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One of us had been saved.
One of us had been abandoned.
But was I the real girl? Or was she? And was the abandoned child the one who had stayed in the echo, her mother’s arms around her, or the one cast out on the sea?
Neither of us had chosen our beginning or the shape of our lives. But we could choose an ending.
“What do we do?” Liam asked.
“I—” I said. I was uncertain. And yet I felt the answer, a lump in my chest waiting to force its way out, the way I had answered Lily without knowing how. I had known the answers because my echo did.Sophie, I thought. She called herself Sophie, not Sophia. She might have aged, stayed the perfect reflection of me, but time didn’t pass in the echo world. She was still Sophie. Still the child left behind.
We were connected. I knew the things that she knew. And then, standing there with our hands linked, reflected in one another’s eyes, I remembered.
28
“PLEASE,” I SAID.The girl with the camera was afraid but trying not to show it. There was a ghost with her, but she couldn’t see it. It shimmered beneath her skin, haunting her, but the sunlight would not let it breathe and be.
“Yeah. Okay. Between the two of you... I’ll take the one with the face,” said the girl.
The screaming came across the hills, chased swiftly by the thunder of the angel’s wings. It was a gift and a warning, and it meant we had little time. “Hurry!” I cried.
She was a clumsy thing, scrabbling over rocks and catching herself on her palms when she stumbled. But she followed. Not toward the traps: the throat of the bunker, with only one way in and one way out, or the church, the false haven where the angel watched. I brought her toward the north, where the birds roosted. The cliffs were silent now; the birds tended their young beyondthe echo, where the persistent sun would let them grow.
We were nearly there when she fell. I grabbed for her, caught her wrist, but the camera tumbled from her hand and skidded down the side of the hill. She lunged for it. “No!” I told her. “No time.” We were almost to the cliffs. We were almost safe.
“I have to get it back,” she said.
“You’ll die.”
She gave me a vicious, wild look. She wasn’t afraid of death. More than that. She thought she’d earned it.
“She’ll be lost,” I told her, desperate.
“Who?” she demanded.
“The girl in your bones,” I told her. “It will drink her down.”
“What girl?” She shook her head in confusion.
“She’s shining in you,” I said. “She never let you go.”
“My sister. Miranda,” she whispered. The kind of love that shone like that, you wouldn’t mistake. She ran with me, over the gray rock to the white, and I led her along the foot-wide track that hugged the bluff.
“These rocks,” she said. “They’re—salt? Why? Is it some kind of—” She stopped as I turned to look at her. “There isn’t a reason, is there?”
“There is,” I said. “But I don’t know...” I waved my hands. I didn’t know how to tell her that the angel feared the touch of salt, and feared this place, and so this place was salt. That the angel feared this placebecauseit was salt. That both of these things were true, because cause and effect were the snake devouring its own tail, the bird laying the egg from which it hatched.
The birds flocked here because the angel feared it. The angelfeared it because the birds flocked here. The thing and its reflection. Who could say which was which?
The screeching came again. Closer now, but we were almost safe. “Here,” I said, and I stepped into the cliff face, into the crack where white against white concealed a passage just wide enough for a single slender figure. The girl had more trouble with it, scraping her back and her hips as she negotiated her passage. But then she was through.
My home: a cave, carved from the salt with rocks and broken shells and fingernails, a centimeter scratched out at a time over the years. We stood in the first chamber, littered with the detritus of my wounded life. A broken chair brought over from the LARC. The wooden birds Uncle Misha gave me every winter. Bits and pieces I’d stolen from other people, other lives.
I’d never shown it to anyone before. I looked at her expectantly. The light from the passage was enough for me to see her wobbly smile.
“It’s... nice,” she said.
Outside, the angel screeched again. This time it was not the warning sound, but the red sound, the rage sound. The girl flinched.
