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She approaches him. Sophia zooms in so close on her mother that every tremor of her hands makes the view bounce dizzyingly.
CARREAU: I don’t think the night is still here because the sun has somehow changed its course. Time is behaving oddly. Look.
He unstraps his watch and hands it to her.
NOVAK: I don’t see what—
She glances up, then back at it.
NOVAK: Huh. It went back a few seconds.
CARREAU: I am reminded of saccadic masking. If you look away from a clock and then back to it, the second hand seems to tick slowly the first time. An illusion, your brain’s attempt to fill in the moment of blurred vision when your eyes were moving.
NOVAK: Time isn’t passing. But our minds are filling it in?
CARREAU: Or this place is. We are not built to process a world without time. How does that even work? How can we breathe and think and progress if the world is temporally static?
Any further discussion is interrupted by shouting. Hardcastle’s and Kapoor’s voices are raised and urgent.
HARDCASTLE: Open up!
He hammers against the door. Novak and Carreau rush to it, hauling aside the pew that blocks it. Kapoor and Hardcastle spill through the door and slam it shut behind them, prompting a frantic knot of activity as they get the pew back in place.
NOVAK: What happened? Will, where did that gun come from?
Hardcastle doesn’t look at her. He’s staring at Baker, who stands in front of the altar, looking a bit dazed. He does, indeed, have a handgun—a revolver—at his side.
Then he steps forward, and points it at Baker.
14
I YELPED. ITwas like shouting into a damp blanket—the sound hit the air and died.
There was no hand on my wrist. No one to have grabbed it. Just an empty room. Except it wasn’t the same room.
The long window was cracked and caked with grime. The cage within was torn open, as if the bars had been wrenched outward with great force. The equipment was old, broken, dented.
I gulped down my fear—not pushing it away, not yet, knowing it would keep me sharp before it overwhelmed me—and walked to the door. As I had expected, Hardcastle was gone. And the hall beyond was as changed as the room.
The doors were in the same places, but they were wrong—one hanging crookedly from a broken hinge, another swollen and rotting, covered in green-black mold. Water dripped from theceiling. The window beside me was cracked and beyond it was only mist that seeped in through the shattered windows, spilling like a thick carpet over the pitted tiles.
“Where am I?” I whispered. This wasn’t the LARC, but it wasn’t where I’d found Rivers either.
A faint scratching came from behind me. I whirled around. A hand, slender and pale, reached around from behind the corner, the nails scratching at the wall. It withdrew, and wet footsteps, the slap of bare feet against the tile, sounded a retreat.
“Wait,” I called. A drop of water splashed onto the back of my hand. I ran after the footsteps.
I rounded the corner. The mist was thicker here, coiling in the air. The other girl stood at the end of the hall, half-shrouded. She wore a long-sleeved gray shirt, soaked and sticking to her skin, and a heavy skirt that dripped water from the hem. I couldn’t see her face through the mist.
“Who are you?” I asked, but I already knew: the girl in the mirror. The reason my reflection was wrong.
“Who are you?” she whispered. Her voice was hoarse, a croak as garbled as Moriarty’s.
“I’m Sophia,” I said.
“I’m Sophia,” she echoed, cocking her head to the side.
“Are you... me?” I asked. My legs felt weak. I still couldn’t see her face.
