I swallowed. The voice in the dark. I remembered scraping at the salt to make that room. I remembered her voice. But Sophie had walled off the memory of the sight of her, and I didn’t know why. “She’s with my mother. They can help us get into the echo, as deep as we can go, and then we can close it. Sophie and I.”
“How do you know all of that?” Dr. Kapoor asked. “Some kind of psychic transference?”
“We’re the same person, sort of,” I said. “We can remember each other’s lives.” Our memories bled into each other. And now I knew why I had so often woken with the taste of salt on my lips, why every rock on this island felt so familiar.
“The mist will fade soon,” Dr. Kapoor said. “Getting over the water should be easy enough. Can you get us into the echo world?”
I met Sophie’s eyes, the image of myself reflected in them. “Yes,” I said.
“We should move quickly,” Mrs. Popova said. “Mist’s gone.”
“How can you tell?” I asked. We weren’t near any windows.
“You get so you can feel it,” she told me. “The Visitors don’t linger after the mist leaves. Or at least they haven’t before, but things that have held constant for a hundred years have gone haywire with you here, so who the fuck knows.” Mrs. Popova was Very Done With This Shit.
“You can stay here,” I said. “You’ve done enough.”
“It should be safe in the LARC,” Dr. Kapoor said. “Liam, you’ll stay with Mrs. Popova.”
“No way,” Liam said. “I’m going.”
“You are not,” Dr. Kapoor said. “I shouldn’t have let your mother leave you here in the first place. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“I’m eighteen,” Liam said. “I don’t need your permission. If you want to stop me, you’re going to have to tie me up.”
Dr. Kapoor looked like she was very willing to do just that, but Mrs. Popova grunted. “No one’s safe. Here or there,” she said. “And he’s got a part in this whether you like it or not.”
Dr. Kapoor nodded reluctantly. I was still holding Sophie’s hand. She had a distant look on her face. “We need to hurry,” she said. “He’s gathering his strength. He’ll be able to send them through again soon.”
Which meant the mist would come, and the Visitors with it. “We can head straight to the dock,” I said.
“The Katydid’s down there,” Kenny confirmed. “We can be over in no time.”
“Who’s ‘we’?” Dr. Kapoor asked.
“Lily vanished over there. So that’s where we should be looking,” Kenny said.
Guilt went through me like a fishhook. “Lily’s dead,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“You—you’re sure?” he asked, holding on to hope with every bit of strength he had.
It broke my heart to tear it from him. “Yes,” I said. “She’s gone. I saw her die.”
His face crumpled. He looked away and seemed for a moment unable to breathe. Dr. Kapoor put a hand on his shoulder. It was the most tender gesture I’d seen from her.
“Stay here,” she said. “If we don’t make it back, you can still get help. Warn people.”
I wasn’t sure what good that would do. But I was glad when Kenny nodded. He’d be safe—or safer than us, at least. It was something.
“I need to go back for Mikhail,” Mrs. Popova said.
But Sophie caught my hand, and I knew. “He’s dead,” I said, grieving for a man I hardly knew.
“You’re certain,” Mrs. Popova said sharply.
Sophie stepped forward, addressing Mrs. Popova directly. “I saw,” Sophie said. “He’s gone. The Warden too.” Her voice was utterly calm. I might have thought she felt nothing at all if I weren’t feeling it for her. Sorrow so deep I didn’t know how I would ever find the bottom or break the surface.
“Sophia?” Liam said, and I realized there were tears running down my cheeks.
“I’m all right,” I whispered. “It isn’t mine.”
Sophie couldn’t survive her sorrow, and so for her, I wept.
* * *
We went down to the shore together, the three of us, Kenny and Mrs. Popova safely within the fortress of the LARC.
“I want to be clear about something,” Dr. Kapoor said, fixing Liam with a steely glare. “You survive, or I will kill you myself. I don’t care if the whole world drowns.”
He gaped but nodded. And I ached. I ached because of what the island had taken from us both—that love, that ferocious love. He’d lost her to the island—not completely, not the way I’d lost my mother, but he’d lost her just the