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“Who?” I ask.
“Lucy,” she says, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “She called us here, to save her. She’s trapped. Can’t you hear her?”
I stare at her. Lick my lips, the answer inexplicably impossible to get out. “No,” I say at last. “I don’t hear her.”
I cannot tell if I am lying.
—
Becca tells me we have to keep moving. She leads me through halls, through rooms, somehow seeming to keep track of the endless turns. It’s all the road, she assures me, every plank in this house. There’s no danger of wandering off.
I tell her everything that’s happened so far. The darkness and the town, Vanessa and Trina.
“Echoes,” she tells me. “When they replace you, they’re called echoes. Zach found this book by someone who said he’d been on the road. He talked about them. It helped, the book. Told us what to expect. But the monsters aren’t the only thing you have to be afraid of here.”
“What happened to you?” I ask.
She gives me a hollow look. “I try not to think about it much,” she says. “I’d been having these dreams. Dreams about the road. About Lucy Gallows. About the beast. They were just nightmares, but Zach went looking online. He helped me put it all together. He’s the one that found out about Ys.”
“Ys?” I echo, pinging against a scrap of memory. The words in the town.
“It’s a city. Or was. It’s where the road goes—used to go. It was destroyed a long time ago by a woman named Dahut. She was a princess, or something. There was a gate in the city that held back the sea, and she left it open, to let her lover sneak in to see her. But she forgot to close it, and the tide came in and drowned the whole city. That’s the story, anyway. And it’s all that death that made the road. If you can get all the way to Ys, you can escape it. But most people get trapped. Lucy did. She’s been stuck onthe road for all these years, but she’s found a way to—she sort of whispers. Only to certain people. Sensitive people. And I guess I’m one of them.”
Every so often she stops, listening. Sometimes she pulls us in a new direction, but I can never hear what she does.
“I’ve got your notebook,” I say after a while of silence, because I need to hear her speak again. “It’s hard to understand, but it helped us, too.”
“My notebook?” she says, face screwing up in confusion. “What notebook?”
“I—this one,” I say, unzipping my bag. I pull out the journal and she snatches it from me, paging through. Something like fear sketches across her face.
“How did you get this?” she demands.
“What do you mean?” I ask. “It was in your room. Under your bed.”
“No,” she says. “I brought it with me. I had it here. I lost it—I don’t know. A long time ago now. But here in the house. Most of those notes I took on the road.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” I say. Anything can happen on the road. But back home? There’s a threshold between this world and the one we came from, and the inexplicable isn’t supposed to cross it. Until this moment, the road has felt contained. A separate world that couldn’t encroach on ours; we could only enter the road’s world. This is different.
“Something wants us here,” she whispers. Her fingertips spider up my arm, her eyes fixed on my shoulder, on nothing at all. “Something brings us. The road. Or something on it.” Herfingertips pause, set sharp against the hollow of my collarbone. She’s trembling. And then she buries her face against my shoulder, burrowing in. Not crying. Pressing herself against me, as if ravenous for any kind of touch, any contact. It lasts a furious moment, and then she’s dragging me down the hall again. Around one more corner, and—
“Becca.”
She stops. Turns back to me, eyes shining. “Let’s go,” she says.
The hall beyond is dark. Clotted and thick with darkness, impenetrable.
“We can’t leave,” I say.
“We can’t stay. I can’t keep you alive in here,” she says.
“The others—”
“They’ll find their way out,” she says. “Or they won’t. But we can’t stay.”
“Becca,” I say gently, but her eyes are feverish.
“Everything here rots,” she whispers. “Turns to ruin. Turns to hate. I don’t remember half the time why I’m bothering to stay alive. We can’t stay. We can’t.”
