Mr. Echo's Arc

Chapter 24 of 25

The scouts filed out of the cavern at first light. Mr. Echo kept his palm on his sternum as he walked. The map beat firm under his ribs, four beats and a rest, stronger than before. That was the problem. The theremin had pressed it in deep, and now the rhythm hummed loud enough that he could feel it thrumming in his teeth. On open ground, with no stone walls to swallow it, the pale woman would hear the trace of it long before they reached cover. Clover Longear walked beside him. She flicked one ear toward his chest and then toward the ridge behind them. "Loud," she said. "She will catch it inside an hour." Kate carried the brass box against her hip. The scarred scout tapped his foot twice, meaning go faster. Mr. Echo scanned the slope ahead. Bare grass. A thin line of gorse. No wall of trees for a long stretch. He heard the wrong echo starting in the space above them, a door beginning to close in an empty house. A gray shape stepped out from behind a low rock. Tsuki Usagiri, the drummer, wearing the crescent tunic and the shell collar. They did not carry the drum this time. They carried nothing. "The beat is too bright," they said. "You cannot walk it under sky." "I know," Mr. Echo said. "Tell me how to muffle it." "You cannot muffle a beat set in bone. You move it out of you into another vessel until you reach trees." Tsuki knelt and pointed at a dark opening under the rock, a rabbit burrow with cracked earth around its mouth and roots hanging over the lip. "Put the beat in the ground. The ground holds sound the way stone did. Then walk empty across the open. Pick the beat up again on the far side where the oaks start." Mr. Echo pulled the sealed glass jar from his coat, the one that had once held Ollie's name. Empty now, still marked with the old runes. He knelt at the burrow mouth. Tsuki placed both paws on his chest and then on the jar's lid. He tapped the five parts against the glass, slow, twice through. Each tap pulled the hum out of his ribs and into the jar. The glass warmed. When he finished, his chest was quiet. The jar buzzed faintly under his hand. He pushed it deep into the burrow and packed dirt over the opening. Kate watched the ridge. "Anything?" He listened for the wrong echo. It was thinning. The pale woman had lost the trace. He stood. His chest felt hollow and light, like a drum with the skin cut away. Clover Longear nodded once. "Clean," she said. "For now." They crossed the open slope at a run. The scouts moved ahead in a loose line. Mr. Echo carried nothing of the map inside him, and the far oaks were still an hour off. He would have to trust the ground to keep what he had put down, and trust himself to find the burrow again on the way back through this country. The rhythm was safe. He was not.