voice like the scrape of rocks. His clothes were patchy, moldering, and his skin was patchy too—peeling from wind-carved sores. I stood rooted in place.
It wasn’t him, but it didn’t matter.
He was the echo of the man who’d tried to kill me, and my body didn’t care that those weren’t the hands that had done it. It feared them just the same.
Help me, I whispered silently, and Sophie replied—replied with all the rage and fury that had sent her at Hardcastle on the shore. Anger was better than fear. Anger was fire, and I needed fire. “Get out of my way,” I growled, advancing. If I’d had one of Dr. Kapoor’s guns, I wouldn’t have hesitated an instant to use it.
But Hardcastle only kept smiling. “Come on. I’ll take you to them,” he said.
I shook my head. If he took me, I was lost.
“There are other ways,” he said. “Less kind. But come with me, and they can live. Your friends.”
“You really think I’d believe that face?” I asked. “You should have worn someone else.” Hardcastle’s echo laughed.
I flung myself at the empty space beside him, thinking to force my way past. He caught me around the waist and tossed me back onto the rocky ground. My back took the impact, knocking my breath out of me. Abby yelled something, and Hardcastle came at me.
I bunched up my legs and drove both of my feet, in their heavy boots, into his stomach. He let out a whuff of breath. His torso gave oddly, and I could feel something soft tearing, something brittle cracking. He staggered back and swiped his hand across his mouth, smearing black liquid across his palm. He grinned, and his teeth were black with it. He came at me again.
This time when I kicked at him, he caught me by the ankle and dragged my body forward. I rolled, scrabbling at the ground to find some purchase, and the angle gave me a glimpse of what was happening behind me—and why Abby and Liam weren’t helping.
More echoes had appeared. Some of them were twisted beyond recognition, corrupted echoes like Lily’s. Others wore the faces of the Landontown residents, or air force uniforms, or LARC ID badges swinging around their necks on lanyards.
Abby and Liam had spread out, darting in opposite directions to avoid the attackers. There were too many of them. We were going to fail, I realized. We were going to fail here and now, and they were going to die, and I was going to be taken, and my defiance would do nothing.
And then came a croaking cry, and the sky filled with black wings, so vast for a moment I thought the dark would swallow me, thought the Six-Wing had come—but no.
Moriarty.
The raven’s talons raked the back of Hardcastle’s head and he yelled in pain. Blood and black ichor splattered around us.
Dr. Kapoor had put Moriarty back in his cage before we left. Mrs. Popova could have let him out, maybe. But I didn’t think she would. Which meant—which meant maybe Dr. Kapoor had. Which meant that she was alive, that she had escaped.
I kicked out. It broke Hardcastle’s grip, and I scrambled to my feet. He lurched toward me, but the raven was there, clamoring around him. I grabbed a rock from the ground—bigger than two fists, one edge sharp. I held it in both hands, above my head, and swung it hard against the side of his skull.
It crunched—not like bone but like a branch giving under your foot. He dropped. I didn’t stop to see if he would get up again. I ran.
I knew what was coming, the transition from church to cavern, the straight beams of wood turning to rough stone. Still I stumbled. My palms slapped against the ground. I heaved back up and kept running down the twisting path. Past knobby columns of stone, through the hollow, liquid sounds that plopped and pinged around me. The path twisted and looped, its shape more serpentine than I remembered.
And then it stopped. My breath was loud. The air was cool and damp. The path bottomed out into the wide chamber, with its weeping congregants, the pale children flitting between them. The shard—the heart of the echo—hung suspended above the black pool, dripping the blood of that other world. And before it was Sophie, blank-eyed, a wide bowl balanced on her palms—and with her was the Six-Wing.
33
I FROZE, BUT the Six-Wing didn’t react to my presence. Its wings bent forward, encircling