WE RAN FOR the door together, the flashlight beam bouncing over toppled tables and chairs and casting crazed shadows on the walls. I skidded around the corner first. The door was shut tight. I walked up to it and shoved with a shaking hand. It didn’t budge.
“Let me try,” Lily said. I knew it wouldn’t work, but I stepped aside. As she pushed and strained, I wandered back toward the other room. There were drips of something on the floor I hadn’t noticed before. Not blood, I thought, kneeling.
The flashlight beam fell across me as Lily abandoned her efforts, and I touched a finger to the black blot. It had the texture of motor oil, slippery and thick. I rubbed it between my thumb and the pad of my finger. A thin tongue of smoky black rose up, and it vanished, boiling off into the air. I smelled something sharp and astringent, like cleaning fluid. The same liquid that had oozed from the bird skull.
“It won’t open,” Lily said unnecessarily.
“Only one way to go, then,” I said. Of course we would go down. It was as inescapable as gravity. “Give me the flashlight. I’ll go first.” This time there was no protest. She handed the flashlight over. I hoped it had fresh batteries.
I walked with steady purpose to the top of the stairs. More black drips on the ground; I’d gone right past them before. The bloodstains were still there. If they were bleeding, I thought grimly, at least they were alive.
The first step creaked alarmingly under my foot as I descended, but the stairway held. I eased myself down. There were ten steps before a landing, more metal bolted into the concrete shaft. I stopped there and shone the light down the next expanse of stairs, leaning out over the rail a bit to see how far down I could see. Two more flights before the next level. The bottom was concrete, but I couldn’t make it out well from this distance.
“Why would they come down here?” Lily asked, barely above a whisper. Her voice seemed to breed in the shadows, hushed echoes swarming down the stairwell ahead of us.
“They were invited,” I said. She stared at me. I stared back. I had no idea why I’d said that. “Ask me another question,” I suggested, curious.
“What’s down there?” she asked.
“A crack in the world,” I answered automatically.
“You’re fucking with me,” she said. I shook my head, unable to speak through the fear closing up my throat. Why had I said that? It was like someone else was answering with my voice. “Where are Abby and Liam?”
“The memory room,” I replied.
“This is a weird prank to pull,” Lily said. “For the record, you have succeeded in freaking me out, and it’s cool if you stop anytime.”
I let that hang. It wouldn’t do any good to argue with her. If thinking it was a prank let her hold herself together, it was for the best. I had no such illusions to fall back on.
I reached the bottom of the steps. Another metal door blocked the way forward, another bloody footprint staining the ground in front of it, but at least it wasn’t more stairs.
“What do you think is on the other side of that door?” Lily asked. I stepped forward to answer her by hauling open the door.
The room beyond was circular, and large enough that the flashlight only reached the middle. But that was enough to illuminate Liam, sitting cross-legged with his back to us, shoulders hunched and head low.
The floor sloped toward a drain in the center of the room, and Liam sat beside it. I approached, flashlight shaking. Lily stayed right at my elbow, her breath loud in my ear. Liam was holding something cradled in his lap. I edged around him.
It was a bird. A tern, or part of one—one white wing, a quivering side, a neck bent violently to the left and a single eye pinning and flaring. But the rest of it was gone, body giving way to viscous black that dripped between Liam’s fingers, over his forearms, as the bird shuddered and strained and shook.
“Shh,” Liam crooned to the bird. “Shh, it’s all right.”
Its wing extended, fluttering, the movements like the spasms of dying muscles. Lily swore under her breath. I choked back a sour taste in my throat. The drips of black liquid slid down the sloped floor and into the drain. The bird tried to lift its head, but it no longer had the right muscles in its neck, and it flopped down again. A gurgling sound came from its throat. It sounded of drowning.
“Put that down,” I said.
“It’s hurt,” Liam said.
“There’s something really wrong with it, Liam. You need to put it down,” I said. “Liam, where’s Abby?”
“She left on wings of shadow. Two and two and two,” he said, singsong. “Hush, hush.” His thumb stroked the side of the bird’s neck.
I put my hand on his forearm, above the dripping black. “Liam. Liam. Let go of the—”
“No!” he shouted. His hands closed around the bird, clenching, fingers digging into the feathered chest. There was a sound like paper crumpling. Black liquid burst from the bird’s skin where Liam’s fingers dug in, and the bird thrashed and came apart in his hands, stringy tendons stretching like taffy, feathers turning black and bubbling into smoke, and then the bird was gone and all that was left was the black liquid sliding down his skin, running down the drain.
Lily screamed. Maybe I did, too, but that was nothing next to the desolate sound that ripped free of Liam’s throat. He dropped down and clawed at the drain as if he could stop the flow of the liquid, as if he could bring the bird back, and then he sobbed, hands limp on his knees. I pulled him against me, holding tight as his shoulders shook with his ragged gasps of breath. He was cold to the touch. I think I said something, but I don’t remember what it was, soothing nothings that he probably couldn’t understand anyway. But after a few minutes or a few seconds—you lose track of time during moments like this—he pulled away from me. His hand went to his temple. He drew in a breath and let it out in a rush.
“Hey,” I said softly. “You back with us?”
He swallowed. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m here.”
“What happened?” I asked. “Where’s Abby?”
His eyebrows drew together, a look of intense concentration on his face as he tried to string together fragmented memories into narrative. “I can’t— There were wings. So many wings. And there was the voice. Singing. It said . . . It said one of us could stay. It said choose. I wanted to go, but she stopped me.” He looked away, an expression of shame passing over his face.
“Who took her?” I asked. “Was it the big man, Mikhail’s double?”
But he only pointed behind me. Behind Lily. We looked at each other and turned slowly.
The wall behind us was covered in strange designs. Someone had taken paint to the concrete walls and turned them into a chaotic mass of handprints, spirals, random phrases, people rendered like cave painting stick figures. White Vs with flecks of red, terns, wheeled about. All of the paintings were layered, one thing painted over another until you could hardly see an inch of concrete or pick out one figure from another.
But in the center, stretching from floor to ceiling and snaking out to the sides, was a massive human figure—mostly human. Arms outstretched as if in benediction, face black and blank except for two empty holes where their eyes ought to be. Huge wings, six of them, emerged from the figure’s shoulders—they were the wings of a tern, angular and elegant. The wings were not solid, not like the central figure. They were made of overlapping letters, words written in overlapping lines until most were incomprehensible. Here and there I picked out meaning.
six-wing—song—it brings the mist—little bird—warden—she dreams—she drowns—
The words dripped from the wings, turning into rambling, mad sentences, braided together in overlapping strands like a woven rope, hardly any more comprehensible.
Seven kings seven kingdoms seven gates seven worlds—
—drowned beneath the sea but the road still—
—went to meet the bramble man and—
—lacuna house, and time twists—
—six wings, the dreamer—
—the girl and the ghost—
I followed the rambling thread of them, gliding through snatches of what might have been poetry or prophecy or prayers—and then, there, in the intersection of two threads, was a house. There was nothing terribly remarkable about it. A single story, a bay window in the front, a tree beside it. Nothing remarkable except that I knew it. It was the house I’d lived in after my mother died, my first foster home. The one that lasted the longest before they realized something was wrong with the lost little girl they’d wanted to love.
It couldn’t be. No one on this island could know what it looked like. But it was.
“We need to get out of here,” Lily said.
My mouth was so dry my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. “We need to find Abby,” I said, though it felt as if my voice was coming from very far away.
I followed the course of the ropes of words with my flashlight. Opposite the image of the Six-Wing, on the far right from where we’d entered, the words formed an arch above a doorway, a black gap in the wall, leading on. Leading deeper. Another bloody footprint stained the ground just in front of it. Liam wasn’t hurt. That meant that Abby must be. “There,” I said.
“You heard Liam. She said not to,” Lily replied. Her voice was frail. She was holding up pretty well, but things were still skating along the edge of the possible. It would get worse if we went deeper. I knew it. Lily knew it.
“There’s only one way she could have gone,” I said. I tore my eyes away from the painting. My mother, the house, my double. This place was focused on me in a way I didn’t understand. I couldn’t escape its gravity, but maybe Lily could. “Wait here with Liam. I’ll go.”
I bent, fetching Liam’s flashlight from where it lay on the ground. I handed it over.
“I shouldn’t let you go,” Lily said. Guilt in her voice.
“You wouldn’t be able to stop me.” I turned toward the black hole. Lily made a noise in a final protest, but I knew she was relieved to be staying behind.
I approached the darkened doorway. The edges were rough. They hadn’t been part of the bunker, I thought, but chiseled out of the wall after it was built. The space beyond was more tunnel than hallway, the walls rough and rocky. Natural caves beneath the island, maybe? But it seemed too straight for that, and while the rock wasn’t smooth like a manmade tunnel would be, it had odd marks, almost ripples, that seemed too regular to be random.
Something had carved this, I thought, but not a human something.
I walked forward cautiously. The tunnel narrowed, almost scraping my shoulders, and the ceiling was only a few inches over my head. My breath filled the space until it seemed it was the tunnel itself that was breathing. The walls cinched in, and now my shoulders did bump against the damp rock, and I realized what the ripples reminded me of—the ridges of a trachea.
Soon I was moving sideways, and every breath was cool and wet and tasted of silt. The flashlight beam struck stone ahead and stopped. No more dark corridor, only a final narrowing of gray rock with a crack the width of my hand running through it.
“Come on, Abby. Where are you?” I whispered. No answer. I growled in frustration and slammed my hand against the wall beside me, only succeeding in scraping the side of my fist. I forced my way forward to the crack.
“Abby!” I called. She had come this way so there had to be a way through. And maybe there was, in that other place. “Abby, can you hear me?”
There was a breeze through the crack, faint as a sigh. I could sense the void on the other side, the emptiness of another tunnel, maybe even a cavern. Nothing and nothing and nothing answered, and then at once there was an eye, pressed to the other side, glistening in the thin sliver of light from the flashlight. I let out a startled scream and jerked back, forgetting the cramped quarters. My back smacked against the wall.
“Sophia?” It was Abby. I steadied myself and leaned close to the crack again.
“Are you all right?” I asked. “Liam wasn’t making a lot of sense. He said something took you.”
“It’s coming back,” she whispered. “I got away, but I don’t know how long I can hide,” she said. She made a gulping sound of fear and animal distress. “I hear it. Please—”
She reached for me through the crack, and I reached for her, as if I could pull her through, as if I could save her. But it was so narrow I could barely fit my hand through. She looked over her shoulder and her eyes widened. “No, no, no,” she said, in prayer and panic. I thrust my hand farther in, wriggling to try to eke out one more centimeter, and she did the same, frantic.
Our fingertips touched for one instant. I shoved forward, and my hand closed over hers. If only I could hold on to her. If only—
Something pressed into my palm. The sharp wooden wings of a bird, and with it something smooth and plastic. She closed my fingers over it. “So he knows,” she said. “Don’t let me be another mystery to haunt him, Sophia. Don’t let him follow.”
She meant Dr. Ashford, I realized. The man who’d protected her for years. Raised her. And if I didn’t get this out of here, he would never know what had happened to her.
“Next time you see me, don’t trust me,” she whispered.
“Abby—”
“Sophia. Run.”
The tunnel echoed with the sound of wings. Abby snatched her hand away.
“Abby!” I called, jamming my flashlight against the crack, but I couldn’t make out anything but emptiness beyond. Emptiness, but not silence. In the deep, in the dark, someone was singing.