Page 72 of Lost Echoes

We round a corner and nearly crash into Luke and Florencia.

Luke catches Ember’s arm. “What happened?”

She tries to answer but can’t. Instead, she points down the hall, back toward the holding wing.

Florencia’s eyes narrow. “You found something. What?”

“Rooms,” I gasp. “Stages. Cameras still running. Someone was watching us. There was—” I stop, still hearing the echo of that laugh. “A child’s voice.”

Luke’s jaw tightens. “Could’ve been an audio trigger. Or a recording loop to disorient intruders. We’ve been hearing things too.”

“What?” I demand.

They exchange a look.

My stomach knots. “Tell us.”

“Whispers.”

Florencia looks past us, frowning. “It means they knew we were coming.”

The words hit like a rush of freezing river water.

Ember regains her breath. “They’re active down there. Wing B. I saw the marks of the spool symbol. Same as the other one.”

Luke curses under his breath. He’s already checking the feed on his tablet, eyes darting. “I’m not picking up internal motion sensors, but that doesn’t mean anything. These systems are siloed.”

Florencia glances toward the west wing. “Sofia and Kenzi are in there by now.”

That realization settles hard in my gut.

Luke looks up from the screen. “We need to link their feed. If we can’t warn them, we can at least capture what’s happening.”

Ember folds her arms. “Can you do that without triggering alarms?”

“Probably,” he says, fingers moving fast. “Depends on the internal architecture.”

I hover beside him, watching lines of code flicker across the tablet screen. He’s calm, too calm. That scares me more than if he’d panicked.

Florencia moves to the far wall then pulls out a small external drive. “If we can get even partial footage of Radley interacting with a survivor, it’s enough to blow this open. That’s all we need.”

I shake my head. “It’s not all we need. There are people still locked down there. Innocent kids. Lost in echoing memories.”

She looks at me gently, almost apologetically. “We save who we can, Billa. But we need proof before we have power. Once we expose this, they’ll all be free.”

It’s the journalist in her talking, the one who’s learned the hard way that truth without evidence is just noise.

But the survivor in me can’t swallow it.

And that isn’t how I see it. “Assuming they survive once Radley and his crew find out they’re done. They’re children. They need us.”

Ember puts a hand on my shoulder, forcing me to focus. “We’ll get them out. First we have to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”

Luke exhales sharply, the tablet emitting a soft chime. “I got it. Camera access in the west wing. Two feeds are live.”

He tilts the screen toward us. A static-blurred image resolves into a wide, clinical room with white walls, bright lights, and a raised platform at the center.

Sofia stands near the back, her posture poised. Beside her, Kenzi sits in a chair, face half in shadow.