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But Hardcastle still has the gun.
HARDCASTLE: Turn off that camera, Vanya. I don’t want to hurt you. But I will if I have to. Turn. It. Off.
Three seconds pass in perfect stillness.
Then the recording ends.
26
THE VIDEO WENTblack. “I remember,” I said softly. “I remember him drowning me.”
“And my mum didn’t do anything to stop him,” Liam said.
“We don’t know that,” I replied. “She’s not one of them, at least. Not an echo.”
Complex emotions warring in his expression. Guilt and hope and love and fear—fear at what might lie beyond that blackness, beyond the end of the recording.
I looked up at my echo, standing uncertainly before us. “You’ve seen this?” I asked her. She nodded. “Abby gave it to you.”Or did you take it from her?I didn’t ask.
“She said. She said bring it,” my echo said. The corner of her mouth trembled. “I brought you something else. It’s yours. I held it, but I think you need it back.”
“What?” I asked, bewildered. “What do you have?”
She beckoned. I stood, leaving the camera with Liam, and approached her warily. She tilted her head, an invitation to come closer. A drop of salt water tracked from her hair and down her cheek. I stepped toward her, and she leaned in, her lips nearly brushing my ear.
“Memory,” she whispered—and the ocean roared.
I couldn’t breathe. I had no lungs for it, and the water was everywhere, black and cold. I could feel the whole expanse of it, this ocean—the water, the salt, the decay, the life flashing quicksilver through it. The water was ever-changing, and it was constant.
I was drowning, and then I wasn’t. The water let me go and I crouched in the bottom of a boat in the dark, watching two giants struggle. Not giants—just people, but I was small. A child. The stars were shimmering back into existence above me, and the boat rocked violently as William Hardcastle threw Vanya Kapoor down. Her head cracked against the bench. She moaned—conscious, but barely. Her eyes fluttered and her hand grasped feebly for Hardcastle. I shrank against the flat stern of the boat as he turned toward me.
We stared at each other. Was this a dream? The cold air biting my cheeks and the press of metal against my back said no. My left eye throbbed with a hot, dull pain.
“Don’t,” I said in a child’s voice, and with the words, the sense of who I was, who I had been in the years between me and this moment, flowed away. I was only Sophia, three years old and terrified, crouched in front of a monster.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
He grabbed me by the front of my jacket, fist twisting the fabric. I screamed and kicked, clawed at his arm, but I was nothing next to his bulk. He started to lift me over the side. I thrashed in blind panic, and he dropped me.
My shoulder hit the edge of the boat with a jolt of pain, and then I was in the water. For a moment it closed over me, and then I kicked and my head broke the surface. I grabbed at the only solid thing before me: the white side of the boat. My cold-numbed fingers closed over it. And then he was there again, hands around my wrists, prying my fragile grip free.
“I’m sorry,” he said again. “I have to.”
He threw me away from the boat. I went under again, the water closing over me, and this time when I kicked, I didn’t break the surface. A roar shuddered through the water—the motor. I knew how to hold my breath, my mama had taught me that, how to kick and how to move my arms to swim, but not with my clothes on, and they were so heavy and it was so, so cold—
There were wings in the water. Wings and a song, and a whisper against my ear.Hush, little bird.
I rose through the water, carried by unseen arms. The water turned to ice, then turned to wood, and I watched a boat weave itself from nothing into something. I crouched, shivering and afraid, as the ocean lost its grip on me.
A creature hovered in the air before me. Its wings beat slowly, and its empty eyes blazed down at me. I wasn’t afraid. Not of that.
Hush, little bird, it whispered. And then it vanished, and so did the memory.
I was in the hallway again. Staring at my reflection who was not a reflection, my wild echo. It wasn’t just the memory that she’d given me. I stared at her, knowledge swirling through my mind. She didn’t have the words for it, didn’t know how to tell me.
I did have the words. And what I knew was terrifying.
“Sophia,” Liam said, uncertain.
