The Echo Room

by Parker Peevyhouse

  “I must have written it before,” Bryn said. “Before we ended up in the wasteland.”

  Bryn’s hair looked different. Shorter, Rett realized. Not even long enough to hook around her ears. It hid her eyes while she looked down at the note in her hands.

  “Did Dr. Wells tell you why we ended up in the wasteland?” Bryn asked. “She said it was a test run. But I don’t think that’s right. I don’t think we were supposed to end up out there.”

  “She told me we were supposed to be here in Scatter Labs in the future. Something must have gone wrong.”

  “I remember…”

  Rett moved her hair out of her eyes so he could study her face. She looked different from how she’d looked in the wasteland, younger. The wasteland is six years in the future, Rett realized. I was older then, too.

  A line appeared between Bryn’s eyes while she thought. At least that was the same as Rett remembered. “You remember what?” he asked her.

  “Thinking something wasn’t right around here.”

  Rett thought of the boy in the other room and his stomach dropped. “I saw … in the other room…” He did his best to describe it to her.

  “Dr. Wells told me we were the only ones,” she said when he’d finished, her voice choked with horror. “She said—”

  “I think we were the first ones to get to the future,” Rett said. “But we weren’t the first ones to try, were we? We’re not just the first ones, Bryn. We’re the only ones.”

  Bryn found his hand and gripped it in hers, and he felt how hard she trembled. “Scatter’s never going to let us leave. If we’re the only ones who can do what they want, they can’t afford to let us go.”

  “We have to get out of here.” Rett pulled her up from the bed and passed her the zippered pouch so he could use the keycard.

  “Where did you get this?” she asked, breathless.

  Rett glanced back at her. She was gaping at the cash in the pouch. “I think we’ve earned it.”

  Bryn zipped the pouch shut. “Same here.”

  She followed him into the hall. The thud of boots echoed nearby. Rett pulled Bryn in the opposite direction.

  They ran, without any idea how to get out, with Rett straining to listen for the clack of more boots on tile. He thought of the girl in the garden—Bryn—with stolen daisies stuffed in her pockets, and he wanted so badly to get her someplace where no one could keep her locked away from anything again.

  “Rett.” Bryn pulled him to a stop. The shadows at the end of the hallway grew, and then three security guards rounded the corner.

  Rett turned back the way they’d come, but at the other end of the hallway, a familiar white lab coat stood out against two more black-clad guards. “Rett. Bryn,” Dr. Wells called. “You’re disoriented. You’re not thinking straight. Whatever you’re feeling, we can work through it.”

  Rett ignored her. He reached out and clutched Bryn’s hand. “Bryn, I’m sorry I wasn’t always honest with you. I’m sorry I’ve screwed things up over and over.”

  Bryn shook her head, but Rett didn’t have time to explain more. “Do you trust me?” he asked her.

  She looked up, confusion in her eyes. Rett took her other hand and pulled her close.

  Her eyes lit up. She understood.

  She leaned in and pressed her lips against his.

  Rett’s heart jolted and they spiraled into the ether.

  6

  4:38 A.M.

  So many stars hung over Rett that the sky seemed to press down on him. He felt its chill through his jumpsuit. Heard nothing but the sound of his own breathing.

  He knew this hollow well, knew a curtain of green light would unfurl overhead even before it did so.

  I’ve come to the future.

  Six years in the future.

  He turned, searching the hollow for Bryn. Did I come here alone?

  “Bryn.” He whispered it, reluctant to break the spell cast by starlight and silence. The weight pressing on him made breathing a struggle. Please be here, Bryn. Please don’t leave me alone … “Bryn?”

  The muffled scrape of shifting dirt answered him. He turned to see a shadowed mass split in two—Bryn stepping out from behind a boulder.

  She slid her arms around his waist and he pulled her shoulders close to him. I’m not alone, he thought, and the weight lifted from his chest.

  He looked up at the light dancing in the sky. Something about this moment … The quiet, the calm, the endless stars and flexing sheet of light. He felt like anything he wished might come true. Like he might close his eyes and find himself lying on his stomach in the middle of his living room, marveling over the comic book panels of a boy who wished his way to magical adventures and home again. The one his mother had read aloud to him, her voice pushing away all thoughts of darker days.

  Under these stars, under this magical dance of green light, that one wish might come true: come back.

  And now he finally understood: this moment was the heavy stone pulling down the fabric of his reality, so that every moment in his life circled this one.

  “Rett?” Bryn spoke into his shoulder. “What are we going to do?”

  They’d left Scatter Labs behind—left locked doors and secrets and isolation and lies.

  But they’d also left everything else. Rett ached at the thought of the money he’d held in his hands, enough money to finally help his mother.

  He lifted his face to the stars, to the shimmering fall of green light. Time will fold like a curtain, and we’ll be back together.

  He eased out of Bryn’s arms and turned to where he knew he’d find the shadow of Scatter 3 rising over them. “We have to go back in there.”

  Bryn shook her head. “That guy’s going to be in there. He had the gun last time. He pointed it at you.”

  Rett saw the scarred barrel in his mind, green in the light of a glow stick, and wondered where the image had come from. He pointed the gun at me, Rett thought. I remember. The spiky feeling of panic came back to him.

  But I gave him that money. He recalled the surprise on the man’s face back in Scatter Labs when Rett had stuffed hundred dollar bills into his hand. “I don’t think he’ll be here this time around. I think he might have left Scatter Labs. I gave him some of the money they paid me, which means he probably wasn’t desperate enough to come out to the wasteland this time.”

  Bryn didn’t respond. Rett turned to find her marveling at him like he had at the curtain of light hanging over them. He ducked her gaze.

  “Six years older,” he said. “Is that why you’re staring? All that ‘wisdom’ showing on my face?”

  “Wisdom and stubble.” She drew her fingers over his jaw and he could have sworn he felt his skin sizzle.

  “I thought it was grit before.” He rubbed his own hand over his face and startled at the unfamiliar rasp. And where his sleeves had been baggy six years ago, his arms now strained against the fabric. “Guess I ate pretty well in Scatter Labs.”

  “And wasted all your time on push-ups when you could have been working on more nightmare comics,” Bryn said, squeezing his shoulders.

  “Actually, I think I did both.” Rett thought of the sheaves of paper in his desk drawer at Scatter Labs. “A lot of both. Come on, it’s cold out here.”

  “Wait.” Bryn caught his hand. “We know how to get back to the time we started in: the passphrase, plus a little adrenaline.”

  Rett recalled the kiss she’d given him in the hallway of Scatter Labs and thought, More than a little. “But that’ll only take us back to Scatter Labs. We’ll be stuck there again.”

  “You found someone to help you sneak out of your room. Do you think he’d help us sneak out of the Labs altogether? If we paid him?”

  Rett nodded, thinking. “We can go back, try it all again. Pretend like we don’t suspect anything, ask for the money like I did last time. Wells will pay us, she’ll ask us to stick around, we’ll pretend to agree. And then—we find the guy who helped me last time, pay him to
help us get out of there.”

  Bryn was frowning. She moved her fingers through her hair. “But our mechanisms. Scatter could find a way to use them against us, maybe use them to hurt us until we agree to come back to them and do what they want us to do.”

  A twinge of remembered pain went through Rett’s head. Last time he’d been in this wasteland, he’d suffered through the worst headache of his life.

  “I saw you when your mechanism went haywire.” Bryn smoothed her fingers over the side of Rett’s head, and he leaned into her touch. “It was terrible—the pain made you lose consciousness.”

  Rett didn’t want to think about that. He’d rather focus on the warmth of her hand moving over his head.

  “We can’t get away from Scatter.” Bryn let her hand fall back to her side. “We’re tied to them as long as we have these mechanisms in our heads.”

  “Wait. Wells said … When I asked her whether we’d be allowed to leave, she said she’d give us a code to say aloud that would turn off our mechanisms for good.”

  “She was probably lying.”

  “No. I don’t think she was.” Rett’s mind raced. “When I first told her that we’d found Scatter’s device, she asked me if I’d seen some ID codes on the display. She said they’d be a string of numbers next to our names. Do you think those could be the codes we need? We say them out loud, and our mechanisms will die?”

  Bryn gripped Rett’s hands in hers. “I remember seeing those on the screen.”

  “You don’t happen to remember what they were, do you?”

  “If I told you that yes, I’d memorized two random strings of numbers whose significance I didn’t understand at the time, how much would you love me?”

  Rett’s heart thudded. His hands suddenly felt heavy in Bryn’s, like he’d never noticed that his hands existed before she’d held them. “I…”

  “You know that’s not possible, right?” Bryn tugged his wrists. “Although it’s nice to know you didn’t immediately doubt that I could hold that level of genius.” She gave him a wry smile that he couldn’t return.

  “Bryn…” He brushed his thumbs over her palms. “I…” He didn’t know how to say it.

  But Bryn seemed to understand. She looked down. “When we first showed up here, I didn’t know if you were here. I was confused, and … I’m glad I’m not alone.”

  But it’s not just that, Rett thought. It’s not just that I’m glad I’m not alone. He tried to find a way to say it—

  “It’s cold out here,” Bryn said. “And you and I both know there will be a creature heading this way soon. We better go inside.”

  Rett nodded. “We need to get the supplies together and get out of here as fast as we can if we want to avoid the bug.”

  “We’ll dig up the device one last time, get those codes.” Bryn started up the slope, leaving Rett to feel the cold and darkness in a way he hadn’t before. She stopped to look back at him, a little unsteady on the incline. “And then we go back to our time for the money Scatter owes us. Say the codes out loud. And we’re free.”

  Free. The word drummed in Rett’s head.

  He wanted to be free of Scatter.

  But not of Bryn.

  She has someone to go back to, he told himself. Just like you do.

  She had said her boyfriend wouldn’t be waiting for her, but would she go look for him? To give him the money she felt she owed him?

  “Rett?” She had noticed his hesitation. She stepped back down the incline to take his hand. “At least we’ll be working together this time.”

  The weight of cold and darkness lifted a little.

  She pulled him up the incline after her.

  At the top of the slope, the door to the depot stood cracked open. “Are we sure no one’s here?” Bryn whispered.

  “Maybe it’s been open like this for a long time,” Rett answered.

  He peered in through the opening. Only darkness.

  The edge of the door raked his jumpsuit as he slipped inside. No way a big guy like the one in Scatter Labs could get through an opening this narrow, he thought. If he were here, he’d have opened the door wider than this.

  Even so, Rett ducked into the changing room first thing. Bryn crept in after him, and then they were breathing in the dark, waiting for their nerves to calm.

  “There’s a fire extinguisher here somewhere,” Bryn whispered. “I can’t see it in the dark.”

  Rett furrowed his brow. “Why—”

  “It’s our only weapon.”

  “Against a possible gun?”

  “We need those GPS units,” Bryn said. “And water, and a compass.”

  Rett leaned out of the room, straining to hear any sign that they weren’t alone. He took a few timid steps into the corridor. The grit underneath his boots made his footsteps crackle.

  “Rett, what are you doing?” Bryn whispered.

  Rett could just make out an empty room under a skylight, and an open doorway yawning black at the other end of the depot. “I don’t think anyone’s here,” he said over his shoulder.

  Muffled sounds from the closet told him Bryn was putting on boots, and a moment later, she appeared in the corridor with another pair for him.

  “Last time, the guy who was here didn’t exactly announce himself,” Bryn said in a low voice.

  “What exactly happened last time?” Rett asked.

  Bryn fidgeted next to him. “I think he came out of the room at the back of the depot. He pointed the gun at you, made you walk to the depot’s main door.”

  She trembled and Rett pressed his shoulder against hers in the dark. “Walking doesn’t sound so bad,” he said. “What else?”

  “You both went outside. I grabbed the fire extinguisher, hit him on the head.”

  “I thought it would have been more exciting. You sure I didn’t kick him or anything?”

  “You felt bad for him after I knocked him out and you tried to pull him back inside.”

  Rett shook his head with mock skepticism. “Doesn’t sound like me.” He took a few more steps down the corridor and peered around at the empty space. “I’m pretty sure he’s not here this time.”

  Bryn came up and pressed a plastic tube into Rett’s hand. “Then I guess it’s okay if we use this.”

  A glow stick. Rett cracked it. “I feel like a superhero with this thing glowing.” He held it out in front of him like a wand. “The Time Master.”

  “Great name,” Bryn said flatly.

  “How about Clock Breaker?”

  “Okay. But the jumpsuit is ruining the effect.”

  “Scatter doesn’t issue capes.” Rett swiped the glow stick through the air, illuminating dust and metal. He came to the dark doorway, and his pulse pounded. No one’s here, he told himself. I’d have heard them by now.

  The glow stick shook as he held it out in a trembling hand and inched forward.

  Its light fell on a familiar desk. And atop the desk, a dark lump.

  What is that?

  He held his breath, as if that might make him invisible to whatever lurked there.

  Inched forward.

  The backpack! He let out his breath and scooped up the pack.

  “Bryn, I found the pack.”

  He turned back to where she waited and passed the pack to her. He couldn’t figure out why she moved so stiffly to take it, why she wasn’t happy to see that the devices and the water pouches were now safely in their possession.

  “It wasn’t in the supply room,” she said.

  “Why would it be the supply room?”

  “Why would it be in the office unless someone—”

  The lights came on.

  Rett threw his arm over his eyes to shield them from the sudden brightness.

  Someone’s here. His heart all but burst from his chest. “He’s in the power supply. We need to seal the doors!”

  He wrenched up the wall over the lounge and reached to slap the button on the wall, to set off the chain reaction that would shut all the d
oors and seal them when the place flooded—seal the power supply where someone must lurk even now.

  But Bryn moved to block him from the button. “The GPS units aren’t in the backpack!” She had jerked open the pack and now held it out so he could see: only the water pouches lay inside. “We need them to find Scatter’s device. We can’t flood the place unless we know they’re safe.”

  Rett shot to the supply room and stomped on the wall. It lifted and he dove underneath. The sight that greeted him made him pause. No mess of strewn supplies, like last time. Instead, neat rows of equipment sat in organized sets.

  Someone came through here. Someone who knows exactly what he’s doing.

  One glance told Rett that the GPS units weren’t here. He ducked out of the room.

  And lightning went through his heart.

  In the dark doorway to the office stood a man in a white jumpsuit with a black Scatter cap, pointing the flare gun at Rett’s chest.

  “Wait,” Rett said, as the man lifted the gun. “Wait, don’t shoot.” He was numb all over with fear.

  “I wondered if I’d see you here,” the man said.

  Rett couldn’t take his eyes off the gun. The man tightened his grip on it, and that’s when Rett noticed something odd: the man’s crooked fingers overlapped. As if his hand had once been broken and never properly healed.

  Rett peered at the face under the grimy cap, a leathery face more lined than Rett remembered, but still unmistakable. “Garrick?”

  “You shouldn’t be surprised to see me,” Garrick replied, one corner of his mouth lifting in a smug smile. “You told me six years ago that Scatter’s security systems would go offline today. The day of the solar storm.”

  Bryn shifted in surprise, and Garrick gave her a fleeting glance. “Figured you’d be here too,” he said.

  Rett caught Bryn’s eye. I only told him about the solar storm to warn him away—I didn’t mean to invite him out here. He tried to say it with a look. Bryn seemed more concerned with the flare gun pointing at Rett’s chest. Her gaze darted between it and Garrick’s shadowed face.