. And I know that I was devastated when I discovered his memories had been taken away, almost as devastated as when I found my parents in a similar situation.
Is that all it takes to love someone?
I glance over at Maverick, fidgeting with his seat belt. Then I focus my eyes back on the road, my answer coming out firmer, more final than I’d expected it to.
“Yes.”
And for the rest of the car ride, neither of us knows what else to say.
✽✽✽✽✽
When we get back to the house, the sun is peeking just above the horizon. I roll to a stop in the driveway, forcing myself to accept this new reality.
Inside the house, there are thirteen people who need help. Who need to start a new life or find some way to resume their old ones. Somewhere out in the world, Alice is alive, probably plotting her next scheme, ready to inflict her wrath on someone else. She can’t be allowed to do it. She has to be stopped.
I glance over at Maverick as he exits the car. Right now, I want more than anything to be back in my normal life, dealing with only drama between Grace and Leo. I want my parents to remember me. I want Maverick to be there, and I want him to hold me tight, telling me that everything will be okay. I want him to have all the answers like he seemed to have before. I want to live a normal life.
But I can’t. All of this mess, with Alice and with Maverick and with my parents—there’s no one else who can deal with it.
<
br /> It’s all up to me now.
Acknowledgments
First of all, I want to say a huge thanks to you, the person holding this book. However you ended up here, and wherever you are, thank you. Books wouldn’t do any good without readers, so you’re an essential part of the equation.
Secondly, I want to say thanks to my best friend Briana. Your constant support and belief in me all the way from the beginning in my melodramatic high school days has kept me going throughout the years. I couldn’t have finished this without you. May you always be the first person I send my stories to, even when they aren’t very good yet.
Mom, thanks for instilling a love of reading into me from a very young age, and for driving me to the library every few days while I was growing up to get another stack of books. If you hadn’t encouraged that little hobby of mine, I might’ve never taken on writing.
Thanks to Dad, who passed down the genes I needed to have the brain of a writer, and who always supported me when I told you I was writing. I still remember those “books” I used to write when I was a kid, and your reminders of my desire to be an author even then helped me stay motivated.
Thanks to Michele, whose self-publishing adventure inspired me to take that step myself. When I first learned that you were writing a book, I hadn’t written in years, but that night I pulled out my laptop and started scanning through my old stuff. Little did I know I’d find the rough beginning of this book in that pile, and a year later would have a fully completed novel from it.
Thanks to Joe, who actually made time to read (most of) this book when I told you about it, even after you haven’t read a book in like 20 years. Also thanks for trying to help me with my grammar, even though almost every time you were completely wrong. It made me laugh.
Shoutout to Michele, Denise, Carole, and Wendy, the wonderful ladies that make up the Southern Scribblers, and whose writing continues to inspire me.
Thanks to Shawna, who helped me take the emotional healing journey I needed to take before I could get this book out there. You’ve changed my perspective on life in so many ways, and I’m so excited to be doing this self-publishing journey with you!
