WE HELD HANDS, my echo and I, and I looked into her eyes. I saw her and saw my reflection. The air hummed around us. I could feel every echo in my bones, a different frequency for every distorted version of the world.
“Sophia!” Dr. Kapoor yelled. “They’re here!”
“Now,” Sophie whispered, and through her I saw what to do. How to take the sound that sang in our bones and amplify it, weave it around the others. We fell through the echoes as the world grew stranger around us, bones growing from the earth, strange flowers bursting from the rock, the sea glazing over with ice and then shattering again.
And suddenly we came to a shuddering stop, both of us gasping, gathered in a stand of trees the color of bone, weeping red sap, branches drooping with swollen fruit.
“This one’s different,” Liam said. “How can this be so different than the places we’ve seen before?”
“There are many,” Sophie said. “They aren’t all real at once.” She looked at me helplessly, her words failing her, and I stared at her, trying to put her knowledge into words.
“There are hundreds and hundreds of layers of the echo world,” I said slowly. “But most of the time they’re sort of—collapsed into each other. They only become real enough to exist in when you . . . well, when you exist in them already. You don’t always notice when you fall out of one and into another, but to get to the last one—or rather, the first one—you always have to go through there.”
I pointed at the bunker. It was where it always was, in every echo. I wondered what had been there before the bunker was built, in the real world. The Six-Wing, and the echo world by extension, had seized on it and embedded it right into the center of this mad architecture.
The door in this echo was made of the same bone-white wood as the trees, and the red sap had dried over it in rivulets that looked disturbingly like veins. Liam hauled it open, revealing the dark corridor beyond, the familiar doors to the left and right. Inside, the bunker looked perfectly normal. It was the connective tissue between all the different echoes. We fumbled with flashlights for a moment.
“Hello?” a voice called.
We whirled around. Dr. Kapoor half raised her shotgun.
“That was Lily,” Liam said.
“Lily’s dead,” I said.
“I know,” Liam said. “I know that.” And yet he was peering into the mist, something almost as solid as hope in his gaze. Could there be any way—?
“It’s a trick,” Dr. Kapoor said. “It makes copies, that’s all.”
“Not anymore,” Sophie said. She twisted her hands together. “They come out wrong. They all come out wrong.”
“Liam?” Lily called. “Sophia?” She came closer with staggering, lurching steps. There was something wrong about her silhouette in the mist. Something misshapen. “Help me. I got away, but I—” She coughed, whined.
The indistinct outline of her body was solidifying, the shape of her clearer. There was movement where there shouldn’t be, something jerking and tugging at her side while her head lolled to the left. “Please,” Lily called.
“You don’t want to see,” Sophie said. She retreated back toward the bunker.
Liam let out a breath, the not-quite-hope extinguished. He followed Sophie.
The thing in the mist screamed. It threw itself forward, racing along on all fours, its grotesquely lengthening arms pulling it along the ground faster than we could react. It leapt from the mist and straight for Liam, its limbs streaked with purplish veins like a blood infection.
It had Lily’s face, but it was wrenched to the side, her neck crooked and a tumorous wing bulging from it. Slashes and open sores covered her body as if she’d tried to slice the traitorous growths from her skin.
I didn’t think—I just threw myself in her way. She struck me and we toppled to the ground, her hair stringy, her mouth a razor-slash of a smile, too full of teeth. She had one arm around my neck before I could react, and then she was pulling us both back into the trees, scuttling crab-like on limbs that bent wrong and reached too far.
The others screamed. I caught a glimpse of the shotgun muzzle and Dr. Kapoor’s furious eyes, but the Lily-thing held me between her and the gun, and then we were vanishing into the mist.
“Where’d they go?” I heard Dr. Kapoor demand. “Did you see?”
The forest was a maze of mist and identical trees. I twisted, tried to pull free, but she held me tight, cooing softly against my cheek.
“One to bring and one more to fetch. Even broken dolls have uses, and I’m oh-so useful now,” she whispered, and her tongue darted out, scraping my face with a quick cat’s-tongue rasp.
I tried to scream. Tried to breathe. But there wasn’t enough air in my lungs—
Water closing over me, darkness rushing in—
She charged out of the mist, half-blind—Dr. Kapoor, wielding the shotgun like a club, slamming it into the Lily-creature’s elbow. I heard bone crack. Her grip went slack. I rolled free, gasping, and then came the blast, so loud I heard nothing else but ringing as I clawed my way upright, surging to my feet. I staggered, but Dr. Kapoor grabbed my elbow, steadying me.
I didn’t look down. Didn’t want to see. The ringing in my ears faded.
“Are you all right? In one piece?” Dr. Kapoor asked. The brisk efficiency of her voice was belied by the worry in her eyes.
“I’m okay,” I said, though with the adrenaline coursing through me I couldn’t feel my body enough to be sure if it was true.
“Let’s get—” Dr. Kapoor began, but she didn’t finish.
“Help me.” Lily’s voice. Lily’s shadow, off to the left.
“Please.” Lily again—but this one was off to the right, this form tall, like it had been seized and stretched by some great hand.
“Help,” she called, her voice garbled with the clamoring of birds, her figure a swarm of shadows approaching from straight ahead—a woman at the center with demented creatures flapping crookedly around her.
And there were more. They were everywhere.
“Get back to the bunker,” Dr. Kapoor said calmly. “Run and don’t look back.”
“You’re not coming?”
“Maybe I am. Maybe I’m not. But you’re not going to wait for me. Clear?” Dr. Kapoor said in the same even tone she used to instruct me in how to fill a spreadsheet properly.
The Lily to the left lurched forward. The blast of the shotgun made my ears ring. The figure dropped with a wet thud. But there were more shadows, more voices, pleading and whimpering and calling.
“Now,” Dr. Kapoor commanded, and I obeyed.
I ran through the mist, through the trees, following the thread that ran between my heart and Sophie’s. I didn’t need to know the way to the bunker, because I knew the way to her. I’d always known the way back to her, but I hadn’t understood.
I burst from the mist to find Sophie and Liam waiting at the bunker door. The shotgun roared behind me; the mist lit up. Then again. “Where’s my mum?” Liam demanded.
“She said not to wait,” I told him, shaking my head helplessly. He leaned forward, as if to run out after her.
“Sophia,” someone called. Not Lily this time. Some other voice, some other throat—the voice was a stranger’s, but they knew my name. It came from behind us, from up over the hill.
“Sophie, Sophia,” another voice sang.
“We have to go,” Sophie whispered.
“My mum’s still out there,” Liam said.
“We can’t wait,” I said. I had always been good at making people do what I wanted them to, what I needed them to.
Liam nodded. He stepped inside the bunker.
The echoes were coming. I looked again toward the trees, in the direction of the shotgun blasts. Rocks skittered down from the hill up above.
I tore myself away, plunged back into the mouth of the bunker, and slammed the door shut behind me. On the inside, the door was the more familiar steel, and I threw the lock, fighting with the rusted mechanism. Bodies slammed against the outside, gibbering and cackling.
Distantly, a muffled shotgun blast rang out.
Liam slid down into a crouch, fingers digging into his scalp. I knelt next to him, but I wasn’t sure what I should do. Touch him? Tell him it was okay? I’d never really been close enough to someone to offer comfort. I didn’t know how it was supposed to go.
“A few hours ago I thought she was the enemy,” he said. “Now she’s gone before I—”
“She’s not gone,” I said fiercely. “You’ll see.”
“I thought you were done lying to me,” he said. I flinched away, the hand I had raised, almost touching him, curling against my belly instead. And then, aware of the process in a way I had rarely been before, I felt myself step away from what I felt—not fear or distress this time, but what I felt for Liam. Because it was too strange and too immense. Because I didn’t know what to do with caring for someone so intensely and suddenly, and I couldn’t help his pain if I was lost in it with him.
Sophie took in a sharp breath, but she caught my eye. She could carry that awhile for me.
“Listen,” I said, without the weight of grief to dull the words. “If anyone can survive out there, it’s your mom. And she’s got the guns. She’ll make it, and she’ll find a way out. She’s done it before. But we can’t let worrying slow us down. Do you understand?”
He looked at me with hatred in his eyes. But the part of me that cared was safely guarded, safely tucked away in Sophie’s heart. And then the hatred softened back into sorrow as he cast away his misplaced anger. I took his hand and helped him to his feet, and if he didn’t quite meet my eyes, he at least wasn’t glaring poison at me anymore.
A footstep scraped behind us. I jumped—and then I laughed in sheer relief and joy.
Abby.
“Hey, guys,” she said. She stepped forward into the light of our flashlights. “What did I miss?”