to her, didn’t you?” I held out my own carving, the little tern with its upward-swept wings. Mikhail took it from me gingerly, turning it over in his hands. “You gave this one to my mother. You gave others to the echo.”
“Sophie,” he said.
“What?”
“That’s what she calls herself,” Mrs. Popova said. “Not Sophia, Sophie. You left. She didn’t. Of course we know about her.” She waved at the table. “Sit down.”
I glanced at Liam, but he seemed to be happy letting me take the lead. I had imagined this as more of an interrogation, but I took the offered chair and Mrs. Popova folded her hands on the tabletop.
“Ask what you need to ask,” she said.
“What is Sophie?” I asked. “Is she like the other echoes?”
“No. She’s different, but we don’t know why.”
“We take care of her,” Mikhail added.
“Who’s we?” I asked. “Dr. Hardcastle too?”
He shook his head sharply. “No. He does not know she is here. Maria and Vanya and I, we watch over her.”
“He did something,” I said. “I can almost remember, but . . .” I shook my head.
“It seems so,” Mrs. Popova said. “We don’t know what it is, but Vanya does. She’s the one that told us we had to be careful to hide her from Dr. Hardcastle.”
“That’s why he didn’t know me,” I said. “But you did. Why didn’t you say anything?”
“We weren’t certain what you wanted,” Mrs. Popova said. “Or what would happen when you came.”
“What is this place?” I demanded.
“A barren hunk of rock where a few fools tried to turn desolation into abundance and failed,” Mrs. Popova said. “This place had always been empty, because there was nothing here. No food, no warmth, no hope. Only evil.”
“The evil in this place wasn’t here until we brought it,” Mikhail rumbled.
“Who’s ‘we’?” I asked.
“The Krachka,” he said. “A fishing ship. There were seven of us. One day the nets dragged something up from the ocean that we didn’t understand. It was like a piece of broken glass the size of a man’s chest. From every angle, it looked different. Like it was flat, but you could never find the edge. It was held in a box covered in strange writing, wrapped with chains.”
“The Krachka crashed like a hundred and fifty years ago,” Liam said. Mikhail fixed him with a look.
“Hush. I am not finished. We started to hear things. Singing. When we looked at the glass, we saw the Six-Wing, the angel. I knew it was something wicked. Something that should be destroyed. But others seemed to worship it. They wanted to free it. I tried to stop them, so they tied me up in the hold, but I broke free. Ran the ship onto the rocks. That was when I lost my eye.” He took a shuddering breath, as if the pain still lived in him.
“Things got a bit chaotic after that,” Mrs. Popova said dryly. “The ship crashed against the rocks. Most of the sailors wouldn’t say anything or accept any help. But they let my brother bring Misha over to this side of the island, where our doctor lived,” Mrs. Popova said. “We tended to him. We didn’t realize until the next day that everyone else was gone. They’d vanished.”
“But that was not the worst of it,” Mikhail said. “The worst was when they came back.”
Mrs. Popova looked down at her hands. “The last time I told anyone about all of this was when your Dr. Kapoor came back from—from that other place. It’s strange to say it out loud.”
“All this time, we have kept silence,” Mikhail said, turning to Mrs. Popova. “What has it given us? Long life and little joy.”
Mrs. Popova sighed. “Very well. As you’ve probably gathered, my family was among the first to settle Bitter Rock. My father was Russian, my mother was Unangan. She converted to Russian Orthodox when she married him. She died of a sudden illness the winter before the Krachka came—and sometimes I thank God for that. She didn’t have to see what happened.
“In any case, the day after the crash, we found Belaya Skala empty. We searched, of course, the sea and the land. Looking for bodies or for some explanation. We found nothing except a hole in the hillside. Wide enough for a man to fall in. Deep. Too deep to climb down. The edges were . . . It’s hard to describe. It was like a wound. I was there with my father, helping. I was a young woman