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THE SIX-WING SCREAMEDand staggered. Joy’s echo was gone from it now—there was only the one face, its features crude as if chiseled out of gray-black stone.
Abby and Liam were shouting nearby. They’d made it past, but they couldn’t help me now—I knew what I had to do. I’d heard it in the song. And I had to do it alone.
I dodged past the Six-Wing and grabbed Sophie. I jerked her arm, sending the bowl of black sludge clattering to the ground. “Sophie!” I yelled. She blinked. I wrapped my arms around her once, fiercely. And, almost without thinking, I slid our mother’s wooden tern into her pocket. The talisman that had reunited us. “Get out of here alive,” I told her.
I didn’t have time to stop and see if she understood. Abby and Liam were coming. They’d help. They’d protect her. I had to go. I listened to the music in my bones, and I let it fall intoperfect synchrony with the song of the echoes. Jagged lines of light striped the air, and the world heaved around me. The Six-Wing reached for me, but it was too slow. I was already gone.
The world vanished, and a different one formed around me in its place. The cave was gone. Instead, I stood on a field of stone, flat and seamless, stretching in all directions. It was night, as far as I could tell, but there were so many stars I could still see clearly. The stars seemed too low, too bright. Too watchful. In the distance a storm churned, lashing itself with lightning, but here it was quiet. The world of echoes had pretended at our world, but this was an entirely alien place. I had slipped through the bars of the gate, I realized—into the realm where the Eidolon, the Seraph, was trapped.
I knew where I was headed. The shadow against the stars.
It was a massive structure, like a castle. Like a cathedral. I scaled the steps. They rang under me like crystal. Deep gouges in them resolved into words when I peered closer, carved in a language I didn’t understand.
The massive stone doors, thirty feet high at least, were shut, but when I pressed my palm to one it swung inward just enough to step through.
Inside, the light of the stars was replaced by the light of blue-petaled flowers, growing from vines on all the walls, on the pillars that supported the cavernous roof. They lit the broken mosaic scattered over the floor: a pattern that made my head ache when I tried to look at it, shapes snarling and twisting and writhing.
The throne sat at the back of the room, on a dais with seven steps. On the throne sat a man, his skin gray, his six great wings white. A metal loop pierced each wing-joint, and a chaotic massof cord and chain held the wings out, posed, as the man slumped inert in his seat.
This was it. This was the monster that had made the Six-Wing in his image. The Seraph.
I walked up the steps, my heart hammering. I could still feel Sophie, but for once, I didn’t push my fear away. She was still in danger. I had to hold on to all the fear I could bear, in case she couldn’t.
I reached the top of the stairs. The Seraph was breathing, but barely, his breath so slow and shallow it hardly stirred his chest. Dust had settled on his shoulders and his arms, even his eyelids.
I lifted a trembling hand. My fingers brushed a gray cheek.
His eyes flew open. His lips parted, and they worked as if to shape a word, but all that came out was a rasp like sandpaper.
He drew in a wheezing breath and spoke again. This time I could almost make out the words. I leaned close.
“We will return.” He looked upward. The ceiling above was covered with a mural. Seven thrones, and seven indistinct figures on them, blazing with light. Tiny, humanoid shapes cowered in poses of fear and worship at their feet. “We will return,” he said again. “And you will worship us.”
“Not today,” I told him, my voice thick with everything I had cast away from myself for so many years. The love I had been denied and the love I had denied myself, because to feel that love would be to feel the grief of losing it. But there was no grief now. Everything that I’d lost I had found again, and so much more beside. William Hardcastle couldn’t take a thing from me, and neither could this monster.
I had never felt so fierce a rush of feeling. Sophie had seenAbby’s sister haunting her, shining from within her, and I understood that now. Because they were in me—my mother and her echo, and Sophie, and Abby, and Liam, and even Dr. Kapoor and Mrs. Popova and Mikhail and Lily and Kenny—the living and the dead, those I’d known since my first breath and those I’d only just met. I had frightened away so many people, I’d stopped trying, and I’d made myself hollow. Only now did I see the foolishness of it.
I was wild with love, drunk on it. It roared through me, and I didn’t need to push away fear, because I was so much stronger than it was now. So muchmore.
The man on the throne swiped at me, grasping with fingers that had too many joints. I danced back to the edge of the dais with a feral laugh. He hit the end of the chain that bound his wrist and halted, chains clanking, muscles straining. Then he slumped against the chair.
He wasn’t the only monster. This wasn’t the only dying world trying to claw its way back to life. Abby’s work proved that much. But someone had done this to him, long ago. Someone had known what he was, and how to stop him. We could learn again. We could stop whatever was coming—and whatever was already in our world, hiding in the crevasses and shadows. We were so much stronger than they thought we were.
I wished Abby could see this place. She would understand what it meant so much better than I could. But she wouldn’t see it, and I couldn’t tell her.
I shut my eyes. I felt the thread, the hum, that connected me to Sophie. Felther. She was alive. That would have to be enough.But maybe...Sophie, I thought, and reached for her.
Sophia.I felt her hand close around mine. We were running for the water together, and it didn’t matter which of us was real, which of us the echo. We were on the island, surviving by hiding and fleeing and finding scraps of comfort, moments of affection. We were far from the sea, alone in every crowd, adrift without past or future. She wasn’t Sophie and I wasn’t Sophia—we simply wereus.
Memory ebbed and flowed between us, the border eroding, our selves spilling into each other at the edge. The barrier between us was a fragile thing.
I shattered it. I let myself pour into her—my memory, for her to guard. My words, because she’d need them. My love, because she’d need that too, she’d need that most of all, and however much spilled into her, there was more, as endless as the rushing sea.
I let all of myself flood into her. Except one thing. I kept my courage. She had her own, and I needed mine still, because I had heard the song and there was only one way to end this.
“You are no one,” the creature on his throne said.
I held my courage tight. “That’s all right,” I told him.
