flashlight against the crack, but I couldn’t make out anything but emptiness beyond. Emptiness, but not silence. In the deep, in the dark, someone was singing.
20
I RAN BACK through the tunnel and squeezed my way free into the circular room, half fearing that the others would be gone, but Lily was kneeling at Liam’s side and looked up as I stumbled in. “Did you find her?” she asked.
My breath came too fast. My fear was turning to panic, the useful edge of adrenaline giving way to a frantic confusion that would only get me killed. But the void was waiting. I focused inward, feeling my breath expand my lungs, letting it out—and letting the fear go with it, into the darkness of the void. It drank up my fear, leaving me steady again.
“We have to go. Now,” I said, smooth as glass. I looked down at my hand, closed in a fist around the thing Abby had given me along with the bird. I eased my fingers open to find an SD card. Not the one we’d found earlier—this was different. From Abby’s camera? “Liam, can you walk?”
But he was staring at the wall, eyes unfocused. His lips moved, and he was mumbling something, but it was impossible to make out.
The music was getting louder. It was like a hundred voices, all overlapping over each other, but it was somehow only one voice at the same time. A language I knew and didn’t know. I kept catching the edge of understanding and then losing my grip on it.
“We have to go,” I said again, shaking Liam’s shoulder.
“I’ve got him,” Lily assured me. She got her arm under Liam’s and hauled him to his feet, surprisingly strong for her size. We shambled to the stairs, cajoling Liam into moving at every step. And at every step, I waited for the sound of wings. We reached the first landing, and I turned, shining my flashlight back toward the black mouth of the tunnel.
It had gotten wider, and there were people in it. The beam didn’t reach far enough to illuminate their faces, but their silhouettes were crowded together, watching.
I didn’t look back again. Not until the top of the stairs, and then only fleetingly, and all I saw was the wild leap of shadows as the flashlight beam raked across the stairwell. Then we were back in the main room of the bunker, and Lily paused to catch her breath. Liam pulled away from her, stumbling and catching himself on one of the tables.
“You all right?” I asked. He shook his head, which was its own kind of progress. “We need to keep moving. Fast.”
“The door is stuck closed,” Lily reminded me. I ducked out from under Liam’s arm anyway and jogged toward the entrance. Had the walls been striped with that much mold before, glistening and black, shot through with silvery lichen?
The door hung open, and beyond was only gray. The mist. Lightning flashed sporadically in the sky, but no thunder to follow it. The flashes illuminated shapes in the air, strange and twisting things far above.
“We’re on the wrong island,” I said dully.
“Sophia!” Lily yelled. I twisted to look behind me, back toward the stairwell. Mold crawled from the stairwell, creeping its way along the walls, and among it bloomed strange mushrooms that looked like teeth. A sound rose up from the stairwell, a dusty, thrashing sound, and the soft percussion of feathers striking stone.
Liam stood rooted in place. Lily grabbed one of his arms, I grabbed the other, and we pulled him with us. Lily was muttering, eyes wide, keeping herself from total panic with visible effort.
Before, the mist’s landscape matched the real one. I’d tumbled in through a reflection and escaped—how? I didn’t have time to stop and ponder.
“Follow me,” I said. “Stay close.” Anywhere was better than staying put.
Liam moved to follow without prompting, blinking as if coming awake, but Lily kept close to him just the same. I set out for the beach where we’d left the boat. The ground shifted, the grass thinning as we came toward the rockier shore. I followed the slope and the sound of the water, and tried not to think about what might be chasing us. I reached the edge of the shore and there, as if waiting for us, was a boat. A skiff. Larger than the Katydid, though not by much. I couldn’t read the name on the side; black mold covered it, swallowing half the hull, the