think she might have survived?” he asked. There was still hope in his voice, though I didn’t think even he knew it was there.
“Her body? No. She’s dead,” I told him. There was hope in my voice too. Because if she wasn’t, that was worse. To be alive and to be trapped in that place, trapped with that thing— But I was as sure as I could be. She’d given me as much of herself as she could, and that was all that survived of her. I was what survived of her.
He walked up the steps of the porch, standing just below me. We were almost eye to eye. “We’d barely gotten started,” he said. “It’s not fair. She shouldn’t be gone.”
“I should be,” I said. “I was the one who . . . She was real.”
“Are you sure about that?” he asked. “Are you sure you were the echo?”
“I . . .” I shook my head. “It has to have been me.”
“And now? You can’t be an echo. There’s no one to be an echo of,” he said. “So what does that make you?”
“I’m Sophie. But I think . . . I think I’m Sophia too. So maybe that makes me both of us. Or maybe it makes me someone new,” I said.
“I think,” he said carefully, “I’d like to get to know that person.”
He didn’t hold me in his arms. He didn’t touch me at all. We only stood together in silence and in memory. Neither of us knew who I was, not yet, but we would learn. I didn’t know what we would find or what that would mean, and there was freedom in that. A future not empty but undefined, full of every possibility.
The door opened. Abby stepped out onto the porch, a blanket around her shoulders like a shawl. She looked between us but didn’t ask. Still, my cheeks heated a little.
“How’s Mrs. Popova?” I asked.
“Tired,” she said. “She says time is catching up to her.”
“What does that mean?” Liam asked. “Is she going to die?”
“We’re all going to die, sooner or later,” Abby said. “She’s already put it off awhile. But she hasn’t turned to dust yet, so I’m guessing she’s got some time before the reaper double-checks his list and comes knocking.”
“Soon you won’t be able to tell there’s anything strange about this place,” I said.
“Soon there won’t be a place here at all,” Abby replied. “The birds are gone. I could be wrong, but I don’t think they’re coming back. Which means no LARC.”
A thrill of panic went through me. Because I hadn’t really thought it through until just that moment—I would be leaving too.
I might have Sophia’s memories, but I had never left this place. Not once.
“You’ll be okay,” Abby said, catching my expression. “You survived in the echo world for fifteen years. You can survive civilization. And you won’t be on your own.”
“I already heard my mum on the phone making ‘arrangements,’” Liam added. “Having spent her fifteen minutes of allotted emotion, she’s in full problem-solving mode. Her way of making up for leaving you behind, I suppose.”
“She’s always been kind to me,” I told him. “She’s always taken care of me.”
He gave me an odd look. “I think you may have more of a relationship with my mother than I do,” he said. “I hadn’t really thought of that.”
“You should get to know her better,” I said. “I think that you’ll like each other once you do. I like both of you, after all.”
“And I dislike both of you,” Abby added with a grin to show she didn’t mean it. Oil and water, I thought, and it was Sophia’s thought, but it was also mine.
In the darkness, stars began to shine overhead. Too dim, and too far away—but no, that was the way they were supposed to look. I was too used to strange worlds and strange skies.
“Nighttime,” Liam said. “It’s been a while.”
I reached into my pocket. My fingers bumped against the slender wings of the wooden tern, and a memory and its reflection surfaced. Sophia, embracing me in the cave. Slipping the bird into my pocket.
“You should take this,” I said. I held the little bird out to Abby.
“It already led me here,” she said. “I don’t think I need it anymore. You can keep it, if you want.”
“It isn’t the one you had,” I told her. “This is Sophia’s bird. She still had yours with her when she . . . So I thought you should