The Echo Room
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for my dad, for introducing me to so many great stories
1
5:37 A.M.
Someone is calling to me …
Rett woke to the cold press of metal beneath him and the knock of pain against the inside of his skull.
He opened his eyes. Metal room, blue with early morning light. The only window a skylight in the high ceiling.
He pushed himself upright. Diagonal yellow stripes banded the walls, constricting the room. The smell of dust and copper made the air heavy.
Where am I?
The place had an industrial feel to it: steel and dust and gloom. Cast in blue, like the prison panel he’d drawn in ballpoint pen for Epidemic X.
Cheerful.
His head throbbed. His skull was shrinking, or his brain was outgrowing it. He put a shaking hand to where the pain cut worst, and his fingers found the long, raised line of a scar. His stomach turned.
He got to his feet, pressed by the familiar weight of urgency that drove him from bed every morning: Look out for yourself, watch out.
He shouldn’t be here. He should be lining up for morning roll call with the other wards of Walling Home, wary of sharp looks cutting his way, sharper blades bristling under mattresses. Only scrap paper and a pen under his own mattress, along with the last remaining issue of his favorite comic.
Whatever this place is, I don’t think I want to be here. The room was empty. Stark, barren. But a pricking sense of caution kept him on his guard. He’d known other empty places, knew how quickly they could fill with dread. Like the entryway at Walling Home, where the tick of the clock had beat like a hammer against his heart as he’d watched his mother walk out the door and leave him behind.
His attention snapped back to the present as a sound broke through his thoughts. Someone calling to him?
No—somewhere, someone was singing.
He tensed, unnerved. What is this place?
A wave of dizziness hit him. He leaned against the wall, which slanted oddly, tilted back as if the room knew he needed to lie down. He struggled to clear his mind, to look around for some clue as to where he was. Doorway to his left, corridor to his right. Skylight, stripes, metal floor.
A broad luminescent strip running along the wall.
He followed the glowing strip out of the room and down a short corridor to a door with a huge sliding lock.
Bolted shut.
Panic shot through him. He hefted his weight against the lock but it didn’t so much as budge. He took a shaky step back to examine it. The lock was jammed, the metal bolt bent at one end. And there—on the floor: a fire extinguisher large enough to have done the damage. Rett tried to ignore the panic that flared again. There’s no way that bolt’s ever coming out of its housing.
An image glowed on the door, reflecting the dim light: overlapping, jagged lines. Spikes of pain, Rett thought absently while his head went on throbbing. Set above the spidery graph was a single word: SCATTER. And next to it, the number three inside a circle.
Scatter 3, Rett thought, testing the phrase for familiarity. A metallic taste filled his mouth and sent a fresh twinge of pain through his head. Scatter 3. Yes, there was something about those words. It would come back to him in a minute.
Or …
He could ask whoever possessed the eerie voice still echoing through the place. The meditative tune pulled at Rett with an almost hypnotic power. He hesitated. Tried not to imagine himself as a doomed figure in one of the comics he had drawn while he huddled in closets or underneath stairwells at the boarding facility he called home. Boy, sixteen, ladder of bones, seen from behind as he slinks through an abandoned storage room, a warehouse for dust. Caption: He should’ve known he’d meet disaster …
He shook away the thought.
Whoever’s singing might be able to help me.
He stalked over the corridor’s gritty floor, past a pair of narrow doors that he’d have to check out later, and then crossed the main room to an open doorway. Angled himself to peer through into a dim, cramped space. More luminescent strips picked up the low light and revealed a figure in a white jumpsuit like a glowing ghost. Rett’s foot scraped over the dirty floor, and the singing stopped. The figure turned sharply, peeling away from the shadows. A girl who looked a few years older than he was, with short brown hair tucked behind her ears, gave him a startled stare. She was thin inside her overlarge jumpsuit, her face hollowed by shadows.
“I didn’t mean to scare you,” Rett said, his voice hoarse and strange to his own ears. He swallowed against the bolt of pain that shot through his head. His throat was paper-dry, his stomach unsteady. “I just— Can you tell me where I am?”
The girl stood frozen, unblinking, and Rett wondered if she, too, found the rustle of his voice misplaced in their cold-metal surroundings.
“My best guess is abandoned storage room,” Rett went on, “but I’m willing to believe something as strange as experimental detention facility if you say it with enough conviction.”
The girl winced. A hand went to her head.
She’s hurt, same as me. “Let me look,” he said. He could usually tell when a gash needed stitches and when it could be left alone—when it would leave a nice scar and when it would just go on bleeding forever. A handy skill born of experience. He’d seen scars on knuckles, good for proving readiness to fight, and gashes on arms and faces, worse for displaying the shame of failure. But head wounds bled forever if you didn’t put pressure on them.
The girl hesitated and then pushed her hair aside to reveal a long raised scar above her ear. No blood—an old wound. “It … looks okay,” Rett said, trying to keep his voice light. A mark like that was the badge of a terrible run-in. Don’t say that to her, he thought, but he knew the expression on his face must be saying it for him. My own head can’t look much better. “Do you know what this place is?” he asked, desperate to redirect his thoughts.
The girl shook her head, then swayed as if hit with the same dizziness that plagued Rett. He put out a hand to steady her, but she flinched away. Rett’s skin went hot with embarrassment. I wasn’t going to hurt you. He dropped his hand to his side. “What’s your name?” he asked quietly, trying not to make her nervous.
“Bryn.”
“I’m Rett.”
Her gaze traveled to his abdomen. Rett looked down. A wide smear of red-brown stained his jumpsuit. What—?
“Is that—blood?” Bryn asked in a halting voice.
Rett touched his stomach. He didn’t feel any pain. “Not mine,” he said. He met her gaze. Alarm flashed in her eyes. He took her fear like a punch to the gut. I swear I’m not a bad guy, he wanted to say. Instead he wilted back, gave
her some space while confusion and humiliation roiled in his already churning gut.
“I’ll go look around,” he finally managed to say. “There must be someone else here.” He backed out of the room, muscles tight with alarm. Because he couldn’t say—he had no idea—how someone else’s blood had gotten onto his clothes.
5:46 A.M.
Rett stumbled through the main room, past the slanted walls striped with peeling yellow paint and dust-bathed metal. Down the short corridor that led to the bolted door. He staggered through a doorway to his right, into a narrow room so dark he could only just make out shelves stacked with white jumpsuits. He seized a jumpsuit, shuddering with relief at the sight of it. Peeled off the one he was wearing, yanked on the clean one. Stashed the bloodstained jumpsuit in a bin. Some of the red-brown had come off on his hands. The sight filled him with horror. He swiped his palms over the edge of a shelf, trying to scrape off the stain.
Blood on my clothes, on my hands. His stomach curled. What happened? Why can’t I remember?
He tried to feel in his muscles whether he had been forced into a fight with someone. He’d once broken another boy’s hand at the government-run facility he’d lived in since age ten. Garrick was taller than him by a head, meaner than him by a full set of knuckles, and the sickening crack of his bones breaking still echoed in Rett’s memory.
Rett didn’t like to think about that day. Fighting never ended well. Using your head works better.
So why is there blood on my hands?
He turned to take inventory of the changing room, as if to prove to himself that he really did know how to use his head. Beneath the shelves, a bin held thick-soled boots. At the back of the closet, a shower head angled above a stall door. Rett felt like jumping into the stall and washing away the last of the blood that stained his skin. Or better yet, the dread that seemed to coat him like the dust that sheathed every surface of this strange place. He went and turned the knob, if only so he could quench his thirst. But even when he wrenched it as hard as he could, no water flowed.
He might have lost himself in disappointment then, except that the boots in the bin reminded him of something: there were boot prints on the floor where he’d woken up. Even though he himself was barefoot, and the slight girl in the other room wouldn’t have left prints so large.
Someone else is here.
He touched a hand involuntarily to the spot where blood had stained his jumpsuit.
Someone … He wiped his sweaty palms against the suit. Someone I must have hurt.
Where?
He crept out of the changing room, eyes on the floor. There they were: boot prints in the dust, smeared where Rett had walked through them barefoot. The trail led him back to the main room, where he stopped short.
One of the striped walls had been lifted into an overhead slot to reveal a room beyond like a space-age lounge. A low angled couch that had once been white but was now gray with dust ran along three walls, taking up the whole space. I’m trapped in a creepy metal dollhouse, Rett thought as he surveyed the cross-sectioned room. A dollhouse with a lock.
“Bryn?” he called, his voice creaking with uncertainty. Did she lift the wall—or did someone else do that? A ladder set over the couch led to an opening in the ceiling, a square of darkness that pulled at him even while it made his scalp prickle. “Bryn? Are you up there?”
No answer but the ring of his own voice against the metal walls.
Rett’s heart beat faster as he stepped onto a ledge at the back of the couch and grabbed the rungs.
He eased his head up into the darkness. For a long, unnerving moment he could only blink against black nothingness. A latch clicked some distance in front of him. And then his eyes adjusted, and he could just make out a set of beds to either side of the room, and the back of Bryn’s white jumpsuit against a bank of metal drawers. What is she doing?
Rett ducked. She’ll think I’m spying on her. I am spying on her. He heard her coming toward the ladder, so he scrambled back toward the far end of the couch and tried to look as little as possible like the bloodstained villain she might be imagining him as. He relaxed into an easy slouch, and kept his hands where she could see them.
Bryn jumped from the ladder and snapped her attention toward him. Her hands were shoved deep into the pockets of her jumpsuit. She took something from the drawer.
The intensity of her gaze was more than he could bear. “Were you the one who opened the wall to this room?” he asked. “There’s someone else here.”
Bryn’s gaze went to the phantom bloodstain on his abdomen. “Or there was,” she said.
Rett wanted to tell her he didn’t think he could have hurt anyone. But how could he explain what he couldn’t remember? If she’s hiding something from me, maybe I’m better off letting her be scared of me.
“You changed your clothes,” Bryn said.
Rett looked down at his jumpsuit. The logo of overlapping lines was the same as the one on the main door, the same as the one on Bryn’s jumpsuit. “There’s a room full of these.” He hadn’t stopped thinking of what Bryn might have in her pockets. He pointed at the ladder. “Did you find anything up there?”
“No.” A flat, heavy no that echoed off the metal walls.
She’s lying.
But she moved her hands to cross her arms, and the pockets of her jumpsuit didn’t bulge at all. So maybe she really hadn’t found anything.
Then again, maybe she had found something and put it in the drawer.
The thought kicked Rett’s defenses into gear. Stealing, hiding—he knew how to watch out for those things. He’d had six years of practice at Walling Home.
He looked her over, head to toe, the way she kept examining him. Narrow frame, squared shoulders, hazel eyes that shone bright enough to startle as she stared back at him in unbearable scrutiny. “You don’t remember…” He wanted to say what happened here? But she tensed defensively, so he said, “how you got here?”
She hesitated. “My best guess is I was drugged. But I’m willing to believe something as strange as I sleepwalked. If you say it with enough conviction.”
Rett stared at her. Is she joking? Or does she think I’m bullshitting her? “The lock on the door is jammed.” He didn’t know what else to say.
Bryn’s gaze went toward the hallway that led to the heavy door. Had she already seen the lock? He imagined her creeping toward the door to examine it while he’d been in the closet sweating out his possible guilt and certain dread.
“Your name’s Rett?” Bryn gave him a look that made him feel like a dog in a kennel. She inched back like she thought he might bite. “Last name?”
Rett started to say, then corrected himself. “None, really. Ward.”
“As in, ward of the state?”
He gave a small nod. It wasn’t a fun thing to admit.
“Walling Home?” Bryn asked.
Rett nodded again, slowly, wondering how she had guessed which facility he belonged to.
“Me too,” Bryn said, so quiet he might have imagined it.
He straightened in surprise. Everything about her took on new meaning: her thin frame, her hard stare, the way she edged along the walls. She was like him—cautious, ready to bolt. He tried to decide if he recognized her. Yes, he’d seen her before, but the too-big jumpsuit made her look different.
He remembered something about her, a rumor … But it slipped out of his mind just as soon as he got hold of it.
“What’s the last thing you remember?” he asked her.
Bryn’s eyes fluttered closed for the briefest of moments before she locked her wary gaze back on Rett. A fine layer of dust coated her skin. Rett rubbed a hand across his own cheek and felt grit. He looked down at his feet; they were black with dirt. I was outside, he thought, but he couldn’t remember more than the chill on his skin.
“I remember waking up in that office there, looking around,” Bryn said, back pressed against the side of the couch.
“Before that?”
Images flashed through Rett’s mind: the dull gray of cafeteria tables, the crisscross of wire inside window glass. The other boys—lean, knobby with muscles—surging toward him in a blur of motion. Punishing him for being small, for being around when they were bored or bitter. He felt the weight of too-tight walls around him, stale air in his lungs—his worst moment at Walling, when he’d been trapped in an old firewood box. He could feel the rough lid against his fists even now, the scrape of it over his skin as he pounded …
He dragged in a rattling breath, trying to get his bearings. His throat was painfully dry. “I’d kill for some water right now.”
Bryn’s gaze flickered to his abdomen again.
Rett bit his lip. Could have found a better way to say that.
He turned his attention again to the chaotic pattern of heavy boot tread laid out over the floor of the main room—
And a trail of prints that disappeared under the far wall. Someone else is here, he thought again.
“What do you think’s under that wall?” he asked Bryn as he walked slowly toward it.
“There’s no latch to lift it.”
Rett bent to look closer. Bryn was right—there was only a rusty plate where a latch used to be.
“I can manage it.” Rett kicked at the wall with his heel until the wall bounced back enough that he could stick his foot underneath and pry it up. It lifted with a groan, and more easily than he had thought it would. Something—adrenaline, determination—was making him stronger and sturdier, if racked with pain and thirst.
Despite his newfound strength, the wall stuck halfway up. Rett turned to Bryn, checking to see if she felt any less hesitant than he did to duck blindly into the dim room beyond and find out what awaited them. He caught a flicker in her eyes that said he’d impressed her with his kick-and-lift trick. Should I tell her how I learned to get out of tight spots? he thought grimly.