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“Hey,” I said softly. “You back with us?”
He swallowed. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m here.”
“What happened?” I asked. “Where’s Abby?”
His eyebrows drew together, a look of intense concentration on his face as he tried to string together fragmented memories into narrative. “I can’t— There were wings. So many wings. And there was the voice. Singing. It said... It said one of us could stay. It said choose. I wanted to go, but she stopped me.” He looked away, an expression of shame passing over his face.
“Who took her?” I asked. “Was it the big man, Mikhail’s double?”
But he only pointed behind me. Behind Lily. We looked at each other and turned slowly.
The wall behind us was covered in strange designs. Someone had taken paint to the concrete walls and turned them into a chaotic mass of handprints, spirals, random phrases, people rendered like cave painting stick figures. White Vs with flecks of red, terns, wheeled about. All of the paintings were layered, one thing painted over another until you could hardly see an inch of concrete or pick out one figure from another.
But in the center, stretching from floor to ceiling and snaking out to the sides, was a massive human figure—mostly human. Armsoutstretched as if in benediction, face black and blank except for two empty holes where their eyes ought to be. Huge wings, six of them, emerged from the figure’s shoulders—they were the wings of a tern, angular and elegant. The wings were not solid, not like the central figure. They were made of overlapping letters, words written in overlapping lines until most were incomprehensible. Here and there I picked out meaning.
six-wing—song—it brings the mist—little bird—warden—she dreams—she drowns—
The words dripped from the wings, turning into rambling, mad sentences, braided together in overlapping strands like a woven rope, hardly any more comprehensible.
Seven kings seven kingdoms seven gates seven worlds—
—drowned beneath the sea but the road still—
—went to meet the bramble man and—
—lacuna house, and time twists—
—six wings, the dreamer—
—the girl and the ghost—
I followed the rambling thread of them, gliding through snatches of what might have been poetry or prophecy or prayers—and then, there, in the intersection of two threads, was a house. There was nothing terribly remarkable about it. A single story, a bay window in the front, a tree beside it. Nothing remarkable except that I knew it. It was the house I’d lived in after my motherdied, my first foster home. The one that lasted the longest before they realized something was wrong with the lost little girl they’d wanted to love.
It couldn’t be. No one on this island could know what it looked like. But it was.
“We need to get out of here,” Lily said.
My mouth was so dry my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. “We need to find Abby,” I said, though it felt as if my voice was coming from very far away.
I followed the course of the ropes of words with my flashlight. Opposite the image of the Six-Wing, on the far right from where we’d entered, the words formed an arch above a doorway, a black gap in the wall, leading on. Leading deeper. Another bloody footprint stained the ground just in front of it. Liam wasn’t hurt. That meant that Abby must be. “There,” I said.
“You heard Liam. She said not to,” Lily replied. Her voice was frail. She was holding up pretty well, but things were still skating along the edge of the possible. It would get worse if we went deeper. I knew it. Lily knew it.
“There’s only one way she could have gone,” I said. I tore my eyes away from the painting. My mother, the house, my double. This place was focused on me in a way I didn’t understand. I couldn’t escape its gravity, but maybe Lily could. “Wait here with Liam. I’ll go.”
I bent, fetching Liam’s flashlight from where it lay on the ground. I handed it over.
“I shouldn’t let you go,” Lily said. Guilt in her voice.
“You wouldn’t be able to stop me.” I turned toward the blackhole. Lily made a noise in a final protest, but I knew she was relieved to be staying behind.
I approached the darkened doorway. The edges were rough. They hadn’t been part of the bunker, I thought, but chiseled out of the wall after it was built. The space beyond was more tunnel than hallway, the walls rough and rocky. Natural caves beneath the island, maybe? But it seemed too straight for that, and while the rock wasn’t smooth like a manmade tunnel would be, it had odd marks, almost ripples, that seemed too regular to be random.
Something had carved this, I thought, but not a human something.
I walked forward cautiously. The tunnel narrowed, almost scraping my shoulders, and the ceiling was only a few inches over my head. My breath filled the space until it seemed it was the tunnel itself that was breathing. The walls cinched in, and now my shoulders did bump against the damp rock, and I realized what the ripples reminded me of—the ridges of a trachea.
Soon I was moving sideways, and every breath was cool and wet and tasted of silt. The flashlight beam struck stone ahead and stopped. No more dark corridor, only a final narrowing of gray rock with a crack the width of my hand running through it.
