Epitaphs (Echoes Book 2)

by Knite, Therin

  And then I wake up.

  Fifteen seconds pass, where I stare idly at the ceiling of the Museum of 20th Century Art, seeing all and nothing, from my place behind the statue of the naked man, in the hall where an all-out war was taking place only minutes before. Fifteen seconds pass, and pain like I have never felt in my entire life burns through me from the inside out. My damaged nervous system malfunctioning in the worst possible way.

  So I scream. And scream. And scream.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The thirteenth tile from the left-hand wall of the ceiling of the main EDPA infirmary has forty-seven black, squiggly lines. I know this because my eyes count them, again and again, for the better part of half an hour after I wake up post-sandstorm dream. On the too-soft bed in a too-thin gown, covered by a blanket too thick for the room’s warm temperature, I lie on my aching back and stare, slow blinking, at the ceiling, as my senses gradually regain their bearings and the world comes into pain-washed focus. The world where I lost a fight five feet from victory. The world where I let a wily college professor pull one over on me. The world where my lie detecting skills have apparently grown rustier than the pipes in the warehouse where Stiegel was killed.

  Jin slouches in a chair next to my bed, still in his rumpled navy blue field uniform. His head rests on his shoulder at an awkward angle doomed to cause a crick, and one of his hands, ungloved, sits atop my own. There’s a resonating warmth on my skin that tells me he was squeezing gently while I was unconscious. He probably spoke to me as well, even knowing I was nearly dead to the world.

  Once I’ve twitched my sore, achy limbs to ensure all my parts are fully functional again—they must have used med-four to heal my broken back—I turn my hand over, palm up, and squeeze Jin’s hand in return. His first response is to murmur sleepily, something like, But I don’t like that flavor of pasta, Mom. And then one of his gray-blue eyes cracks open, glances about, uncomprehending, until it lands on my battered body on the bed.

  I say, “We really need to stop meeting like this.”

  He starts and straightens up, scooting to the edge of his seat to get as close to me as the bed railing will allow. “Adem! Are you okay?”

  I manage a motion that resembles a nonchalant shrug, but it’s hampered when a wave of pain radiates through my back. “Gods. Everything hurts. Why does everything hurt? No pain meds?”

  Jin nibbles on his lip and seeks out the nurse call button attached to the side of the bed. “Sorry about that. They wanted to make sure you’d regained feeling in your…everything below the neck.” His breath hitches. “Your spinal cord was damaged, Adem. Four vertebras crushed in your column. The coordinator lady who was watching the dream said you were thrown against something? She had a hard time seeing you—apparently crosses mess the computers up—but holy hell could I tell you’d been crushed. When they wheeled you to the copter, I thought you were dead, Adem. Limbs like liquid. Chest still, not breathing. Rubberized neck in one of those oversized braces. It looked like your skin was the only thing holding your body together, you were so—”

  “Thanks, Jin. But I can do without that mental image. The memory of hitting a stone wall at thirty miles per hour is more than enough to satisfy my curiosity.” Not quite. I’ll replay my defeat in the sandstorm dream again and again and again, until I’ve analyzed every inch of the memory, burned every mistake into my mental list of Things I Must Not Do and Ways I Must Not Fail. But that’s an exercise for my alone time, locked in my messy room, lying on my unmade bed, recounting all the fuckups in my day. For now, the repeating sensation of my back versus a wall, slam, crack, thump, hurts enough to keep the lesson burning bright.

  Teeth worry Jin’s lower lip. “I thought I told you not to scare me like that again.”

  I turn my head to the left, pressing my nose into the pillow, and sigh. “If only that was entirely within my control, Jin. Alas, whether or not I get hurt in an echo depends largely on how well I fight in one, and this time around, I made a rookie mistake, played it dumb, and paid the price.” A bitter laugh catches in my throat. “All I seem to be doing this case. Making dumb mistakes.”

  “Hey, don’t say that!” His thumb rubs circles into each of my knuckles. “You were epic out there, Adem. Everyone agrees. Even Chamberlain. She commended you for bravery in front of the whole taskforce.”

  I reach up with a trembling hand and pinch Jin’s wrist.

  “Ow!” He recoils. “What was that for?”

  “I wanted to be sure I’m not dreaming.”

  “You’re supposed to pinch yourself, not me.”

  “Ah, my mistake.”

  He pouts. “Ass.”

  I try to smile, but it must come off like an agonized grimace because Jin hits the nurse button again and peers around the edge of the curtain. The infirmary is quiet now—strange considering the carnage at the museum. All the deaths. All the injuries. All the souls who were not saved. All who died, and all who lived to watch their damaged flesh knit back together. (And watch their damaged minds unravel.)

  “Where is everyone?” I ask.

  Jin vaguely waves a hand in the direction of the infirmary’s exit. “Team meeting in that big task room on the side of the foxhole. We caught the GM Poly kids after the echo ended. One of them, Tanaka, died on the way to the hospital. His lungs were shredded by the sand. He drowned in his own blood…poor fucker.” A stilted breath. “The rest of them suffered similar but lesser injuries and survived. Two are well enough to be interrogated, so they’re stewing in those tiny rooms down in the basement level.”

  I wet my lips with a dry tongue. “Where is everyone who was injured?”

  Jin raises his eyebrows. “In the task room, like I said. All of them. Broken arms and legs and ribs and cracked skulls and perforated organs—we lost eight men, three women in that museum. Four EDPA and seven IBI. Everybody’s angry. Everybody’s out for blood now. Whether they need splints or crutches or transfusions, they’re going to fight tooth and nail, to the end, to avenge their fallen comrades.”

  His hand finally releases my weakened one and sets it atop the blanket. “I know it was personal for EDPA before, what with that Geller guy who died, but now, with so many…this is going to turn violent in a way I’ve never seen before, I think. Riot violent. War violent.” A shudder runs through his entire body, toes to the tips of his unkempt hair. “I watched them, IBI and EDPA combat teams alike, fighting in that museum, giving it every bullet and knife and grenade they had on their belts to take down those monsters, to penetrate the storm. I saw it all, Adem. A bird’s eye view from the security cams. And yet, still, I can’t even begin to imagine how much harder they’ll fight from now on with such motivation behind them.”

  “If all goes well, they won’t have to fight long.” My fingers tightly grip the railing of my bed, and I inhale, exhale, pray to the old gods I don’t believe in, and force myself into a sitting position. Unbearable pain sears through the muscles in my back, and I almost lose all the tension in my body, flop down, boneless, onto the thin blue infirmary sheets. But I grit my teeth and clutch the rails for dear life, tears prickling my eyes, until the wave of pain subsides to a dull, monotonous throbbing.

  Jin gawks at me, his hands outstretched like he wants to catch me from an imaginary fall. “What the hell are you doing, Adem? Lie down! You’re going to hurt yourself.”

  “No go, Jin. I need to get to the task room. I have vital information for the case.”

  “What?” He all but kicks his chair halfway across the room, metal legs grinding on tile. “Are you nuts? You almost died four hours ago. You’re in no condition to go gallivanting off into another knockout round with Chamberlain and friends. You need to rest. You can get back on task in the morning, and by morning, I mean when the sun is over the tree line and restaurants are actually open for breakfast.”

  A spark of panic zips across the edges of my mind. “It’s been four hours? Shit! I need to get upstairs now, Jin.”

  His cheeks tur
n purple. “I’m not aiding and abetting an infirmary escape, Adem. Especially with your back in that condition. Whatever you need to say, you can say it to me, and I’ll pass it on to the bigwigs upstairs. Or, hell”—he reaches over to the nightstand next to my bed and plucks my scuffed Ocom from atop a pile of clothes I recognize as my EDPA locker spares—“why don’t you just call Chamberlain or Lovecraft or Briggs and have a little teleconference? Something that doesn’t require you moving in your exceptionally fragile state.”

  “Jin, I appreciate your concern. And while your options are definitely valid in a practical sense, they aren’t good choices for me right now because—”

  “Because you have something to prove,” he spits out, dropping my Ocom onto my blanket-covered lap. “That you’re smart and skilled and worthy. That your peers are so damn far behind you it’s a fucking joke to suggest they could ever equal you in any way. That you embody so much intellect and persistence and dedication that not one of your superiors could ever claim your role inadequate.” He rolls his shoulders back, and they pop with a resounding crack. “Yeah, yeah, Adem. You can’t make the healthy choice because it hurts your pride. Same stunt you pulled at—”

  “Don’t you dare say Jericho, not after that goddamn bar fight.”

  His teeth clamp down over his lower lip so hard I’m sure it’s going to burst wide open in a gush of bitter red. But the skin holds. For now. “Fine. Fine. But I stand by my decision. I’m not helping you get out of that bed. You either stand up on your own two legs, or you stay there.”

  “Fine,” I say.

  “Fine.” He turns away, crosses his arms, and sticks up his nose in his best attempt at emulating a snotty rich child.

  Grumbling, I lower the railing on the side of the bed and swing my legs over the edge, careful not to jostle my back. My bare feet touch the frigid floor, toes curling inward, and I grip the side of the nightstand as I hoist myself up. For about two seconds, everything is fine—and then my knees buckle and I careen toward the floor.

  Jin, pretending to stare at the wall at an oddly sharp angle but actually watching my “progress,” whirls around with a gasp and catches me before my dumb ass smacks the floor. His arms wrap around my waist, low, to avoid the spasm-wracked section of my upper back that shattered when it hit the fortress wall. My face flops onto his shoulder, and for a moment, I stay limp—that is, I have to catch my breath—and let him hold me.

  He snorts out, “Told you so.”

  I weakly jab his gut with my hand. “I didn’t disagree with you, Jin. My body is wrecked. But I still intend to get upstairs.”

  He nudges my head away from his shoulder and looks me in the eye, challenging. “How?”

  “How about this?” A third voice cuts in.

  We both snap our heads to my left to find Cyril standing in the gap between the blue, rippling curtains that surround my bed. Beside her, what she’s pointing at, is a wheelchair. A basic chair. No motors or control sticks in sight. The kind of chair that requires you to roll yourself along or have someone else roll you along.

  (In other words, Cyril, who’s been listening in on my conversation with Jin for the past five minutes or so, has decided to butt into our conflict and force a resolution to the issue by creating a scenario where I go to the task room, but only with Jin helping me along. Meddlesome. But effective—I’ll give her that.)

  She taps the back handle with her bitten-down nails and clicks her tongue at me. “I am tired, so tired, boy, of seeing you in my infirmary, that I am happy to kick you out early if that’s what you wish. Especially under these circumstances.” Her lips curl in disgust, and I realize she must have spent the past four hours tending to numerous horrific injuries from the raid gone bad. “But I’ll warn you now: Do not push your body. Your head wound was minor, a hairline skull fracture. It healed right up, the swelling now down with med-four. Your nose, too, was easily fixed. Yet again.

  “But your back was another matter. Still mending. So no pushing, you hear? You stay in this chair until I explicitly tell you otherwise, or so help me, I will make you beg for a rematch with that dream monster. Clear?”

  Jin and I both gulp.

  I manage to mutter out, “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Good.” She pushes the chair toward us, and it rolls to a stop less than a foot away. “So get going. You’ve got a case to solve.” Her feet tense to take her backward, away from my bed, when she false starts, stops, and adds, “Ah! Almost forgot. You need this.” She whips a syringe out of her coat pocket, and before Jin or I can even hope to react, she jams it into my neck and presses the button. Pain medication—non-narcotic, thank the old gods—rushes through my veins, a spreading warmth. The ache in my back subsides in seconds. “There we go,” Cyril says. “Now get the hell out of my infirmary.”

  Ten minutes of silence pass with Jin helping me dress (awkward) and then wheeling me to the foxhole. As we go, I cast brief glances at his flushed cheeks, and he casts brief glances at the back of my recently injured head, neither of us willing to talk about the fact we just had a toddler-level bitch fight in front of an EDPA doctor. Finally, we reach the doors to the operations center, and they whoosh open before us.

  Jin pushes my wheelchair across the floor. Every terminal has at least two agents seated nearby, and all of them, all, stop what they’re doing to watch us pass, confused and mildly concerned that a seemingly crippled boy is joining the case effort. But none of them say a word, and we arrive in one piece at the door to the task room.

  Time to bring down the house of cards, Adem. Do it right.

  The door is transparent, and I knock three times on the thick glass before Dynara and Briggs, at the head of the table, break their concentration on May, who’s speaking, and stare at me. A brief moment of confusion passes over the room, people shuffling and shifting and squirming, unsure of what winds are changing where, and then everyone is looking. At me. At Jin. At the wheelchair.

  Frederick, nearest to the door, taps the internal control pad, unlocking the barrier and releasing the soundproof seal that keeps top-secret information stored inside. Jin uses one arm and a leg to maneuver my chair past the threshold. Then he pushes me right up to an empty gap between two chairs at the table.

  With a sharp exhale, I drop my arms on the scratched black surface, flash all the agents, IBI and EDPA alike, a cheerful smile, and say:

  “So, Chelsea Lang is the sandstorm killer, and the dean-professor duo are her accomplices. I think we should arrest them.” A microscopic pause. For effect. And I add, last and definitely least, “What are your thoughts?”

  * * *

  At the task room table surrounded by people far more important and experienced than me, I explain my conclusions about the sandstorm dream. “I didn’t get a clear look at the maker’s face, but I realized, when I saw Castile in the dream, as a cross, that the maker could only be one person. Someone with a distinctive red coat, like the one worn by a girl caught sneaking around on a college campus. Someone young and naïve but smart and strategic at the same time—prone to emotional outbursts but clever enough to harness those emotions effectively. Someone we’d already met and questioned and released—to house arrest—after we exposed her first layer of lies: Lang.”

  I grab the edge of the table and pull my chair a few inches closer so I can rest my weakened arms yet mimic a “professional” laced-hands look. Like all the other authority figures in the room. “It fits, Lang as DuPont’s killer. Involved in the competition, at least peripherally. Acquainted with DuPont. Well enough to know where he’d be and when and that he’d be alone, isolated, when he was wherever he would go. A student at GM Poly with easy access to the buildings and the faculty. She had all the opportunity in the world to kill DuPont.”

  Lance, seated three spots down from me, nibbles on the arm of his workstation glasses and swings his chair from side to side. “But that doesn’t make a lick of sense, Adem. She was DuPont’s friend. And we have records of it. Pictures we swiped from soci
al media, the two of them hanging out at parties, clubs, bars, birthday celebrations. Why would Lang kill a boy she’d been good friends with since her freshman year?” He raps the table with the glasses. “Plus, we have Lang on campus cameras walking up to the building where DuPont was killed, don’t we? Right when the breach happened? If she was outside the building, outside the dream, she couldn’t have been the maker, too.”

  I throw Lance a weary smile and glance at Dynara. Her shoulders, now decked out in her white Commissioner coat again, stiffen at the implication in my eyes, and she shakes her head. To Frederick, on her left, she orders, “Bring up the camera footage from the front of the CS Building.” To Lance, “Bring up the Nexus log mapping of the breach zone.”

  Frederick uses his Ocom to remotely connect to the large screen bolted to the back wall of the task room, and everyone turns their chairs to the angle required for optimal viewing. The camera footage pops up on the right side of the screen, the left side remaining blank for the moment, and Frederick plays the video once through.

  As expected, it shows a snow-covered field, a salt-slicked sidewalk, and acres of nearly abandoned campus ground. For two minutes straight, not a single student passes in front of the CS Building, and then, as a blurred disturbance takes command of the floor of the building where DuPont died, into view walks Chelsea Lang in her red winter coat.

  She waltzes right up to the front steps of the building, nonchalant, searching the upper floors for the window to Lab 420. When she finds it and sees the whirling, churning, killing sand, the shadow of the hulking monster lumbering toward the fallen DuPont, she…reacts in a way we cannot see. Because the only camera attached to the front entrance of the CS Building was broken, last week, and thus, our view of the dream unfolding in real life and the only living “witness” to its horror—our view is from behind.

  Briggs, sitting in between Weiss and Frederick, inhales, sharp and quick. “We can’t see her face. Her reaction. We can’t see whether she was scared or…”