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KAPOOR: What about William?
KAPOOR [echo]: Try slapping him. I mean, something positive ought to come out of this.
Kapoor snorts. She crouches down and looks into William Hardcastle’s slack face.
And then she leans forward, and whispers in his ear. He shivers. The bowl slips from his fingers, clattering to the floor. Kapoor stands up and holds out her hand.
HARDCASTLE: What...?
KAPOOR: Questions later. How do we do this, echo girl?
She looks at Novak’s echo, who still has one hand against the oozing wound in her belly.
NOVAK [echo]: Just get me... bring me to the pool.
Kapoor and her echo are the ones that help her, Hardcastle still too disoriented to help, Novak holding the crying, confused girls. They bring the echo to the edge of the black pool beneath the glass shard, and she steps in. She staggers free of them. With each step she sinks lower in the liquid. When her fingertips brush the surface, it begins to crawl up her arms. It flows in rivulets along her clavicle, up her throat. It slips between her lips. It trickles over her eyelids, and her eyes fill with that shadowless void.
SOPHIA: Mama...
NOVAK [echo]: I love you, little bird. Nowgo.
25
MRS. POPOVA ANDMikhail weren’t quite looking at each other, as if it was shameful to have spoken all of this aloud. I wondered if they ever really talked about it on the island—or if they pretended their lives were some kind of normal, only sometimes giving a knowing look toward the rocky bluffs across the water.
Outside, a voice howled in rage or pain. Inhuman and unearthly, and horribly familiar. I jumped up, startled, but Mrs. Popova put her hand on my arm. “It’s the Warden,” she said. Mikhail’s double. That was who Dr. Kapoor had been afraid of running into—not Mikhail after all. “The mist is here, but it’s all right. He never comes inside.”
Footsteps crunched in the gravel along the drive. A new sound came, a kind of gutturalhuhhh-uh-huh, like someone trying to clear a crushed throat.
“Never comes inside because he can’t, or he doesn’t?” I asked.
A body struck the door with force. The door shuddered with the impact. Liam leapt to his feet, toppling his chair with a crash. Mrs. Popova gripped the crucifix that hung around her neck and muttered a prayer.
The Warden slammed into the door again. Wood cracked. Mikhail stayed in his seat, eyes fixed on the wall opposite. It took me a moment to recognize the look on his face. It was the grim acceptance of a man who has been waiting a very long time for the inevitable to arrive.
“Do you have your rifle?” Mikhail asked Mrs. Popova.
“Sure, I just tucked it down the back of my pants,” she said sourly. “It’s in the truck.”
Bang. Another impact, and then the slow scraping drag of a footstep. A voice, low and garbled, came through the door. “Soooophiiiaaaa,” the Warden said, and coughed wetly, a meaty hacking that cut off with a wheeze. “Ty k nam vernulas.”
“‘You came back to us,’” Mikhail translated. The tortured voice went on, and Mikhail murmured the translation. “‘We saw you in the boy’s memories. She tried to hide you from us, but we know you have returned. Come outside. Come with us.’”
The voice stopped. There was a long pause, an unbalanced kind of silence, made to break. And then the Warden slammed into the door once again.
Mikhail stood, pressing his palms flat against the table. “You must run,” he said.
Bang. The frame of the door splintered. One more good hit and it would give. There was no back door, no other way out. The windows were too small to fit through. The Warden roared.
“My truck’s out front,” Mrs. Popova said. Her voice was shaking, but she dug for her keys. “We just need a clear path out.”
“Where do we go?” I asked. “If they can get in here, is anywhere safe?”
“The LARC is built like a fortress,” Liam said.
“The LARC is a fortress. That’s why it’s built that way,” Mrs. Popova said.
“He will be inside in a moment,” Mikhail said. “I will fight. You run.”
