I’d stopped trying, and I’d made myself hollow. Only now did I see the foolishness of it.
I was wild with love, drunk on it. It roared through me, and I didn’t need to push away fear, because I was so much stronger than it was now. So much more.
The man on the throne swiped at me, grasping with fingers that had too many joints. I danced back to the edge of the dais with a feral laugh. He hit the end of the chain that bound his wrist and halted, chains clanking, muscles straining. Then he slumped against the chair.
He wasn’t the only monster. This wasn’t the only dying world trying to claw its way back to life. Abby’s work proved that much. But someone had done this to him, long ago. Someone had known what he was, and how to stop him. We could learn again. We could stop whatever was coming—and whatever was already in our world, hiding in the crevasses and shadows. We were so much stronger than they thought we were.
I wished Abby could see this place. She would understand what it meant so much better than I could. But she wouldn’t see it, and I couldn’t tell her.
I shut my eyes. I felt the thread, the hum, that connected me to Sophie. Felt her. She was alive. That would have to be enough. But maybe . . . Sophie, I thought, and reached for her.
Sophia. I felt her hand close around mine. We were running for the water together, and it didn’t matter which of us was real, which of us the echo. We were on the island, surviving by hiding and fleeing and finding scraps of comfort, moments of affection. We were far from the sea, alone in every crowd, adrift without past or future. She wasn’t Sophie and I wasn’t Sophia—we simply were us.
Memory ebbed and flowed between us, the border eroding, our selves spilling into each other at the edge. The barrier between us was a fragile thing.
I shattered it. I let myself pour into her—my memory, for her to guard. My words, because she’d need them. My love, because she’d need that too, she’d need that most of all, and however much spilled into her, there was more, as endless as the rushing sea.
I let all of myself flood into her. Except one thing. I kept my courage. She had her own, and I needed mine still, because I had heard the song and there was only one way to end this.
“You are no one,” the creature on his throne said.
I held my courage tight. “That’s all right,” I told him.
I let the song in my bones, in Sophie’s bones, swell, shifting to match the song of this place, of all the many echoed worlds. I let it fill me, until it felt as if it would spill out from my mouth, from my skin, until my whole body was a cathedral for that glorious, hideous sound.
And then I silenced it.
INTERVIEW
Sophia Novak
SEPTEMBER 2, 2018
Ashford settles back in his chair. He adjusts his glasses.
ASHFORD: You believed that silencing the song would destroy the echo worlds. Destroy the connection between the Seraph’s realm and ours.
SOPHIA: Yes.
ASHFORD: But it did not succeed.
SOPHIA: It did. Or it seems to have.
ASHFORD: And yet you are here. How is that possible?
SOPHIA: Is it really the first time you’ve heard someone narrate their own death, given your line of work?
ASHFORD: No, I suppose not. You do not, however, appear to be a ghost, given that it is broad daylight and I can’t see your bones, so I must ask—how did you get out?
SOPHIA: I didn’t. Haven’t you been listening?
Ashford does not seem shocked by this information—it is as if he knew it but hoped to be contradicted.
ASHFORD: You’re Sophie.
SOPHIA: My name is Sophia Novak.
ASHFORD: But you are an echo. Correct?
SOPHIA: Maybe. Or maybe she was. You’re not afraid of me now, are you?
Ashford raises an eyebrow.
ASHFORD: No. Did you think I would be?
SOPHIA: She said you wouldn’t be.
ASHFORD: Sophia did?
SOPHIA: No. Abby.
ASHFORD: Where is she, Ms. Novak? Please. Just tell me that she’s all right.
Sophia looks down at her hands.
VIDEO EVIDENCE
Recorded by Liam Kapoor
JUNE 30, 2018, TIME UNKNOWN
The scene in the cavern is chaotic, caught at first in glimpses as the phone in Liam’s hand swings wildly. Sophia leaps toward the shard and vanishes. The Six-Wing claws after her, but it recoils from the heart itself, and screeches futilely at the empty air where she was