I FROZE, BUT the Six-Wing didn’t react to my presence. Its wings bent forward, encircling Sophie. Through the gaps, I watched its long arm extend, its fingers brush against her shoulder. It sang, the words not from any language I’d ever heard—and yet I almost understood them.
Sophie lifted the bowl to her lips and drank, and acidic cold trickled down my throat. With each swallow, I understood more of the song, and things beyond the song. This is how it would reclaim us. Change our hearts so that we obeyed only its whims. And then we would sing for it in turn, and wrench open the gate that bound the Eidolon.
Sophie drank, and I crept forward, my fear dissolving into peace. The black liquid slid down Sophie’s throat. I passed between soldiers and sailors and men and women. I took my place across from Sophie, the Six-Wing between us. A child appeared, a girl no more than seven or eight, and she placed a shallow bowl in my hands, filled to the brim with black liquid. I smiled and lifted it to my lips.
The Six-Wing turned to watch.
Suddenly the Six-Wing wasn’t the matte black of empty shadow—I could see it. See it truly. Its face was blurred, indistinct. Its eyes—the pupil and iris shivered, splitting in two, merging again. And that was what was wrong with its face, too, shuttling rapidly from one to another.
It had my mother’s face. She surfaced from the shadows, submerged, then broke the surface again—and I heard her in the song, too. The Six-Wing sang of the shard and the broken world and the gate.
My mother—my mother’s echo—sang of me, and of Sophie. She sang of the black, of sinking into it, of pulling it inside of her and being pulled inside of it. It had tried to unmake her, but her daughters needed her, and she would not let go. If Sophie and I were special, it was because we were Joy Novak’s daughter. She was different. Her echo was different too. The Six-Wing had created Joy’s echo, but it could not control her. Instead, she had sunk into the black pool, the stuff from which all the echoes were born, the stuff from which the Six-Wing’s echo had arisen. And she had taken control.
Not completely. But enough. Enough to let Dr. Kapoor and Dr. Hardcastle escape. Enough to corrupt the new echoes into unstable, mad things, obviously inhuman and barely functional.
Enough to save me.
With every beat of those great wings, with every word of the song, she became less her, more it, but somehow, somehow, she had remained.
The Six-Wing reached for me. No, she reached for me, my mother’s echo.
Our hands met and I saw, I remembered as she poured the memory into me through the song.
She cannot persist against the fury of the Six-Wing, but she must. She must stay herself, she must remember, because her daughters are running and they will not live if she fails. She holds and she holds and she holds and go, she whispers, go. They reach the shore—go—they reach the boat.
And William has the gun. William has the gun and she almost lets it loose, this monster, this winged beast, this servant of a broken prince, because if she lets him loose, together they can tear William apart. But there will be no end to the blood, then, and so she watches as Joy whispers her love to one of their daughters and she hates this woman, this flesh-and-bone version of herself—she hates her for choosing one, until she sees what Joy means to do.
What Joy does: she stays. She stays, because both these children are their daughters and Joy and her echo are both their mothers, and of course she stays, and they will protect her, this child of theirs who must remain.
But the echo of Joy Novak watches the ship on the water. She watches them reach the very edge of this false world, and she opens for them a way out. And then, with all her effort trained on that gap, that tear for them to escape through, she can only watch, helpless, as William throws her daughter from the boat.
She is rage and she is fear, and she is the Six-Wing, and there is so little room left to be Joy. And yet she holds, because she cannot keep the way out open and still strike at him.
She holds, because if she does not, he dies and so does her daughter.
She lets the boat slip away, slip through the mist. And she plunges beneath the waves, into the deep water where her daughter sinks, eyes open, lungs empty, on the edge of the breath that will end her. She holds. She lifts the girl up. She kisses her lips to fill her lungs with breath.
She pulls her from the water, but it is not enough, because the ocean is cold and hungry and the shore is so far away. And so she gathers her will and makes it a solid thing—her arms encircle her daughter and turn to wood, her words whisper their way into a wind to coax the sea into carrying her. She uses all of the Six-Wing’s power, all of its control over this place to craft a ship out of nothing.
The Six-Wing screams, for it wants the child. It needs the child.
But it made a mistake. It made too perfect an echo. It stole Joy Novak’s face, her voice. Her love. And that love is strong enough to bend this false reality. It is strong enough to keep the Six-Wing caged.
The boat she has made for her daughter floats away, the girl shivering, curled up in its bottom.
Go, she whispers. Go.
Time works differently here. For the echo of the woman who was Joy, it stutters. Sometimes she sees her daughter: singing by the water, skipping rocks, running from the echoes who hunt her, always. Joy’s echo distracts them. She blinds them. She walks them into the ocean to be battered by the rocks.
She holds. For years, she holds.
She cannot protect her daughter alone. But she is not alone, and Joy Novak tends the girl well.
It is moments later. It is a lifetime past. Her daughters are both here, and she cannot hold any longer. She is so tired.
“Help them,” I whispered. I gave her memories of my own. Abby and Liam and the echoes outside, Moriarty with his furious darkness. “Help them, please.”
She could not help them. Not alone. But she was never alone here, because my mother stayed. Together they protected Sophie. And together, they can do this.
I felt her cast herself out over stone, over salt, the Six-Wing stripping free of her as she crosses where it cannot. She finds Joy Novak, half-broken, half-human. My mother’s echo isn’t made of flesh and blood anymore—she’s made of will and anger, love and rage, and she sinks into Joy’s skin, lending her strength. Unmaking herself to make Joy whole. I heard her whisper one last word, and then she was gone.
Go.