what I knew. The three of us didn’t talk much, and the silence was a nervous one.
Four more hours of organization, and Dr. Kapoor rattled through to release us for the day. Liam drove Abby and me down to Mrs. Popova’s. I slouched back against the seat. No storms on the horizon. No murderous malformed birds, no wounded men with sickly smiles. But I didn’t feel safe for an instant.
I’d told Abby and Liam an abbreviated version of what had happened, my voice low in case Kenny or Hardcastle walked by, but I repeated it in excruciating detail once we were tucked away in my room. Abby and I sat on the bed, while Liam folded himself down onto the floor in front of the door in a pose that made him look particularly gangly. Abby took the skull from me, slipping on a pair of leather gloves first, and examined it carefully.
“Pozhirayet,” she read. “The inscription. It means ‘it devours.’”
“You speak Russian?” I asked her.
“I have a knack for languages, and everything’s useful in our line of work. Only real job where fluency in Latin can save your life.” She pulled her laptop out of her bag and tapped away at the keyboard.
“What are you looking for now?”
“Your mutilated man,” she said. “Daniel Rivers. Age twenty-eight. Lives in Colorado. Lists a PhD from UC Berkeley, but he works at a ski resort.” She spun the laptop around so I could see the Facebook page she’d pulled up. Liam craned his neck to get a look.
I stared at the dates under the photos. Three days ago, two weeks ago, a month ago. He’d shaved off his beard, but it was him. “I don’t understand. I saw him.”
“And Liam saw you, down by the beach,” Abby pointed out.
“The man I saw wasn’t Daniel Rivers,” I said, realization dawning. “It was an echo?”
“That’s my guess,” she said.
“This is fucked-up,” Liam muttered. We looked at him, and he crossed his arms. “I just feel like someone should say that periodically, to remind us. Abby’s acting like this is normal. But it isn’t. It’s fucked-up.”
“Fucked-up is normal for me,” Abby said.
“We need to get to those records,” Abby muttered.
Then the ground lurched beneath me. Cold shivers ran down my back, and my stomach churned.
Backlash.
“I’ll—I have to—I need a shower,” I managed, and turned abruptly, marching into the hall. I ignored Liam’s puzzled response, not even registering his words. I was almost running by the time I reached the bathroom, and I had to try three times to throw the lock. I turned the shower on full blast and sank to my knees, biting my sleeve to stifle the moan that escaped my lips.
No. No. No, I thought, and my mind filled with the image of Daniel Rivers’s broken flesh. Of wings and claws. Of William Hardcastle, his empty smile, his hand outstretched.
No. No. No—and I realized I was saying it, too, bent to the floor, my words soft and my lips pressed almost to the tile.
There was nothing to do but endure.
INTERVIEW
SOPHIA NOVAK
SEPTEMBER 2, 2018
ASHFORD: It’s interesting to me, Ms. Novak, that you are so concerned about what I did and did not tell Abby. Given how much you concealed from her and Mr. Kapoor yourself.
SOPHIA: What do you mean?
ASHFORD: You doled out information so carefully. You knew that Abby was investigating your mother’s disappearance, yet you did not tell her about your reflection until she noticed it herself. Nor did you tell her about the girl that you and Mr. Kapoor saw on the beach the night she arrived—not until Mr. Kapoor mentioned it himself.
SOPHIA: I wasn’t trying to deceive her.
Ashford leans back in his chair, considering her.
ASHFORD: Is that so? But you didn’t tell them about this emotional backlash you experienced either. Why?
SOPHIA: Isn’t that obvious?
ASHFORD: Please. Assume I’m ignorant.
Sophia looks down at her hands, fingers laced, palms spread.
SOPHIA: It took me years to learn how to tell when the backlash was coming. And even then, sometimes there was no warning at all. It came sometimes without me pushing away emotion to trigger it. Over time, I learned how to ride it out without hurting myself—or anyone else. But by then, I’d been to too many psychiatrists to count. Been fed drugs that made me sleep and shake and even have a seizure once but never helped. Lost every friend I managed to make. Do you know what it’s like to have people look at you like you aren’t even human?