TWILIGHT FELL, AND I stood on the porch of Mrs. Popova’s house, watching the moon play over the rippling water at the shore’s edge. For the first time, there were words in my mind to wrap around what I saw, what I felt. But there was no one to speak them to.
My mother was asleep inside. We’d found her, bloody and nearly unconscious, as we raced from the cathedral. We’d tried, briefly, to help the people inside. But with the Seraph gone—dead, or shut away, we didn’t know which—they were undone. Their flesh gave under our fingers, scattered to ash like my mother’s wings.
The strange children raced beside us. They raced into the sunlight outside, where the earth was littered with a thousand, a hundred thousand dead, malformed birds. The children leapt into the air, laughter turning to the cawing of crows.
We’d run, and there she was. My mother, or maybe both of them, the way I was Sophie and Sophia both. Her echo had merged with the Six-Wing to protect us all those years, and when she needed to, she tore herself free. She poured herself into the living woman and gave her strength enough to come, to help.
We gathered her up. Liam and Abby had to carry her, hurt as they were—I couldn’t, for I felt at once as substantial as tissue paper and also as if I carried an unbearable weight on my shoulders.
Sophia.
She was there and she wasn’t, as we ran.
I shut my eyes against the memory of running. The climb up the steps. We’d made it out. We’d stepped from the bunker into the light of a true sun, filtering down through the mist. Like stepping through an open door. Easy.
Easy, because the echo worlds were dying. Collapsing into each other. Falling into silence.
“Sophie?”
I opened my eyes. Liam stood on the beach, hands in his pockets. He’d cleaned up. Gotten his injuries bandaged. Called his mum. Twelve hours on and we were already getting good at pretending that normal was a possibility, after all of this.
“Hey,” I said. “I didn’t hear you.”
“You’ve got a lot on your mind,” he said.
I smiled a little, a pleasant-painful feeling hooking me just under my heart. “Is everything okay at your place?”
“Yeah. Dr.—Mum fell asleep,” he said. “I guess she’s been awake for most of six weeks. Which is how long we’ve been gone, by the way. In case no one thought to tell you before you, say, called home and got an earful from a concerned parent.”
I laughed. “I’m sure you charmed your way out of it.”
He looked at me, head tilted a little to the side. “You sound different.”
“I know.”
“How much of her is . . .”
“I’m not sure.” I bit my lip. Enough that when I looked at him, I remembered every second she’d stolen with him. There weren’t nearly enough of them. Enough that I could not tell which thoughts were mine and which were hers, and whether there was any difference at all. We had never quite been different people, she and I, and now any effort to imagine two where there was one seemed wrong.
“Do you think she might have survived?” he asked. There was still hope in his voice, though I didn’t think even he knew it was there.
“Her body? No. She’s dead,” I told him. There was hope in my voice too. Because if she wasn’t, that was worse. To be alive and to be trapped in that place, trapped with that thing— But I was as sure as I could be. She’d given me as much of herself as she could, and that was all that survived of her. I was what survived of her.
He walked up the steps of the porch, standing just below me. We were almost eye to eye. “We’d barely gotten started,” he said. “It’s not fair. She shouldn’t be gone.”
“I should be,” I said. “I was the one who . . . She was real.”
“Are you sure about that?” he asked. “Are you sure you were the echo?”
“I . . .” I shook my head. “It has to have been me.”
“And now? You can’t be an echo. There’s no one to be an echo of,” he said. “So what does that make you?”
“I’m Sophie. But I think . . . I think I’m Sophia too. So maybe that makes me both of us. Or maybe it makes me someone new,” I said.
“I think,” he said carefully, “I’d like to get to know that person.”
He didn’t hold me in his arms. He didn’t touch me at all. We only stood together in silence and in memory. Neither of us knew who I was, not yet, but we would learn. I didn’t know what we would find or what that would mean, and there was freedom in that. A future not empty but undefined, full of every possibility.
The door opened. Abby stepped out onto the porch, a blanket around her shoulders like a shawl. She looked between us but didn’t ask. Still, my cheeks heated a little.
“How’s Mrs. Popova?” I asked.
“Tired,” she said. “She says time is catching up to her.”
“What does that mean?” Liam asked. “Is she going to die?”
“We’re all going to die, sooner or later,” Abby said. “She’s already put it off awhile. But she hasn’t turned to dust yet, so I’m guessing she’s got some time before the reaper double-checks his list and comes knocking.”
“Soon you won’t be able to tell there’s anything strange about this place,” I said.
“Soon there won’t be a place here at all,” Abby replied. “The birds are gone. I could be wrong, but I don’t think they’re coming back. Which means no LARC.”
A thrill of panic went through me. Because I hadn’t really thought it through until just that moment—I would be leaving too.
I might have Sophia’s memories, but I had never left this place. Not once.
“You’ll be okay,” Abby said, catching my expression. “You survived in the echo world for fifteen years. You can survive civilization. And you won’t be on your own.”
“I already heard my mum on the phone making ‘arrangements,’” Liam added. “Having spent her fifteen minutes of allotted emotion, she’s in full problem-solving mode. Her way of making up for leaving you behind, I suppose.”
“She’s always been kind to me,” I told him. “She’s always taken care of me.”
He gave me an odd look. “I think you may have more of a relationship with my mother than I do,” he said. “I hadn’t really thought of that.”
“You should get to know her better,” I said. “I think that you’ll like each other once you do. I like both of you, after all.”
“And I dislike both of you,” Abby added with a grin to show she didn’t mean it. Oil and water, I thought, and it was Sophia’s thought, but it was also mine.
In the darkness, stars began to shine overhead. Too dim, and too far away—but no, that was the way they were supposed to look. I was too used to strange worlds and strange skies.
“Nighttime,” Liam said. “It’s been a while.”
I reached into my pocket. My fingers bumped against the slender wings of the wooden tern, and a memory and its reflection surfaced. Sophia, embracing me in the cave. Slipping the bird into my pocket.
“You should take this,” I said. I held the little bird out to Abby.
“It already led me here,” she said. “I don’t think I need it anymore. You can keep it, if you want.”
“It isn’t the one you had,” I told her. “This is Sophia’s bird. She still had yours with her when she . . . So I thought you should have it.”
Abby took it from me, her brow wrinkled in confusion. “I don’t understand.”
“What’s not to understand?” Liam asked.
“This is the same bird,” Abby said. “The wing’s broken, see? And there’s a stain on the side. Sophia’s wasn’t damaged.”
I reached into my pocket. My fingers bumped against something small and hard, and I pulled it out. It was the tip of the wing, broken off. “It must have happened while we were running,” I said.
“Then it is Sophia’s bird,” Abby replied. “But it’s exactly the same as the one my sister gave to Ashford. Which means . . . I have no idea what that means.” She snarled in frustration. “What were my father and my grandfather doing here? Why did Miranda send me—to help you? Or was there something else? I don’t understand. I thought I would understand.”
“Maybe that means you aren’t finished yet,” I told her. “Whatever brought you here, it isn’t done with you quite yet.”
She closed her hand around the bird. “It’s done for tonight,” she said. “Tonight, let’s just be done.”
“Well, we’ve already spent most of the night out here talking,” Liam said jokingly. “Want to stick around and watch the sun rise?”
“I’d like that,” she said. We sat on the steps, the three of us in a line.
Dawn was coming. We’d made it through the dark.