like I can go work retail after watching a girl dissolve into ash and getting thrown across the room by a ghost.”
“That happened?” I asked her.
“Yup. Met a lovely girl named Dahut. She was possessing another girl, Becca—but we got her out. Mostly. Little bit left behind, but nothing Becca can’t handle. Probably. We’re keeping an eye on it.”
“So is that whole binder full of supernatural stuff?” Liam asked.
“Yup,” she said. The binder was huge, filled with a million different tabs labeled in tiny, precise handwriting.
“It’s very organized,” I noted.
“You were expecting a scrappy, overstuffed notebook covered in manic scribbles?” she guessed. “We’ve got a lot of those in storage. Dr. Ashford insists on a more methodical approach.” She turned the binder so I could see the labels on the tabs—everything from Spectral phenomenon to Doors appearing in forests, fields, etc. “There’s an index,” she told me.
“Your boss let you take this?”
“I sort of stole it. I did mention we’re pissed at each other right now, right?” she said idly, but she didn’t meet my eyes.
“You were talking about those things—echoes,” Liam said suddenly. His arms were crossed, his gaze on the floor, but now he lifted his eyes to look at Abby. “How good are they? Could they convince you they were real?”
She frowned. “Some of them can. Why?”
He tensed his jaw. “Nothing,” he said after a beat. “Look. I’m in. I’ll help you.”
“You don’t have to,” I told him. It was enough that he believed. That he wasn’t running.
“I want to,” he said seriously. “Just tell me where to start.”
Abby sighed. “I’m not going to try to talk you out of it. Maybe Ashford could, but truth is, I hate working alone. Plus, it’ll be easier getting back to Belaya Skala with the connections you two have, and that’s definitely got to be our next stop.”
I shook my head. “We don’t have to get back to Belaya Skala—not yet, at least.” I spread my hands, indicating the room around us. “We’re in a room full of specimens and documents from and about Belaya Skala and Bitter Rock. We’re exactly where we need to be. So pick a drawer. It’s time to be good little worker bees.”
I walked to the nearest drawer—labeled Bones—Mounted—and opened it with a flourish.
It was full of Tupperware.
“I think you’ve cracked the case,” Liam deadpanned.
I threw a Tupperware lid at him.
* * *
We settled into a rhythm after a while. Empty a drawer, sort the contents—which never matched the label—move them in front of the drawer that did match the label, repeat. So far we had mostly managed to make the room look significantly less organized.
One of the cabinet drawers—one of the long, flat ones, the kind that contained maps and documents—was rusted shut. I hauled at it. Useless. It probably hadn’t been opened in years.
“You need a hand?” Abby asked, looking up from a shoebox full of USB drives, which she’d been plugging into her computer one by one to check for anything interesting.
“Nope,” I said through clenched teeth. I cast around for something to force it open with. I found a screwdriver and jammed it into the bent corner of the drawer. I shoved. I pulled. It creaked ominously but didn’t open.
“You will not defeat me,” I told the drawer sternly. It remained shut, all innocence and aluminum. I braced myself against the cabinet behind me, lifted my foot, and kicked hard at the handle of the screwdriver.
It popped open, the screwdriver pinging off to hit the wall.
“Look at the badass,” Abby said. I leaned forward eagerly.
Inside I found a map showing Bitter Rock; I recognized the fat, fishhook shape immediately, along with the streets and buildings. Almost none of them had changed, although the LARC was absent from this map. There were a series of notations, X’s with dates scribbled next to them, scattered throughout the islands and the surrounding waters. The note-taker had sketched a series of wobbly circles around Belaya Skala. And then around the rest of Bitter Rock. The circles expanded to contain later dates and marks, as if whatever this map was tracking was growing. The last circle was dated 1981, and it covered almost all of the island, leaving only a tiny curl of land untouched.
“Check this out,” I said. I slid it across the floor toward Abby, and she scooted over to take a look. Liam crouched down next to her.
I turned back to the drawer. There was another map underneath the first, but where that