Echo Boy Read Online Free PDF Page A

smile.
    Standing there, with the blood-soaked knife.
    ‘I was waiting for you to come,’ she said. ‘I was waiting for you to come, I was waiting for you to come . . .’
    She kept saying it, like a broken machine, which I suppose she was.
    And I just stood there, until she moved.
    How long was that? How long?
    I don’t really know. Time had disintegrated, along with reality itself. But I must have had something inside me – some determined will to survive, and for that man-made monster to not take me, my life, a life which was the product of those two bodies on the floor – and there must also have been just enough distance, and just enough of an obstacle in terms of those bodies, for me to run that short stretch along the landing towards the window.
    I also found enough of a voice to command that window to ‘Open!’
    Though there was a tiny delay, from the command to the action of it opening. A delay no doubt caused by the fact that my dad had been determined not to spend more money on technology than he needed to by having them replaced.
    So she – that thing I really don’t want to dignify with the human name Alissa – she grabbed me, the sleeve of my cotton top, andshe would have finished me off too. But I wasn’t like my parents must have been.
    No.
    There was no fear inside me at that second in time. Fear belongs to people with stuff to lose. It was just pure anger, pure hate, and the hate was so strong that just for a second I had the power to match an Echo, even though an Echo was designed to be three times as strong as a fully-grown human man. In that second this didn’t matter because I had them inside me – I had my parents inside my heart – and when I pulled away from her and slammed my elbow hard into her face, it was as though all of us, the whole family, were doing it.
    She staggered backwards.
    Being an Echo, she obviously hadn’t felt any pain, but she had to obey the same laws of physics as anyone else, so it was a moment before she could come at me again. But by that time the window was open and I was jumping out of it, leaping into the water. As soon as my head was out in the air, I screamed up towards the rails and the leviboard. (External leviboards were one piece of technology my parents had always been forced to upgrade because of rain damage.) It descended to just above water level, and I climbed out just as Alissa was jumping in (if she had been a first-generation Echo, that would have been enough to finish her off, but she was as waterproof as I was).
    Once in the car, my brain almost combusted as the fear finally arrived, and so I forgot the right command combination. By this time she was trying to get inside. Failing, she stood on the rail itself, right in front of the car.
    ‘Reverse,’ I said.
    But there were only five metres of rail behind us. There was only one thing I could do.
    ‘Forward,’ I said. ‘Fast. Full speed. To . . . to fast rail.’
    And the car sped ahead with such momentum that we smashed right into Alissa, and headed away to anywhere, the windscreen streaked with blood, my face streaked with flood water and unstoppable tears.
    She was dead. No question.
    But then again, as Dad always said, in life you can never ask too many questions.

7
    Something else Dad once said: ‘I am not having an Echo in this house.’
    He had said something similar quite a few times. But Mum was insistent. ‘They are by far the best tutors. If we want Audrey to go to a good university, I think we should get one. It could help her.’
    ‘Echos are the end of civilization,’ he said. ‘They are the end of humanity. People who sell Echos are selling the end of the human race.’
    ‘People like your brother, you mean?’
    ‘Yes. People like Alex.’
    ‘So you’ll let your rivalry with your brother get in the way of your daughter’s education?’
    This made Dad cross. ‘What is the point of educating our daughter if there is no future for mankind?’
    ‘And us buying