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“Come on, Abby. Where are you?” I whispered. No answer. I growled in frustration and slammed my hand against the wall beside me, only succeeding in scraping the side of my fist. I forced my way forward to the crack.

“Abby!” I called. She had come this way so there had to be a way through. And maybe there was, in that other place. “Abby, can you hear me?”

There was a breeze through the crack, faint as a sigh. I could sense the void on the other side, the emptiness of another tunnel, maybe even a cavern. Nothing and nothing and nothing answered, and then at once there was an eye, pressed to the other side, glistening in the thin sliver of light from the flashlight. I let out a startled scream and jerked back, forgetting the cramped quarters. My back smacked against the wall.

“Sophia?” It was Abby. I steadied myself and leaned close to the crack again.

“Are you all right?” I asked. “Liam wasn’t making a lot of sense. He said something took you.”

“It’s coming back,” she whispered. “I got away, but I don’t know how long I can hide,” she said. She made a gulping sound of fear and animal distress. “I hear it. Please—”

She reached for me through the crack, and I reached for her, as if I could pull her through, as if I could save her. But it was so narrow I could barely fit my hand through. She looked over her shoulder and her eyes widened. “No, no, no,” she said, in prayer and panic. I thrust my hand farther in, wriggling to try to eke out one more centimeter, and she did the same, frantic.

Our fingertips touched for one instant. I shoved forward, and my hand closed over hers. If only I could hold on to her. If only—

Something pressed into my palm. The sharp wooden wings of a bird, and with it something smooth and plastic. She closed my fingers over it. “So he knows,” she said. “Don’t let me be another mystery to haunt him, Sophia. Don’t let him follow.”

She meant Dr. Ashford, I realized. The man who’d protectedher for years. Raised her. And if I didn’t get this out of here, he would never know what had happened to her.

“Next time you see me, don’t trust me,” she whispered.

“Abby—”

“Sophia. Run.”

The tunnel echoed with the sound of wings. Abby snatched her hand away.

“Abby!” I called, jamming my flashlight against the crack, but I couldn’t make out anything but emptiness beyond. Emptiness, but not silence. In the deep, in the dark, someone was singing.

20

I RAN BACKthrough the tunnel and squeezed my way free into the circular room, half fearing that the others would be gone, but Lily was kneeling at Liam’s side and looked up as I stumbled in. “Did you find her?” she asked.

My breath came too fast. My fear was turning to panic, the useful edge of adrenaline giving way to a frantic confusion that would only get me killed. But the void was waiting. I focused inward, feeling my breath expand my lungs, letting it out—and letting the fear go with it, into the darkness of the void. It drank up my fear, leaving me steady again.

“We have to go. Now,” I said, smooth as glass. I looked down at my hand, closed in a fist around the thing Abby had given me along with the bird. I eased my fingers open to find an SD card. Not the one we’d found earlier—this was different. From Abby’s camera? “Liam, can you walk?”

But he was staring at the wall, eyes unfocused. His lips moved, and he was mumbling something, but it was impossible to make out.

The music was getting louder. It was like a hundred voices, all overlapping over each other, but it was somehow only one voice at the same time. A language I knew and didn’t know. I kept catching the edge of understanding and then losing my grip on it.

“We have to go,” I said again, shaking Liam’s shoulder.

“I’ve got him,” Lily assured me. She got her arm under Liam’s and hauled him to his feet, surprisingly strong for her size. We shambled to the stairs, cajoling Liam into moving at every step. And at every step, I waited for the sound of wings. We reached the first landing, and I turned, shining my flashlight back toward the black mouth of the tunnel.

It had gotten wider, and there were people in it. The beam didn’t reach far enough to illuminate their faces, but their silhouettes were crowded together, watching.

I didn’t look back again. Not until the top of the stairs, and then only fleetingly, and all I saw was the wild leap of shadows as the flashlight beam raked across the stairwell. Then we were back in the main room of the bunker, and Lily paused to catch her breath. Liam pulled away from her, stumbling and catching himself on one of the tables.

“You all right?” I asked. He shook his head, which was its own kind of progress. “We need to keep moving. Fast.”

“The door is stuck closed,” Lily reminded me. I ducked out from under Liam’s arm anyway and jogged toward the entrance. Had the walls been striped with that much mold before, glistening and black, shot through with silvery lichen?

The door hung open, and beyond was only gray. The mist. Lightning flashed sporadically in the sky, but no thunder to follow it. The flashes illuminated shapes in the air, strange and twisting things far above.

“We’re on the wrong island,” I said dully.

“Sophia!” Lily yelled. I twisted to look behind me, back toward the stairwell. Mold crawled from the stairwell, creeping its way along the walls, and among it bloomed strange mushrooms that looked like teeth. A sound rose up from the stairwell, a dusty, thrashing sound, and the soft percussion of feathers striking stone.