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The cawing of the crows—high, sharp, angry shots of sound. The buzzing of the telephone wires.
Echo watches the crows in the empty basketball court across the street as they hop over the cracked and weed-strewn pavement. The air shimmers with dry heat. The buzzing of the telephone wires is actually a high-pitched ringing in her ears.
She's alone on a long, straight shot of road, cutting through the old business district, at the high point of day. She feels the beat-beat pulse of the sun above her and the rivulets of sweat dripping down her temples, the sheen of sweat across her forehead. Next to the basketball court, the neon OPEN sign in the window of a Chinese restaurant buzzes O-P—N, the E burned out. Most the other stores on the street are just empty fronts, dead dark windows glinting, faded lettering above the door.
She was trained to notice details once—
Get her out! Get her out! Get her out! Raucous shouting and screaming over clouds of heavy smoke, pitch-black night cut with flashlight beams and searchlights—arson, she thought—arson—and the smoke searing in her lungs—
The Chancellor run this town, you know, not the Mayor, said in a sweet, sad voice, a woman's hands holding her hands—
Three mysterious deaths in two weeks is no coincidence—Someone’s cleaning house—
You saw this coming—
You think we sent you here to investigate fraud—?
So she still notices them now. The cawing of the crows. The buzzing in her head. The quiet, empty street, the sizzling high burning rays of the sun.
Just missing a couple of tumbleweeds, she thinks, and smiles to herself as if this were the first joke she'd ever heard. The tugging at the corners of her lips feels odd, something she hasn't experienced in a long time, and she ducks her head and lets her hair fall down past the side of her face. Like she needs to hide her expression from the crows. The heat is new, too, the dry spark of the air. Wherever she used to live, it was cold, snow-covered—as a child, she'd layer sweaters and coats, she wore thick woolen mittens with red stripes on them and a hat with flaps that came down over her ears—
The buzzing grows louder. She winces and covers her ears.
Everything around her now is washed out with ill-use and time, heat-soaked and abandoned, and she's lonely here beneath a pale and cloudless sky. Something not right, she thinks, about having no more than a few scraps of memory to tell her about—how many years of life? She can barely recall her own name. Echo might not even be it. Might be a code name, or a nickname—something someone called her once that stuck.
The Chancellor runs this town, you know. You'll never see him—
Yeah, you got that buzzing, too? Mmmmmmm-hmm. That's gonna haunt you for the rest of your life. Better hope it's the only thing that does.
I'm going to haunt you for the rest of your life—
She jumps. Every bit of her tenses, that old red-alert feeling, those old hair-trigger instincts always vigilant. She half-turns, as if expecting to find a weapon drawn behind her back. Somehow she figures that's happened before. But there’s nothing. The cracked glass window of an old storefront, a peeling poster for a local band affixed to the glass. Rotten. Her heart's beating too hard and her palms are sweating. The last scrap of memory was really two memories twinned, a growled threat from the shadows, and then that sweet woman's voice again, on top:
I'm going to love you for the rest of your life.
She stares at her hands. Without noticing, she's been rubbing at her left ring finger, until the skin is irritated and red, like she's trying to play with a piece of jewelry that isn't there. But instead of a ring there’s a small line of looping text, tattooed in a circle, right above the knuckle.
Till death.
Till I forget, she thinks, and this time doesn't smile. The soft voice and the soft touch of hands holding her hand, and a sly and secret grin on a face she can't recall. Knees bumping against knees. Fans whirring—voices echoing in a high, empty room—metallic echoes.
They were in the warehouse just as the markets were shutting down, talking in quiet voices while men shouted in the background, taking down the stalls, hiding the evidence away. The only businesses in town, they liked to say, that the Chancellor doesn't own. She was sitting on an overturned bucket. The woman was holding her hands.
Echo remembers it all, perfect and complete, for one shining second. There were crows in the warehouse, too. They were cawing—high, sharp, plaintive shots of sound.
She remembers for only a second and then the scene snaps out again. She's left uncertain and dazed, blinking at the way the faded pavement seems to burn.
But before she forgets she hears quite plainly in her ear, above the ringing that doesn't cease and the buzzing of the telephone wires and the sizzling of the sun, the woman's name.
I'm Harper.
She knows that they met on Echo's first day in town, at the diner where Harper worked. The place wasn't busy in the slow trickle of hours between the lunch rush and dinner, so Harper brought her a free slice of pie—made it myself!—and sat with her while she ate, and told her about all the people in town. Echo thought she was being chatty, at the time. Simple and sweet. But Harper had pegged her from the start as a stranger with a purpose, too silent, with a too-long stare, a trespasser with an agenda that could dovetail with Harper's own, if she just played the game right. She was everything she seemed, and something underneath. A sweet girl with a stare that didn't waver. Always reaching for Echo's hands, as if to get her attention, squeezing her fingers to emphasize details that might have seemed like nothing, names that might have passed by forgotten—as if Echo wasn't trained to notice details, wasn't carefully cataloguing every word.
They spoke a secret language with each other. Right from the start to the end.
The end—
Till death.
She couldn't find Harper in the warehouse fire but she'd known loss before, knew how to hold it back and keep herself steady, while inside her stomach clenched like a tightly formed fist. Billows of smoke rising to obscure the clouds. Licks of flames through the windows. Thinking I'm going to haunt you for the rest of your life and at the same time I'm going to love you for the rest of your life, as a woman with dark hair and hollow eyes and a pattern of sharp daggers tattooed on her arm inked the lines around their fingers. The sign in the door buzzed in neon red flames--O-P-E-N—the E was not burned out—and the farthest fluorescent light flickered and buzzed in the ceiling overhead.
Or was that already the buzzing in her ears? Had it started already?
Maybe it should say Always, Harper suggested, just before the needle touched her skin. The tattoo artist rolled her eyes. Echo rolled back in her chair, the wheels squeaking on the tiled floor, her expression set and blank, as if she were thinking. Keeping back the tremors of impatience even then.
Something concrete, she said. That's better. A promise we can keep.
After, they stood in the corner of the shop, playing palm against palm, kissed the bride not once but many times beneath the buzz of the dying fluorescent light. That crackle of sound, that fizzing light, and the sweet warmth of Harper's mouth and her body so tantalizingly close, and how she'd promised this until death. Until death written right in the skin.
I'm going to love you for the rest of my life.
Echo remembers it all. Perfect and complete. For one shining moment, all of the pieces fit together and she understands. She knows.
Then she doesn't know a thing.
She's got some sort of reminder tattooed on her skin. Doesn't know if it means anything anymore. If the expiration date has come and gone. She's got images of gold-blonde hair and a smile like a promise, and then of a man made of shadows, taunting her from the dark, a flicker of flame from a lighter and then an inferno of flames, rising all around her, an engulfing heat and a cacophony of voices. Voices screaming all around her. Until death, until hell.
She's alone on a straight shot of road. The old business district's abandoned now. Everything's moved over to the west side of town, block after block of buildings that the Chancellor's bought up; he's got his own little government set up there, you know. Everyone owes everyone something, and all favors run downhill to him. Even the diner's paying double-tax.
Echo's stomach rumbles.
The diner.
Somehow she has a feeling that she liked it there. She liked the patterns of sun on the pale yellow tabletops. She liked the quiet hours between the lunch rush and dinner. She liked the peach pie—best she's ever had, and sometime in another life, she'd traveled pretty far.
Maybe if she can find her way back there again, she'll be all right.