I STARED AT Dr. Kapoor, thoughts wheeling through my head, my careful emotional remove fracturing. Footsteps came up the walk. Dr. Kapoor stepped closer and dropped her voice to an angry hiss. “Go home, Ms. Novak. Go home, and never think of this place again.”
The front door opened, and William Hardcastle stepped in. Dr. Kapoor gave me a look—a warning look. And a frightened one. Don’t, she mouthed.
William Hardcastle smiled. “Sophia,” he said in surprise. “I didn’t expect to see you here. Ms. Hayes, I’m sorry for everything that’s happening.”
His voice echoed in my mind. In my memory. I’m sorry.
My eyes dropped to his hands, hanging easily by his sides. They were large hands. Spade-like, I thought. Strong hands with blunt fingers and light brown freckling across the backs. I knew those hands. I was sure of it now.
I’m sorry, he’d said.
They’d been holding me under the water, the day I drowned.
He was still talking, but all I heard were those two words. Those words, and the hollow sound of water closing over my head. He was sorry. He was so sorry for all of this. His regret was suffocating, and I could only pray that the emptiness of my eyes, my inability to speak, could be excused by the circumstances. Two people missing. Maybe dead.
“I know that this is a difficult situation, but we’re going to do everything we can to find Lily and Ms. Ryder,” he said.
I tried to push my fear, my shock away. I needed that numbness. I needed that distance and coldness, but it wouldn’t come, because the cold was the water and the water was all around me, it was in my mouth and it was dragging at my limbs and I couldn’t breathe.
“Thank you,” I managed, a whisper that left my throat raw.
He smiled. It made his blue eyes look flat.
“Liam, why don’t you walk Ms. Hayes back to Mrs. Popova’s?” Dr. Kapoor said pointedly.
“Right,” Liam said. Anger hummed below the syllable, and for a moment I feared that he would lash out. If he demanded answers from his mother now, Dr. Hardcastle would realize we knew the truth—or part of the truth, at least. And he would be able to put together who I was.
I took Liam’s hand to pull him away, and to anchor myself. I had to get out of there, and only my grip on him kept me from running as fast as I could.
I drew him along down the road. We bypassed the car by unspoken agreement. Tension jangled in the air between us. Liam said my name. He sounded concerned. The worrier of the two of us. At least he’d kept it together. Not like me. Not this time.
“Sophia, slow down.”
I realized I was walking so fast that Liam could barely keep up. I halted abruptly. Whatever brief respite I’d earned myself was gone now, my fear tangling around me once more.
The wind stirred my hair, whipping stray strands across my face. I clawed them back behind my ears. There was something wrong with me. Or something wrong with the air. I couldn’t get a deep enough breath.
“You’re panicking again,” Liam said quietly. He started to reach for me.
“Touch me and I’m going to fucking lose it,” I warned him. I shut my eyes, but it didn’t help. I saw the water. Saw the boat. Saw Hardcastle’s hand around my wrist, holding so tight it hurt—saw Lily’s hands, closed over mine in comfort.
I saw her broken on the ground, and I saw the yawning black of the ocean.
I turned on my heel and strode off the road. We were in a gap between the houses, just a spit of rock and sand and driftwood. It was too gray and nondescript to be beautiful.
I walked all the way to the edge of the water and two steps farther. Liam called after me again, and I wondered if he thought I would keep walking, the way she had, walk all the way into the sea and let the waves fold over me. It was an efficient way of vanishing.
But I stopped with cold water lapping over my shoes, up to my ankles. It rushed out and I sank a centimeter into the sand as the water drew away the ground I rested on.
The girl who looks like me. Or is it the other way around?
“Tell me I’m real,” I whispered.
“Of course you’re real,” Liam said.
I looked back at him. Salt spray pricked my cheeks. “Am I? Or am I one of them? Just an echo? What if she’s the one that’s real?”
“You’re nothing like those things. What you told me about Mikhail’s echo and that other one—”
“But she’s not like that either,” I said. “She’s . . . strange. But that doesn’t mean anything, not if she grew up in that place. What if I’m not me at all? What if I’m the monster who stole a girl’s life?”
“You’re not a monster,” Liam said firmly.
“Maybe that’s why I don’t feel things properly,” I said. “Maybe that’s why it takes so long for emotions to catch up with me.”
“Or maybe it’s a natural fucking response to trauma,” Liam said. “Something happened to you here. And you don’t even know what it is so that you can deal with it. I was a complete shit to call you a sociopath, Sophia, especially when I’ve had enough therapy to have my own PhD by now. You’re real. You’re human. You’re you.”
“I’m not even sure what that means.” I let out my breath, long and slow, and looked out over the water. Dr. Kapoor had chosen a house that faced Belaya Skala. The window of her bedroom, I realized, looked right out at the headland. “They know,” I said. “They know about this place.”
“You mean Dr. Kapoor and Hardcastle?” Liam asked.
“I mean all of them. Your mom. Hardcastle. Mrs. Popova. Everyone here knows. They know that Lily isn’t missing, that she hasn’t fallen down and passed out behind a rock or drowned in the ocean. They know the island took her. Is there even going to be a search? Or will they just send a boat over and wait on the shore long enough to make us think they tried?”
Liam didn’t answer. I crouched, letting the waves run over my hands. Foam flecked my wrists. Even in the summer, the water was shockingly cold. It had been cold then too. “Hardcastle was there,” I said. “I don’t remember much, but I remember him. There was a boat, and the waves, and he grabbed my wrist and . . .”
I shuddered. My hands were going numb in the cold water, and I let that numbness seep through me. I wouldn’t be afraid. I wouldn’t give anyone my fear.
“No one is going to know the truth about what happened to Lily and Abby,” Liam said. “They’re going to think it was some freak accident.”
“So no one’s going to know it was our fault,” I said. “Lily wouldn’t have been in danger if it weren’t for us.”
“It’s not our fault,” Liam said. “It’s that fucking island’s fault.”
From here, it just looked like a lump of rock. Barren and inert. “I don’t understand,” I whispered. “What is that place? Why is it here? Why does anyone stay?”
“You think Dr. Kapoor will tell us?” Liam asked doubtfully.
“I doubt it,” I said. “But she sure as hell knows more than we do. She knows the other me. She . . .” I frowned. “Those shells and things on your windowsill. Are they yours?”
“No. I’m not really the collecting type,” Liam said.
“But could they be from when you were a kid? Something you left there years ago?”
“Definitely not.”
“And there’s no way that Dr. Kapoor has a random shell collection,” I said. He snorted in amused agreement. She hadn’t been surprised to see me—the echo-me—in the house. She’d been annoyed, but not surprised. “She lets my echo stay there. She must. Which means those things belong to my echo.”
Including the deer, carved so carefully. One of Mikhail’s. If he’d given it to her, it meant he knew too. He didn’t recognize me when I arrived because he knew me as a child. He recognized me because he knew her. He hadn’t told me everything.
I straightened up. Salt water dripped from my fingertips, and I felt nothing. All my fear and anger and grief were on some other shore. Maybe I wasn’t human. But maybe it was better not to be.
“I know what we need to do next,” I said, and started back toward the road.