But I didn’t think so. I thought it was just me. My mind was an old cassette tape that kept being recorded over. Only wavering ghost notes from the old music came through. I wondered, sometimes, what the original recording would sound like—what the source code of me might look like. I worried it was darker than I wanted it to be. I worried it didn’t exist at all. I was like a balloon tied to Ella’s wrist: If I didn’t have her to tell me who I was, remind me why it mattered, I might float away.
Passing out felt like doing just that: giving up, floating into the ether. Even the pain in my head faded away.
But gravity was insistent. The world wanted me back.
A voice lapped over me in slow motion. My eyesight returned in a paisley wash of swirls and blobs, before resolving into something true. Someone crouched in front of me. The sun at their back made them into negative space. My arm felt like a bag of wet flour, but I lifted it anyway, to touch the halo of their hair. The person grew very still as I tangled my fingers into the softness by their neck.
“Mom?” I croaked.
“No. Sorry.” Finch’s voice was careful and small. My memory came back with it. I dropped my hand, squeezed it into a fist.
“You passed out,” he said.
My back was propped against the low stone wall of a brownstone garden. The light had changed. It was hotter, more golden. After a couple of false starts, I spoke again. “What is it?”
He was looking at me with an expression I couldn’t place. He looked like Ella after she ate pot brownies and took me to a show at the planetarium, his eyes all wide and reverent. He looked … he looked wonderstruck.
I must’ve been misreading it—I couldn’t have looked that good passed out. I glared at him a little, and some of the shine went out of his eyes.
“You weren’t out long,” he said. “You didn’t hit your head—you’ll be fine. You just need to eat something.”
“The girl,” I said. “With the pig. And the boy with the camera. Where’d they go?”
He frowned slightly. “I didn’t see them. I was busy with you, I guess.”
The street was empty, but I still felt the presence of watching eyes.
“I caught you kinda awkward,” Finch said. “You hurt your knees going down.”
But the pain was good. It was something to focus on. My body had that horrible heavy post-nap feeling, where you can’t tell what day it is and you could almost cry. I wanted my mom, in a way you maybe can’t ever want anyone else. It was primal and sharp and it made me feel like a needle in the haystack of a cold and terrible world. I wanted my mom.
“We have to go. I have to get out of here.”
“Okay.” He lifted his hand like he was going to touch my face, then kept lifting and ran it through his hair. “We’ll go as soon as you can walk. Can you walk?”
I could. A rush of pins and needles ran through my legs as I stood, and the fresh scrapes ached.
We walked. Slivers of migraine stabbed the backs of my eyes every time I looked at a surface bright with sun. Finch saw me wincing, rummaged around in his bag, and placed a battered Rangers cap on my head.
It was the sort of easy flirtatious move I saw guys make all the time, even at Whitechapel, but his fingers were gentle and the look in his eyes complicated. In the wedge of shade beneath the cap, my thoughts started to clarify. What had I actually seen on the sidewalk outside of Perks’s place? A photography student. A girl with an eccentric pet. This wasn’t Twice-Killed Katherine territory, this was plain paranoia.
Paranoia so quick and overwhelming I’d passed out. How hard would Audrey mock me if she could’ve seen me swooning—and being caught by Ellery Finch?
“Audrey,” I said.
“What about her?”
“She stopped her dad— I mean, he wasn’t going to—he wouldn’t have actually shot me, but she stopped him. Maybe if I call I can catch her alone, make her talk to me.”
I waved him away, toward the bodega we’d stopped at to get food. My phone was nearly dead, but I dialed Ella for the thousandth time once Finch was out of sight, bracing myself to hear her voicemail.
I didn’t. Instead there was a long pause and a distant click, and my heart swelled into my throat. Then a nice mechanical voice told me her number had been disconnected.
I sat down hard on a Siamese pipe, pulling the brim of Finch’s hat over my face. I already knew the Hinterland could sneak in while we slept, plant creepy photos in books, and send crows to do their bidding, but turning off my mother’s number was so blunt, so rooted in the real world, it scared me more than anything.
Before my heart had slowed I called Audrey, so certain she’d let it go to voicemail I was briefly speechless when she answered.
“Alice?”
“Audrey. You picked up.”
“Oh, my god, I can’t believe my dad pulled a gun on you!” Her voice was high and fast. I pictured her face, mascaraed and alarmed between sheaves of shiny processed hair.
“Audrey, my phone is dying and I need you to tell me what happened to my mom.”
“I would’ve called you last night, but I couldn’t get away from my dad. He’s been, like, embracing his gun for the last twenty-four hours. I swear he’s gonna shoot himself in the balls.”
I was heartened to hear her sounding like herself again, but didn’t have time for it. “Audrey, please focus for a sec. My mom.”
“Oh, sorry. Sorry. I’m still freaked out. We’re on our way to our place in the Hamptons … oops, I shouldn’t have told you that. We stopped for lunch, I’m in this gross bathroom. I just ate, like, a nine-hundred-calorie lobster roll. Do you think I’m in shock?”
I was holding my phone so tight I could feel ridges forming in my palm. “My mom, Audrey.”
“God, I’m sorry! Okay, what happened was I went home over lunch because, well, I had to.”
Audrey refuses to poop at school. Don’t ask me how I know this.
“So when I got in I smelled this crazy smell—I mean, you smelled it. I thought Nadia had forgotten to take out the trash.”
I made a frantic get on with it motion with my hand, even though she couldn’t see me.
“Then I heard fighting—no big deal, considering it was practically divorce day. But then I heard Ella making this sound I’d never heard before. Like this hysterical babbling sound. I’m sorry, that’s what it sounded like. And she kept saying, ‘Please, please.’ And that’s when I started to think maybe she was talking to someone else.”
The hairs rose on my neck. I wrapped one arm around the cold curling in my stomach.
Audrey continued, in the most subdued voice I’d ever heard her use. “I went to their room. My dad was standing there looking horrible, just totally blank—like he’d been hit in the head. And your mom was crouching on the ground. And there were two, um, two others with them.”
“Two others? Two people?”
Her voice had hairline fractures in it. “Not really. I don’t think. Alice, they looked like people, but I don’t think they were. They were the wrong … they were just wrong. The man had face tattoos, he was kinda hot. But his feet, they were dirty and bare—disgusting. He smelled so bad I thought I’d die. And the woman, her eyes…” She paused. I could hear the flick, flick of a lighter and her sharp inhale before she spoke again. “Your mom … I think she knew them. They’d told my dad something about her—he won’t tell me what it was, but it’s something really bad. It made him hate her.”