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He shook his head sharply. “No. He does not know she is here. Maria and Vanya and I, we watch over her.”
“He did something,” I said. “I can almost remember, but...” I shook my head.
“It seems so,” Mrs. Popova said. “We don’t know what it is,but Vanya does. She’s the one that told us we had to be careful to hide her from Dr. Hardcastle.”
“That’s why he didn’t know me,” I said. “But you did. Why didn’t you say anything?”
“We weren’t certain what you wanted,” Mrs. Popova said. “Or what would happen when you came.”
“Whatisthis place?” I demanded.
“A barren hunk of rock where a few fools tried to turn desolation into abundance and failed,” Mrs. Popova said. “This place had always been empty, because there was nothing here. No food, no warmth, no hope. Only evil.”
“The evil in this place wasn’t here until we brought it,” Mikhail rumbled.
“Who’s ‘we’?” I asked.
“TheKrachka,” he said. “A fishing ship. There were seven of us. One day the nets dragged something up from the ocean that we didn’t understand. It was like a piece of broken glass the size of a man’s chest. From every angle, it looked different. Like it was flat, but you could never find the edge. It was held in a box covered in strange writing, wrapped with chains.”
“TheKrachkacrashed like a hundred and fifty years ago,” Liam said. Mikhail fixed him with a look.
“Hush. I am not finished. We started to hear things. Singing. When we looked at the glass, we saw the Six-Wing, the angel. I knew it was something wicked. Something that should be destroyed. But others seemed to worship it. They wanted to free it. I tried to stop them, so they tied me up in the hold, but I broke free. Ran the ship onto the rocks. That was when I lost my eye.”He took a shuddering breath, as if the pain still lived in him.
“Things got a bit chaotic after that,” Mrs. Popova said dryly. “The ship crashed against the rocks. Most of the sailors wouldn’t say anything or accept any help. But they let my brother bring Misha over to this side of the island, where our doctor lived,” Mrs. Popova said. “We tended to him. We didn’t realize until the next day that everyone else was gone. They’d vanished.”
“But that was not the worst of it,” Mikhail said. “The worst was when they came back.”
Mrs. Popova looked down at her hands. “The last time I told anyone about all of this was when your Dr. Kapoor came back from—from that other place. It’s strange to say it out loud.”
“All this time, we have kept silence,” Mikhail said, turning to Mrs. Popova. “What has it given us? Long life and little joy.”
Mrs. Popova sighed. “Very well. As you’ve probably gathered, my family was among the first to settle Bitter Rock. My father was Russian, my mother was Unangan. She converted to Russian Orthodox when she married him. She died of a sudden illness the winter before theKrachkacame—and sometimes I thank God for that. She didn’t have to see what happened.
“In any case, the day after the crash, we found Belaya Skala empty. We searched, of course, the sea and the land. Looking for bodies or for some explanation. We found nothing except a hole in the hillside. Wide enough for a man to fall in. Deep. Too deep to climb down. The edges were... It’s hard to describe. It was like a wound. I was there with my father, helping. I was a young woman at the time. Nineteen.”
“It is hard to remember we were ever so young,” Mikhail said.A slight smile played over Mrs. Popova’s lips, but she kept up the tale.
“We searched the whole island. And then the mist came. We were there—my father, my sister, and me. My sister’s husband had been on Belaya Skala. He was among the vanished. When we heard his voice calling her name, we were overjoyed. She ran out into the mist to meet him. I was right behind her. I saw her run into his arms. I watched him snap her neck with a twist of his hands. Like it was nothing.” She shut her eyes and shuddered.
“My father had his gun. My sister’s husband died smiling. And then we heard screaming. He was not the only one that had returned. We fled across the water, but not all of us made it.”
Mikhail nodded. “After that, no one went to Belaya Skala. But sometimes the mist would come and cover the island, and you could hear them calling in it.”
“Most of the others left,” Mrs. Popova said. “Many right away. Others within a few years, when they realized it wouldn’t stop.”
“Wait,” I said. “If you were nineteen in the 1880s...”
“Time doesn’t pass here properly,” Mrs. Popova said. “At first the effect didn’t reach past the headland. But it spread. Sometimes I wish it had bothered to get this far before I was quite so gray in the hair.” Her lips twisted at the feeble joke.
“But why would you stay?” I asked. “If it was so dangerous—”
“My daughter is still there,” Mikhail said. “And so I could not leave.”
“And someone had to be here to warn people,” Mrs. Popova added. “To tell them about the mist.”
“Your daughter,” I said. “You mean her echo?”
Mrs. Popova looked over at Mikhail. He was silent. She put her hand over his. “At first the children seemed to grow up normally, but then...”
