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A woman in a crown stands before a pattern of waves and towers, a flooded city.
A trio of people, two women and a man, stand facing away, flanked by pine trees.
Thorny vines sprout from the shoulders of a featureless man, twining in all directions.
A white-haired woman’s hands rest on the shoulders of two young women. One girl’s ribs and sternum seem to shine through her skin. A goblet of red liquid hovers above them.
And at the very center, so large it dwarfs all the other figures, is a creature painted in pure matte black—not just a silhouette, but a void. Like an angel, with six wings spread from its shoulders. Its only features are its eyes—an emptywhite. Whatever black substance has been used to paint the thing is still wet, dripping with fat, oily drops that vanish into smoke, or rather steam, before they strike the ground.
BAKER: Where are we?
NOVAK: Better question: How do we get out?
11
“THE GIRL INthe boat,” Liam repeated.
“You’re saying it wrong,” I told him with a faltering smile. He let out a breath and sat against the bank of drawers behind him. My smile faded. I wrapped my arms around my middle as I spoke. “My mother was here in 2003. She worked with your mom and Dr. Hardcastle. She was one of the people that supposedly died in the storm.”
“And you think that whatever happened to her was, what, supernatural?” Liam asked.
“Yes.”
He scrubbed his hand over his mouth, then crossed his arms. Uncrossed them. “All right.”
“‘All right?’” I repeated. “What does that mean?”
“It means I follow you so far,” he said. “Sophia, I watched you walk into the water. And then you were right behind me, safeand dry. I saw what happened to you on Belaya Skala yesterday. Either I’m going mad, or something unnatural is happening. I mildly prefer the version of the world where I have a moderate mood disorder and there are monsters to the one where I’m hallucinating. Besides.” He shrugged. “I trust you.”
“Wait,” Abby said. “What was that about Sophia walking into the water?”
I bit my lip. “The night you came,” I said. “There was a girl in the mist. I didn’t see her face, but Liam did. She looked like me.”Like my reflection, I thought, thinking of the tangled hair and weary eyes that stared back at me so often.
“Echoes,” Abby said thoughtfully.
“Say that again?” Liam replied.
Abby opened her messenger bag and pulled out a thick three-ring binder. She set it on the chest of drawers beside her and flipped it open, paging through. “Echoes are what we call doppelgangers—doubles. They can look just like a person. Sound like them. Sometimes even have the same memories. Here.” She beckoned us over.
She’d flipped to what appeared to be printed still frames from a video. A girl with colorful leggings and long black hair was bent over her apparent twin—they were even wearing the same outfit. But the girl on the ground was battered and wounded, blood staining her clothes. She gaped up at the standing girl, who wore a sly little smile.Vanessa Han and echo, Briar Glen, MA,read the label.
“That one was on a road that didn’t exist,” Abby said. “One of the remnants of the old worlds I told you about.”
“Are these echoes evil?” I asked.
“That one was,” Abby said, tapping the picture.
“How do you fight them? A stake to the heart? Silver bullets?” I asked.
Abby regarded me with an expression that was one part approval, one part sorrow. “The other worlds are dead or dying, and things like the echoes? They’re like bacteria, breeding in rotting meat. They mutate. What works once won’t work again. What’s true once won’t be true again.”
“So even if you defeated them once...” I started.
“They might be different here,” Abby said. “There’s just so much we don’t know. Why the other worlds died. What the things that come from those worlds want. Whether their intrusions on our world are scattered, random incidents, or whether they add up to something.”
“Like what?” Liam asked.
“That’s the big question, isn’t it?” Abby said. “Dr. Ashford’s life’s work. And mine now too, I guess. Not like I can go work retail after watching a girl dissolve into ash and getting thrown across the room by a ghost.”
