Page 8 of Our Last Echoes


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I couldn’t tell if he was joking. And I didn’t know what myanswer might be if he wasn’t. Was that what I was? A ghost? “Did it really happen?” I asked.

“Maybe?” Kenny said, but Liam looked thoughtful.

“There was this thing,” he said. “When I was little, Dr. Kapoor was a postdoc, and she was spending the summer here. When she got back, she was really... withdrawn, I guess? I was too little to know why, but I heard her talking with Mum once. I remember something about a girl, and I remember having the impression something bad had happened to her. That would have been... 2003?”

“That’s the year that storm happened,” Lily said.

“What storm?” I asked. As if I didn’t know.

“It was this awful accident,” Lily said. “Some idiots went out on the water during the mist, and the weather turned. The boat sank, or something? Three people died. They never even found the bodies. But I don’t remember there being a kid involved.”

“No one really talks about it,” Kenny pointed out. “Could be we don’t have all the details. The only people around from back then are Hardcastle and Kapoor, and good luck getting anything out ofthemabout it.”

“Ah,” I said, as if that satisfied my curiosity, as if it didn’t really matter to me at all. A storm. Three people dead. Just a number, some faceless figures. But I knew their names. Joy Novak. Martin Carreau. Carolyn Baker. The coverage was obscure, the records thin, but I knew they’d been here. And then... they weren’t.

“Are you all right?” Liam asked.

“I thought we agreed you wouldn’t ask me that,” I replied. I wasn’t all right. My nerves jangled, and a familiar vertigo sweptover me, the prelude to the crash that always came after I pulled my little trick with unwanted emotions. I was out of time. “I’m just tired. I think I should get some rest,” I said. Was my voice too loud, too frantic? Liam frowned slightly, but the others looked unconcerned.

“You’re the third door on the left,” Lily informed me. “Bathroom’s at the end of the hall.”

“Thanks.” I stumbled as I stood, but I hoped they’d just pass it off as weariness from a long trip. I offered an anemic wave and hurried down the carpeted hallway, hearing my breath too loudly in my ears.

I barely got the door closed behind me before my knees went out. I sagged and slid, letting my bag fall to the ground beside me, as the fear I’d pushed away less than an hour ago slammed back into me.

I screwed my eyes shut. I shoved one hand into my pocket and wrapped it tight around my mother’s wooden bird, letting the sharp points of the wings bite into my palm. I sucked in breath after breath through my nose, and told myself I was safe, that there was no reason for this surge of adrenaline, this racing pulse, this wild, untamed fear.

I counted breaths. Fifteen. Thirty.

By forty-five, I was something approaching calm. I relaxed my hands, opened my eyes, and let my head loll against the door. That hadn’t been so bad. I hadn’t felt like I was dying. I hadn’t thrown up. And no one had seen.

I stood up shakily. The window threw my reflection back at me—hollow eyes, hair like a mass of briars around my face. Ilooked away quickly. I hated seeing my reflection. Especially after one of my crashes—that emotional collapse that inevitably followed after I’d shoved away fear or sorrow into that empty void-space. Though sometimes the blinding fear or anger or rending sadness rushed over me like a wave with no reason at all. I was lucky this time. I’d had warning and somewhere private to ride it out.

I dropped my bag on the bed and sat next to it. I pulled out my clothes, stacking them side by side on the bed to store later, and reached to the bottom of the bag, to the most important object I carried with me: a printout of a scanned photograph.

The phone call had come late at night, when I was leaving my shift at the burger place near my school, walking back to my foster home. It was short-term placement—three months left and I’d be out on my own, eighteen and done with high school. I never answered unknown numbers, but for some reason I picked up.

What do you know about Bitter Rock?

I was sure Abby had the wrong person. Or that it was some kind of prank. And then she texted the scan to me: a photo, front and back.

The photo showed my mother and me. I was maybe three. Small, but I always have been. I was pressed against her side, grinning up at her. I’d had brown hair as a kid; it had only lightened to blonde as a teenager. The same as hers, which was pulled back in a braid, the same way I wore mine now. A close-mouthed smile made her look like she had a secret and wanted you to know it. Her hands were in the pockets of a puffy vest; her gaze was fixed squarely on the camera. Behind her was the sky, and scrubgrass, and a rocky cliffside. And in the corner of the photo was the edge of a sign.LANDON AVIAN RES—

That’s all you could read. There was a date scrawled on the back of the photo, next to our names. August 10, 2003. Days before she died. She looked happy. She looked well. She looked a world away from dying in a Montana hospital.

I lay down on the bed, holding the small wooden bird between my thumb and forefinger. Now that I’d seen one in person, there was no mistaking that it was a red-throated tern. A bird that only came from one island.

I knew a Sophie once, Mrs. Popova had said. Who else could she mean? I didn’t remember her. Did I? I shut my eyes and summoned up an image of Mrs. Popova’s face, and something kicked hard at my gut, the same not-quite-memory that I’d gotten looking at Mikhail.

Abby, the girl who called me, had told me about 2003, the summer when my mother, Martin Carreau, and Carolyn Baker went missing. Their deaths—or disappearances—were strange enough on their own, she said, but it wasn’t the first time it had happened.

She didn’t tell me more than that, so I found it on my own. The disappearances weren’t tied to Bitter Rock directly, not overtly, but you could make the connection if you knew what you were looking for. A small island. People missing. Investigations that petered out far too soon.

TheKrachkafirst—a fishing boat. The crew missing and an entire village with it. An airbase in World War II abandoned without explanation. A back-to-the-land commune wiped off the map.

And three vanished ornithologists in 2003.

Abby wasn’t the first to put the pieces together and see the pattern. I’d found other theories—internet forums teemed with posts suggesting the missing were the victims of aliens, government experiments, the Rapture in miniature. And then the voices of reason always chimed in:coincidence. It was a dangerous part of the ocean. Lots of storms and lots of rocks. It was too remote for emergency services or search crews to get out there, increasing the chances of bodies going unrecovered. And, of course, some of it could be made up or exaggerated. It was the obvious explanation. The one that didn’t require you to believe in the impossible.

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