The First Echo

The antiseptic smell hit her first.

Sharp. Clinical. The kind of clean that did not feel clean so much as feel like the absence of everything else.

Sarah blinked.

Beige ceiling tiles. A water stain in the far corner shaped vaguely like a running dog. The low hum of the strip light above her that had been flickering since Year 7 and would apparently flicker until the end of time.

The nurse's office.

She knew this room. Not well, she was not the type who ended up here regularly, but well enough. The narrow bed with the crinkly paper sheet beneath her. The cabinet of supplies she was never supposed to look in. The motivational poster on the wall with a sunset and a quote about potential that had been there longer than most of the staff.

She pushed herself upright.

Bad idea.

The room tilted. She pressed one hand flat against the bed and waited for everything to stop moving. Her head was still pounding. Not the sharp violent pain from before but the aftermath of it. The dull persistent ache of something that had burned through her and left the edges scorched. Each heartbeat pushed the throb a little further behind her eyes.

What happened?

The classroom. The exercise book open in front of her. Mrs Davies at the board. Then nothing normal after that.

The pain arriving like something breaking open.

The sounds stretching.

The walls doing something walls were not supposed to do.

And then the vision.

Sarah sat very still on the edge of the bed and tried to hold it. Tried to keep the details from dissolving the way dreams dissolved in the shower, the way anything real and strange dissolved the moment ordinary life pressed back in around it.

A white room.

Lights that were too bright. The kind designed to leave nowhere to hide.

Cold metal. A table. Restraints. The suggestion of something that had happened there repeatedly and without apology.

A girl.

Dark hair. Eyes wide with a terror that was not about dying. It was worse than that. More specific than that. The terror of someone who had been somewhere long enough to stop believing they would ever leave.

She was screaming.

Not with her mouth.

With something deeper. Something Sarah had no word for. A frequency that had bypassed her ears entirely and arrived somewhere further in. Not in her head but behind it. Behind everything. In a place she had not known existed until it was filled with someone else's fear.

*Help me.*

Not spoken. Not even thought exactly. Just present. Like a weight that had been placed inside her chest without permission.

Sarah pressed her fingers to her temples.

It had felt like a memory.

Not like something she had imagined or dreamed or invented. Like something she had been there for and somehow forgotten until this moment.

Which was impossible.

She had never been in a white room. She had never seen that girl. She had certainly never seen the number on the wall. The one that had appeared in the final second before the darkness came.

E-17.

Not a room number. Not a classroom.

A label.

The thought settled in her stomach like something cold.

*"Sarah, dear. You're awake."*

Mrs Davies appeared from the small adjoining corridor. She crossed the room quickly with the particular anxious energy of a teacher who had watched a student collapse on her watch and was still quietly processing it.

*"How are you feeling? You gave us quite a fright."*

*"I'm fine,"* Sarah said. Her voice came out rougher than she expected. She cleared her throat. *"Just a headache. I'm fine."*

*"You collapsed in the corridor, love. That is not just a headache."*

*"I stood up too fast. Low blood sugar probably."*

Mrs Davies looked at her with the expression of someone who had heard creative explanations from students for twenty years and was choosing her battles.

*"The nurse will be back in a few minutes. I want her to check you over before you go anywhere."*

*"Okay."*

*"Your friend is outside. Lily. She has been out there since they brought you in. She would not go back to class."*

Something loosened slightly in Sarah's chest.

*"Okay. Thank you, Mrs Davies."*

The teacher nodded. She smoothed the front of her cardigan the way she did when she was transitioning from concerned to composed and stepped back toward the door.

*"I will let her know you are awake."*

The door opened. Closed. The strip light hummed.

And Sarah became aware, in the specific way you became aware of something you had been avoiding, that she was not alone in the room.

She turned her head.

Jessica Robbins.

Sitting in the plastic chair in the far corner. Uniform immaculate. Blonde hair pulled back so precisely it looked considered rather than practical. She was looking down at her lap, picking at a loose thread on the hem of her skirt.

Or appearing to.

Sarah watched her for a moment.

Jessica's posture was still. Too still. Not the stillness of someone relaxed but the stillness of someone who had decided on a position and was maintaining it deliberately. Her eyes were down but there was nothing vacant about her. She was present in the way people were present when they were paying very careful attention to something they did not want you to know they were paying attention to.

*"What are you doing here?"*

The question came out more direct than Sarah intended. Not rude. Just honest. She did not have the energy for anything else.

Jessica looked up.

For just a moment, a fraction of a second, something moved across her expression. Not the usual coolness. Not the particular blankness she wore in classrooms. Something more complicated than either of those things.

Then it was gone.

*"I was passing,"* Jessica said. *"When you collapsed. I helped bring you here."*

Sarah looked at her.

*"You helped bring me here."*

*"Yes."*

*"Why?"*

Jessica held her gaze. *"Because you fell."* A pause. *"That is generally why people help."*

It was a reasonable answer.

It was also, Sarah felt in some way she could not articulate, not the whole answer.

She studied Jessica's face. The controlled expression. The blue eyes that gave nothing away. The slight tension around her jaw that suggested something being held carefully in place.

*"You were in Maths this morning,"* Sarah said. *"When Mrs Bennett—"*

*"I know what happened in Maths."*

*"You said—"*

*"I know what I said."* Not defensive. Flat. Like she was acknowledging a fact she had already catalogued. *"How is your head?"*

The change of subject was smooth enough that it took Sarah a second to register it had happened.

*"Still hurts."*

Jessica nodded once. Looked back down at her skirt.

The silence between them was strange. Not hostile. Not comfortable. Something in between. The kind of silence that had a shape to it, that took up space in the room without filling it with anything you could name.

Sarah wanted to ask something else. She was not sure what. Something about the way Jessica had looked at her in the corridor that morning. That brief moment before class when their eyes had met and Sarah had felt something she still could not name.

Recognition.

Like Jessica had seen her. Not just looked at her but actually seen her. As if Sarah were something specific and known rather than just another face moving through a corridor.

The door opened before she could find the words.

Lily came in like weather.

*"Oh thank God."*

She crossed the room in four steps and dropped into the chair beside the bed. She grabbed Sarah's hand and squeezed it with both of hers, hard enough to be felt.

*"You absolute idiot. You scared me half to death. Mrs Davies was talking about calling your mum and I had to talk her down and then—"*

She stopped.

Breathed.

*"Are you okay? Actually okay. Not just saying okay."*

*"Actually okay,"* Sarah said. *"Mostly."*

*"What happened?"*

*"Headache."*

Lily's eyes narrowed. She had a very reliable radar for insufficient answers.

*"That was not just a headache. Mia said you went completely white before you went down. Like actually white. And you were just standing there staring at nothing for a few seconds before you fell."*

*"I don't remember that."*

*"That's not reassuring, Sarah."*

*"I know."*

Lily looked at her for a long moment. She opened her mouth. Then she stopped.

She had noticed Jessica.

The room shifted slightly. The air of it. The quality of the silence.

Lily looked at Jessica. Jessica looked at Lily. Neither of them said anything for a moment. The look between them was the kind that happened between people who did not know each other well but had enough awareness of each other to tread carefully.

*"Robbins,"* Lily said. Not unfriendly. Careful.

*"She helped bring me in,"* Sarah said.

Lily looked at Sarah. Then back at Jessica. The expression on her face was the specific expression of someone filing something away rather than responding to it out loud.

*"Right,"* she said.

Then, redirecting with the ease of someone who had decided not to press something in public, she turned back to Sarah.

*"Okay. So. How are you actually feeling? On a scale."*

*"Four."*

*"Four."* Lily considered this. *"So bad enough that you're telling me four instead of lying and saying two."*

*"When did you get this perceptive?"*

*"I have always been perceptive. You have always been bad at hiding things."*

Sarah almost smiled.

From the corner of the room came the quiet sound of the plastic chair shifting. Sarah glanced over.

Jessica was standing.

She smoothed the front of her skirt and picked up her bag from the floor beside the chair and slung it over one shoulder. Her expression had returned to its default. Composed. Distant. Giving nothing.

*"Glad you're alright,"* she said.

She said it to the room rather than to anyone specifically.

Then she walked out.

The door closed quietly behind her.

Lily watched the door for a moment.

*"That,"* she said, *"was weird."*

Sarah did not answer.

She was still looking at the door.

The vision was still sitting somewhere behind her eyes. The white room. The metal table. The number on the wall. And now it had company. The expression on Jessica's face in that fraction of a second before the mask came back down. The thing that had moved through it too quickly to name.

Sarah did not know what it was.

She only knew it had not been nothing.

Outside the nurse's office window the Manchester rain continued its patient persistent work against the glass. Somewhere down the corridor the bell rang for the end of period. Footsteps picked up outside. Voices. The ordinary sounds of a school moving on.

Sarah sat on the paper crinkled bed and thought about a room she had never been in and a girl she had never met and a number that felt impossibly like it should mean something to her.

E-17.

She pressed her fingers against her temple.

The ache pulsed back.

Then something else arrived.

Not pain.

Not a vision.

Just a word.

Arriving from nowhere, or from somewhere so deep inside her it amounted to the same thing. Rising up through everything else the way a sound rose through still water.

*Live.*

Sarah sat very still.

She did not know where it had come from.

She did not know what it meant.

She only knew it had not come from her.

*To be continued.*

© Roviel (Testimony Aigbe)

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