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And then came a croaking cry, and the sky filled with black wings, so vast for a moment I thought the dark would swallow me, thought the Six-Wing had come—but no.
Moriarty.
The raven’s talons raked the back of Hardcastle’s head and he yelled in pain. Blood and black ichor splattered around us.
Dr. Kapoor had put Moriarty back in his cage before we left. Mrs. Popova could have let him out, maybe. But I didn’t think she would. Which meant—which meant maybe Dr. Kapoor had. Whichmeantthat she was alive, that she had escaped.
I kicked out. It broke Hardcastle’s grip, and I scrambled to my feet. He lurched toward me, but the raven was there, clamoring around him. I grabbed a rock from the ground—bigger than two fists, one edge sharp. I held it in both hands, above my head, and swung it hard against the side of his skull.
It crunched—not like bone but like a branch giving under your foot. He dropped. I didn’t stop to see if he would get up again. I ran.
I knew what was coming, the transition from church to cavern, the straight beams of wood turning to rough stone. Still I stumbled. My palms slapped against the ground. I heaved back up andkept running down the twisting path. Past knobby columns of stone, through the hollow, liquid sounds that plopped and pinged around me. The path twisted and looped, its shape more serpentine than I remembered.
And then it stopped. My breath was loud. The air was cool and damp. The path bottomed out into the wide chamber, with its weeping congregants, the pale children flitting between them. The shard—the heart of the echo—hung suspended above the black pool, dripping the blood of that other world. And before it was Sophie, blank-eyed, a wide bowl balanced on her palms—and with her was the Six-Wing.
33
I FROZE, BUTthe Six-Wing didn’t react to my presence. Its wings bent forward, encircling Sophie. Through the gaps, I watched its long arm extend, its fingers brush against her shoulder. It sang, the words not from any language I’d ever heard—and yet I almost understood them.
Sophie lifted the bowl to her lips and drank, and acidic cold trickled down my throat. With each swallow, I understood more of the song, and things beyond the song. This is how it would reclaim us. Change our hearts so that we obeyed only its whims. And then we would sing for it in turn, and wrench open the gate that bound the Eidolon.
Sophie drank, and I crept forward, my fear dissolving into peace. The black liquid slid down Sophie’s throat. I passed between soldiers and sailors and men and women. I took my place across from Sophie, the Six-Wing between us. A child appeared, agirl no more than seven or eight, and she placed a shallow bowl in my hands, filled to the brim with black liquid. I smiled and lifted it to my lips.
The Six-Wing turned to watch.
Suddenly the Six-Wing wasn’t the matte black of empty shadow—I could see it. See it truly. Its face was blurred, indistinct. Its eyes—the pupil and iris shivered, splitting in two, merging again. And that was what was wrong with its face, too, shuttling rapidly from one to another.
It had my mother’s face. She surfaced from the shadows, submerged, then broke the surface again—and I heard her in the song, too. The Six-Wing sang of the shard and the broken world and the gate.
My mother—my mother’s echo—sang of me, and of Sophie. She sang of the black, of sinking into it, of pulling it inside of her and being pulled inside of it. It had tried to unmake her, but her daughters needed her, and she would not let go. If Sophie and I were special, it was because we were Joy Novak’s daughter. She was different. Her echo was different too. The Six-Wing had created Joy’s echo, but it could not control her. Instead, she had sunk into the black pool, the stuff from which all the echoes were born, the stuff from which the Six-Wing’s echo had arisen. Andshehad taken control.
Not completely. But enough. Enough to let Dr. Kapoor and Dr. Hardcastle escape. Enough to corrupt the new echoes into unstable, mad things, obviously inhuman and barely functional.
Enough to save me.
With every beat of those great wings, with every word of thesong, she became lessher, moreit, but somehow, somehow, she had remained.
The Six-Wing reached for me. No,shereached for me, my mother’s echo.
Our hands met and I saw, Irememberedas she poured the memory into me through the song.
She cannot persist against the fury of the Six-Wing, but she must. She must stay herself, she must remember, because her daughters are running and they will not live if she fails. She holds and she holds and she holds andgo, she whispers,go. They reach the shore—go—they reach the boat.
And William has the gun. William has the gun and she almost lets it loose, this monster, this winged beast, this servant of a broken prince, because if she lets him loose, together they can tear William apart. But there will be no end to the blood, then, and so she watches as Joy whispers her love to one of their daughters and she hates this woman, this flesh-and-bone version of herself—she hates her for choosing one, until she sees what Joy means to do.
What Joy does: she stays. She stays, because both these children are their daughters and Joy and her echo are both their mothers, and of course she stays, and they will protect her, this child of theirs who must remain.
But the echo of Joy Novak watches the ship on the water. She watches them reach the very edge of this false world, and she opens for them a way out. And then, with all her effort trained on that gap, that tear for them to escape through, she can only watch, helpless, as William throws her daughter from the boat.
She is rage and she is fear, and she is the Six-Wing, and there isso little room left to be Joy. And yet she holds, because she cannot keep the way out open and still strike at him.
She holds, because if she does not, he dies and so does her daughter.
She lets the boat slip away, slip through the mist. And she plunges beneath the waves, into the deep water where her daughter sinks, eyes open, lungs empty, on the edge of the breath that will end her. She holds. She lifts the girl up. She kisses her lips to fill her lungs with breath.
She pulls her from the water, but it is not enough, because the ocean is cold and hungry and the shore is so far away. And so she gathers her will and makes it a solid thing—her arms encircle her daughter and turn to wood, her words whisper their way into a wind to coax the sea into carrying her. She uses all of the Six-Wing’s power, all of its control over this place to craft a ship out of nothing.
The Six-Wing screams, for it wants the child. It needs the child.
