Our Last Echoes

by Kate Alice Marshall

  “I came for you,” I whispered. She looked skeletal. She wasn’t just leaning against the salt wall—it had grown over her, turning her clothing into firm plates like armor, coating her skin, which was red and raw beneath.

  But she was my mother. She was the face I saw when I closed my eyes. I had always wondered if that face was a real memory, or if it was a composite of pictures and stories and imagination, but here she was in front of me and it didn’t matter.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m sorry I couldn’t go with you.”

  “You had to protect Sophie,” I said. “I know that now.”

  She reached for me, but I was too far away. I hesitated—hesitated just for a moment, staring at that salt-rimed skin, those sunken eyes, those brittle limbs. Her face crumpled. “You’re afraid,” she said despairingly.

  “Yes,” I said. My voice broke. “I’m afraid. I’m afraid of this place. I’m afraid of what you’ve turned into. I’m afraid of what’s going to happen to me and what that thing wants me for. I’m afraid, Mama, and you weren’t there.” A sob tore free of me. She stretched out a hand for me again—but she couldn’t reach me. I was the one who had to move.

  Step by halting step, I did. She caught my hands and drew me down, drew me against her. Her heart beat erratically. Her skin was cold and sharp with salt. She smelled of sea and stone, and there was nothing soft in her, but she held me, and I wept, and my tears made channels in the salt.

  “Little bird,” she said. “I thought you would be safe.”

  “I wasn’t,” I said. “He threw me in the water. You weren’t there, and he tried to kill me. I don’t know how I didn’t drown.” Blame was a thorn in every word. I couldn’t help it. I knew why she had stayed, and still I hated her for it. I hated her for choosing Sophie over me.

  “Neither do I,” she said. “But you didn’t drown. You lived, and you’ll live now. Both my beautiful girls will live.” She said it like she was making a promise to herself.

  “The Six-Wing took Sophie,” I told her.

  She stiffened. “No,” she said. “No, no, no, that can’t—she can’t—”

  “She said it wouldn’t hurt her,” I hurriedly added. “She said it needed both of us.”

  “Yes,” she said with some relief. “It needs you both. But once it has you both, it’s done.”

  “But we can stop it,” I said. “Sophie and I. If we’re together, we can destroy this place.”

  I sat up, pulling away from her. She pressed her palms to my cheeks, her smile fragile.

  “I have dreamed of you a thousand times,” she said. “I wish that you had stayed away. But I know that you can do this.”

  “I will,” I said with all the boldness I could muster. “And then we’ll go home. You and me—and Sophie.”

  “I can’t go home,” she said. “I wish I could, little bird, but there isn’t enough of me left.”

  My eyes had adjusted in the dark. And so when I looked at her this time, I saw what I hadn’t before. Broken, ragged black wings, growing from her back. They were grafted to the salt, vanishing beneath it. Blood stained the wall around them, and fresh wounds wept where the skin had opened.

  “This place gets inside of you,” she whispered. Her pupils were pinpricks; her irises filled her whole eyes. “It gets inside of you, and you’ll never scrape it all out.”

  32

  I STOOD ON the gray rock, the taste of salt on my lips where I had pressed a kiss against my mother’s cheek. Live, she’d told me. Please just live. But I hadn’t wanted my last words to her to be a lie. I love you, I’d said instead.

  Abby held my phone now, recording; Liam held my hand. We faced the ramshackle village, and we steeled ourselves one last time as we started forward.

  “It’s quiet,” Abby murmured. “Not to be cliché, but—”

  “They don’t need to come for us,” I said. “We’re coming to them, remember?”

  “If it’s what they want, doesn’t that mean it’s a bad idea?” Liam asked.

  “There isn’t a good idea in this scenario.”

  There was a shadow in the doorway of the church. I expected wings and empty eyes, but it was a man, his shoulders slightly hunched and his face obscured by the dark. We walked forward.

  “We can’t let them take me,” I said. “I don’t know exactly what happens if they do. But I have to make it inside with my will intact.”

  “We’ve got you,” Abby assured me.

  “All the way to the end,” Liam added. He squeezed my hand. For a moment I saw, as vividly as if it was truly laid out in front of me, the future that might have been. The future that belonged to Sophia Hayes: a summer of endless sunlight, of hard work, of evenings learning Liam Kapoor by heart. A future flung open to possibility, hers to choose. And she’d choose him. They’d travel, drink coffee in cafes, wander side streets, hike trails. They’d go everywhere until they found the here they wanted to stay in, and having seen the world, they’d build their own.

  But I was Sophia Novak, and my future was not one of endless possibility. It was as unyielding as the rock beneath our feet. It was the church, and it was what lay inside, and there was nothing else beyond it that I could see. That I could even hope for.

  We’d reached the church. It seemed larger than it had before, grander—and the shadows within it were far too deep. The man in the doorway stepped forward. William Hardcastle’s echo looked at me and smiled.

  “Welcome home,” he said, his 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.

  An
d 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 Sophie. Through the gaps, I watched its long arm extend, its fingers brush against her shoulder. It sang, the words not from any language I’d ever heard—and yet I almost understood them.

  Sophie lifted the bowl to her lips and drank, and acidic cold trickled down my throat. With each swallow, I understood more of the song, and things beyond the song. This is how it would reclaim us. Change our hearts so that we obeyed only its whims. And then we would sing for it in turn, and wrench open the gate that bound the Eidolon.

  Sophie drank, and I crept forward, my fear dissolving into peace. The black liquid slid down Sophie’s throat. I passed between soldiers and sailors and men and women. I took my place across from Sophie, the Six-Wing between us. A child appeared, a girl no more than seven or eight, and she placed a shallow bowl in my hands, filled to the brim with black liquid. I smiled and lifted it to my lips.

  The Six-Wing turned to watch.

  Suddenly the Six-Wing wasn’t the matte black of empty shadow—I could see it. See it truly. Its face was blurred, indistinct. Its eyes—the pupil and iris shivered, splitting in two, merging again. And that was what was wrong with its face, too, shuttling rapidly from one to another.

  It had my mother’s face. She surfaced from the shadows, submerged, then broke the surface again—and I heard her in the song, too. The Six-Wing sang of the shard and the broken world and the gate.

  My mother—my mother’s echo—sang of me, and of Sophie. She sang of the black, of sinking into it, of pulling it inside of her and being pulled inside of it. It had tried to unmake her, but her daughters needed her, and she would not let go. If Sophie and I were special, it was because we were Joy Novak’s daughter. She was different. Her echo was different too. The Six-Wing had created Joy’s echo, but it could not control her. Instead, she had sunk into the black pool, the stuff from which all the echoes were born, the stuff from which the Six-Wing’s echo had arisen. And she had taken control.

  Not completely. But enough. Enough to let Dr. Kapoor and Dr. Hardcastle escape. Enough to corrupt the new echoes into unstable, mad things, obviously inhuman and barely functional.

  Enough to save me.

  With every beat of those great wings, with every word of the song, she became less her, more it, but somehow, somehow, she had remained.

  The Six-Wing reached for me. No, she reached for me, my mother’s echo.

  Our hands met and I saw, I remembered as she poured the memory into me through the song.

  She cannot persist against the fury of the Six-Wing, but she must. She must stay herself, she must remember, because her daughters are running and they will not live if she fails. She holds and she holds and she holds and go, she whispers, go. They reach the shore—go—they reach the boat.

  And William has the gun. William has the gun and she almost lets it loose, this monster, this winged beast, this servant of a broken prince, because if she lets him loose, together they can tear William apart. But there will be no end to the blood, then, and so she watches as Joy whispers her love to one of their daughters and she hates this woman, this flesh-and-bone version of herself—she hates her for choosing one, until she sees what Joy means to do.

  What Joy does: she stays. She stays, because both these children are their daughters and Joy and her echo are both their mothers, and of course she stays, and they will protect her, this child of theirs who must remain.

  But the echo of Joy Novak watches the ship on the water. She watches them reach the very edge of this false world, and she opens for them a way out. And then, with all her effort trained on that gap, that tear for them to escape through, she can only watch, helpless, as William throws her daughter from the boat.

  She is rage and she is fear, and she is the Six-Wing, and there is so little room left to be Joy. And yet she holds, because she cannot keep the way out open and still strike at him.

  She holds, because if she does not, he dies and so does her daughter.

  She lets the boat slip away, slip through the mist. And she plunges beneath the waves, into the deep water where her daughter sinks, eyes open, lungs empty, on the edge of the breath that will end her. She holds. She lifts the girl up. She kisses her lips to fill her lungs with breath.

  She pulls her from the water, but it is not enough, because the ocean is cold and hungry and the shore is so far away. And so she gathers her will and makes it a solid thing—her arms encircle her daughter and turn to wood, her words whisper their way into a wind to coax the sea into carrying her. She uses all of the Six-Wing’s power, all of its control over this place to craft a ship out of nothing.

  The Six-Wing screams, for it wants the child. It needs the child.

  But it made a mistake. It made too perfect an echo. It stole Joy Novak’s face, her voice. Her love. And that love is strong enough to bend this false reality. It is strong enough to keep the Six-Wing caged.

  The boat she has made for her daughter floats away, the girl shivering, curled up in its bottom.

  Go, she whispers. Go.

  Time works differently here. For the echo of the woman who was Joy, it stutters. Sometimes she sees her daughter: singing by the water, skipping rocks, running from the echoes who hunt her, always. Joy’s echo distracts them. She blinds them. She walks them into the ocean to be battered by the rocks.

  She holds. For years, she holds.

  She cannot protect her daughter alone. But she is not alone, and Joy Novak tends the girl well.

  It is moments later. It is a lifetime past. Her daughters are both here, and she cannot hold any longer. She is so tired.

  “Help them,” I whispered. I gave her memories of my own. Abby and Liam and the echoes outside, Moriarty with his furious darkness. “Help them, please.”

  She could not help them. Not alone. But she was never alone here, because my mother stayed. Together they protected Sophie. And together, they can do this.

  I felt her cast herself out over stone, over salt, the Six-Wing stripping free of her as she crosses where it cannot. She finds Joy Novak, half-broken, half-human. My mother’s echo isn’t made of flesh and blood a
nymore—she’s made of will and anger, love and rage, and she sinks into Joy’s skin, lending her strength. Unmaking herself to make Joy whole. I heard her whisper one last word, and then she was gone.

  Go.

  VIDEO EVIDENCE

  Recorded by Abigail Ryder

  JUNE 30, 2018, TIME UNKNOWN

  Abby and Liam crouch behind a stand of rocks. Abby breathes heavily, but has her forearm pressed against her mouth, her sleeve muffling the sound of her breathing. Her face is white as paper, drained of blood. Liam fumbles with the phone, then extends it out around the side of the rock. The crowd of echoes stands in front of the cave. Moriarty circles high overhead, calling. Hardcastle’s echo lies facedown near the church entrance, motionless.

  ABBY: One of those guns would be nice about now. We have to get in there.

  LIAM: I know. How are you?

  ABBY: Think I just broke a few ribs, no biggie.

  LIAM: Can you move?

  ABBY: Not fast. I’ll distract them. You get past. Help Sophia.

  LIAM: I’m not going to leave you.

  ABBY: You gotta pick one of us, Liam, and we both want it to be Sophia.

  LIAM: Goddammit. If you—

  But Abby surges to her feet with a yell of pain and charges around the rock, toward the echoes. They charge toward her. She screams at them, a wounded battle cry—and the scream is redoubled.

  Joy Novak is there, is coming, mangled wings crusted with salt growing from her back. Shadows flicker behind her, almost like wings themselves. Her irises and pupils are doubled, filling the whole of her eyes so almost no white shows.

  She looks at Liam and Abby.

  NOVAK: Find her.

  She spreads her full wings, black as a raven’s, salt falling from them like snow.