Our Last Echoes

by Kate Alice Marshall

  Abby and Liam run for the church.

  34

  THE SIX-WING SCREAMED and staggered. Joy’s echo was gone from it now—there was only the one face, its features crude as if chiseled out of gray-black stone.

  Abby and Liam were shouting nearby. They’d made it past, but they couldn’t help me now—I knew what I had to do. I’d heard it in the song. And I had to do it alone.

  I dodged past the Six-Wing and grabbed Sophie. I jerked her arm, sending the bowl of black sludge clattering to the ground. “Sophie!” I yelled. She blinked. I wrapped my arms around her once, fiercely. And, almost without thinking, I slid our mother’s wooden tern into her pocket. The talisman that had reunited us. “Get out of here alive,” I told her.

  I didn’t have time to stop and see if she understood. Abby and Liam were coming. They’d help. They’d protect her. I had to go. I listened to the music in my bones, and I let it fall into perfect synchrony with the song of the echoes. Jagged lines of light striped the air, and the world heaved around me. The Six-Wing reached for me, but it was too slow. I was already gone.

  The world vanished, and a different one formed around me in its place. The cave was gone. Instead, I stood on a field of stone, flat and seamless, stretching in all directions. It was night, as far as I could tell, but there were so many stars I could still see clearly. The stars seemed too low, too bright. Too watchful. In the distance a storm churned, lashing itself with lightning, but here it was quiet. The world of echoes had pretended at our world, but this was an entirely alien place. I had slipped through the bars of the gate, I realized—into the realm where the Eidolon, the Seraph, was trapped.

  I knew where I was headed. The shadow against the stars.

  It was a massive structure, like a castle. Like a cathedral. I scaled the steps. They rang under me like crystal. Deep gouges in them resolved into words when I peered closer, carved in a language I didn’t understand.

  The massive stone doors, thirty feet high at least, were shut, but when I pressed my palm to one it swung inward just enough to step through.

  Inside, the light of the stars was replaced by the light of blue-petaled flowers, growing from vines on all the walls, on the pillars that supported the cavernous roof. They lit the broken mosaic scattered over the floor: a pattern that made my head ache when I tried to look at it, shapes snarling and twisting and writhing.

  The throne sat at the back of the room, on a dais with seven steps. On the throne sat a man, his skin gray, his six great wings white. A metal loop pierced each wing-joint, and a chaotic mass of cord and chain held the wings out, posed, as the man slumped inert in his seat.

  This was it. This was the monster that had made the Six-Wing in his image. The Seraph.

  I walked up the steps, my heart hammering. I could still feel Sophie, but for once, I didn’t push my fear away. She was still in danger. I had to hold on to all the fear I could bear, in case she couldn’t.

  I reached the top of the stairs. The Seraph was breathing, but barely, his breath so slow and shallow it hardly stirred his chest. Dust had settled on his shoulders and his arms, even his eyelids.

  I lifted a trembling hand. My fingers brushed a gray cheek.

  His eyes flew open. His lips parted, and they worked as if to shape a word, but all that came out was a rasp like sandpaper.

  He drew in a wheezing breath and spoke again. This time I could almost make out the words. I leaned close.

  “We will return.” He looked upward. The ceiling above was covered with a mural. Seven thrones, and seven indistinct figures on them, blazing with light. Tiny, humanoid shapes cowered in poses of fear and worship at their feet. “We will return,” he said again. “And you will worship us.”

  “Not today,” I told him, my voice thick with everything I had cast away from myself for so many years. The love I had been denied and the love I had denied myself, because to feel that love would be to feel the grief of losing it. But there was no grief now. Everything that I’d lost I had found again, and so much more beside. William Hardcastle couldn’t take a thing from me, and neither could this monster.

  I had never felt so fierce a rush of feeling. Sophie had seen Abby’s sister haunting her, shining from within her, and I understood that now. Because they were in me—my mother and her echo, and Sophie, and Abby, and Liam, and even Dr. Kapoor and Mrs. Popova and Mikhail and Lily and Kenny—the living and the dead, those I’d known since my first breath and those I’d only just met. I had frightened away so many people, I’d stopped trying, and I’d made myself hollow. Only now did I see the foolishness of it.

  I was wild with love, drunk on it. It roared through me, and I didn’t need to push away fear, because I was so much stronger than it was now. So much more.

  The man on the throne swiped at me, grasping with fingers that had too many joints. I danced back to the edge of the dais with a feral laugh. He hit the end of the chain that bound his wrist and halted, chains clanking, muscles straining. Then he slumped against the chair.

  He wasn’t the only monster. This wasn’t the only dying world trying to claw its way back to life. Abby’s work proved that much. But someone had done this to him, long ago. Someone had known what he was, and how to stop him. We could learn again. We could stop whatever was coming—and whatever was already in our world, hiding in the crevasses and shadows. We were so much stronger than they thought we were.

  I wished Abby could see this place. She would understand what it meant so much better than I could. But she wouldn’t see it, and I couldn’t tell her.

  I shut my eyes. I felt the thread, the hum, that connected me to Sophie. Felt her. She was alive. That would have to be enough. But maybe . . . Sophie, I thought, and reached for her.

  Sophia. I felt her hand close around mine. We were running for the water together, and it didn’t matter which of us was real, which of us the echo. We were on the island, surviving by hiding and fleeing and finding scraps of comfort, moments of affection. We were far from the sea, alone in every crowd, adrift without past or future. She wasn’t Sophie and I wasn’t Sophia—we simply were us.

  Memory ebbed and flowed between us, the border eroding, our selves spilling into each other at the edge. The barrier between us was a fragile thing.

  I shattered it. I let myself pour into her—my memory, for her to guard. My words, because she’d need them. My love, because she’d need that too, she’d need that most of all, and however much spilled into her, there was more, as endless as the rushing sea.

  I let all of myself flood into her. Except one thing. I kept my courage. She had her own, and I needed mine still, because I had heard the song and there was only one way to end this.

  “You are no one,” the creature on his throne said.

  I held my courage tight. “That’s all right,” I told him.

  I let the song in my bones, in Sophie’s bones, swell, shifting to match the song of this place, of all the many echoed worlds. I let it fill me, until it felt as if it would spill out from my mouth, from my skin, until my whole body was a cathedral for that glorious, hideous sound.

  And then I silenced it.

  INTERVIEW

  Sophia Novak

  SEPTEMBER 2, 2018

  Ashford settles back in his chair. He adjusts his glasses.

  ASHFORD: You believed that silencing the song would destroy the echo worlds. Destroy the connection between the Seraph’s realm and ours.

  SOPHIA: Yes.

  ASHFORD: But it did not succeed.

  SOPHIA: It did. Or it seems to have.

  ASHFORD: And yet you are here. How is that possible?

  SOPHIA: Is it really the first time you’ve heard someone narrate their own death, given your line of work?

  ASHFORD: No, I suppose not. You do not, however, appear to be a ghost, given that it is broad daylight and I can’t see your bones, so I must
ask—how did you get out?

  SOPHIA: I didn’t. Haven’t you been listening?

  Ashford does not seem shocked by this information—it is as if he knew it but hoped to be contradicted.

  ASHFORD: You’re Sophie.

  SOPHIA: My name is Sophia Novak.

  ASHFORD: But you are an echo. Correct?

  SOPHIA: Maybe. Or maybe she was. You’re not afraid of me now, are you?

  Ashford raises an eyebrow.

  ASHFORD: No. Did you think I would be?

  SOPHIA: She said you wouldn’t be.

  ASHFORD: Sophia did?

  SOPHIA: No. Abby.

  ASHFORD: Where is she, Ms. Novak? Please. Just tell me that she’s all right.

  Sophia looks down at her hands.

  VIDEO EVIDENCE

  Recorded by Liam Kapoor

  JUNE 30, 2018, TIME UNKNOWN

  The scene in the cavern is chaotic, caught at first in glimpses as the phone in Liam’s hand swings wildly. Sophia leaps toward the shard and vanishes. The Six-Wing claws after her, but it recoils from the heart itself, and screeches futilely at the empty air where she was a moment before.

  It has nowhere to turn except on Sophie.

  ABBY: Move! Sophie, get away from there!

  Sophie turns and stares blankly at Abby. The Six-Wing reaches for her with six-fingered hands, each digit a knuckle too long, clawed at the end. Liam hesitates, but Abby flings herself forward, despite her broken ribs. Her knife is already black with echoes’ blood.

  LIAM: Come on!

  He grabs Sophie’s arm as Abby draws the Six-Wing’s attention. She at last seems to wake, to move. Together, she and Liam race to the inert forms of the kneeling figures. They are no help, but some of them are armed. Sophie has the same idea. Liam fumbles a sidearm from a soldier’s belt, and Sophie finds a long knife, a fish-gutting knife, on a sailor with rotted eyes.

  The Six-Wing knocks Abby aside with one wing and stalks toward Sophie.

  The camera drops. The struggle plays out in shadows on the wall, in crashing and shouts.

  Suddenly: stillness. And then Sophie and the Six-Wing scream.

  35

  SOPHIA HAD VANISHED, and I couldn’t follow. It was wrong—all wrong. It should have been me in there. She was the real one. The one with a life, with a voice, with a soul. The Six-Wing advanced on me.

  In the moment before it ended, I heard her. It wasn’t words but a feeling. A knowing. The connection between us hummed.

  Sophie—listen.

  She washed over me. I gasped, as desperate for air as if I was drowning. It was too much—she was emptying herself, and I couldn’t hold all of that for her and stay myself.

  And so I stopped trying.

  Sophie.

  Sophia.

  We are here.

  We are.

  We—

  And then, in one bright instant of pain, she was gone, and I was only myself.

  It was like an electric shock—the connection between us broken so suddenly, so violently, that the energy of it rebounded. The shard flared with brilliant light.

  And then it shattered. It fractured into a thousand pieces and they burst apart. I ducked instinctively, but the slivers halted, hovering in a cloud of scintillating fragments.

  The Six-Wing screamed, wings beating in the frantic arrhythmic tempo of a dying bird. It hunched, clawing at its face.

  “We have to go!” Abby yelled. She clasped one hand over her shoulder, wounded in the fight, though I hadn’t seen it.

  “Sophia,” Liam said simply.

  I looked at the shattered heart of the world. Somewhere in those many facets, I almost imagined I caught a glimpse of a face staring back at me. My reflection, maybe.

  Maybe not.

  “Gone,” I whispered. “She’s gone.”

  We fled.

  VIDEO EVIDENCE

  Recorded by Dr. Vanya Kapoor

  AUGUST 14, 2018, 12:29 AM

  The camera is trained on the ocean, and at the mist that cloaks the island in the distance. At the edge of the frame, Dr. Kapoor sits, her arm in a sling. Kenny Lee appears, walking out with a thermos. He sits beside her, pours a cup, hands it over.

  LEE: You should let me take a shift.

  KAPOOR: Soon.

  LEE: You’ve got to rest.

  KAPOOR: The only thing waiting for me back there is an empty house and a phone with my son’s mother on the other end of it.

  LEE: And a bed. There’s a bed too.

  KAPOOR: I don’t—

  There’s a blast of air that rocks the camera.

  LEE: What was that?

  Kapoor and Lee leap to their feet. A cacophony of bird calls fills the air. White forms flash from the mist, flying straight toward them—toward them, and overhead. Lee picks up the camera, tracking their movement as the huge mass of birds wings south.

  LEE: That looks like all of them!

  The mist begins to clear, revealing the bay, the water empty and still, untroubled by the slightest wave.

  KAPOOR: Come on. Come on, Liam. Don’t do this to me. Don’t do this to her.

  Out of the mist, a final bird flies: a raven, massive and black as pitch. Kapoor sucks in a hopeful breath.

  LEE: There!

  Lee points excitedly, and zooms the camera in on the small blot in across the water, floating at the edge of the mist. A boat, with three figures sitting in it. The sound of the motor makes its way to the shore, and Lee whoops.

  KAPOOR: Is Liam there?

  LEE: Yeah! Yeah, you can see his stupid haircut!

  Lee continues to yell and wave his arms. Kapoor sinks down, as if the weight of relief is more painful than the fear.

  KAPOOR: Three. There are only three.

  LEE: Wait. There’s someone else in the boat. Lying down.

  The figure is in the bottom of the boat, covered in a blanket. The boat draws up to the shore. Liam leaps out, and Kapoor grabs hold of him, crushing him to her.

  LIAM: You’re alive. You made it.

  KAPOOR: Of course I did. That island tried to kill me once already.

  LEE: Here, let me help you.

  Lee sets the camera down as he moves to help Abby haul the skiff farther up on shore.

  LIAM: We found the boat—we thought for sure that meant you hadn’t . . .

  KAPOOR: I stumbled out of the echo on Belaya Skala, and Maria and Kenny were waiting for me. I thought—I thought that if you managed to get out, you’d need a ride back. Left the boat for you.

  NOVAK: Vanya.

  Kapoor jerks. She turns toward the boat, toward where Lee and Sophie are helping the fourth passenger from the boat. She stands on the shore, unsteady, her arms still striped with salt tracks.

  KENNY: Oh, my God.

  NOVAK: It’s good to see you, Vanya.

  Novak’s smile is weary but genuine. The blanket drops from her shoulders. Her ragged wings hang, broken, bloodied, from her back. She shuts her eyes and lets out a soft sigh as the light of this world shines across them.

  Black spreads like frost over the feathers, the patches of exposed skin and fractured bone. They flake away, soot scattered in the wind, leaving only skin behind.

  Sophie laces her fingers through her mother’s.

  KAPOOR: And which one are you, then?

  The girl looks at her steadily, and does not answer.

  The mist fades. The waters are still. The birds are gone.

  36

  TWILIGHT FELL, AND I stood on the porch of Mrs. Popova’s house, watching the moon play over the rippling water at the shore’s edge. For the first time, there were words in my mind to wrap around what I saw, what I felt. But there was no one to speak them to.

  My mother
was asleep inside. We’d found her, bloody and nearly unconscious, as we raced from the cathedral. We’d tried, briefly, to help the people inside. But with the Seraph gone—dead, or shut away, we didn’t know which—they were undone. Their flesh gave under our fingers, scattered to ash like my mother’s wings.

  The strange children raced beside us. They raced into the sunlight outside, where the earth was littered with a thousand, a hundred thousand dead, malformed birds. The children leapt into the air, laughter turning to the cawing of crows.

  We’d run, and there she was. My mother, or maybe both of them, the way I was Sophie and Sophia both. Her echo had merged with the Six-Wing to protect us all those years, and when she needed to, she tore herself free. She poured herself into the living woman and gave her strength enough to come, to help.

  We gathered her up. Liam and Abby had to carry her, hurt as they were—I couldn’t, for I felt at once as substantial as tissue paper and also as if I carried an unbearable weight on my shoulders.

  Sophia.

  She was there and she wasn’t, as we ran.

  I shut my eyes against the memory of running. The climb up the steps. We’d made it out. We’d stepped from the bunker into the light of a true sun, filtering down through the mist. Like stepping through an open door. Easy.

  Easy, because the echo worlds were dying. Collapsing into each other. Falling into silence.

  “Sophie?”

  I opened my eyes. Liam stood on the beach, hands in his pockets. He’d cleaned up. Gotten his injuries bandaged. Called his mum. Twelve hours on and we were already getting good at pretending that normal was a possibility, after all of this.

  “Hey,” I said. “I didn’t hear you.”

  “You’ve got a lot on your mind,” he said.

  I smiled a little, a pleasant-painful feeling hooking me just under my heart. “Is everything okay at your place?”

  “Yeah. Dr.—Mum fell asleep,” he said. “I guess she’s been awake for most of six weeks. Which is how long we’ve been gone, by the way. In case no one thought to tell you before you, say, called home and got an earful from a concerned parent.”