And she would have come back. If I hadn’t escaped Ross too, she would have sacrificed her freedom, her new life. I know that absolutely.
I remember that hidden tribe in South America. How they would form a circle so tight around someone that they couldn’t escape. I clasp El’s hands. I make her look at me. And then I tell her about every good thing that she has ever done. Every good thing that she has ever been. Over and over. Until finally she sees me. Hears me. Believes me.
And then – then – I cry for Iona. I cry for the sister that neither of us even had the chance to love. To need. To save. I cry for the moment she sat beside me in Chief Red Cloud’s teepee, eyes big and blue and full of the best kind of sympathy.
It’ll be okay, Cat. I love you.
I cry for that melted, shiny thing on a metal stretcher. A bald rippled scalp, deep eyeless holes, teeth fixed into a lipless grin.
And most of all, I cry for Mouse. The little smiling girl with the chalk-white face and ruby-red lips who once told me, If you’re quiet and small and scared in the dark, no one will ever see you. Because no one ever had.
EPILOGUE
The day after Boxing Day we get up before dawn and make our way along the walkway in silence. The wind is low and the sea is calm. The lights of houses and boats slowly vanish until only the occasional streetlight remains, reflecting gold against the water. We climb, and duckboards take us through dark close mangroves, until finally we break into fresh air. And light. The dawn is coming: a thin bright line on the horizon, bathing the sea silver. A distant cockerel crows once, twice. I can smell flowers, something sweet like lilac.
We walk along a track, skirt around rocky outcrops and leaning trees. When we turn a corner, the wind blows hard against us, pushing my hair away from my face, cooling the sweat on my neck.
‘Oh my God.’
El turns to me, smiles. Looks at the huge shadow of rock sitting on a ledge above the water. ‘Morgan’s Head.’
I follow her as she steps down through a path overgrown with ferns and bushes bright with red and yellow flowers, grasping the bark of palm trees as the way grows steeper.
‘The lagoon’s just down here,’ she says over her shoulder, as we reach the vast craggy crown of Morgan’s Head.
I fight the ridiculous urge to say hello. Flatten my palms against the stone instead.
El smiles again. ‘I did that too, the first time.’
And then I see the lagoon. It’s beautifuclass="underline" shallow blue-green water, turning darker as it gets closer to the rocks and reefs at its mouth. Surrounded on all other sides by high cliffs of stone beneath dense green thickets. At the bottom, we step straight down into the water, cool and shallow, sandy underfoot.
‘It’s beautiful, El.’
‘I’ve come down here every day since I got here,’ she says. ‘It was exactly how I always imagined it would be.’
For a few moments, we stand in silence and the sea, look out to the silver-grey horizon turning gold. It’s so unimaginably quiet. Peaceful.
I turn to the rucksack slung over El’s shoulders, take out the cardboard box with pink-painted flowers. We both look down at it, and then at each other. It’s the first time we’ve all been together since we were children.
‘I wish—’ My voice catches.
‘Me too,’ El says, and her voice is as close to breaking. She presses her palm against my knuckles, against the box.
I open it, and we each take a handful of ashes and throw them out over the clear blue water. Watch as they catch the low wind, fan and float and fall, settle like spindrift across the waves, disappear. By the time the box is empty, the sky has lightened and the air is warmer.
‘Goodbye, Iona,’ El says.
And I know she hears the whispered echo of my ‘Sorry’ in the same moment that I hear hers.
We’re quiet for a long time, until finally El packs away the empty box, clears her throat. ‘What will you do now?’
I don’t reply. I know what she’s asking. I think of the vast blue sky and sea of Venice Beach; the gothic spires and cobbles of Edinburgh. The wind tickles my hair against my neck, my bare shoulders.
‘There’s no such bird as a glorious golden curre, you know.’ El looks out at the horizon. I hear Mum’s reading voice, low and steady and comforting. Whenever she spreads her big golden wings and flies away, where she lands is where her next life begins as if the one before it had never happened at all.
‘Curre is Latin for run!’
I turn to look at the press of El’s lips, the set of her jaw, as she tries not to ask me again what I’m going to do, where I’m going to go.
‘Anne of Green Gables was never my favourite book,’ I say. ‘It was always Papillon.’
‘What?’
‘It didn’t matter how many times he was caught and imprisoned – in penal colonies or camps, asylums or prisons or islands – he never ever stopped trying to escape. In a sailboat. With a pirate.’
‘I miss The Redemption,’ El says, and her voice is uncertain. Uncertain of me.
Four minutes. Four minutes and God knows how many generations of pain and lies and suffering have always separated us. But she still knows me better than anyone else in the whole world. Not because we were once almost fused together like sand and limestone – we never were – but because we will always be bound together by something much stronger.
Mirrorland was magic. It taught us how to fight. To hide. To dream. It taught us how to escape long before we broke through its wall or its world. I look back out to sea, where the sun has begun pushing up over the horizon, turning the sky and sea a bloody and beautiful red. X marks this spot. A rough coastline of rocks and beach, an interior of forest and flatland. A tropical paradise instead of a snowy wonderland. The end of Mirrorland’s treasure hunt.
And so I turn to look at El. Reach across the space between us to take her hand.
‘We can buy another Redemption,’ I say. ‘Sail the Caribbean together.’
And at her sob, I close my eyes, remember for the last time the give of the soft, creaking wood as I shifted my weight from left foot to right under the ocean swell, the cool touch of a twenty-knot southeasterly against my face, the excited shouts of our crew and the ringing screams of splintering wood and dying men, the bellows of cannon and musketoons. How safe we had always felt, no matter how terrifying the battle. No matter how loud the roar of the squall. No matter who looked back at us from the mirror.
We will not leave each other, I think. Never so long as we live.
I squeeze El’s hand tighter, hear the long-ago echo of her chattering teeth as we looked out towards the harbour and the blood-bright promise of the firth and the dawn. And I wish Mum could see us. I wish she could know that all of it had been worth it in the end. All the suffering, all the horror, all that dark and wonderful magic. That we made it to The Island. That we’re together. All three of us. We will always be together.
And even though I haven’t said anything at all, El looks at me and smiles wide, the rising sun turning her face golden.
‘She knows.’
And that was the day our third life began.