SOPHIE SQUEEZED MY hand. She looked grateful, and I understood why—she didn’t have the words to tell us what had happened or what we had to do, but I did. She could use my words, and I could use her memory, and together we were almost whole.
“Abby is still alive, or she was a few hours ago,” I said. “She’s with—” I swallowed. The voice in the dark. I remembered scraping at the salt to make that room. I remembered her voice. But Sophie had walled off the memory of the sight of her, and I didn’t know why. “She’s with my mother. They can help us get into the echo, as deep as we can go, and then we can close it. Sophie and I.”
“How do you know all of that?” Dr. Kapoor asked. “Some kind of psychic transference?”
“We’re the same person, sort of,” I said. “We can remember each other’s lives.” Our memories bled into each other. And now I knew why I had so often woken with the taste of salt on my lips, why every rock on this island felt so familiar.
“The mist will fade soon,” Dr. Kapoor said. “Getting over the water should be easy enough. Can you get us into the echo world?”
I met Sophie’s eyes, the image of myself reflected in them. “Yes,” I said.
“We should move quickly,” Mrs. Popova said. “Mist’s gone.”
“How can you tell?” I asked. We weren’t near any windows.
“You get so you can feel it,” she told me. “The Visitors don’t linger after the mist leaves. Or at least they haven’t before, but things that have held constant for a hundred years have gone haywire with you here, so who the fuck knows.” Mrs. Popova was Very Done With This Shit.
“You can stay here,” I said. “You’ve done enough.”
“It should be safe in the LARC,” Dr. Kapoor said. “Liam, you’ll stay with Mrs. Popova.”
“No way,” Liam said. “I’m going.”
“You are not,” Dr. Kapoor said. “I shouldn’t have let your mother leave you here in the first place. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“I’m eighteen,” Liam said. “I don’t need your permission. If you want to stop me, you’re going to have to tie me up.”
Dr. Kapoor looked like she was very willing to do just that, but Mrs. Popova grunted. “No one’s safe. Here or there,” she said. “And he’s got a part in this whether you like it or not.”
Dr. Kapoor nodded reluctantly. I was still holding Sophie’s hand. She had a distant look on her face. “We need to hurry,” she said. “He’s gathering his strength. He’ll be able to send them through again soon.”
Which meant the mist would come, and the Visitors with it. “We can head straight to the dock,” I said.
“The Katydid’s down there,” Kenny confirmed. “We can be over in no time.”
“Who’s ‘we’?” Dr. Kapoor asked.
“Lily vanished over there. So that’s where we should be looking,” Kenny said.
Guilt went through me like a fishhook. “Lily’s dead,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“You—you’re sure?” he asked, holding on to hope with every bit of strength he had.
It broke my heart to tear it from him. “Yes,” I said. “She’s gone. I saw her die.”
His face crumpled. He looked away and seemed for a moment unable to breathe. Dr. Kapoor put a hand on his shoulder. It was the most tender gesture I’d seen from her.
“Stay here,” she said. “If we don’t make it back, you can still get help. Warn people.”
I wasn’t sure what good that would do. But I was glad when Kenny nodded. He’d be safe—or safer than us, at least. It was something.
“I need to go back for Mikhail,” Mrs. Popova said.
But Sophie caught my hand, and I knew. “He’s dead,” I said, grieving for a man I hardly knew.
“You’re certain,” Mrs. Popova said sharply.
Sophie stepped forward, addressing Mrs. Popova directly. “I saw,” Sophie said. “He’s gone. The Warden too.” Her voice was utterly calm. I might have thought she felt nothing at all if I weren’t feeling it for her. Sorrow so deep I didn’t know how I would ever find the bottom or break the surface.
“Sophia?” Liam said, and I realized there were tears running down my cheeks.
“I’m all right,” I whispered. “It isn’t mine.”
Sophie couldn’t survive her sorrow, and so for her, I wept.
We went down to the shore together, the three of us, Kenny and Mrs. Popova safely within the fortress of the LARC.
“I want to be clear about something,” Dr. Kapoor said, fixing Liam with a steely glare. “You survive, or I will kill you myself. I don’t care if the whole world drowns.”
He gaped but nodded. And I ached. I ached because of what the island had taken from us both—that love, that ferocious love. He’d lost her to the island—not completely, not the way I’d lost my mother, but he’d lost her just the same.
“Okay. Let’s—” Dr. Kapoor continued, but she didn’t get to finish.
“What do you think you’re doing, Vanya?”
Sophie gasped, shrinking back, and my breath stopped in my throat, the world spinning around me as Dr. Hardcastle strode toward us, fury in his face.
I’m sorry, he’d said. Sorry. Like it mattered. Like it could remove even the slightest bit of evil from the act. Sophie’s fear and mine crashed together and turned to rage. This man—this man had stranded our mother. Had left her behind and he had promised, he had promised her that he would keep her daughter safe, and he had lied.
He had left us on the shore. He had cast us in the cold water. And all he’d said was sorry.
The rage filled us both. There was nowhere for it to go. But I—I had lived my life among people. Among rules and society. I knew how to swallow it down. Sophie didn’t.
He saw us, both of us, and his eyes widened. Was he afraid in that moment? I hope so.
Sophie screamed and threw herself at him. If she’d had a weapon, she would have killed him. She had her fists, though, and her nails, and she flew at him, all fury and agony. Her nails raked his cheek. He yelled in pain and caught her by the wrist. She thrashed, kicked at him, but however much strength her anger gave her, he was still bigger than her, still stronger. He spun her against him and wrapped his arms in a bear hug around her, hands grasping her wrists so all she could do was scream and struggle against him, her hair a ragged veil over her face.
“Aren’t any of you going to do something?” he demanded. “This thing—”
“She is not a thing,” I screamed at him. I grabbed at his arm. “Let her go!”
“Jesus. You’re her,” he said. “You don’t understand. These creatures are dangerous.”
“Let her go, Will,” Dr. Kapoor said.
He made a noise in the back of his throat, like a scoff, and threw Sophie free of him. She hit the pebbled ground and rolled, scrambling upright to sit, panting, her teeth bared. I ran to her, wrapped my arms around her for both comfort and restraint. I couldn’t push my fear away, or my anger, because it would only flow into her. I had to let it submerge me.
And I had to keep going anyway.
I pressed my brow against her hair. “It’s all right,” I told her.
“He hurt us,” she whispered. She shook, and I felt it through my whole body.
I watched the boat vanishing into the fog as my mother wrapped her arms around me and a shriek tore through the air. I felt the cold shock of the water as he flung me away. I remembered a monster.
I stood. “You deserve so many things,” I told him. Contempt turned every word to acid, and I relished the way it burned my lips, my tongue. “You deserve to be hurt. Maybe you deserve to die. God knows you deserve to be afraid. But you don’t deserve to have one bit of power over me. You don’t deserve one more moment of fear or anger. I will not give it to you. And I will not let you keep us from what we have to do. Stay here and rot. You don’t matter. You are nothing.”
His face contorted: rage first. Then contempt. Then—desolation. He looked as if he wanted me to scream at him and strike at him, because if I hated him for what he’d done, it would save him from having to do it himself.
Sophie pulled herself to her feet, clinging to my hand. “He needs to be punished,” she hissed at me.
“Yes,” I said. “But we can’t wait around to do it. Don’t let him take anything else from us.”
She took three short, sharp breaths between her teeth, her hand gripping mine tight enough to hurt. Then she nodded.
We left him there on the shore. We made for Belaya Skala.