The word didn't echo. It stayed, a pressed coin in the room.
"Did you hear that?" I spoke.
"I heard it." Rowan's voice was low, careful, like he was keeping a wound from reopening.
"Then why did you move the curtain?" I asked. "You saw a face."
"I saw someone." He didn't meet my eyes.
Ruth's hands folded in her lap. "Someone, or something?"
"Both," Rowan said. "And it knows how to be polite."
"You think I don't feel that?" I snapped. The sentence came out sharper than I meant. My throat tasted like metal.
"You heard it say 'soon'." He said it was like a fact, not a question.
"It looked at me," I said. "It pointed." My fingers fumbled the Polaroid in my pocket until the image bent.
"Pointing is a show." Ruth's voice was steady. "They want you to look."
"Want me to look," I breathed. "Because it was my face."
Rowan inhaled. "We don't know what we're looking at yet."
"You said you sealed it," Ruth said. "You said there were no copies."
"We sealed the main library," he said. "We couldn't erase every backup. People take things home. People hide things in drawers."
"So someone hid her in a drawer," I said. "And now she's standing in a window pointing at me."
"She's not just standing," Rowan corrected. "She's learning how to arrive."
"Learning how to arrive?" Ruth repeated.
"Yes." He folded his hands until his knuckles showed. "Patterns. Speech signatures. When you feed an echo enough fragments of a life, it begins to mimic the life that fed it. It wears the voice like a coat. It borrows breath."
"Borrow breath," I whispered. The apartment felt like a borrowed breath.
A floorboard creaked upstairs.
"Attic," Ruth said.
"Don't go up there," Rowan snapped.
"Why not?" I asked. "Because the script says so?"
"Because whoever left that recorder didn't want us finding them in the light." He moved toward the stairs before he finished the sentence.
"Then I'm coming," I said.
"Stay behind me," he ordered.
"That's new," I said.
"Then stop being dramatic and move." He sounded almost like the old Rowan, the one who used to argue with faulty data at three a.m. and that steadied me.
We climbed. The air smelled of dust, tea has gone cold, paper has gone sour. Light from the hallway sliced the darkness into bars. Rowan's flashlight jittered.
"There's a recorder," he said, voice small.
"It's blinking," I said. "It's on."
"Pull the batteries," he told me.
I didn't. I hit play instead.
Static rolled, then a voice layered, sounding like someone speaking through glass.
"Find her."
Ruth's whisper: "Why would they tell someone to find a person who's dead?"
"Because finding her will do one thing," Rowan said. "It will make the living choose sides."
"Choose sides for what?" I demanded.
"For blame," he said. "For responsibility. For a story that makes sense."
"Who decides that story?" Ruth asked.
"We do," he said. "We don't get to choose the parts people remember." He swallowed. "But the echoes someone's teaching them to point fingers."
The recorder clicked off in the dark. The attic air felt like a held note.
"You're certain it's not a prank?" I said,
"Not a prank." Rowan's jaw worked. "Too precise."
We came down slowly, feet soft, ears bricked with the hush of a house that had learned to listen.
Ruth was at the kitchen window; hands pressed to the glass. There was a photograph she held like a rosary.
"Look," she said.
I stepped closer. The Polaroid was Amelia's same smile, same scar. Someone had circled her eyes with red ink until the white paper looked wounded.
On the back: We know where you're keeping her.
Ruth's mouth moved and nothing came out.
"You wrote 'remember,'" I said, pointing to a torn corner of a letter on the table.
"We were told to keep certain things quiet," Rowan said. "There were records. Notes. People kept them to sleep."
"Sleep?" I asked.
"To convince themselves they were safe," he said. "To stop asking."
My phone buzzed on the counter. Unknown number, flashing like a heart monitor.
Rowan read it aloud. "'We saw you.'"
"You saw me, what?" I said, my voice had a dry edge. "Open a file?"
"Open a memory." He sounded like a man trying to steady a child. "Or open a wound."
"Which is it?" I asked.
"Both."
"How do you stop this?" Ruth demanded. "How do you close a thing that isn't alive, but learns how to be?"
"We don't," Rowan said. "Not by ourselves."
"Then we run?" I said,
"That might buy time," he admitted. "But running without a plan is walking into the same script, a different set."
"Do you have a plan?" Ruth's eyes were sharp now.
He hesitated so long that I could count the dust motes.
"No," he said finally. "Not yet. But staying here is worse."
"Because?" I asked.
"Because they know where we are." He pointed to the back door. "And whoever left this wants us to move. They want us to take the bait."
Ruth set the photograph down carefully, like something dangerous. "Then go," she said. "Use the lane behind the house. I'll lock up and buy you for a few minutes. That's all I can do."
"You can do more," Rowan said.
"I can do that," she said. "It's how I survive."
I zipped my coat without thinking. Rain touched the window and left a blurred fingerprint like someone trying to erase a face.
"Do you think she'll come after us?" I said,
Rowan didn't answer right away. He closed his eyes as if weighing cold metal on his tongue.
"If it's an echo learning to be her," he said, "it will follow the sound that feeds it."
"Which is me," I said.
"You're the echo they tuned into," he said. "Where you are, it will go."
Ruth handed Rowan a set of keys. "Back lane," she repeated. "No lights. No stopping."
"Don't come back," he said to her, and there was a weight in the sentence I hadn't heard before.
"I won't," she answered.
The back door opened to a wet garden. Wind bent the hedges and the night smelled green and sharp.
"Get in the car," Rowan said to me.
I did.
He went around the bonnet and climbed in. The engine started like a sentry waking. We pulled away slowly, the house shrinking in the rearview.
"Is she there?" I asked,
"No," Rowan said. But his hands were white on the wheel.
We turned into the lane.
A light flickered upstairs at the house with one single bulb, then dark.
The rearview caught the house, the window like an eye.
I saw movement in the attic pane.
A face leaned close to the glass.
Not Amelia's.
Mine.
It smiled.
I slammed my hand over my phone as if the image could be clawed out of the world.
Rowan glanced at me. "What is it?" he asked.
"Me," I said. "It's me."
He looked at the window as if he could unsee a thing.
"Keep driving," Ruth's voice came from the night behind us, thin and fierce.
We did.
The house slipped away.
The face didn't.
It hung in my brain like a name that won't settle.
The engine swallowed the rain.
Unknown number: THE EXPERIMENT NEVER ENDED.
And in the glass of the back window my own face, watching us go bright and very, very patient.