Mr. Echo's Arc

Chapter 19 of 25

Longear and the guide were gone below the ridge. Mr. Echo tucked the small reel into his shirt pocket and pressed his palm flat over it. Then he heard it. Lily's voice, three ridges back, calling his name in a child's easy pitch. It was not Lily. It was the pale woman wearing her. The Fen ahead of them opened into flat reed and standing water for a mile. No trees. No cover. His group had no box to throw sound with, and the pale one tracked them by the noise they could not help making. Kate stood up slowly. "How long." "Twenty minutes," Mr. Echo said. "Less if we run and she hears us run." Clover's ears were flat against her skull. Longear — the scarred rabbit in the brown hood — had not left with her sister. She had stayed at the ridge to watch them across the first stretch. Now she stepped forward. Her hearing was the sharpest of any of them. She had caught the voice before he had. Longear pointed down the ridge, off the line they had planned. "Shadow cavern. Half a mile. Old burrow mouth cut into stone. My sister and I slept there once." She looked at Mr. Echo. "Stone eats sound. Inside it you make no shape she can follow." They ran. Kate went first, then Clover, then Mr. Echo with the reel against his chest, then Longear last because her ears would tell them when the voice moved closer. The reed hissed under their feet. Twice Longear caught his sleeve and made him stop breathing. The voice curled around them from the wrong side each time, testing. Then Longear turned them sharp left down a fold in the ground he would not have seen alone, and there it was: a black mouth in a wall of striped stone, ringed with loose rubble and old root. They went in on their hands. The dark closed behind them like a lid. Mr. Echo felt the change at once. The cavern did not return his breath. His device would have read the walls as a hole in the world. He set his back against cold rock and listened for what was not there. Lily's voice, when it came, came thin and confused. It circled the outside of the stone and did not find a shape to catch. It called twice more. It moved off. Kate exhaled. Clover pressed her forehead to Longear's shoulder. Mr. Echo felt for the small reel in his pocket and found it still whole. The pale woman had lost their trail on open ground. She would not lose it forever. She would circle back to any noise they made leaving. Longear spoke into the dark. "I know one more cavern west of here. After that, only reed." Mr. Echo nodded against the stone. They had bought hours, not days. The map in his pocket now had to move them from hole to hole until the reed ran out.