crumpling. Black liquid burst from the bird’s skin where Liam’s fingers dug in, and the bird thrashed and came apart in his hands, stringy tendons stretching like taffy, feathers turning black and bubbling into smoke, and then the bird was gone and all that was left was the black liquid sliding down his skin, running down the drain.
Lily screamed. Maybe I did, too, but that was nothing next to the desolate sound that ripped free of Liam’s throat. He dropped down and clawed at the drain as if he could stop the flow of the liquid, as if he could bring the bird back, and then he sobbed, hands limp on his knees. I pulled him against me, holding tight as his shoulders shook with his ragged gasps of breath. He was cold to the touch. I think I said something, but I don’t remember what it was, soothing nothings that he probably couldn’t understand anyway. But after a few minutes or a few seconds—you lose track of time during moments like this—he pulled away from me. His hand went to his temple. He drew in a breath and let it out in a rush.
“Hey,” I said softly. “You back with us?”
He swallowed. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m here.”
“What happened?” I asked. “Where’s Abby?”
His eyebrows drew together, a look of intense concentration on his face as he tried to string together fragmented memories into narrative. “I can’t— There were wings. So many wings. And there was the voice. Singing. It said . . . It said one of us could stay. It said choose. I wanted to go, but she stopped me.” He looked away, an expression of shame passing over his face.
“Who took her?” I asked. “Was it the big man, Mikhail’s double?”
But he only pointed behind me. Behind Lily. We looked at each other and turned slowly.
The wall behind us was covered in strange designs. Someone had taken paint to the concrete walls and turned them into a chaotic mass of handprints, spirals, random phrases, people rendered like cave painting stick figures. White Vs with flecks of red, terns, wheeled about. All of the paintings were layered, one thing painted over another until you could hardly see an inch of concrete or pick out one figure from another.
But in the center, stretching from floor to ceiling and snaking out to the sides, was a massive human figure—mostly human. Arms outstretched as if in benediction, face black and blank except for two empty holes where their eyes ought to be. Huge wings, six of them, emerged from the figure’s shoulders—they were the wings of a tern, angular and elegant. The wings were not solid, not like the central figure. They were made of overlapping letters, words written in overlapping lines until most were incomprehensible. Here and there I picked out meaning.
six-wing—song—it brings the mist—little bird—warden—she dreams—she drowns—
The words dripped from the wings, turning into rambling, mad sentences, braided together in overlapping strands like a woven rope, hardly any more comprehensible.
I followed the rambling thread of them, gliding through snatches of what might have been poetry or prophecy or prayers—and then, there, in the intersection of two threads, was a house. There was nothing terribly remarkable about it. A single story, a bay window in the front, a tree beside it. Nothing remarkable except that I knew it. It was the house I’d lived in after my mother died, my first foster home. The one that lasted the longest before they realized something was wrong with the lost little girl they’d wanted to love.
It couldn’t be. No one on this island could know what it looked like. But it was.
“We need to get out of here,” Lily said.
My mouth was so dry my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. “We need to find Abby,” I said, though it felt as if my voice was coming from very far away.
I followed the course of the ropes of words with my flashlight. Opposite the image of the Six-Wing, on the far right from where we’d entered, the words formed an arch above a doorway, a black gap in the wall, leading on. Leading deeper. Another bloody footprint stained the ground just in front of it. Liam wasn’t hurt. That meant that Abby must be. “There,” I said.