Now he felt sicker than ever. He touched the device. The strange silvery metal was safe enough—he’d handled the meteorites without a twinge of sickness. But the signal the device gave off—that was a different story. He imagined it pulsing through him, and it was all he could do not to empty his stomach into the dirt.
“Scatter didn’t bury their device in a wasteland to keep it safe,” he said. “Their device caused the wasteland. Or at least the signals from it did. Scatter said the signal can reach into the past, to a time even before the device was created. To a time even before the meteor shower that provided the metal this thing is made from. It spread and spread, poisoned our food, made everyone sick. It wasn’t some ecological experiment that did that. The signals from this device started it all, and it’s getting worse.”
He expected Bryn to argue with him. Tell me I’m wrong, he thought. And he couldn’t even figure out why he wanted to be wrong, until—
“Then we have to destroy the device,” Bryn said, her voice hollow.
Rett turned sharply. “We’d never be able to go back. We’d be stuck here.”
“You can go back,” Bryn said, her gaze trained on the dirt. “I’ll stay and destroy the device.”
Her words were a vise tightening around his lungs. “No. I’m not going to do that.” Rett gripped her hand and tried to fight off the horrible hot feeling smothering him.
“I told you already,” Bryn said, pulling free and kneeling at the device. “I have no one to go back to. You do. If only one of us gets out of this, I want it to be you.”
“I’m not leaving you.” Rett scanned the boulders, the rocky crawl of dirt, the distant horizon, searching for some way out of this. There’s always something. The static-and-boil sound of the distant river called to him. “The river—we’ll throw the device in just as we say the passphrase. We’ll both get home, and Scatter’s device will be destroyed. They won’t even know exactly what we’ve done. They won’t know pieces of their device are being eaten away by corrosive water until it’s too late to get all those pieces back.”
Bryn trailed her fingers over the device’s display, her expression uncertain.
“We’re both going back, Bryn.”
In the silence that followed, Rett thought he could hear a faint echo from the flare Garrick had shot still reverberating in the hollows of the wasteland.
Then he realized it was the sound of a helicopter’s blades cutting the heavy air. He looked up. A dark smudge showed against the bright sky.
“They saw the flare,” Rett said. “They’re coming for us.”
Bryn followed his gaze, her face lined with dread.
Rett lifted the device from the dirt. The lid fell away, its brittle hinges finally breaking.
“Rett, what’re you doing?”
“We’re going back,” he said, his voice grating against his ragged throat. “I’m going to say the passphrase right as I smash the device, and you and I are going back.”
He ran.
The broken-glass sound of the rushing river met him. Rett stopped at the edge of the cliff, the device cradled in his tired arms, and looked down at the white water running in a wide swath below. He lifted the device, ready to smash it on the rocky side of the ravine, ready to make Scatter’s invention disappear forever in the wild currents of the river.
But something stopped him: a cold, trickling realization.
He slowly lowered the device. Dropped to his knees with it in his hands.
“Rett?” Bryn said breathlessly behind him.
“It won’t work,” he said, so exhausted with the weight of disappointment that he felt he might tumble forward, into the river. “If either of us goes back to the past, it’ll be like rewinding time. The device won’t be destroyed anymore.”
Bryn sank down next to him.
“Haven’t we come to this wasteland over and over again?” Rett said. “And every time, don’t we find a different future? Not completely different. We find the same depot, same supplies. And a scavenger, someone who always shows up to take what we most need. Someone who…” A lurch of deep regret. “Someone who—no matter how we try to help—always ends up dead.”
Bryn trailed her fingers down his arm and slipped her hand into his.
“But still,” Rett went on, “every time we go to the past, we reset the future. If we destroy the device now and go back to the past, the device will still be built, will still send out its poisonous signals. We won’t have destroyed it.”
The distant beat of helicopter blades grew louder now, competing with the churn of the river for Rett’s attention. “It won’t work.”
Bryn squeezed his hand and then slipped her fingers free. “So we’ll both go back,” she said. “We’ll go back to Scatter Labs, six years in the past. And you’ll get out, like we talked about. Go back to your mom. Say the code that’ll kill the mechanism in your head—”
What is she saying? “Bryn—”
“And I’ll come here alone. After you’re safe in the past, I’ll come here and destroy the device.”
“No. You can’t do that.” Rett gripped her wrist like she might vanish right before him. “You don’t know if you’d even be able to get here to the wasteland on your own to destroy the device.”
Bryn lifted her eyebrows. “You don’t think I can manage it? How about we put some money on that bet?” She nudged his shoulder, but he didn’t much feel like joking around. He leaned closer, pressing his arm against hers.
“There has to be another way,” Rett said.
“There is no other way.” Bryn leaned her forehead against his. “I have to come back here on my own. You have to stay in the past. You have someone to go back to—I don’t.”
“You have me.”
Bryn brushed her lips against his, and it was all he could do to stay rooted in the moment.
“You’ll go back to your mom,” Bryn said. “Then, six years later, you’ll come find me. You’ll help me get out of this place. Okay? Hey, maybe that’s you in the helicopter.” She put her hand on the side of his face. “I can picture you stealing a helicopter.”
The device’s display flickered at the corner of Rett’s vision. He pulled back to look at the names blinking on and off the screen—operatives moving into and out of the field. Time traveling, and returning home to their own times.
His gaze snagged on a name: Cassie Ward.
Garrick’s sister.
“I have to get her out,” Garrick had said. “I promised her.”
Rett sank. Sank like the dirt could turn into lightless ocean depths and let him go on sinking forever. She promised, but she never came back for me. My mother never came back.
He curled his fingers underneath the device. Anger and grief roiled in his veins, churning like the water below.
“She never came,” he said to the hot, nerveless air. “She took everything from me when she left me.” His anger crested like a wave and he shuddered with the pain of it. “Took everything I needed, because I just needed her.”
Bryn wrapped an arm around his shoulders but he shrugged her off.
“I want to go back,” he said. “Just once, I want to have what I need.”
“We’ll go back. You can go back.”
The blinking display called Rett’s attention. Flashing names—appearing, disappearing.
So many Wards.
Scatter took everything from them, too.
And I was going to smash the device and leave them stranded. They would never have gotten home to their own times.
They’d be like me, no home to go to. No one to care for them. No one to care for.
He thought of Garrick’s sister, and the mother who waited for her. The brother who had died trying to save her.
He thought of his own mother, who had never come for him. Who wouldn’t even answer his frantic messages. Who had been silent for …
Years.
Not just since he’d gone to Scatter Labs. Before.
Before he’d e
ver gotten the offer to leave Walling. Before he’d asked if he could leave the facility early.
Before any of this had started, he hadn’t heard from his mother in …
Three years.
The putrid smell of the rotting eggs came back to him, pushed on the wind whipped up by the helicopter blades.
No, he was imagining it.
Because he knew.
He knew why his mother had gone silent. Knew why she had never come for him.
He knew what had happened to her. And he knew that it had happened a long time ago.
The names flickered. Blinked onto the screen, blinked off. Suddenly there was a moment when all the Wards, except for Rett and Bryn, vanished from the screen. When all the children Scatter had taken from Walling were home in their own times.
Rett flipped the power off.
Ensuring that all those Wards were safe.
Safe until the device turned back on.
But it never would turn back on—
Rett swung the device, smashing it down onto the cliff’s edge. Splinters of silvery metal exploded outward, flashing in the sun. A mass of sun-brightened wires erupted from the metal casing. The box hit the rocks again, tumbled and spun, a bundle unraveling. A moment later, all vanished beneath the churning surface of the river, lost forever in the currents.
Rett felt Bryn at his back. He turned and fell wearily against her, almost surprised to find her in his arms. His voice came out ragged in the wind that buffeted them: “We can’t go back.” And then, with a sob, “She’s dead. My mother’s dead.”
10:12 A.M.
The square building that made up Scatter’s outpost seemed mostly to be an excuse for the helipad on the roof. The helicopter pilot and a man in another Scatter uniform led Rett and Bryn down into the dust-muted building and ordered them into a pair of folding chairs facing a metal desk. The pilot pushed paper cups of water into their hands and leaned against the desk to inspect her guests (—prisoners? Rett wondered). The pilot’s face was brown with dirt and sun, eyes puckered as if with surprise at this sudden break from boredom. Her partner, the one who had earlier directed them into the helicopter, stood swaying in the doorway as if he might run back up to the roof the moment another flare went up. Both wore black uniforms with Scatter’s logo showing in white.
Sunlight struggled in through the dust-coated windows. Beyond, the wasteland fell away in every direction, so that Rett felt as if he were still riding in the sky above it. His cup was empty already. The pilot took it and Bryn’s empty cup and refilled them at a cooler.
“You said you shot that flare? Just the two of you?” She held the cups out of their reach. Her uniform was rumpled, the cuffs frayed—a change from the pressed uniforms and starched lab coats of Scatter’s past.
“Just the two of us,” Rett agreed, glancing at Bryn. The pilot and her uniformed friend hadn’t seen Garrick’s body. The less they knew, the better.
The pilot handed over the cups of water. Rett drained his immediately and the woman refilled it again while Rett tried to figure out why her first question hadn’t been, What the hell were you doing in the middle of our wasteland and how did you get past our walls?
The other uniformed man fidgeted in the doorway, biting his nails.
“Found the flare gun in the depot?” the pilot asked.
Rett nodded. Bryn tried to shake the last drops of water from her cup into her mouth.
The pilot settled against the desk but her feet wouldn’t stop moving, scraping over the gritty floor with nervous energy. “People try to sneak in here from time to time. See what we’ve gotten hidden away.” She gestured toward the windows. “Lots of dirt.”
The pilot’s eyes flicked from Rett to Bryn, waiting for some cue. “Against the law to get anywhere near this place. Serious business.”
She’s not angry, Rett thought. She knows we wouldn’t break into this wasteland without more supplies than we’ve got on us. She knows something’s up.
“Got those clothes from the depot?” the pilot asked Bryn.
“Flare gun, too,” added the man in the doorway, earning a glare from the pilot.
“We’ve established that,” the pilot said.
But did the flare gun come from the depot? Rett wondered. They’d gotten it from Garrick. He stole a quick glance at the man in the doorway, whose nervousness was written all over his face. What’s he so nervous about?
“Take off your boot and Sanders will have a look at your ankle,” the pilot told Rett. “Nasty limp you got.”
“I already wrapped it,” Rett said.
“All right. We got some painkillers here—Sanders, go get those.”
Sanders disappeared from the doorway and then reappeared with two white pills for Rett. Rett swallowed them without hesitation, draining the last of the water in his cup.
“How about you?” the pilot asked Bryn. “Could swear I saw you limping, too.”
Bryn tucked her feet under her chair. “I’m fine.”
The pilot studied her for a moment, then Rett. “I’ve seen my share of strange things around here. Never thought I’d see Scatter’s own operatives.”
Rett felt the hard pills stick somewhere in his chest. He stopped breathing.
“You get lost somewhere along the way?” the pilot asked. “Don’t think you’re supposed to be out here, are you?”
Bryn lowered her head to look at Rett from out of the corner of her eye. Rett glanced at her, tried to breathe.
“You got stuck here?” the pilot asked. “Had to shoot off a flare for us to get you? What happened?”
Rett stared into his empty cup.
“The mechanisms in our heads malfunctioned,” Bryn said.
It wasn’t exactly a lie, even if it wasn’t the reason they couldn’t get back. They’d never get back now, with Scatter’s device smashed and swirling in the river currents. These two didn’t seem to know what Rett had done to the device, though.
The pilot moved her tongue along her teeth, thinking. “That kind of thing happened a lot in the early days. When they were still working out the bugs.”
Rett flinched at the last word. The pilot didn’t notice.
“Hell if I’ll ever let them try to put one of those things in my head.” The pilot looked to Sanders for confirmation, but the man only stared out the window, his face pinched.
“Lucky you’ve never been desperate enough to have to,” Bryn said under her breath. Rett reached for her hand and squeezed it.
“Network’s been down all day,” the pilot said, oblivious to Bryn’s annoyance. “Solar storm. The sun’s been pushing huge flares our way, scrambling signals and putting satellites offline. Never thought you could see an aurora this far south, but it was showing half the night. I’ll try again to connect to the system, ask HQ what to do with the two of you.”
She straightened. Rett studied the floor so his nerves wouldn’t show.
“If your”—The pilot gestured at her head—mechanism—“isn’t working, looks like you might be stuck here. Won’t be able to send you back to your own time. Can’t guess it matters much, though. Isn’t that why they use orphans? Won’t matter to you which place you’re stuck in.”
Rett’s anger flared, but he kept his mouth shut. The pilot waited a moment for an answer she realized she wouldn’t get, and then she went out through the doorway opposite Sanders.
Sanders jumped to refill Rett’s and Bryn’s cups again, then hovered as if expecting something in exchange. Rett thought he knew what Sanders wanted.
“He’s dead,” Rett told him.
“What?”
“The man you were waiting for,” Rett said. “The one who shot the flare. Garrick. The bugs got him.” Rett’s stomach twisted. As much as I hated Garrick, he didn’t deserve that.
Sanders froze, alarm showing on his face.
“He told us he had a contact,” Rett explained. “Someone who helped him get in here? Someone who was going to help him get out?”
Sanders shot across to the other doorway and peered through it, anxious to make sure the pilot hadn’t overheard them. Bryn caught Rett’s eye, and he could see that he’d surprised her.
Sanders turned back. “He was just a scavenger,” he said in a strained voice that made Rett wonder if he were lying or just nervous. “Just wanted some of Scatter’s old stuff. I didn’t see any harm in letting him take it.”
“You mean, for a price.” Rett dug something out of his pocket and held it out on his palm: a small, dark rock, marbled with more silver than any of the other meteorites Rett had seen in the wasteland. He thought it must be worth a fortune. “Did he promise to give you some of his loot? Any rocks like these that he might find? He said the alloy inside it is worth a lot of money. What will you do for us if I give it to you?”
Sanders glanced through the doorway again, then darted toward Rett like he meant to snatch the rock. “What were you doing at the depot?” he said in a low tone, ignoring the rock.
“I told you, our mechanisms—”
“Did Wells send you here?”
Rett blinked at him in surprise.
“She did, didn’t she?” Sanders bit a thumbnail. “Some of us, we’ve seen what Scatter can do, and we don’t like it.” His gaze shifted to the wasteland outside the window. “But you can’t take down a goliath like Scatter without first finding a chink in its armor.”
Rett’s thoughts buzzed. A distant memory floated to mind: Wells, sorry at last for the part she had played in their misery. She’d driven them to wasteland, left them in the starry hollow. There’s only one way left to do this. You’ll have to find it …
“Scatter’s armor is gone,” Rett told Sanders, and pictured silver shards swirling in river currents.
Sanders stared at him for a long moment. He pushed away the hand that held the rock out to him. “There’s a boat. Half a mile south. You can ride the river out, the wall doesn’t go across it. Cameras might be out, too, because of the solar storm. So you don’t even have to wait for nightfall.” He glanced at the door the pilot had gone through, and then smiled at Rett and Bryn as if they were sharing a joke. “Better go now. Won’t it be a surprise that you two have vanished? Like those mechanisms in your heads just decided to send you off to who knows where?”
The Echo Room Page 25
