Our Last Echoes

by Kate Alice Marshall

  “I have to get it back,” she said.

  “You’ll die.”

  She gave me a vicious, wild look. She wasn’t afraid of death. More than that. She thought she’d earned it.

  “She’ll be lost,” I told her, desperate.

  “Who?” she demanded.

  “The girl in your bones,” I told her. “It will drink her down.”

  “What girl?” She shook her head in confusion.

  “She’s shining in you,” I said. “She never let you go.”

  “My sister. Miranda,” she whispered. The kind of love that shone like that, you wouldn’t mistake. She ran with me, over the gray rock to the white, and I led her along the foot-wide track that hugged the bluff.

  “These rocks,” she said. “They’re—salt? Why? Is it some kind of—” She stopped as I turned to look at her. “There isn’t a reason, is there?”

  “There is,” I said. “But I don’t know . . .” I waved my hands. I didn’t know how to tell her that the angel feared the touch of salt, and feared this place, and so this place was salt. That the angel feared this place because it was salt. That both of these things were true, because cause and effect were the snake devouring its own tail, the bird laying the egg from which it hatched.

  The birds flocked here because the angel feared it. The angel feared it because the birds flocked here. The thing and its reflection. Who could say which was which?

  The screeching came again. Closer now, but we were almost safe. “Here,” I said, and I stepped into the cliff face, into the crack where white against white concealed a passage just wide enough for a single slender figure. The girl had more trouble with it, scraping her back and her hips as she negotiated her passage. But then she was through.

  My home: a cave, carved from the salt with rocks and broken shells and fingernails, a centimeter scratched out at a time over the years. We stood in the first chamber, littered with the detritus of my wounded life. A broken chair brought over from the LARC. The wooden birds Uncle Misha gave me every winter. Bits and pieces I’d stolen from other people, other lives.

  I’d never shown it to anyone before. I looked at her expectantly. The light from the passage was enough for me to see her wobbly smile.

  “It’s . . . nice,” she said.

  Outside, the angel screeched again. This time it was not the warning sound, but the red sound, the rage sound. The girl flinched.

  “Safe,” I told her. I took her hands and walked her to the chair, sat her down in it. “Safe.”

  “What is this place?” she asked.

  “Home,” I said. “It doesn’t come here.”

  “You brought her.” The voice was dry and rasping. The girl’s eyes widened. “I want to see her.” The girl stood, looking toward the back. Toward the second room, toward the shadows from which the voice came.

  “It’s all right,” I told her.

  “Come closer.”

  The girl swallowed and walked toward the voice. I remained, sitting on the salt of the floor, biting my thumb hard enough to hurt. The girl crept closer and closer to the dark. She cast one last look over her shoulder at me, and then vanished within the second chamber, out of the reach of the light. I wrapped my arms around my knees.

  I did not go into the dark anymore. My fingertips were still scarred from the effort of clawing out the salt of the walls, digging a space where the light would never touch.

  It was impossible to say how long the girl was back there. This was not a place where time found purchase. But when she emerged, she looked pale, and she wetted her lips several times before she spoke.

  “She told me what’s happening. That this world is going to spread. That that thing—the Six-Wing?—is going to use you and Sophia to do it. And every person in the world will suffer.”

  “Not just people,” I said. I trailed my fingers along the salt, sending loose grains skittering. The words were in my chest, a recitation, mimicry giving me more eloquence than I possessed. “Magpies hold funerals for their dead. An albatross flies ten thousand lonely miles and never forgets its mate. We are not the only ones that would be mourned.”

  I wished the words were mine. I wished I had words to put to all the thoughts that flew in a great murmuration through me, but I had trouble holding on to spoken things. I had only pieces of them, the trailing edge of echoes.

  “She told me what I have to do,” the girl said. “And she said that you have to bring Sophia here, and then we can try. I can go with you. Help you.”

  I shook my head. “You stay. Safe.”

  “You won’t be.”

  “Stay with her,” I insisted. “It’s not good alone.”

  She looked back over her shoulder. Bit her lip. “I’ll stay,” she promised me. “Until you get back, I’ll stay.”

  I padded away, the salt scraping at the soles of my feet. She didn’t follow as I slipped back out into the sunlight.

  Two terns had fallen through the echoes to this one, and they glided lazily out over the water. That meant the mist was rising, in the other world, the barriers grown thin. It was time to go.

  29

  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.�
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  “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.

  PART FIVE

  ALL WHICH IT INHERIT, SHALL DISSOLVE

  VIDEO EVIDENCE

  Recorded by Sophia Novak

  JUNE 30, 2018, 9:16 PM

  The island is calm. Almost inert. A gentle breeze stirs the air, and a few birds tilt in gentle crescents above the island, but otherwise there is only the scrape of the skiff against the rocks to break the stillness. But it is the kind of stillness that promises a storm. Sophia, holding the phone that is recording the video, steps out onto the shore. Liam hops out after her.

  LIAM: What are you doing?

  SOPHIA: Abby would want us to record this. She’s putting herself in danger for us. It seems like the least we can do in return.

  LIAM: Plus, if we don’t make it out . . .

  SOPHIA: Yeah.

  SOPHIE: It knows we’re coming.

  The girl, fey and wild, her callused feet bare and dirty, looks off toward the peak of the headland.

  SOPHIE: It will come for us.

  KAPOOR: Then we’d better hurry.

  She unlocks a long storage chest at the back of the boat and extracts a pair of shotguns, along with a box of ammunition.

  KAPOOR: Right. Any of you know how to use these?

  SOPHIA: No?

  KAPOOR: Well, all right, then. More for me.

  She slings one strap over her shoulder and carries the other shotgun in the crook of her arm.

  LIAM: You have shotguns?

  KAPOOR: This island is overrun with monsters. Of course I have shotguns. There’s a gun in almost every room of the LARC, if you know where to look. I have a goddamn machete under my bed. I have been coming to this island for fifteen years and I do not fuck around. Now. Where are we going?

  Sophie points up the hill.

  KAPOOR: Bunker, then. Good. I’ll lead the way.

  She sets off at a march, and the others fall in behind. The climb up the flank of the headland is uneventful, and though Sophia diligently keeps the camera focused on the processio
n, there is nothing out of place until they have nearly reached the bunker.

  LIAM: What was that? Did you hear it? I think it was a voice.

  SOPHIA: The mist is coming.

  KAPOOR: Are you sure?

  SOPHIA: The air shimmers before it comes.

  KAPOOR: I don’t see any shimmering.

  LIAM: She’s right. Look.

  He points. Mist creeps from behind the hill, rolling southward.

  KAPOOR: Let’s get moving!

  They sprint for the bunker. Shadows dart and dash in the mist as it races toward them. They reach the door. Liam gets hold of the handle, hauls.

  LIAM: It’s welded shut again. How is that possible? We came through it—

  SOPHIA: You were already in an echo when you went through. Just a very faint one. We need to cross over before we can get in. Here.

  She hands Liam the phone and turns to Sophie. The girls take each other’s hands.

  KAPOOR: Whatever you’re going to do, do it quickly.

  The mist rolls over them. Within it, a dozen voices whisper eagerly, and footsteps draw close.

  30

  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?”