“PLEASE,” I SAID. The girl with the camera was afraid but trying not to show it. There was a ghost with her, but she couldn’t see it. It shimmered beneath her skin, haunting her, but the sunlight would not let it breathe and be.
“Yeah. Okay. Between the two of you . . . I’ll take the one with the face,” said the girl.
The screaming came across the hills, chased swiftly by the thunder of the angel’s wings. It was a gift and a warning, and it meant we had little time. “Hurry!” I cried.
She was a clumsy thing, scrabbling over rocks and catching herself on her palms when she stumbled. But she followed. Not toward the traps: the throat of the bunker, with only one way in and one way out, or the church, the false haven where the angel watched. I brought her toward the north, where the birds roosted. The cliffs were silent now; the birds tended their young beyond the echo, where the persistent sun would let them grow.
We were nearly there when she fell. I grabbed for her, caught her wrist, but the camera tumbled from her hand and skidded down the side of the hill. She lunged for it. “No!” I told her. “No time.” We were almost to the cliffs. We were almost safe.
“I have to get it back,” she said.
“You’ll die.”
She gave me a vicious, wild look. She wasn’t afraid of death. More than that. She thought she’d earned it.
“She’ll be lost,” I told her, desperate.
“Who?” she demanded.
“The girl in your bones,” I told her. “It will drink her down.”
“What girl?” She shook her head in confusion.
“She’s shining in you,” I said. “She never let you go.”
“My sister. Miranda,” she whispered. The kind of love that shone like that, you wouldn’t mistake. She ran with me, over the gray rock to the white, and I led her along the foot-wide track that hugged the bluff.
“These rocks,” she said. “They’re—salt? Why? Is it some kind of—” She stopped as I turned to look at her. “There isn’t a reason, is there?”
“There is,” I said. “But I don’t know . . .” I waved my hands. I didn’t know how to tell her that the angel feared the touch of salt, and feared this place, and so this place was salt. That the angel feared this place because it was salt. That both of these things were true, because cause and effect were the snake devouring its own tail, the bird laying the egg from which it hatched.
The birds flocked here because the angel feared it. The angel feared it because the birds flocked here. The thing and its reflection. Who could say which was which?
The screeching came again. Closer now, but we were almost safe. “Here,” I said, and I stepped into the cliff face, into the crack where white against white concealed a passage just wide enough for a single slender figure. The girl had more trouble with it, scraping her back and her hips as she negotiated her passage. But then she was through.
My home: a cave, carved from the salt with rocks and broken shells and fingernails, a centimeter scratched out at a time over the years. We stood in the first chamber, littered with the detritus of my wounded life. A broken chair brought over from the LARC. The wooden birds Uncle Misha gave me every winter. Bits and pieces I’d stolen from other people, other lives.
I’d never shown it to anyone before. I looked at her expectantly. The light from the passage was enough for me to see her wobbly smile.
“It’s . . . nice,” she said.
Outside, the angel screeched again. This time it was not the warning sound, but the red sound, the rage sound. The girl flinched.
“Safe,” I told her. I took her hands and walked her to the chair, sat her down in it. “Safe.”
“What is this place?” she asked.
“Home,” I said. “It doesn’t come here.”
“You brought her.” The voice was dry and rasping. The girl’s eyes widened. “I want to see her.” The girl stood, looking toward the back. Toward the second room, toward the shadows from which the voice came.
“It’s all right,” I told her.
“Come closer.”
The girl swallowed and walked toward the voice. I remained, sitting on the salt of the floor, biting my thumb hard enough to hurt. The girl crept closer and closer to the dark. She cast one last look over her shoulder at me, and then vanished within the second chamber, out of the reach of the light. I wrapped my arms around my knees.
I did not go into the dark anymore. My fingertips were still scarred from the effort of clawing out the salt of the walls, digging a space where the light would never touch.
It was impossible to say how long the girl was back there. This was not a place where time found purchase. But when she emerged, she looked pale, and she wetted her lips several times before she spoke.
“She told me what’s happening. That this world is going to spread. That that thing—the Six-Wing?—is going to use you and Sophia to do it. And every person in the world will suffer.”
“Not just people,” I said. I trailed my fingers along the salt, sending loose grains skittering. The words were in my chest, a recitation, mimicry giving me more eloquence than I possessed. “Magpies hold funerals for their dead. An albatross flies ten thousand lonely miles and never forgets its mate. We are not the only ones that would be mourned.”
I wished the words were mine. I wished I had words to put to all the thoughts that flew in a great murmuration through me, but I had trouble holding on to spoken things. I had only pieces of them, the trailing edge of echoes.
“She told me what I have to do,” the girl said. “And she said that you have to bring Sophia here, and then we can try. I can go with you. Help you.”
I shook my head. “You stay. Safe.”
“You won’t be.”
“Stay with her,” I insisted. “It’s not good alone.”
She looked back over her shoulder. Bit her lip. “I’ll stay,” she promised me. “Until you get back, I’ll stay.”
I padded away, the salt scraping at the soles of my feet. She didn’t follow as I slipped back out into the sunlight.
Two terns had fallen through the echoes to this one, and they glided lazily out over the water. That meant the mist was rising, in the other world, the barriers grown thin. It was time to go.