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ABBY: This is no time for poetry, Harry Potter.
LIAM: Harry Potter? Is that seriously the only British thing you can think of?
ABBY: Fish and chips. Bangers and mash.
SOPHIA: Can you two stop bickering for one minute?
ABBY: I don’t know what to do.
Something clatters and bangs against the walls up above. Sophie looks up.
SOPHIE: You go. I stay. I can make it let you go for a little while. Long enough.
SOPHIA: Wait a minute. You aren’t giving yourself to that thing!
LIAM: Guys?
SOPHIE: It won’t hurt me. Not yet.
LIAM: Guys!
They whip around. Their flashlights converge on the landing above. It should bathe the whole landing in light, but the figure there defies illumination. Its edges are like ink dropped into water, dissolving without ever losing its substance. Its body is human in outline, but it is like an absence in the world. Its wings are half-folded, all six of them, made of the same black void as the rest of the being. The image stutters, flickering back and forth like a digital glitch. Not quite there, not quite here.
Sophie steps toward it.
SOPHIA: Sophie, no—
She snatches for Sophie’s hand, but Sophie steps smoothly outof reach, walking calmly up the steps toward the creature. She stretches out her hands, murmuring something the microphone doesn’t quite catch. The creature retreats a step, the movement uncertain.
SOPHIE: It’s all right. It’s what must happen.
She looks over her shoulder. There is fear in her eyes, but determination too.
SOPHIE: Go. Find Mother. I’ll be ready.
The creature of shadow and void spreads its wings, and leaps upon her. Sophie screams, her calm torn away, but before Sophia or anyone else can move to help her, they are gone—the Six-Wing, the echo-girl, even the mold that covered the walls moments ago.
All that remains is the distant sound of wings.
31
I SHUT MYeyes, not to block out the image of what had just happened, but to focus. There—Sophie was there. The sense of her. Thesensationsof her, her heartbeat quick, mouth sour with adrenaline. Alive, and not in pain, and not afraid—or notonlyafraid, a storm of other feelings clashing within her, too chaotic to tease apart or interpret.
It’s okay, she’d told that thing, like she wascomfortingit. What did that mean?
Meanwhile, the stones were screaming.
It was a tortured sound, more tearing than grinding, and we clapped our hands over our ears as it went on and on and on. The walls buckled. The stairs collapsed into each other like a twisting kaleidoscope, and then everything snapped into brutal focus. The Six-Wing’s hold relinquished, the stairs led down, as they should, to a concrete floor, to a steel door.
Abby lurched down the last few steps and to the concrete floor. Her knees buckled. She caught herself in a crouch, and Liam rushed to help her back to her feet. Her skin was the same gray as the walls around us, her lips pale and cracked.
Alive, I told myself, looking upward into the dark.Alive. Stay that way, I willed my echo.
“I’m good,” Abby said, pulling free of Liam’s support. She wavered, but stayed upright, and held up a warning hand when he started to reach out to her again. Oil and water still.
I set my hand against the steel door handle. Something soft and wet gave beneath my fingers, but I suppressed my shudder and shoved the door open, revealing the round room.The memory room, I’d called it when Lily asked me what lay beyond, and now I understood why. They were her memories, of course. Sophie’s. Even her handprints, here and there, growing from the soft, pudgy hand of a toddler to the long, slender fingers of the gaunt girl I knew.
God, what had her life been? Wandering through this tortured world? Had she seen glimpses of my life in her dreams, the way I’d seen hers? No one aged here, but she did, tugged along in the river of time by my passage through it.
