Abby begins to pant, as if from exertion, though their pace is not strenuous.
SOPHIA: Are you okay?
ABBY: Something’s wrong. We should have reached the bottom by now.
LIAM: Do you hear that? Someone’s singing.
SOPHIE: It’s coming. It’s found us.
Metal creaks above them. Sophia trains the camera on the dark above, and the flashlights shine along the underside of the metal steps. Down the walls comes a rush of dark mold.
ABBY: Come on!
They clatter down the stairs, but only keep going down and down and down.
ABBY: The blood and the salt. It’s supposed to keep the way open. Keep it the same. It isn’t . . . it isn’t working. The Six-Wing isn’t supposed to be able to stop us like this, but—
SOPHIE: Living blood. It requires living blood.
ABBY: Sorry, do you know something I don’t? Because I don’t remember dying.
SOPHIE: No. But you carry the dead. You’re haunted.
LIAM: Aren’t we all?
ABBY: This is no time for poetry, Harry Potter.
LIAM: Harry Potter? Is that seriously the only British thing you can think of?
ABBY: Fish and chips. Bangers and mash.
SOPHIA: Can you two stop bickering for one minute?
ABBY: I don’t know what to do.
Something clatters and bangs against the walls up above. Sophie looks up.
SOPHIE: You go. I stay. I can make it let you go for a little while. Long enough.
SOPHIA: Wait a minute. You aren’t giving yourself to that thing!
LIAM: Guys?
SOPHIE: It won’t hurt me. Not yet.
LIAM: Guys!
They whip around. Their flashlights converge on the landing above. It should bathe the whole landing in light, but the figure there defies illumination. Its edges are like ink dropped into water, dissolving without ever losing its substance. Its body is human in outline, but it is like an absence in the world. Its wings are half-folded, all six of them, made of the same black void as the rest of the being. The image stutters, flickering back and forth like a digital glitch. Not quite there, not quite here.
Sophie steps toward it.
SOPHIA: Sophie, no—
She snatches for Sophie’s hand, but Sophie steps smoothly out of reach, walking calmly up the steps toward the creature. She stretches out her hands, murmuring something the microphone doesn’t quite catch. The creature retreats a step, the movement uncertain.
SOPHIE: It’s all right. It’s what must happen.
She looks over her shoulder. There is fear in her eyes, but determination too.
SOPHIE: Go. Find Mother. I’ll be ready.
The creature of shadow and void spreads its wings, and leaps upon her. Sophie screams, her calm torn away, but before Sophia or anyone else can move to help her, they are gone—the Six-Wing, the echo-girl, even the mold that covered the walls moments ago.
All that remains is the distant sound of wings.
31
I SHUT MY eyes, not to block out the image of what had just happened, but to focus. There—Sophie was there. The sense of her. The sensations of her, her heartbeat quick, mouth sour with adrenaline. Alive, and not in pain, and not afraid—or not only afraid, a storm of other feelings clashing within her, too chaotic to tease apart or interpret.
It’s okay, she’d told that thing, like she was comforting it. What did that mean?
Meanwhile, the stones were screaming.
It was a tortured sound, more tearing than grinding, and we clapped our hands over our ears as it went on and on and on. The walls buckled. The stairs collapsed into each other like a twisting kaleidoscope, and then everything snapped into brutal focus. The Six-Wing’s hold relinquished, the stairs led down, as they should, to a concrete floor, to a steel door.
Abby lurched down the last few steps and to the concrete floor. Her knees buckled. She caught herself in a crouch, and Liam rushed to help her back to her feet. Her skin was the same gray as the walls around us, her lips pale and cracked.
Alive, I told myself, looking upward into the dark. Alive. Stay that way, I willed my echo.
“I’m good,” Abby said, pulling free of Liam’s support. She wavered, but stayed upright, and held up a warning hand when he started to reach out to her again. Oil and water still.
I set my hand against the steel door handle. Something soft and wet gave beneath my fingers, but I suppressed my shudder and shoved the door open, revealing the round room. The memory room, I’d called it when Lily asked me what lay beyond, and now I understood why. They were her memories, of course. Sophie’s. Even her handprints, here and there,