Page 23 of Lost Echoes
Does anyone else remember the green room?
I freeze. “Green room?”
Luke glances at me. “Ring a bell?”
Too much. Mom used to whisper about a room she called green whenever she had nightmares—though she’d never explain what it meant.
I grip the desk, suddenly dizzy. “Luke, this is real. These people really were at Radley.”
He squeezes my shoulder. “Then we’re exactly where we need to be.”
A new message pops up at the top of the board. Not part of any thread. Just a stark warning in bold red:
THEY ARE WATCHING.
For a heartbeat, neither of us breathes.
Then Luke mutters, “Okay… that’s not creepy at all.”
My stomach knots. I can’t shake the feeling that by opening this door, we’ve already been seen.
He scrolls past the red warning, unfazed. “Could just be scare tactics to keep outsiders away. That’s what I would do.”
But my skin prickles as if unseen eyes are roving over me. “Or it means someone knows we’re here.”
“Then let’s find out what they’re hiding.” His voice is steady, sure. The way he says it makes me feel braver than I am.
He dives deeper, clicking through threads, chasing cryptic links tucked inside replies. Most of them dead-end in error messages or garbled code. But then he freezes, his cursor hovering over a string of faint gray text at the bottom of the screen. It’s barely visible, like a shadow of a link.
“What’s that?” I whisper.
Luke highlights it. The faint text sharpens into words:
Lost Echoes.
He shoots me a look. “Hidden in plain sight.”
My pulse quickens as he clicks. The Ward vanishes, replaced by a darker interface. Black background. White text. But this one feels… colder. Organized. No threads about memories or scars. Just files, lists, and diagrams.
Luke scrolls, and the breath exits my lungs. Facility schematics. Patient logs. Timelines stretching back decades.
“This isn’t just Radley,” Luke murmurs. “There are two others. Look.” He points at the headings.
Radley. North Ridge. Willow Glen.
I stare at the names, my chest hollowing out. “North Ridge and Willow Glen?”
“Both running parallel programs. Connected infrastructure. It’s like… Radley wasn’t the whole machine. It was just part of a bigger project.”
My stomach knots. “So they weren’t caught up in one doctor’s obsession. They were part of something bigger, something systematic.”
“And Laurel is just the face of the experiments. The one paying the price for something much darker.” Luke scrolls faster, his face pale in the screen’s glow. “And whoever kept this hidden wanted it buried deep.”
I grip his wrist before he can click again. “Luke… if we keep going, we can’t pretend we don’t know anything. We’ll know too much. There will be no turning back.”
He looks at me, his eyes steady, unwavering. “Then we’ll learn the truth, together.”
Another link flickers at the bottom of the screen. Blinking like a heartbeat.
