cause and effect were the snake devouring its own tail, the bird laying the egg from which it hatched.
The birds flocked here because the angel feared it. The angel feared it because the birds flocked here. The thing and its reflection. Who could say which was which?
The screeching came again. Closer now, but we were almost safe. “Here,” I said, and I stepped into the cliff face, into the crack where white against white concealed a passage just wide enough for a single slender figure. The girl had more trouble with it, scraping her back and her hips as she negotiated her passage. But then she was through.
My home: a cave, carved from the salt with rocks and broken shells and fingernails, a centimeter scratched out at a time over the years. We stood in the first chamber, littered with the detritus of my wounded life. A broken chair brought over from the LARC. The wooden birds Uncle Misha gave me every winter. Bits and pieces I’d stolen from other people, other lives.
I’d never shown it to anyone before. I looked at her expectantly. The light from the passage was enough for me to see her wobbly smile.
“It’s . . . nice,” she said.
Outside, the angel screeched again. This time it was not the warning sound, but the red sound, the rage sound. The girl flinched.
“Safe,” I told her. I took her hands and walked her to the chair, sat her down in it. “Safe.”
“What is this place?” she asked.
“Home,” I said. “It doesn’t come here.”
“You brought her.” The voice was dry and rasping. The girl’s eyes widened. “I want to see her.” The girl stood, looking toward the back. Toward the second room, toward the shadows from which the voice came.
“It’s all right,” I told her.
“Come closer.”
The girl swallowed and walked toward the voice. I remained, sitting on the salt of the floor, biting my thumb hard enough to hurt. The girl crept closer and closer to the dark. She cast one last look over her shoulder at me, and then vanished within the second chamber, out of the reach of the light. I wrapped my arms around my knees.
I did not go into the dark anymore. My fingertips were still scarred from the effort of clawing out the salt of the walls, digging a space where the light would never touch.
It was impossible to say how long the girl was back there. This was not a place where time found purchase. But when she emerged, she looked pale, and she wetted her lips several times before she spoke.
“She told me what’s happening. That this world is going to spread. That that thing—the Six-Wing?—is going to use you and Sophia to do it. And every person in the world will suffer.”
“Not just people,” I said. I trailed my fingers along the salt, sending loose grains skittering. The words were in my chest, a recitation, mimicry giving me more eloquence than I possessed. “Magpies hold funerals for their dead. An albatross flies ten thousand lonely miles and never forgets its mate. We are not the only ones that would be mourned.”
I wished the words were mine. I wished I had words to put to all the thoughts that flew in a great murmuration through me, but I had trouble holding on to spoken things. I had only pieces of them, the trailing edge of echoes.
“She told me what I have to do,” the girl said. “And she said that you have to bring Sophia here, and then we can try. I can go with you. Help you.”
I shook my head. “You stay. Safe.”
“You won’t be.”
“Stay with her,” I insisted. “It’s not good alone.”
She looked back over her shoulder. Bit her lip. “I’ll stay,” she promised me. “Until you get back, I’ll stay.”
I padded away, the salt scraping at the soles of my feet. She didn’t follow as I slipped back out into the sunlight.
Two terns had fallen through the echoes to this one, and they glided lazily out over the water. That meant the mist was rising, in the other world, the barriers grown thin. It was time to go.
29
SOPHIE SQUEEZED MY hand. She looked grateful, and I understood why—she didn’t have the words to tell us what had happened or what we had to do, but I did. She could use my words, and I could use her memory, and together we were almost whole.
“Abby is still alive, or she was a few hours ago,” I said. “She’s with—”