I YELPED. IT was like shouting into a damp blanket—the sound hit the air and died.
There was no hand on my wrist. No one to have grabbed it. Just an empty room. Except it wasn’t the same room.
The long window was cracked and caked with grime. The cage within was torn open, as if the bars had been wrenched outward with great force. The equipment was old, broken, dented.
I gulped down my fear—not pushing it away, not yet, knowing it would keep me sharp before it overwhelmed me—and walked to the door. As I had expected, Hardcastle was gone. And the hall beyond was as changed as the room.
The doors were in the same places, but they were wrong—one hanging crookedly from a broken hinge, another swollen and rotting, covered in green-black mold. Water dripped from the ceiling. The window beside me was cracked and beyond it was only mist that seeped in through the shattered windows, spilling like a thick carpet over the pitted tiles.
“Where am I?” I whispered. This wasn’t the LARC, but it wasn’t where I’d found Rivers either.
A faint scratching came from behind me. I whirled around. A hand, slender and pale, reached around from behind the corner, the nails scratching at the wall. It withdrew, and wet footsteps, the slap of bare feet against the tile, sounded a retreat.
“Wait,” I called. A drop of water splashed onto the back of my hand. I ran after the footsteps.
I rounded the corner. The mist was thicker here, coiling in the air. The other girl stood at the end of the hall, half-shrouded. She wore a long-sleeved gray shirt, soaked and sticking to her skin, and a heavy skirt that dripped water from the hem. I couldn’t see her face through the mist.
“Who are you?” I asked, but I already knew: the girl in the mirror. The reason my reflection was wrong.
“Who are you?” she whispered. Her voice was hoarse, a croak as garbled as Moriarty’s.
“I’m Sophia,” I said.
“I’m Sophia,” she echoed, cocking her head to the side.
“Are you . . . me?” I asked. My legs felt weak. I still couldn’t see her face.
“I . . .” she began. And then she shuddered. “Don’t let them find you,” she said, low and urgent—and then she turned and fled.
I plunged after her. “Wait!” I called. The word crumpled as soon as it left my lips. No echoes in this place; the air was too thick. I had the sensation of being inside some great beast’s throat. With every step the mist curdled around me, growing denser.
The walls fell away around me. I stumbled to a stop under open sky. It was as if something had torn the front half of the LARC away, leaving only rubble, twisted rebar, and wiring tangling like snakes. The mist spilled across the island. It wasn’t night, exactly. The breaks in the clouds showed a glimpse of a sky without sunlight—but without stars either, and instead a strange ridged and whorled texture that reminded me of glass left long under the waves, until the shape of it was nearly lost.
“Wait,” I said again, my voice thin, but she was gone.
I made my way down the path. If this island was like Bitter Rock, that’s where shelter would be. And it did have the island’s shape—though the road beneath my feet wasn’t gravel, but some kind of solid stone, as if it had formed naturally. Instead of the speckling of white and yellow flowers beside the road, the flowers were fleshy things, a deep and glistening purple-red like liver meat.
I wasn’t alone. There was someone out in the empty field past the road, the dim light reducing them to a silhouette. Not the girl—not my half-wild twin. It was a man. Or at least I thought it was a man. Hunched over, moving at a lurching gait.
I hesitated at the edge of the road. Nothing here had tried to hurt me—not yet, at least. Not even the dark angel in the church. And if there was someone here who could answer my questions, I had to risk it. I stepped forward. It was like stepping into emptiness, though the ground remained solid beneath my feet. I had no tether, nothing to hold on to, nothing to hold me back. Only the thrumming need. Forward. Find the answers. Find her.
The man stood with one knee knocked inward, one shoulder hunched so far forward I didn’t see how he managed to balance. He stood utterly still, his back to me, the only motion the wind tugging at his wild, ash-blond curls.
His knee wasn’t just bent inward oddly; it was broken. The foot twisted inward until it was completely perpendicular to the other. His clothes hung in shreds. I thought for a moment his skin was blistered, but as I drew closer I made out the craggy edges of rocks that seemed to be growing out of his skin, the smallest the size of a thumbnail, the largest as big around as a fist, lodged at the base of his neck.
His shoulder jerked. His head turned toward me, and I started to take a step back. He rotated, his bad leg collapsing, his weight flinging the other way to keep some semblance of balance. Rocking back and forth unsteadily, he regarded me from behind a ragged net of salt-rimed hair. The rocks were embedded in his cheeks. No, not rocks—barnacles.
He took a lurching step toward me and spoke rapidly in what might have been Russian.
“Von otsyuda!” he said, and repeated it, over and over. “Von! Von!”
He reached for me, but his leg gave out and he collapsed onto the ground, grasping for my ankle. I stumbled back. He screamed a bloodcurdling sound, high-pitched and tortured. He clawed his way across the grass toward me, and distantly, something—someone—answered his scream.
I ran. At first I sprinted back the way I had come, but the road was no longer empty—there was someone there, a figure standing on the road. Man or woman, I couldn’t tell, but they were coming toward me with long, purposeful strides. I turned, scrambling down the face of the hill instead. Pebbles shot out from under my feet, making a sound like rain. I had to get to safety. I had to get help. But where either of those things were, I had no idea.
I chanced a look behind me, slowing so I didn’t trip and send myself on a neck-snapping journey down the hill. My eyes scuttered over the dark and the mist, finding no purchase—but then the figure on the road moved. It was still coming for me. It let out a sound between a howl and a scream, and broke into a loping run.
I pelted down the hill so fast I almost overbalanced myself. I hit the base of the slope hard enough that pain lanced through my shins, but I didn’t break stride. I’d angled away from the road, heading toward the inward curve of the island. There: A house. Not Mrs. Popova’s. This must be where Mikhail’s house was, if it matched the real world.
I ran up on the nearest porch and hammered on the door. No answer. I tried the knob, and it turned. The door swung inward—but it was more like folding it inward on a seam, no hinges at its edge. I stared in from the doorway.
It was like a patchwork room. Parts of the walls were wood paneling. But there were gaps of bare, utterly featureless wall too. The rest of the room was the same way: a kitchen table set with a dinner of roast chicken and carrots—the far end of which ended abruptly, held up by gray, stony spikes instead of wooden legs. A door opened into another room, but there was only a crooked sliver of the room visible beyond and then—nothing. Solid, blank gray.
I stepped back, and back again. From here, all I could see through the windows was the normal-looking room, because that was all there was. There was only what you could see from the windows, as if it was a diorama created by someone who had never ventured inside. I backed away, swallowing hard and battling panic.
The ground thrummed. I could feel it through the soles of my feet, and the windowpanes rattled with it.
My pursuer was running down the street toward me. He passed through the oily circle of light beneath one of the lanterns, and I recognized him with a startled jerk. Bristling beard, huge shoulders. Mikhail.
I couldn’t outrun him, but I sprinted away, hoping the distance between us would buy me some time to find safety, find help. But I didn’t make it far. Two houses down, a buckle in the pavement caught the toe of my shoe and I sprawled forward, hands scraping painfully against the ground, and then the footsteps were on me. Blunt fingers dug into my arms. I screamed in raw terror as he flipped me onto my back, the bulk, the sheer weight of him seeming to crush all coherent thought from me.
A meaty hand closed around my throat. I couldn’t breathe. My limbs smacked against the implacable mass of his body. His breath washed over me. It was hot and stank of low tide: fish rot and brine. Spots of color burst in my vision. The strength leached out of me quicker than I could have imagined possible and then—
A horrible cawing screech and a flurry of black feathers signaled my rescue. The man reared back, letting out a wordless bellow and swiping at the air, but his avian attacker was already wheeling away into the sky, screaming right back at him. Moriarty. I didn’t waste the time it bought me. I scrambled upright, my limbs sluggish and my breath seeming to ooze back into my body reluctantly. My vision slewed over the landscape, searching for something, anything to tell me which way to run, and caught against the pale figure at the end of the road, standing in the center of a yellowed patch of light, mist coiling around her knees. The girl.
She beckoned. I went to her. I glanced back once to see Moriarty still harassing the giant, diving at him and then flapping wildly to gain altitude and avoid the swipes of those massive hands. Then I had reached the light, and the girl.
There were no shadows now to hide her. She had my face. Thinner than mine, cheeks sunken, rings around her eyes nearly as deep as bruises, but she could have been my twin. She put out her hand. The fingers were rough with calluses and scars, healed-over cuts and fresh ones. Grime caked the creases of her palm.
Apprehension skittered over my skin, like a creature with too many legs. Her fingers twitched. Waiting. I looked back. Moriarty flew high, free of the man’s grasping hands, and the man’s attention turned to me once more.
I took her hand.
She spun at once, pulling me with her. Off the road and away from the house, running straight for the rocks and the water. She didn’t head down toward the pebbled beach but out along a spit of tumbled boulders, black and scabbed over with barnacles and mussels. If I slipped, they’d tear my skin open.
The man had slowed, forced to clamber over the rocks and far less nimble than we were. But he was still coming. I looked at my twin. She pressed a finger to her lips, dropping my hand. She fell back a step and I had to pivot to still face her.
“Do you remember?” she asked.
“Remember what?” I replied helplessly. He was coming. We didn’t have time to chat.
She shook her head sadly. “Listen,” she said, and she grabbed both my hands.
The hum in my bones, the sound I had almost stopped noticing, swelled and swelled, growing so loud it made my teeth ache and my skull feel like it was splitting. I opened my mouth to scream, but the sound that came out was something else entirely—a sound like the clamor of birds.
My feet went out from under me on the slippery rocks, and then I was falling. Light and dark broke around me, warring for dominance, and then I hit something—hard—and the darkness won.