showing starkly around her irises, met mine, and a fraction of my anger washed back into me.
“Oh,” I whispered. “Oh, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
The anger ebbed. She made a mewling sound and drew back against the wall, pulling in on herself.
She’d borne it all. All my anger, all my fear. It hadn’t been an empty, uncaring void that held my rage and terror for me. It was her.
“I’m sorry,” I said again. But she shook her head, as if it didn’t matter.
“It’s all right. Because you’ve come back,” my echo said. “You’ve come back and now it ends, but how it ends, we don’t know.”
I could see my reflection in her eyes. My true reflection, mirrored as it should be. And I knew, from the faint vibration in my bones, that I could slip as easily into that other world as I could step through a doorway. “We’ll end it,” I told her.
“What if we can’t?” she asked.
“Then we can’t,” I replied. I took her hand and helped her up.
One of us was real.
One of us was the echo.
One of us had been saved.
One of us had been abandoned.
But was I the real girl? Or was she? And was the abandoned child the one who had stayed in the echo, her mother’s arms around her, or the one cast out on the sea?
Neither of us had chosen our beginning or the shape of our lives. But we could choose an ending.
“What do we do?” Liam asked.
“I—” I said. I was uncertain. And yet I felt the answer, a lump in my chest waiting to force its way out, the way I had answered Lily without knowing how. I had known the answers because my echo did. Sophie, I thought. She called herself Sophie, not Sophia. She might have aged, stayed the perfect reflection of me, but time didn’t pass in the echo world. She was still Sophie. Still the child left behind.
We were connected. I knew the things that she knew. And then, standing there with our hands linked, reflected in one another’s eyes, I remembered.
28
“PLEASE,” I SAID. The girl with the camera was afraid but trying not to show it. There was a ghost with her, but she couldn’t see it. It shimmered beneath her skin, haunting her, but the sunlight would not let it breathe and be.
“Yeah. Okay. Between the two of you . . . I’ll take the one with the face,” said the girl.
The screaming came across the hills, chased swiftly by the thunder of the angel’s wings. It was a gift and a warning, and it meant we had little time. “Hurry!” I cried.
She was a clumsy thing, scrabbling over rocks and catching herself on her palms when she stumbled. But she followed. Not toward the traps: the throat of the bunker, with only one way in and one way out, or the church, the false haven where the angel watched. I brought her toward the north, where the birds roosted. The cliffs were silent now; the birds tended their young beyond the echo, where the persistent sun would let them grow.
We were nearly there when she fell. I grabbed for her, caught her wrist, but the camera tumbled from her hand and skidded down the side of the hill. She lunged for it. “No!” I told her. “No time.” We were almost to the cliffs. We were almost safe.
“I have to get it back,” she said.
“You’ll die.”
She gave me a vicious, wild look. She wasn’t afraid of death. More than that. She thought she’d earned it.
“She’ll be lost,” I told her, desperate.
“Who?” she demanded.
“The girl in your bones,” I told her. “It will drink her down.”
“What girl?” She shook her head in confusion.
“She’s shining in you,” I said. “She never let you go.”
“My sister. Miranda,” she whispered. The kind of love that shone like that, you wouldn’t mistake. She ran with me, over the gray rock to the white, and I led her along the foot-wide track that hugged the bluff.
“These rocks,” she said. “They’re—salt? Why? Is it some kind of—” She stopped as I turned to look at her. “There isn’t a reason, is there?”
“There is,” I said. “But I don’t know . . .” I waved my hands. I didn’t know how to tell her that the angel feared the touch of salt, and feared this place, and so this place was salt. That the angel feared this place because it was salt. That both of these things were true, because