“YOU SHOULDN’T HAVE come,” Becca says, and my throat feels closed up. “Are you—you’re alone? But you couldn’t have gotten this far without—”
“Shut up,” I say, desperate with emotions too immense to have names, and pull her close. She’s stiff against me for the first moment. In the second, one of her hands creeps up my back with the fluttering step of a cautious insect, and then flattens between my shoulder blades, a pressure that is as much disbelief as love. Then she wrenches away.
“You can’t have come this far alone,” she says, gaze dropping from mine and shifting toward the dark corner of the room like she can’t bear to meet my eye. She stands like she’s resisting the urge to scrape the sensation of my touch from her skin. I want to ask her what happened to her, but I don’t need to know to understand.
A year in this place? I must be stranger than any monster.
“The others are with me,” I say, and she flashes me a look of relief at the chance to retreat into practicality and fact. Feeling is too dangerous. “Anthony and Trina and Mel. Kyle and Jeremy Polk, too, and Vanessa Han was with us, but—”
She holds up a hand. “Wait. They’re all here? In the house?”
“I don’t know. They were, and then I was alone,” I say. I’m babbling. Still not sure I believe what I see—my sister, standing right in front of me.
“It does that,” Becca says. “They’re probably in the halls somewhere by now, though.” She cocks her head, listening. “We have to move. It’s not good to stay in one place too long. Come on.”
She takes my hand again and leads me out into the hall. She’s not wearing shoes, I realize. Her bare feet are filthy, but they make hardly any sound on the floorboards as she hurries forward. I’m not so graceful. She takes a practiced series of turns, then ducks inside another room—an office, maybe, with a desk piled with books and old papers sitting in the middle of the room, a wide book like a ledger open and covered in dust at the middle. The pages are covered in spidery writing, familiar—in the town in the woods on the road are the halls that breathe, I make out, and then Becca shuts the door almost all the way and turns back to me.
“Tell me again who you brought with you,” she says. “How many have you lost?”
“Two,” I tell her. “A girl you don’t know and Vanessa.” I name the others quickly, and she shuts her eyes, lips moving as if she’s speaking to herself. When they open again, they’re shiny with tears.
“You shouldn’t have come. None of you should have come,” she says.
“We came to find you.”
“And it’s no good,” she says. “Two by two. You can only get out two by two, and there’s an even number of you.”
“What?”
“The exit to this place. It’s darkness,” Becca says. “The kind you need a partner to get through. Like the Liar’s Gate—the first one?”
“I know its name. It was in the notebook. What—what happened to Zach?” I ask.
“Zach’s dead,” she says flatly. “I’ve been by myself for . . . I don’t know how long.”
“You’ve been gone a year,” I say. And however long we’ve been on the road now. A day? I can’t be sure.
“A year?” she asks. Laughs, half-wild. “So you’re older than me now.” I make a confused sound, and she waves a hand. “You don’t change in this place. No getting hungry. No sleep. You get tired, but I don’t think you age. So you’re older than me. Big sister.” She smiles, crooked. I keep wanting to touch her, reassure myself that she’s real.
“We thought you were dead,” I say. “We looked for you. The police—they thought you ran away with Zachary, and—”
“I didn’t mean to leave. I thought—I thought we could get through, and find her, and it would be all right. She promised it would be all right.”
“Who?” I ask.
“Lucy,” she says, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “She called us here, to save her. She’s trapped. Can’t you hear her?”
I stare at her. Lick my lips, the answer inexplicably impossible to get out. “No,” I say at last. “I don’t hear her.”
I cannot tell if I am lying.
Becca tells me we have to keep moving. She leads me through halls, through rooms, somehow seeming to keep track of the endless turns. It’s all the road, she assures me, every plank in this house. There’s no danger of wandering off.
I tell her everything that’s happened so far. The darkness and the town, Vanessa and Trina.
“Echoes,” she tells me. “When they replace you, they’re called echoes. Zach found this book by someone who said he’d been on the road. He talked about them. It helped, the book. Told us what to expect. But the monsters aren’t the only thing you have to be afraid of here.”
“What happened to you?” I ask.
She gives me a hollow look. “I try not to think about it much,” she says. “I’d been having these dreams. Dreams about the road. About Lucy Gallows. About the beast. They were just nightmares, but Zach went looking online. He helped me put it all together. He’s the one that found out about Ys.”
“Ys?” I echo, pinging against a scrap of memory. The words in the town.
“It’s a city. Or was. It’s where the road goes—used to go. It was destroyed a long time ago by a woman named Dahut. She was a princess, or something. There was a gate in the city that held back the sea, and she left it open, to let her lover sneak in to see her. But she forgot to close it, and the tide came in and drowned the whole city. That’s the story, anyway. And it’s all that death that made the road. If you can get all the way to Ys, you can escape it. But most people get trapped. Lucy did. She’s been stuck on the road for all these years, but she’s found a way to—she sort of whispers. Only to certain people. Sensitive people. And I guess I’m one of them.”
Every so often she stops, listening. Sometimes she pulls us in a new direction, but I can never hear what she does.
“I’ve got your notebook,” I say after a while of silence, because I need to hear her speak again. “It’s hard to understand, but it helped us, too.”
“My notebook?” she says, face screwing up in confusion. “What notebook?”
“I—this one,” I say, unzipping my bag. I pull out the journal and she snatches it from me, paging through. Something like fear sketches across her face.
“How did you get this?” she demands.
“What do you mean?” I ask. “It was in your room. Under your bed.”
“No,” she says. “I brought it with me. I had it here. I lost it—I don’t know. A long time ago now. But here in the house. Most of those notes I took on the road.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” I say. Anything can happen on the road. But back home? There’s a threshold between this world and the one we came from, and the inexplicable isn’t supposed to cross it. Until this moment, the road has felt contained. A separate world that couldn’t encroach on ours; we could only enter the road’s world. This is different.
“Something wants us here,” she whispers. Her fingertips spider up my arm, her eyes fixed on my shoulder, on nothing at all. “Something brings us. The road. Or something on it.” Her fingertips pause, set sharp against the hollow of my collarbone. She’s trembling. And then she buries her face against my shoulder, burrowing in. Not crying. Pressing herself against me, as if ravenous for any kind of touch, any contact. It lasts a furious moment, and then she’s dragging me down the hall again. Around one more corner, and—
“Becca.”
She stops. Turns back to me, eyes shining. “Let’s go,” she says.
The hall beyond is dark. Clotted and thick with darkness, impenetrable.
“We can’t leave,” I say.
“We can’t stay. I can’t keep you alive in here,” she says.
“The others—”
“They’ll find their way out,” she says. “Or they won’t. But we can’t stay.”
“Becca,” I say gently, but her eyes are feverish.
“Everything here rots,” she whispers. “Turns to ruin. Turns to hate. I don’t remember half the time why I’m bothering to stay alive. We can’t stay. We can’t.”
Behind her, something moves at the edge of the darkness, sliding out, pale and sharp. My mind offers up thorn and claw until the length of it brushes both words away, and another long, sharp thing—leg—emerges, the color of bone. It pierces the wall halfway up, spanning the hallway. And then, pushing through the dark, a face. Eyeless, gaping, purpled tongue lolling between split and bleeding lips.
I hiss a warning. Becca turns, and her whole body goes still, the kind of stillness only the dead achieve.
The head withdraws. Then the legs, leaving only one needle-thin point protruding from the dark. Becca falls back a step on the balls of her feet. She draws me away. One step. Two. She doesn’t even breathe. She eases open a door, glances inside, and pulls us in. Shuts the door. Opens it.
A new hallway stretches in front of us. On the wall opposite is an arrow, scratched deep but fading. She frowns and crosses to it, pulling a knife from her jeans pocket to gouge new lines as she mutters to herself.
“Becca, what was that?” I ask.
“Spider,” she says. Doesn’t look at me. “I thought that one got out somehow. Died. There’s two. One white, one black. There used to be other things in here, but the spiders killed them. Except the woman. They don’t bother her. Can’t get past the light.” She stops. Lets out a shuddering sigh. “If it’s hiding in the dark, we can’t hurt it with light. Can’t get past it.”
“We will,” I say. “Let’s find the others. We’ll figure something out. Together.”
She looks down at her knife blade. Her tongue wets her lips. She rolls her sleeve up, slowly, and I suck in a startled breath.
There are words inked on her arm. Some dark black, others smeared and faded into illegibility. The letters overlap and spill over one another until the skin beneath looks less real than the ink.
Don’t speak
Don’t move
Listen
She fumbles in her pockets, muttering, and pulls out a pen. She squints at it, assessing the ink in the clear barrel, throws it aside. Searches again. The actions are manic, so focused she seems to have forgotten I’m there at all. She swears suddenly, dives for the discarded pen, and, kneeling on the floor, sets the tip to her skin, raking it back and forth to coax out a pale gray, broken line of ink.
“Running out. Last one. Can’t be the last one,” she’s whispering. The pen scratches at her skin. It starts to redden.
I catch her wrist, catch her eye. It takes a long time before I’m sure it’s my sister looking back at me.
“We’ll get out of here,” I tell her. I take the pen from her and slide it into my pocket, out of sight.
Slowly, she nods.
“How do we find the others?” I ask.
She touches two fingers to the last word written on her arm. Listen.
“We need to get my things,” she says. “Then we’ll find them.”