"There's a technique," Ezra said the next morning, laying out a small case of equipment across the study desk with the careful precision of a surgeon preparing instruments, "that extractors use for exactly this situation. A hidden Echo, protected and reinforced the way yours has been, usually has a trigger condition built into it. Something the person who hid it decided would signal the right moment for it to surface."

"You think my mother built in a trigger."

"I think it would explain the dreams. The voice, the urgency, the fragments that never quite resolve into full words. I think what you've been experiencing isn't random static leaking out of...