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“It should be safe in the LARC,” Dr. Kapoor said. “Liam, you’ll stay with Mrs. Popova.”
“No way,” Liam said. “I’m going.”
“You are not,” Dr. Kapoor said. “I shouldn’t have let your mother leave you here in the first place. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“I’m eighteen,” Liam said. “I don’t need your permission. If you want to stop me, you’re going to have to tie me up.”
Dr. Kapoor looked like she was very willing to do just that, but Mrs. Popova grunted. “No one’s safe. Here or there,” she said. “And he’s got a part in this whether you like it or not.”
Dr. Kapoor nodded reluctantly. I was still holding Sophie’s hand. She had a distant look on her face. “We need to hurry,” she said. “He’s gathering his strength. He’ll be able to send them through again soon.”
Which meant the mist would come, and the Visitors with it. “We can head straight to the dock,” I said.
“TheKatydid’s down there,” Kenny confirmed. “We can be over in no time.”
“Who’s ‘we’?” Dr. Kapoor asked.
“Lily vanished over there. So that’s where we should be looking,” Kenny said.
Guilt went through me like a fishhook. “Lily’s dead,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“You—you’re sure?” he asked, holding on to hope with every bit of strength he had.
It broke my heart to tear it from him. “Yes,” I said. “She’s gone. I saw her die.”
His face crumpled. He looked away and seemed for a moment unable to breathe. Dr. Kapoor put a hand on his shoulder. It was the most tender gesture I’d seen from her.
“Stay here,” she said. “If we don’t make it back, you can still get help. Warn people.”
I wasn’t sure what good that would do. But I was glad when Kenny nodded. He’d be safe—or safer than us, at least. It was something.
“I need to go back for Mikhail,” Mrs. Popova said.
But Sophie caught my hand, and I knew. “He’s dead,” I said, grieving for a man I hardly knew.
“You’re certain,” Mrs. Popova said sharply.
Sophie stepped forward, addressing Mrs. Popova directly. “I saw,” Sophie said. “He’s gone. The Warden too.” Her voice was utterly calm. I might have thought she felt nothing at all if I weren’tfeeling it for her. Sorrow so deep I didn’t know how I would ever find the bottom or break the surface.
“Sophia?” Liam said, and I realized there were tears running down my cheeks.
“I’m all right,” I whispered. “It isn’t mine.”
Sophie couldn’t survive her sorrow, and so for her, I wept.
We went down to the shore together, the three of us, Kenny and Mrs. Popova safely within the fortress of the LARC.
“I want to be clear about something,” Dr. Kapoor said, fixing Liam with a steely glare. “You survive, or I will kill you myself. I don’t care if the whole world drowns.”
He gaped but nodded. And I ached. I ached because of what the island had taken from us both—that love, that ferocious love. He’d lost her to the island—not completely, not the way I’d lost my mother, but he’d lost her just the same.
“Okay. Let’s—” Dr. Kapoor continued, but she didn’t get to finish.
“What do you think you’re doing, Vanya?”
Sophie gasped, shrinking back, and my breath stopped in my throat, the world spinning around me as Dr. Hardcastle strode toward us, fury in his face.
I’m sorry, he’d said. Sorry. Like it mattered. Like it could remove even the slightest bit of evil from the act. Sophie’s fear and mine crashed together and turned to rage. This man—this man had stranded our mother. Had left her behind and he had promised, he hadpromised herthat he would keep her daughter safe, and he had lied.
