I rounded the corner. The mist was thicker here, coiling in the air. The other girl stood at the end of the hall, half-shrouded. She wore a long-sleeved gray shirt, soaked and sticking to her skin, and a heavy skirt that dripped water from the hem. I couldn’t see her face through the mist.
“Who are you?” I asked, but I already knew: the girl in the mirror. The reason my reflection was wrong.
“Who are you?” she whispered. Her voice was hoarse, a croak as garbled as Moriarty’s.
“I’m Sophia,” I said.
“I’m Sophia,” she echoed, cocking her head to the side.
“Are you . . . me?” I asked. My legs felt weak. I still couldn’t see her face.
“I . . .” she began. And then she shuddered. “Don’t let them find you,” she said, low and urgent—and then she turned and fled.
I plunged after her. “Wait!” I called. The word crumpled as soon as it left my lips. No echoes in this place; the air was too thick. I had the sensation of being inside some great beast’s throat. With every step the mist curdled around me, growing denser.
The walls fell away around me. I stumbled to a stop under open sky. It was as if something had torn the front half of the LARC away, leaving only rubble, twisted rebar, and wiring tangling like snakes. The mist spilled across the island. It wasn’t night, exactly. The breaks in the clouds showed a glimpse of a sky without sunlight—but without stars either, and instead a strange ridged and whorled texture that reminded me of glass left long under the waves, until the shape of it was nearly lost.
“Wait,” I said again, my voice thin, but she was gone.
* * *
I made my way down the path. If this island was like Bitter Rock, that’s where shelter would be. And it did have the island’s shape—though the road beneath my feet wasn’t gravel, but some kind of solid stone, as if it had formed naturally. Instead of the speckling of white and yellow flowers beside the road, the flowers were fleshy things, a deep and glistening purple-red like liver meat.
I wasn’t alone. There was someone out in the empty field past the road, the dim light reducing them to a silhouette. Not the girl—not my half-wild twin. It was a man. Or at least I thought it was a man. Hunched over, moving at a lurching gait.
I hesitated at the edge of the road. Nothing here had tried to hurt me—not yet, at least. Not even the dark angel in the church. And if there was someone here who could answer my questions, I had to risk it. I stepped forward. It was like stepping into emptiness, though the ground remained solid beneath my feet. I had no tether, nothing to hold on to, nothing to hold me back. Only the thrumming need. Forward. Find the answers. Find her.
The man stood with one knee knocked inward, one shoulder hunched so far forward I didn’t see how he managed to balance. He stood utterly still, his back to me, the only motion the wind tugging at his wild, ash-blond curls.
His knee wasn’t just bent inward oddly; it was broken. The foot twisted inward until it was completely perpendicular to the other. His clothes hung in shreds. I thought for a moment his skin was blistered, but as I drew closer I made out the craggy edges of rocks that seemed to be growing out of his skin, the smallest the size of a thumbnail, the largest as big around as a fist, lodged at the base of his neck.
His shoulder jerked. His head turned toward me, and I started to take a step back. He rotated, his bad leg collapsing, his weight flinging the other way to keep some semblance of balance. Rocking back and forth unsteadily, he regarded me from behind a ragged net of salt-rimed hair. The rocks were embedded in his cheeks. No, not rocks—barnacles.
He took a lurching step toward me and spoke rapidly in what might have been Russian.
“Von otsyuda!” he said, and repeated it, over and over. “Von! Von!”
He reached for me, but his leg gave out and he collapsed onto the ground, grasping for my ankle. I stumbled back. He screamed a bloodcurdling sound, high-pitched and tortured. He clawed his way across the grass toward me, and distantly, something—someone—answered his scream.