Chapter 3 FIRST ECHO
Zara Pov
The water came up to our knees.
Cold was too small a word for it. The water in the Breach version of Harrison Station had intent — it moved through fabric and muscle and settled into the marrow like it was planning to stay. I could see my breath. I could feel my heartbeat accelerating past efficiency, my body making calculations it wasn't asking my permission for.
Sawyer had gone quiet the moment we hit the water. I respected that.
Panic is the loudest thing in a room. Whatever was down here was tracking by sound.
I knew this because I had already watched it move twice.
I hadn't been consciously tracking it. But that was the thing about RECALL that the orientation packet had buried in a footnote — it didn't require conscious attention to record. Everything I'd personally witnessed in the last seventy-two hours was in there, available for playback, whether I'd been paying attention or not.
I closed my eyes and let it run.
The first moment: thirty seconds after we descended, before I'd registered it as a threat, my eyes had caught a displacement in the water forty feet north of us. A ripple. Moving against the ambient current. Stopping when we stopped. Moving when we moved.
I had filed it and kept walking.
The second moment: fifty seconds after that. It surfaced, briefly — just an outline, just a shape breaking the water's surface for two seconds before sinking again.
I saw what it was.
I wished, deeply, that I hadn't.
"Don't look directly at it," I said, barely above a breath.
Sawyer lowered his eyes without asking why. I noted that.
The Congregation was forty feet north, moving slow. Eight feet tall — maybe more. Made of bodies. Not assembled. Merged. Arms at wrong angles, faces distributed across its surface like a pattern someone had decided was aesthetic, open mouths and closed eyes embedded throughout. It moved with the terrible fluid grace of a thing with too many joints and no conscience.
My body wanted to do several unproductive things. I overruled all of them.
"Survival trial," I said. "Not defeat. Not engage. Survive. Where's the exit marker?"
Sawyer pointed south — barely visible through the dark, a pale blue arch hovering over what used to be the emergency exit door.
Two hundred feet of flooded platform. One Congregation. Sound-tracking.
I closed my eyes and replayed the two movements again. Ran them a third time. Watched the pattern.
It pauses when we pause. Moves on sound and vibration. Surfaces on the east side. East side only.
There were four support columns between us and the exit. West wall, column to column, let the Congregation's own movement patterns create the cover.
"There's a system to it," I said.
Sawyer looked at me.
"I can replay what I've witnessed with exact accuracy," I said. "I'm going to map its movement. Stay on my left. Step where I step. Match my pace exactly. If I stop, you stop. If I move fast, you move fast. No questions until we're out."
A beat.
"You have been drafted for four hours," he said.
"Yes."
"And you already have a plan."
"I always have a plan."
He looked at me for one more second. Then he nodded.
We moved west.
I won't tell you it was clean. It wasn't clean. The Congregation surfaced twice — once close enough that I could see the individual faces in its mass, mouths working without sound, and I had to physically compress the fear into a shape I could put in a pocket and keep moving. Once it came within ten feet of us, close enough that I could feel the displaced water around it, and I stood completely still for ninety seconds while Sawyer's breathing went ragged beside me and I counted the pattern beats I'd memorized until it turned away.
Four minutes and eleven seconds.
We reached the exit arch.
I reached out to touch it.
A hand closed around my wrist.
Not Sawyer.
Firm. Measured. Not pulling, not restraining — stopping me just long enough to communicate something. I turned.
He was standing on the platform behind us, completely dry. Impossibly dry. He hadn't come through the water. He'd come from above, or from somewhere else entirely, and he was looking at me with an expression that gave away nothing except the faint, focused interest of someone processing data points.
Twenty-five, maybe. Sharp features, dark eyes currently doing a very thorough inventory of everything about me in approximately four seconds. He wore black — not tactical, just dark clothes and a jacket — and above his head, his designation tag read:
DORIAN VOSS / HANDLER / ASSIGNED: NULL-001
My Handler.
"RECALL," he said. Not a question. Not a compliment.
"You watched the whole time," I said.
"That's what Handlers do."
"You didn't help."
"Handlers don't intervene in standard trials." His eyes moved briefly to Sawyer, then back to me. "You had it handled."
There was something in the flat certainty of it — like he'd already run the calculations and confirmed the outcome — that converted the last of my fear-adrenaline into something with an edge.
"Ninety-one percent of Tier F Players are voided in their first three missions," I said.
"Ninety-two," he said, "as of last month." He glanced toward the arch. "Touch it."
The arch dissolved into a cascade of blue light when I pressed my palm to it. Behind us, the Congregation made a sound I was going to spend several weeks trying to forget — low, resonant, assembled from too many mouths at once.
A box appeared in my vision.
MISSION COMPLETE — SURVIVAL TRIAL
PERFORMANCE RATING: A \[EXCEPTIONAL FOR DESIGNATION\]
REWARD: +1 ECHO AVAILABLE
ECHO DESIGNATION: \[KWAME, AGE 17 / BRONZE-I / CAUSE: CONGREGATION IMMERSION\]
ABSORB? YES / NO
Warning: Echo absorption includes Memory Load.
All deaths are experienced firsthand.
Kwame. Seventeen years old.
"Don't," Sawyer said immediately. His voice was different — stripped of its earlier easy tone. "Not today. I mean it, Zara. The Memory Load on a Congregation death is—"
I pressed YES.
I don't know exactly why. Some combination of needing to know and grief redirected, some part of me that had already lost so much today that more loss seemed survivable. Whatever my reasoning was, it took approximately one second to understand I had been wrong.
The memory hit like a physical blow.
Seventeen years old. A basketball in his hand, walking home from practice. Earbuds in, someone's playlist running. Draft notification appearing in his vision — no warning, no packet, no orientation, no Sawyer. Just a Breach opening in the street in front of him and something pulling him in. Forty-seven minutes. No ability. No knowledge. The water rising to his chest. The Congregation locating him in the dark. The last thing he felt—
I came back to myself on my knees on the platform, both hands flat on the tile, the water already receding as the Breach closed around us.
Dorian was crouched in front of me.
"First Echo," he said. Not gently. Just accurately.
"He was seventeen," I said.
A pause.
Something moved through his expression — barely, a single frame, there and gone before his face locked back into neutral. I caught it anyway.
"Stand up," he said. "You need to be standing when we exit."
I stood up.
The System updated my vision. ECHO COUNT: 1.
The Breach released a breath.