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I throw the book as far as I can into the field. It lands somewhere in the grass, far out of reach, and the whispers fade reluctantly. I shiver and turn away.
“Let’s go,” I say.
“Wait,” Anthony says. “We can’t just leave Jeremy. What if he—what if he ends up like Zoe?”
“We’ll take him through the gate,” I say. “That’s what ended things for Zoe. We’ll bring him through the next gate, and then we’ll keep moving. Make it matter.”
Becca stands. She brushes her hands off on her jeans and walks to me. Nods once. There could be a hundred layers of meaning in that nod, but I’m too tired to catch a single one of them.
I help wrap Jeremy’s bloodied body in Anthony’s coat, and between us and Mel, we carry him, slowly, toward the shore, leaving Trina—the memory of her—behind. There is nothing we can say to make what happened okay. There is nothing we can say to make it hurt less. We can only watch Jeremy’s body turn to smoke and ash as we approach the next gate, and add their names to the litany of the dead.
—
I open the gate this time. I wait to see if there is any strange sensation as I push the key into the lock. Some tingle the others missed or didn’t mention. But there is only the scrape of the key in the lock and faint resistance as it turns—and then, softly, a whisper, hardly more than a breath against my ear.Find her.I shiver.
Beyond the gate, the road turns to gravel, and then melds seamlessly with the rock and then sand of the shore. The whole beach is the road, I realize, and it curves like a hand clutching the water. The sea smells of salt and fish-rot. Ropy kelp clumps here and there at the edge of the water, shoved a few inches farther, then dragged back by the breaking of the swells. White specks and lines interrupt the gray sand: the skeletons of birds, delicatewings outstretched, ribs crushed down against the gray. Hundreds of them, as far as I can see in either direction, until the beach curls out of view behind black, toothy rocks.
A short walk to the left, a spit of land protrudes into the sea. The waves crash to either side of it, sending plumes of spray that meet over the highest point. If the tide rose, it might swallow the land and leave the nub at the end with its pale, narrow lighthouse an island—but I am not certain there is a tide here. There is no moon to replace the fading sun. We get our flashlights out again, though there’s still enough light to navigate by. None of us want to be caught unawares by the dark.
“The lighthouse?” I ask. “Or—do we go down the beach?” I look to Becca. She bites her lip.
“I think the lighthouse,” she says. She wrings her hands rhythmically, her gaze darting down and to the side. She’s nervous with so many people around—even just the four of us. She’s been alone so long. “The lighthouse. Yes. We should—we should go to the lighthouse.”
We make our way single file down the spit of land. Salt-spray batters us and the delicate bones of birds crunch beneath our feet. With the sun down, it’s getting cold. We might not need to sleep or eat, but the cold still bites its way in.
The door is painted red, or was—faded now to dull wood and a few scraps of paint.
I push it open. The whole structure gives a hollow groan. A desolate, empty sound. The room is round and largely featureless. A staircase winds up—narrow, no handrails, tightening with the shape of the tower until it reaches a hatch in the ceiling.
I am overcome suddenly with weariness. I shrug off my bag and set it inside the door. The others follow suit. Kyle sits with his back to the wall, and Mel walks to the stairs for a more comfortable perch.
“Look at that,” Becca says. She points above the door. I twist to see. Carved in the rock are two words:Final Refuge.
“Does that mean we’re safe here?” Mel asks. I laugh, louder than I mean to. She cracks a crooked smile. “Dumb question.”
“Safer, maybe,” I say. “I’m going to go check out the top.”
“I’ll go with you,” Mel says immediately. I hesitate. I don’t want to be alone with Mel, really. I don’t have room right now to deal with what I feel when I’m around her. To grapple with what I want and can’t have—Mel isn’t interested in me, and even if she was, just thinking about it makes me feel selfish and shallow with so much horror around us.
“Okay,” I force myself to say, and head for the stairs. Mel’s footsteps echo behind me.
The trapdoor is heavy, but I manage to shoulder it open without Mel’s assistance—which is good, since by the time we reach the top, the staircase is barely wide enough for one person, much less two. We clamber up through the hatch and into a round room with a single narrow window. A wooden ceiling stands above us, along with another trapdoor, this one accessible with a ladder.
The only furniture is a cot, a little table with an oil lamp resting on it, and a bookshelf. The books are swollen and discolored, their titles illegible.
“Did someone live here?” Mel wonders.
“Maybe. Or maybe it’s just a prop. Like the houses around themansion,” I say. I crouch by the bookshelf and pull down a book. The text inside is readable on some of the pages—if I could read French. The illustrations need no translation, though. A young girl dangles a noose from one hand. A man’s face is drawn in intricate detail, his eyes covered in clusters of fat, fleshy moths. A precise drawing, like a scientific illustration, depicts another man, this one composed of branches and thorns, with vines growing out from his shoulders like twisted wings.
“So,” Mel says. Too casually. “Anthony and Becca.”
I turn the pages, past a drawing of a snake twining through flowers. “Yeah,” I say. “What about them?”
“Did you know?” she asks.
“That they’re...” I wave my hand. They never really did define what they were. They just wanted each other. But he didn’t believe her about the dreams, about Lucy. Just like me. And so she found someone who did. “I knew. I wasn’t supposed to, but I did.” She was my sister. He was my best friend. I spent too much time around them not to put it together—the secretive texts, the whispered conversations cut off when I entered the room, the way they took such precise care to never stand too close together.
Plus, I was always a nosy little sister. I snooped.
