Page 107 of Echoes

“My love, this is it. This is all I will ever ask of you. I need to be with you. I don’t care about anything else. I don’t care about this job, this project, my parents who don’t accept me, or all the men who told me I’d never make it. This whole world could fall away, and if I have you, I will be the happiest woman because I’m with you.”

“We only got a year.”

“No, sweetheart, we had four amazing years together. They just didn’t look like the beginning others get to have, but we’ve had fouryears, and we can have many more. You just need to open that door and finish this.”

Iris walked to the door, turned the knob, and entered the room she’d been avoiding. She found the breaker box on the wall and opened the metal door. She remembered that Daphne had instructed her to use a port that her team had made and labeled‘Port-17: Do Not Use.’That was supposed to put anyone else off from using it if they happened upon this box.

“Plug it in, my love. It needs the charge. Ten seconds. That’s all.”

Iris plugged the cord into the open port, and nothing happened.

“Shouldn’t it power on?”

“No, not yet. You’ll do that.”

The lights in the room flickered, and Iris nearly pulled the device out of the port.

“Iris, hold on. Almost there,” Daphne told her.

“Security could be on their way,” Iris countered.

“Yes, so you need to be fast. You can pull it out now,” Daphne said.

Iris removed the cord and turned around.

“What now?”

“Now, hopefully, they put me in one of these drawers.” Daphne motioned to the wall of body drawers.

That was what Iris called them anyway. She knew they had bodies in them, and that those bodies were frozen, but she still wasn’t sure that she could see Daphne like that.

“Iris, you have to pull them out one by one. Quickly, sweetheart. I don’t know if security saw the lights. If they did, they’d check all the rooms.”

Iris nodded, trying to give herself some courage, and pulled open the bottom left drawer. Nothing. Bottom middle one. Nothing. Bottom right. Nothing. She went to the middle row next and yelped when she saw a male body in the left middle drawer.

“Sweetheart, next one.”

“Is he… You’re experimenting?”

“We didn’t have cadavers then. The government must have given the team this one to test. They kept the project going even after we destroyed the device. We told them it burned up during a test. Iris, please. Next one.”

Iris pulled open the second middle drawer and saw no one. She closed it and looked up at Daphne just as she was about to pull openthe third drawer in the middle row, but Daphne was gone.

“No,” Iris whispered. “No, I need you here. I need you to tell me what to do. Come back, Daphne!”

She pulled out the drawer without even realizing what she was doing, and there she was.

“Oh, my God!”

The love of her life was lying there stiff as a board and frozen. She had a cut on her forehead and had a white sheet over her body, so Iris couldn’t see any of her other wounds.

“No…” she let out.

Iris cried then. She set the device down next to Daphne’s body, reached her arms over her, and pressed her face to Daphne’s chest. She sobbed as she held on to her, feeling the cold begin to seep into her own body and missing Daphne’s warmth. God, she missed how Daphne used to come home and envelop her in her arms, hold her for several minutes while she kissed her cheek, her neck, and her lips. She wanted that back, and she needed to do this for them. She needed to pull herself together and do this for Daphne.

“Stop right there!”

Iris jumped and saw a security guard standing in the open doorway, holding a gun at her.