and clambering onward on the slippery rock.
I should have been relieved. But now the secret was once again mine, so was the responsibility. I’d have to tell him myself. And to say it out loud again felt like an incantation: as if each time I uttered the words, I made Kip’s past more real.
chapter 9
Piper and Zoe had paused on the brink of the final island. Piper blocked the way, crouching at the point where the isthmus met the wooded slope.
When I tried to edge past him, he stood and yanked at my sweater, pulling me back. “Wait,” he said.
“What are you doing?” I said, shaking him off.
“Look,” he said, crouching again and peering at the path. I bent to see what he was so intent on.
He pointed out the strand of wire stretched across the width of the path, six inches above the ground. “Stay down,” he said. Zoe, beside him, squatted on her heels. He leaned forward and tugged the wire.
The arrow passed a foot above our heads and disappeared into the sea. Piper stood, grinning. Somewhere on the island ahead of us, a bell was clanging. I looked back to the water. The arrow had not even left a ripple. If we’d been standing, it would have gone straight through us.
“She’ll know we’re coming, at least,” said Zoe. “But she won’t be happy that you wasted an arrow.”
Piper bent and pulled the wire again. Twice slowly, twice quickly, and slowly twice more. Up the hill, the bell sounded out the rhythm.
Three more times, as we crossed the island, Piper or Zoe halted us so that we could step over trip wires. Another time, I felt the trap even before Zoe warned me to step off the path. When I bent to examine the ground, I could sense a kind of insubstantiality to it: a confusion between air and earth. Crouching, I saw the layer of long willow twigs woven together and covered with leaves.
“There’s a six-foot drop under there,” Piper said. “Sharpened stakes planted at the bottom, too. Sally made Zoe and me dig it, when we were teenagers. Was a bitch of a job.” He set off ahead of me. “Come on.”
It took us nearly an hour to cross the island, making our way up the forested slope and avoiding the traps. Eventually we ran out of land. The island had climbed to a peak at its southern edge, where a cliff dropped away to the sea in front of us. There was nothing beyond but the waves and the unlikely angles of the submerged city.
“There,” said Piper, pointing through the final trees. “Sally’s place.”
I could see nothing but the trees, their pale trunks blotched with brown like an old man’s hands. Then I saw the door. It was low, and half-concealed by the boulders that clustered at the cliff’s edge. It stood impossibly close to the end of the bluff—it looked like a doorway into nothingness, and was so faded and battered by the coastal winds that the wood was bleached to the same shade as the salt-parched grasses around it. It had been built to take advantage of the cover of the boulders, so that at least half of the building must have hung out over the edge of the cliff itself.
Zoe whistled, the same rhythm that Piper had sounded on the warning bell: two slow notes, two quick, and two slow.
The woman who opened the door was the oldest person I’d ever seen. Her hair was sparse enough that I could see the curve of scalp beneath it. Around her neck, the skin was draped like a cowl. Even her nose looked tired, drooping at the tip like melted candle wax. I was fairly sure that her forehead bore no brand, but it was hard to tell: age had branded her now, her forehead cragged with wrinkles. The loose flesh of her eyelids hung so low over her eyes that I imagined they must disappear altogether when she smiled.
But she wasn’t smiling now. She was looking at us.
“I hoped you wouldn’t come,” she said.
“Nice to see you, too,” said Zoe.
“I knew you wouldn’t come unless you were desperate,” the woman said. She came forward, a lurch in her step. Both legs were twisted, the joints gnarled and fused. She embraced Zoe first, and then Piper. Zoe closed her eyes when Sally held her. I tried to picture Zoe and Piper as they must have been when, ten years old and on the run,