Page 100 of Echoes

“The one-year anniversary of us moving in together.”

Iris’s eyes welled up with tears again, and she said, “We never got that.”

“No, but maybe we could,” Daphne suggested.

“What do you mean?” Iris dropped the box on the bed.

“The project I worked on was for the US government. It was top-secret for a reason.”

“I know. You mentioned that it was important.”

“We were working on a device that would bring people back from the dead.”

“You werewhat?”

“I know… It all started with them wanting a specific person to come back to find out what happened to them. They’d been murdered, and the government needed to know if they’d told any secrets to the Soviets, so they asked us if it would be possible to bring someone back to life for a few minutes. We started working.”

“You were working on a device that could bring people back to life?”

“It started as a concept,” Daphne explained. “We ran into a lot of issues, as you can imagine, and we kept the body frozen while we worked out what a device could do. In the end, we found something that would work. It took so much energy; we blacked out the entire city.”

“That wasyou?” Iris asked as she sat back down on the bed, holding the hand that now held her ring tightly to her chest with her other hand.

“It worked, Iris. We brought him back for three minutes. He told us what happened, and the government was able to arrest the Soviet spies. Then, they asked us to keep going.”

“You brought a man back from the dead?”

“Only for three minutes at first.”

“But… I can’t have you for only three minutes.”

“Sweetheart, we know how to bring people back permanently. My team does. We didn’t tell the government, and we destroyed the device.”

“You destroyed it?”

“We didn’t know what they’d do with it, and the man in charge from the CIA was very interested in what we were doing. He said if we could find a way to lengthen the time and maybe have it work on non-frozen bodies, we could bring back anyone who had recently died.”

“Why would he want to do that?”

“Imagine if soldiers were killed on the battlefield, but you could revive them and send them back into war… If a president was killed, like Kennedy, we could just bring him back to life without the public even knowing.”

“Kennedy was shot in the head. Does the device fix bullet wounds?”

“No. But maybe doctors could have repaired some of the damage. And people knew he was shot, so they would’ve expected him to have scars. It’s not perfect, and it wouldn’t work on everyone, but he wanted to try it, and we weren’t willing to let him walk around with a world-changing device, just waking up anyone he wanted. It would’ve been too dangerous.”

“We buried you, Daphne.” Iris sniffled. “You’re in a coffin, and you’re six-feet–”

“I’m not there,” Daphne replied.

“What?”

“Sweetheart, I don’t know how much time I have this time, but I’m not there. Because of the project I was working on, I asked the team to keep my body frozen if anything happened to me. We all did. It was a fail-safe in case something happened to us. We knew our CIA contact couldn’t be trusted. They changed out my body with another one, and there was no open casket.”

“You’re not where we buried you? I cried over your grave, Daphne. Your parents–”

“I never thought I’d die, sweetheart. I’m… Iwasforty-three years old. I thought that if the project was scrapped, they’d leave us alone. But I died, and my team put my body in a freezer until they could rebuild the device and bring me back.”

“This is wrong, Daphne… You’re not supposed to be dead, but you’re not supposed to come back to life, either. As much as I want you here, as much as I want you to hold me, I–”

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