MIKHAIL GAVE ME tea, but no more answers. I couldn’t tell whether he’d told me all he knew, or whether he thought he could protect me by staying silent. Either way, I left as soon as my clothes were some semblance of dry.
We were supposed to be at the LARC at seven thirty a.m. My shoes were still soggy, but I shoved them on anyway and jogged for Mrs. Popova’s. I hoped that I could sneak in without being noticed. I went around the back and was relieved to find the door open. That would put me at the end of the hall, and hopefully people were still scraping together breakfast in the kitchen and hadn’t thought to try to rouse me yet.
I crept toward my room, but urgent voices to the right, coming from Abby’s room, stopped me. Abby was saying something I couldn’t make out, and then Liam’s voice cut through.
“Bullshit. We can’t just sit here and do nothing while—”
“Keep your voice down, will you?” Abby hiss-whispered. “Do you want the whole house to hear you? There’s nothing we can do. We don’t know where she is. If she’s even alive.”
I opened the door. They both jumped, Abby reaching for something at her belt—a knife, probably—and while her hand paused when she saw it was me, she didn’t entirely relax.
Liam, though, just about collapsed with relief. He crashed into me with a hug, and if I stiffened up for a moment, it was a brief moment. I hugged him back, taking more pleasure than I cared to admit from holding his slender body, the very boy scent of him. Human and normal and cute and clever and a million things that weren’t monsters in the mist.
“Missed you too,” I said, before the moment could get too intense.
“Where were you?” Liam demanded. “We couldn’t find you anywhere.”
“Second verse, same as the first,” I said.
“A little bit louder and a little bit worse?” Abby supplied.
“Pretty much. It was that other place—only it was different this time, and . . .” I trailed off, gave them a questioning look. “How did you get away from Dr. Kapoor and Dr. Hardcastle?”
Liam’s cheeks flamed. “Uh. We didn’t, exactly. They saw me.”
“How are you not locked in your room for the rest of your natural life?” I asked.
“We sort of . . .” He looked at Abby helplessly, and she rolled her eyes.
“Liam was just showing his new girlfriend around, to impress her,” she said. “We’re dating now. Whee.”
I might have been jealous if they weren’t so obviously horrified by the necessary deception.
“It’s just a cover,” Liam said. “I’m not—”
“I get it,” I said. “It was smart.”
“Okay, enough with the tedious romantic subplot. What happened to you?” Abby asked. Lily walked past in the hall, and we fell silent.
“Let’s take a walk,” I suggested. We headed out to the beach and wandered down it in the pale morning light. I told them what had happened, every step of it. The other island, the strangers, my flight down the hill, the half-formed house. And then I got to Mikhail.
“What do you think?” I asked Abby when I was done.
“About what?” She tucked her hair behind her ear, a losing battle against the wind.
“Mikhail. What he said.”
“I think he was telling you as little as he could,” she said. “He’s hiding something.”
“You don’t know that,” Liam said.
“No. She’s right,” I said. I didn’t want her to be. Mikhail had helped me. He’d been kind, and wounded, and lost. But he knew more than he’d said, I was certain. “But it doesn’t matter.”
“It doesn’t?” Abby asked with a skeptical arch to her eyebrow.
“No. Because whatever he is or isn’t telling us, we know the important thing. What happened to my mother—to me—happened on Belaya Skala. I’ve crossed over to that other world twice, but never on the headland. We need to get over there if we’re going to find the truth.”
“You want to go back to that place?” Liam asked.
“If it gets me answers,” I said.
“You shouldn’t go alone,” Abby said.
“I can’t ask you both to risk yourselves for me,” I said. “Especially you, Liam. Abby has her own reasons, but you . . .”
He hadn’t looked at me yet. “I’m not exactly doing it for you,” he said. He swallowed. “I want to help you, but it’s not just that.”
“What, then?” I asked.
“That summer, the summer of the Girl in the Boat, something changed,” Liam said. “I was really young, but I remember how close Dr. Kapoor and I were. She’s the one that convinced Mum to have a kid in the first place. But after that summer, she never had time for me. She barely spoke to me at all, or looked at Mum, except when they were fighting. And then she left and came back here. And it was a relief, because it felt like we’d been living with a stranger.” His voice was raw and thick with bitterness.
Abby looked away, clearly uncomfortable, but on impulse I reached out and grabbed Liam’s hand. He didn’t meet my eyes, but he squeezed my hand and took a deep breath. And then he continued.
“I’ve always thought that she just realized she wasn’t cut out to be a mother. But it wasn’t just me—she used to be incredibly close with her parents, but she hardly ever sees them now. And with all of this, I just . . .” He faltered, then set his jaw and looked straight at me. “What if we were living with a stranger? What if she isn’t here because of the bloody birds?”
“What are you saying?” I asked.
“What Mikhail said. Sometimes people come out of the mist, and they look the same, and they sound the same, but it’s not them.” Liam asked. His eyes were dark, intense, and fixed on me. “What if what came out of the mist isn’t my mother at all?”