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“Safe,” I told her. I took her hands and walked her to the chair, sat her down in it. “Safe.”

“What is this place?” she asked.

“Home,” I said. “It doesn’t come here.”

“You brought her.”The voice was dry and rasping. The girl’s eyes widened.“I want to see her.”The girl stood, looking toward the back. Toward the second room, toward the shadows from which the voice came.

“It’s all right,” I told her.

“Come closer.”

The girl swallowed and walked toward the voice. I remained, sitting on the salt of the floor, biting my thumb hard enough to hurt. The girl crept closer and closer to the dark. She cast one last look over her shoulder at me, and then vanished within the second chamber, out of the reach of the light. I wrapped my arms around my knees.

I did not go into the dark anymore. My fingertips were still scarred from the effort of clawing out the salt of the walls, digging a space where the light would never touch.

It was impossible to say how long the girl was back there. This was not a place where time found purchase. But when she emerged, she looked pale, and she wetted her lips several times before she spoke.

“She told me what’s happening. That this world is going to spread. That that thing—the Six-Wing?—is going to use you and Sophia to do it. And every person in the world will suffer.”

“Not just people,” I said. I trailed my fingers along the salt, sending loose grains skittering. The words were in my chest, a recitation, mimicry giving me more eloquence than I possessed. “Magpies hold funerals for their dead. An albatross flies ten thousand lonely miles and never forgets its mate. We are not the only ones that would be mourned.”

I wished the words were mine. I wished I had words to put to all the thoughts that flew in a great murmuration through me, but I had trouble holding on to spoken things. I had only pieces of them, the trailing edge of echoes.

“She told me what I have to do,” the girl said. “And she said that you have to bring Sophia here, and then we can try. I can go with you. Help you.”

I shook my head. “You stay. Safe.”

“You won’t be.”

“Stay with her,” I insisted. “It’s not good alone.”

She looked back over her shoulder. Bit her lip. “I’ll stay,” she promised me. “Until you get back, I’ll stay.”

I padded away, the salt scraping at the soles of my feet. She didn’t follow as I slipped back out into the sunlight.

Two terns had fallen through the echoes to this one, and they glided lazily out over the water. That meant the mist was rising, in the other world, the barriers grown thin. It was time to go.

29

SOPHIE SQUEEZED MYhand. She looked grateful, and I understood why—she didn’t have the words to tell us what had happened or what we had to do, but I did. She could use my words, and I could use her memory, and together we were almost whole.

“Abby is still alive, or she was a few hours ago,” I said. “She’s with—” 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 mylips, 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.”