“THE GIRL IN the boat,” Liam repeated.
“You’re saying it wrong,” I told him with a faltering smile. He let out a breath and sat against the bank of drawers behind him. My smile faded. I wrapped my arms around my middle as I spoke. “My mother was here in 2003. She worked with your mom and Dr. Hardcastle. She was one of the people that supposedly died in the storm.”
“And you think that whatever happened to her was, what, supernatural?” Liam asked.
“Yes.”
He scrubbed his hand over his mouth, then crossed his arms. Uncrossed them. “All right.”
“‘All right?’” I repeated. “What does that mean?”
“It means I follow you so far,” he said. “Sophia, I watched you walk into the water. And then you were right behind me, safe and dry. I saw what happened to you on Belaya Skala yesterday. Either I’m going mad, or something unnatural is happening. I mildly prefer the version of the world where I have a moderate mood disorder and there are monsters to the one where I’m hallucinating. Besides.” He shrugged. “I trust you.”
“Wait,” Abby said. “What was that about Sophia walking into the water?”
I bit my lip. “The night you came,” I said. “There was a girl in the mist. I didn’t see her face, but Liam did. She looked like me.” Like my reflection, I thought, thinking of the tangled hair and weary eyes that stared back at me so often.
“Echoes,” Abby said thoughtfully.
“Say that again?” Liam replied.
Abby opened her messenger bag and pulled out a thick three-ring binder. She set it on the chest of drawers beside her and flipped it open, paging through. “Echoes are what we call doppelgangers—doubles. They can look just like a person. Sound like them. Sometimes even have the same memories. Here.” She beckoned us over.
She’d flipped to what appeared to be printed still frames from a video. A girl with colorful leggings and long black hair was bent over her apparent twin—they were even wearing the same outfit. But the girl on the ground was battered and wounded, blood staining her clothes. She gaped up at the standing girl, who wore a sly little smile. Vanessa Han and echo, Briar Glen, MA, read the label.
“That one was on a road that didn’t exist,” Abby said. “One of the remnants of the old worlds I told you about.”
“Are these echoes evil?” I asked.
“That one was,” Abby said, tapping the picture.
“How do you fight them? A stake to the heart? Silver bullets?” I asked.
Abby regarded me with an expression that was one part approval, one part sorrow. “The other worlds are dead or dying, and things like the echoes? They’re like bacteria, breeding in rotting meat. They mutate. What works once won’t work again. What’s true once won’t be true again.”
“So even if you defeated them once . . .” I started.
“They might be different here,” Abby said. “There’s just so much we don’t know. Why the other worlds died. What the things that come from those worlds want. Whether their intrusions on our world are scattered, random incidents, or whether they add up to something.”
“Like what?” Liam asked.
“That’s the big question, isn’t it?” Abby said. “Dr. Ashford’s life’s work. And mine now too, I guess. Not like I can go work retail after watching a girl dissolve into ash and getting thrown across the room by a ghost.”
“That happened?” I asked her.
“Yup. Met a lovely girl named Dahut. She was possessing another girl, Becca—but we got her out. Mostly. Little bit left behind, but nothing Becca can’t handle. Probably. We’re keeping an eye on it.”
“So is that whole binder full of supernatural stuff?” Liam asked.
“Yup,” she said. The binder was huge, filled with a million different tabs labeled in tiny, precise handwriting.
“It’s very organized,” I noted.
“You were expecting a scrappy, overstuffed notebook covered in manic scribbles?” she guessed. “We’ve got a lot of those in storage. Dr. Ashford insists on a more methodical approach.” She turned the binder so I could see the labels on the tabs—everything from Spectral phenomenon to Doors appearing in forests, fields, etc. “There’s an index,” she told me.
“Your boss let you take this?”
“I sort of stole it. I did mention we’re pissed at each other right now, right?” she said idly, but she didn’t meet my eyes.
“You were talking about those things—echoes,” Liam said suddenly. His arms were crossed, his gaze on the floor, but now he lifted his eyes to look at Abby. “How good are they? Could they convince you they were real?”
She frowned. “Some of them can. Why?”
He tensed his jaw. “Nothing,” he said after a beat. “Look. I’m in. I’ll help you.”
“You don’t have to,” I told him. It was enough that he believed. That he wasn’t running.
“I want to,” he said seriously. “Just tell me where to start.”
Abby sighed. “I’m not going to try to talk you out of it. Maybe Ashford could, but truth is, I hate working alone. Plus, it’ll be easier getting back to Belaya Skala with the connections you two have, and that’s definitely got to be our next stop.”
I shook my head. “We don’t have to get back to Belaya Skala—not yet, at least.” I spread my hands, indicating the room around us. “We’re in a room full of specimens and documents from and about Belaya Skala and Bitter Rock. We’re exactly where we need to be. So pick a drawer. It’s time to be good little worker bees.”
I walked to the nearest drawer—labeled Bones—Mounted—and opened it with a flourish.
It was full of Tupperware.
“I think you’ve cracked the case,” Liam deadpanned.
I threw a Tupperware lid at him.
We settled into a rhythm after a while. Empty a drawer, sort the contents—which never matched the label—move them in front of the drawer that did match the label, repeat. So far we had mostly managed to make the room look significantly less organized.
One of the cabinet drawers—one of the long, flat ones, the kind that contained maps and documents—was rusted shut. I hauled at it. Useless. It probably hadn’t been opened in years.
“You need a hand?” Abby asked, looking up from a shoebox full of USB drives, which she’d been plugging into her computer one by one to check for anything interesting.
“Nope,” I said through clenched teeth. I cast around for something to force it open with. I found a screwdriver and jammed it into the bent corner of the drawer. I shoved. I pulled. It creaked ominously but didn’t open.
“You will not defeat me,” I told the drawer sternly. It remained shut, all innocence and aluminum. I braced myself against the cabinet behind me, lifted my foot, and kicked hard at the handle of the screwdriver.
It popped open, the screwdriver pinging off to hit the wall.
“Look at the badass,” Abby said. I leaned forward eagerly.
Inside I found a map showing Bitter Rock; I recognized the fat, fishhook shape immediately, along with the streets and buildings. Almost none of them had changed, although the LARC was absent from this map. There were a series of notations, X’s with dates scribbled next to them, scattered throughout the islands and the surrounding waters. The note-taker had sketched a series of wobbly circles around Belaya Skala. And then around the rest of Bitter Rock. The circles expanded to contain later dates and marks, as if whatever this map was tracking was growing. The last circle was dated 1981, and it covered almost all of the island, leaving only a tiny curl of land untouched.
“Check this out,” I said. I slid it across the floor toward Abby, and she scooted over to take a look. Liam crouched down next to her.
I turned back to the drawer. There was another map underneath the first, but where that one had been orderly, this one was chaos. It looked as if someone had started out drawing in the island, roughing in its topological features. And then lost their mind. There were jagged teeth scribbled along the isthmus, turning it into a grinning mouth. Eyes clustered along the hillsides. Elongated human figures that reminded me of cave paintings were scattered randomly across the page. In the center of it all, drawn with such a heavy hand it nearly blotted everything else out, was a shape that I took at first to be random scribbling. But the shape of it coalesced from the mad tangle of lines, some so ferociously drawn they’d ripped through the page.
Two wings stretched upward, two pointed down, and two swept out to either side. They sprouted from a central body that suggested something both human and inhuman at once—a head, two arms, two legs, its eyes blank holes.
THE SIX-WING was written beneath it in shaky handwriting. And beneath: It took them.
My hands were trembling, my heart beating fast as a bird’s in my chest, as I held the map up for the others to see. The creature from the church. The creature from my dreams.
“This is what you saw?” Abby asked, taking the map from me. I could only nod. And then I twisted back to the drawer, a metallic taste in my mouth. There had to be more here. An explanation for how the monster from my dreams was replicated in ink on a madman’s map. There—something at the back of the drawer.
My hand closed around a hard object the size of my palm. A bird’s skull, the bone strangely blackened, easily double the size of the others along the wall. I frowned at it. A strange sensation gnawed its way down my spine. Like a vibration, the hum of a ship’s engine as you stand on the deck.
“Sophia?” Abby said.
A black liquid trickled from one gaping eye, oozing slowly down the contours of the bone. I touched it with my fingertip and found it was slippery, cold. Abby said my name again, but I heard it only distantly. Strange darts of light shivered through the air. My breath slipped from my lips in a cloud.
“It’s happening a—” Liam said, but it was like listening to voices from underwater.
“What—” I began, looking up, and then the room exploded into a flurry of wings. Birds careened, screaming, around me. Wings struck my face. Claws raked at my neck. I caught glimpses of the frantic bodies: doubled limbs, twisted spines, skulls with no eyes or too many. Birds flopped and writhed on the ground, or crashed into the walls. Screamed and screamed and screamed.
And I was alone.
“Liam! Abby!” I yelled, but they were gone. I charged for the door, the skull still clutched in one hand, and dived through. I slammed it shut behind me, putting my whole weight on it, and caught one white-winged bird. I felt the crunch and pop of its hollow ribs between the door and its frame. With the hand that clutched the skull, I shoved the twitching thing back through and latched the door. Bodies thumped against the other side, the screeching muffled now but unending.
I backed away, breath coming in short, sharp gasps that couldn’t seem to fill up my lungs. My stomach lurched and roiled, all acid and revulsion. My shoulder blades smacked against the wall, and it was then I realized the hall was dark. The lights overhead were out. And there was no sign of either Liam or Abby.
I had to remind myself to breathe. Convince myself to think things through, instead of picking a direction and running until I couldn’t anymore.
This wasn’t right. Neither was a room full of dead birds coming violently to life. I crept forward down the hall. Ahead of me, a door banged, again and again, the seconds in between punctuated by the whistle of a strong wind. I followed the sound.
I came around the corner. The door—one of the side doors—flew open again with another bang, then rebounded to almost shut. It couldn’t close all the way because someone was standing there—a man in a bright green windbreaker. The door hit his shoulders; the wind shoved it open.
I took a step closer, opening my mouth to call out to him, ask if he needed help—and the words shriveled in my throat as I drew close enough to see him in more detail.
The man’s back was pulp. Blood and spurs of smashed bone. Strips of his rain shell and the T-shirt beneath stuck to the door, tacked in place by dried blood, and the flesh beneath had been beaten by the repeated slamming of the door until it was the color and texture of a rotten plum. The back of his head was caved in, glistening with brain matter and bits of skull. With each impact his lips worked to shape words, his eyes blinking hard as if trying to wake himself.
“Puh . . . puh . . . puh,” he said, a moldy syllable squashed between his blistered lips.
I gave myself one quailing moment of fear, of revulsion. And then I seized my horror, my hesitation, and flung them away. I couldn’t stand there and do nothing. I couldn’t let fear stop me from helping someone who needed it.
I crossed the last five steps and caught the door in mid-swing. For a moment we stood there, my fingers wrapped around the edge of the door. I closed my throat up, teeth clenched. I shunted my revulsion and fear into the void, and let cold calm take its place.
I’d had to call 911 once before. Some kids had gotten drunk and wrapped their car around a telephone pole. One of them shot through the windshield like a javelin and landed on the lawn, all crooked-limbed and limp. I’d gotten to my front door in time to see his friends bailing out, running. No one else was home and there was only me, walking across the lawn with bare feet, the dew cold and the boy’s blood blistering hot. The woman on the phone was the calmest person I’d ever talked to. She’d started out trying to calm me down, but quickly realized she didn’t have to. She gave me directions without any frills. Make sure his airway is clear. Put pressure around the cut on his arm. Talk to him.
When the ambulance showed up, she told me I should consider a career as a 911 operator, that I was cool under pressure. When I told the story to my foster mother later, she gave me a look I knew well. The is there something wrong with you? look.
Wrong or not, it was useful. “I’m going to go get help,” I said now, remembering the exact tone of voice that woman on the phone had used. “Come inside.”
I put my hand on his arm. I needed to get him out of the doorway to keep him from getting hurt any more than he already was—though how he was still standing, how he was still alive, I had no idea.
When my hand touched his arm, his head twisted around to look at me. He was white, with a reddish beard and brown hair. He looked familiar somehow, but I didn’t think he was one of the locals I’d encountered. “Puh,” he said. Then, “Please. Don’t. Please. Don’t touch me. What are you doing? What are you—what are—”
He rushed forward, away from me, stumbling and running out of the building and toward the steep hillside on the west side of the island, only to stop, stock-still, at the top of it and fling his arms outward with a bestial howl.
Beyond him, the sky was wracked with storms. They masked the horizon as far as I could see, lightning flashing within the clouds with the quick and steady tempo of a heartbeat. The thunder rumbled and cracked like massive planks of wood splintering and straining.
The wind blasted my face. In the distance, another howling voice answered the man, and then another voice, an inhuman keening shriek that came from across the water. From Belaya Skala. The man looked back toward me with a triumphant grin. And then he stepped back, and plunged over the edge.
I raced back inside and slammed the door shut. The birds were screaming again, trapped in that room. I was still clutching the skull. I could feel that there was something carved into the dome of its head, so I forced my fingers open and read: ПОЖИРАЕТ.*
My bones vibrated, the harsh thrum of an engine—
I opened my eyes and stared into the shocked gaze of my reflection in the window, and the thrumming vibration slammed to a halt.
“Ms. Hayes?”
I spun with a yelp and blinked. Fluorescent light bathed the hall. No screaming birds, just the faint hum of the lights and my own scattered breathing. Dr. Hardcastle stood a few feet away, a look of caution and concern on his face. Fresh fear lurched up: Runrunrun.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
I cleared my throat, thinking fast. Dr. Hardcastle didn’t appear aware of anything out of the ordinary. Other than me—and I couldn’t afford to stand out. Which meant I had to shove my fear and my confusion and my utter disorientation as deep as I possibly could as quickly as I possibly could, and never mind how much worse it would be later, and—
Smile. “You scared the crap out of me!” I declared. Just the right touch of silly me. Just the right shake of my head. “Oh, hey, check this out. I found it in the specimen room. I was going to ask Kenny about it, but I guess I got turned around.” I held out the skull. Get him focusing on anything except just how out of breath I am.
“May I?” He took it from me, and I was so intent on stitching together this mask of cheer over my face that I didn’t even flinch when his finger nudged against mine. “Huh. It looks like a tern, but I couldn’t tell you specifically. You found it in the specimen room?”
“It was in the back of a drawer,” I said.
“Part trash heap, part treasure trove. It’s probably been here longer than I have, and that’s saying something.” He handed it back to me. “You can keep it, if you’d like.”
“Really?” I didn’t have to fake surprise this time.
He gave me a winning, empty smile. “Whoever it belonged to is long gone, and the LARC doesn’t need it. Call it a souvenir. Since Bitter Rock doesn’t have a gift shop.”
I mimicked his expression, beaming vapidly at him. “Thanks,” I said. “Everyone here is so great.”
“We take care of each other at the LARC,” he said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me . . .”
“Of course.” The last stitch of my mask cinched into place. My anger would wait. I would let it out later. When it was useful. Right now, I needed answers.
His footsteps faded. I put a hand on the door, but I didn’t open it. I listened, straining for the sound of shrieking birds or rolling thunder. There was only silence.
I eased the door open. The sky was gray but the sun was bright even filtered through the clouds. No man, no storm, no twisted, broken birds. I let the door swing shut again, and stepped away.
“Sophia!” Liam called. He and Abby were running toward me, faces frantic with worry. I all but staggered toward them, relief hitting me hard.
“Where did you go?” Abby and I said at the same time, and stared at each other a beat.
“You disappeared,” Liam said.
“So did you,” I replied, a touch accusatory. But no—I was the one who had gone somewhere. I strode past them, back the way I had come. The door to the specimen room was closed. Abby and Liam trailed behind me, as if understanding that I needed to see for myself. I punched in the code and pushed open the door.
I expected chaos. I expected ruin and there wasn’t any. The birds stood still in their stiff poses, stuffed and sewn up tight, watching me with glass eyes and not the slightest hint of a twitch or a cry. I looked down at the skull in my hand. And at the tacky smudge on my palm: blood, half-dried, and three bright green threads from a rain shell stuck to it. There was no sign of that black liquid.
“There was a man,” I said softly. His face nagged at me. I’d seen it before. Where?
I whipped around, had to stop myself from sprinting all the way to the foyer.
“Where are you going?” Liam asked, but I shook my head, forcing them to follow. I ran to the entryway, searching the photos that hung there.
There. From last year. A man in a bright green windbreaker, standing between Kenny and Lily in front of the LARC, smiling broadly with his hands in his pockets.
I pressed my fingers against the glass beside his face. The same eyes. The same jacket. But that smile—this was a smile of joy, not that leering, twisted grin he’d flashed at me.
“Daniel Rivers?” Liam said, reading the caption over my shoulder.
“He was here,” I said. “Or not here. Wherever I was. He was . . .” I swallowed, trying not to picture it. And then, my movements urgent, I stalked along the wall. 2016. 2015. Back and back. The faces changed, the numbers waxed and waned, but there was a sameness to every group. And then—
2004. 2002. “She’s not here,” I said. I laid my palm flat against the wall between the two photos. “2003. There’s no picture.”
“Maybe they took it down because of the accident,” Liam said.
“You don’t hide the photos of people who died tragically; you memorialize them. Make them more prominent,” Abby replied. “Unless you’re trying to hide something. Erase the fact that they were ever here.”
Liam flicked his lip ring over his teeth in what I was coming to realize was a thoughtful tic. “There are other photos. And employment records,” he said. “I know where they’re kept. But we’re not allowed in there.”
“Liam Kapoor, are you suggesting a daring heist?” Abby asked. “And I thought you were such a fine young man.”
“Oh, I’m trouble,” Liam assured her. She snorted like she didn’t believe him, and he rolled his eyes.
I could only stare at that empty spot on the wall. No wider than the gap between any of the other photos. As if the years had been folded over to make it seem like she had never existed at all. To make her vanish. “We have to find her,” I said softly. I realized my error and cleared my throat. “We have to find proof that she was here,” I said, correcting myself. Because that was the thing I wasn’t allowed to say out loud.
If someone had lied about how she died, could they have lied about more?
How did I know that she had died at all?
It was the hope I did not dare to speak, even silently to myself: my mother might still be alive.