Page 114 of Echoes

“That doesn’t make any sense,” he said and appeared to both believe them and not believe them at the same time.

“That’s all we know,” Eliza said. “It showed me the man who murdered my father. I was able to find him because of the device.”

She wanted to see his reaction to bringing up her father’s murder.

“I know. I killed him.”

“Who?”

“The man who murdered your father,” he said. “You don’t need to know the details, but he was dealt with.”

“Why? He was in prison.”

“Do you work for the CIA?” Lydia asked.

“What? No,” he replied, sounding offended. “They’re the ones that started this in the first place. Their stupid secret projects got people killed. I don’t work for them.”

“Who do you work for, then?”

“No one,” he said loudly. “Iama police officer, but I don’t work for the CIA. I’d never work for them after what they did to my family.”

“What did they do?” Eliza asked, finding that she was really interested.

“Do you have it?” he asked back.

“It doesn’t bring people back.”

“But it still does something that it shouldn’t be doing. If what you said is true, it messes with time somehow, and humans shouldn’t be able to manipulate the past. Imagine what would happen if someone got ahold of that and could go back to a moment where they needed to make a different decision, and that decision got–”

“People hurt. Yeah, we know,” Lydia interrupted.

The man’s hand lowered, and he held the gun at his side. Eliza sighed again, feeling relief hit her almost as hard as the energy had earlier. Something had shifted in this man, and he was no longer threatening their lives.

“That’s why we put it in the ocean,” Lydia went on. “We didn’t want anyone else to find it, but we were told not to destroy it.”

“Told?”

“A note,” Eliza said. “We didn’t expect it to be found, but… asalvage companylocated it, and we found out. Long story short, we went and got it back from them before they knew what it was. They hadn’t even opened it yet. We held on to it after that, thinking it was safer with us because at least we knew that it was dangerous. We were fine until you showed up and ransacked our house,” she lied, not wanting to reveal anything about Rosie and Felicity.

“I had to find it,” he replied. “And you were my only lead.”

“Why?” Lydia asked.

“My grandfather was killed because of this thing. He was an innocent bystander. My father was a kid at the time, and he wanted to know what happened to his dad. He found out what that building was used for, and ten years later, he tracked down the man who had run the project initially for the CIA. That man killed my father to protect this secret.”

Eliza took the man in more now. He couldn’t be more than forty years old, might have even been a little younger. If his father had been a kid when the initial project had run and then had been killed about ten years later, she wasn’t sure how he looked so young now.

“I’m confused,” she said.

“The CIA reinstituted their little project, and they had another device. They used it to bring my dad back to life. Then, they repeated it to kill him over and over again and used the device to bring him back over and over again. They used him as an experiment, wanting to know how many times it could work on one person. I have a long story to tell myself, but to keep it short, my dad was nineteen when he went in and got himself killed. Years later, they were still using him as a guinea pig, and someone involved in the program took pity on him and released him. She was my mother.”

“Oh,” Lydia said.

“And I’ve been looking for the device ever since he told me the story so that it could be destroyed. The man who killed your father was also looking for it, but he wanted to use it. I want it gone. I want it erased from this earth.”

“So do we,” Eliza offered. “We don’t want it around any more than you do.”

“But this device isn’t the one that they used on my father,” hesaid with a nod.

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