Mr. Echo's Arc

Chapter 16 of 25

Mr. Echo sat with his back to the wall of the burrow and counted the time by his own breathing. The ghost girl had walked west with the box, past the pinch where he could not follow. Without the hum against his knee, the tunnel was only dirt and dark. Clover Wanderpaw sat beside him. Kate crouched at the passage mouth, listening. The standing rabbit did not move. He had no way to call the girl back. If the pull took her further than she could remember, she would keep walking, and the box with her. He worked the problem out loud. "She has no name I can shout. No thread back." Kate looked at him. "Then make one." Mr. Echo turned that over. Sound was what he had. Sound was what he had spent. He had given the box every voice it ever carried, and now he had given the box itself. He felt through his coat. In the inside pocket he found the small tin cup he drank from on the trail, and a spoon. He pulled them out and set them on the dirt. Kate watched him. Clover watched him. He struck the spoon against the cup. The sound was thin and clear. It did not fill the tunnel. It marked it. "She followed us from the salt line," he said. "She followed because we kept moving and she wanted to see. She will follow a sound she knows is mine." He struck the cup again. Three taps, a pause, two taps. The pattern he had taught the first Bunnyman in the clearing weeks ago. He struck it once more, then waited, then struck it once more. A beacon on a five-count. The standing rabbit's ears turned toward the pinch. Kate leaned in. "Something," she said. Mr. Echo did not stop tapping. He kept the count steady. His arm ached. He heard nothing back, because he never heard sound coming, only sound going missing. He listened for the wrongness instead, the shape of the tunnel changing as a body moved inside it. The wrongness came. The long throat past the pinch tightened in his hearing, then softened, then tightened again. Something walked back toward him against the tap. The black cat came out first, low to the ground. Then the ghost girl, the box held in both hands. Behind her, bent almost double in the small space, a rabbit in a brown hood pushed through the pinch on her elbows and dropped into the hollow. Her ears were long and scarred at one tip. She looked at Clover and said, "You came." Clover said, "You left." Neither moved for a moment. Mr. Echo set down the cup and spoon. The tin cup would ride in his pocket now, not the pack. He had a signal. He had the girl back, and the box, and Longear, who had walked west three days and turned around for a sound she recognized.