Marion grabbed the car keys from the wall hook and burst out of the house. She flew down the porch steps so fast she fell off the bottom one, skinning her knee on the pavement. She pushed herself up and ran for the hammock. Her tender feet were on fire.
“Mom! Get up!”
Her mother was looking around, dazed, her cheek pink from sleeping with it pressed against not-Marion’s shoulder. She squinted at Marion. “Marion? You nearly knocked me over.”
“Come on, get up.” Marion heaved her mother out of the hammock. “Faster, let’s go.”
“Marion!” Her mother pulled against Marion’s grip. “What’s wrong with you? Where are we going?”
“Mom, move your feet,” Marion cried. Limping, she pushed her mother down the hill toward the station wagon, and looked back over her shoulder toward the woods—just trees, no doppelgängers.
Mrs. Althouse let out a frightened sob. “You’re scaring me, sweetie, slow down!”
Marion opened the passenger-side door and shoved her mother toward it. “Please, get in. Close the door and lock it.”
Then Marion limped around to the driver’s side, looking up once more at the woods. A movement at the corner of her eye—the front doors of Kingshead opening, revealing a slim golden figure. Val? Or her mother?
Marion jumped into the car, turned the key in the ignition, floored the gas pedal.
“Marion?” Her mom was staring at her, clinging to the door as if prepared to jump out if necessary. “What’s going on? What did you see?”
Marion spoke into her phone—“Call Zoey”—and sped down the drive.
She watched the road ahead. She didn’t dare look into the trees on either side.
Twenty agonizing minutes later, after dropping off her mother at the police station—which crawled with both staff and volunteers—Marion reached the Harlows’ house.
“Zoey?” She jumped out of the car, limped toward the porch. She had called Zoey thirteen times during the drive, but Zoey had never picked up. Marion hadn’t been able to stop scratching her skin. Her forearms stung, branded from elbow to wrist with red nail marks.
The house’s front door flew open. Zoey marched down the steps to meet Marion in the driveway, and Marion laughed through her tears.
“Oh, thank God,” she breathed, reaching out for a hug.
Zoey shoved her away and held out her phone. “What the fuck is this, Marion?”
Marion stared at the screen: her own name, their text conversation. She read the three latest messages once, then twice, and took a step back from the phone as if it had struck her.
i chose Thora because she was fascinated with me
i craved her obsession
she tasted sublime
“I didn’t send those,” Marion said at once.
Zoey’s eyes were bright with tears. “This is sick. You’re sick. This isn’t funny.”
“I swear, I didn’t send them!” Marion pulled up their text chain on her own phone, ready to show Zoey that those messages were fake, that they’d been sent by someone else—but then Marion saw the letters staring back at her from her own screen, just as they’d looked on Zoey’s:
she tasted sublime
“Holy shit,” Marion whispered. She felt like she was teetering on the edge of a fatal drop. “They’re here. They’re in my phone.”
“Right,” said Zoey. “Because you sent them.”
“I didn’t! Please, I . . .” Marion scrolled uselessly through her phone, trying to find something, anything, to prove her innocence. “I didn’t send them. I didn’t. I don’t know who did, but it wasn’t me.” She shook her head, burst into breathless tears. “Zoey, please, I . . . I saw her. The not-Marion. She was with my mom. She saw me, and her eyes changed. They were white; they flashed. She ran into the woods, and I grabbed my mom and drove away, brought her to the police station.”
Marion tried to slip her phone back into her pocket, but her hands were shaking, so she could barely manage it. “I don’t know what’s happening. The horse. Last night, I . . . Jesus, Zoey, I don’t know what to do.”
Zoey watched her through narrowed eyes, then pulled up an image on her own phone and held it up.
“Did her eyes look like this?” she asked.
Marion squinted at the photo—a sketched little girl, hair in pigtails, eyes round and solid white.
A chill scraped across her arms. “Yes, like that, exactly! One moment her eyes were normal. They were mine. And then . . .” She gestured at the phone. “Where did you get that?”
Zoey hesitated.
“The secret room?” Marion reached for Zoey’s hands, but Zoey flinched, her expression closed. Marion backed off, her hands in the air. “Please, will you show it to me? If there’s something in there that helps explain any of this . . .” Yes. She was going to say it. She set her jaw, made herself look Zoey in the eye. “Zoey, I teleported last night.”
Zoey went very still. “You what? Wait, no, hold on.” She looked around the quiet neighborhood—freshly painted mailboxes and trimmed hedges, waterfront bungalows topped with lazy spinning weather vanes. “Let’s go inside.”
“Okay,” said Zoey, once they’d climbed down into the secret room. She sat at a desk, in front of a computer that was asking for a password, and stared Marion down. “Continue.”
Marion inhaled. The air was too close down here, too still and damp. “Remember, behind the police station, when you threw Val away from me like you were a superhero or something?”
“No, I’d forgotten all about that,” said Zoey blandly.
“The same thing happened to me last night,” Marion whispered. “I mean, not the exact same thing, but . . . I was walking around because I couldn’t sleep”—because after kissing Val, the world flipped on its axis, and how could I possibly sleep after that?—“and one of the Mortimer horses, he totally freaked out, busted out of his fence, went running.”
Marion told her the whole story—the horse jumping off the cliff, how she teleported to the snow-covered beach, seeing not-Marion in her mother’s arms.
When she finished, Zoey stared at her, expressionless.
Marion deflated. “You don’t believe any of this.”
“No, I do, actually, and . . .” Zoey’s eyes widened. “Wait. ‘There is such a thing as a tesseract.’”
“A what?”
“You tessered.” Zoey pounded her fist against the chair’s arm. “That’s what you’re describing. You tessered. That can’t be a coincidence. I wonder . . .”
She swiveled around in the chair, typed carefully into the password box. With a soft chime, the desktop appeared, tiled with neat rows of folders.
Zoey let out a shaky laugh. “Tesseract. He left the clue for me.”
She opened a file labeled with that day’s date. A video appeared—a frozen image of Chief Harlow, sitting where Zoey was sitting now.
“Those are the clothes he was wearing this morning,” Zoey said quietly. “He recorded this right after I ran away from him.”
Marion wanted to ask what had happened, why Zoey had run, but then the recorded Chief Harlow began to speak: “Zoey, record this video on your phone, and then delete the file from my computer.”
He paused, waiting. Zoey pointed her phone’s camera at the screen and started recording.
“This message, first and foremost, is an apology,” the recorded Chief Harlow began. “I didn’t mean to scare you this morning, Zo. I know I did, and that’s unforgivable.”
Marion glanced at Zoey. She had pressed her lips together in a tight hard line, her eyes bright and unblinking.
“Second,” the recording continued, “I must apologize for this: I’ve been lying to you for a long time, and it’s time to come clean. I hope you can understand why I kept this from you, even if you can’t forgive me for it. I’ve screwed up a lot, sweetie, even as recently as just ten minutes ago. I could’ve handled so many things so much better. And I should have.”
He paused and looked away from the camera, his jaw clenching. “I work for an ancient organization called the Hand of Light, along with thousands of other men around the globe. Some of them will arrive on Sawkill shortly. Some are already here.”
“Briggs?” Zoey whispered.
“Our mission,” Chief Harlow went on, “is to hunt down the creatures that have invaded our world. The world is bigger and older than you think, Zoey. There are many pockets of it, inaccessible to most humans, full of beings both remarkable and terrifying.”
Chief Harlow drew in a deep breath. “One of these monsters lives here, on Sawkill. It has been hunting girls for decades. I believe it killed Thora. And Charlotte. And Jane.”
Marion felt like she had been punched. She gripped the edge of the desk, leaned heavily against it.
Charlotte.
“The creatures can’t be killed by any conventional means,” Chief Harlow went on. “We—the Hand of Light—have tried for centuries. Even modern weapons barely slow it down. We have devised a particular method of extermination that has a high rate of success, but not without great cost. Zoey . . .”
Chief Harlow leaned a bit closer. “I let you move to Sawkill because I thought you would be safest near me. Given my knowledge of the monsters, and my connections with fellow soldiers like me who live all around the world, I thought having you here, potentially dangerous as it was, would be better than not knowing where you are, wondering every morning if—somewhere, in some town—you’d been taken by one of them. I was wrong. This is all happening more quickly than I’ve ever seen it. I think that the rate at which these girls have been disappearing means we’re all in immediate danger.”
His voice broke. He looked down at his phone, wiped his face. “Zo, why aren’t you answering your phone, sweetie? I’m gonna come find you. If you see this message before I find you, then you’ve got to leave. You need to get off this island. Take our boat, get to shore. I’ve bought you a ticket from Boston to San Francisco for tomorrow morning. Go stay with your mother, and don’t ever come back here. Don’t worry about Grayson, or Marion, or anyone. Get as far away from Sawkill as you can. Stay indoors. Don’t go out at night. Don’t talk to strangers. Run, Zoey.”
Marion, rigid, stared at the screen. The world had shrunk to the sounds of Chief Harlow’s voice and the ragged push and pull of her own breathing.
Then, from upstairs, came the sound of the front door slamming shut, and a man calling out, “Zoey?”
“Oh my God.” Zoey leaped up from the desk. “My dad’s home. Shit. Shit.”
“Wait!” Marion grabbed her arm. “He left this video for you. He obviously wanted you to find it. Why would he be upset that we’re down here?”
The sound of a man’s voice drifted down through the ceiling—a voice Marion didn’t recognize.
Zoey froze, listening.
“Who is that?” Marion whispered.
“No clue.”
The sound of brisk footsteps tapped a countdown across the ceiling.
“I’ll go stall them.” Zoey ran for the exit. “Delete the file, turn off the computer, then hurry upstairs and move the dresser back.”
Marion nodded, deleted the file, emptied the trash, then switched off the computer and turned—
And stopped.
Zoey was standing by the bottom step, gazing up at the secret door with a carefully closed-off expression.
A pair of boots walked down the stairs. They became a pair of legs in blue jeans, then a torso with a holstered pistol at the belt, then a white man with a shaved head and piercing blue eyes. He smiled first at Zoey, then at Marion.
“Excellent,” he said. “I was getting tired of your father stalling, Zoey. Come into the kitchen, both of you. I’ll make tea. We have much to discuss.”
The sight of Zoey speechless lit a fire in Marion’s belly. She stepped forward, fists clenched. “Where’s Chief Harlow?”
“Right here, Marion,” came the voice of Chief Harlow, upstairs in his bedroom. “It’s all right. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
Nothing to be afraid of. It was almost enough to make Marion laugh. Instead, she clasped Zoey’s hand and led the way upstairs.