Chapters (73)
- Chapter 1
- Chapter 2
- Chapter 3
- Chapter 4
- Chapter 5
- Chapter 6
- Chapter 7
- Chapter 8
- Chapter 9
- Chapter 10
- Chapter 11
- Chapter 12
- Chapter 13
- Chapter 14
- Chapter 15
- Chapter 16
- Chapter 17
- Chapter 18
- Chapter 19
- Chapter 20
- Chapter 21
- Chapter 22
- Chapter 23
- Chapter 24
- Chapter 25
- Chapter 26
- Chapter 27
- Chapter 28
- Chapter 29
- Chapter 30
- Chapter 31
- Chapter 32
- Chapter 33
- Chapter 34
- Chapter 35
- Chapter 36
- Chapter 37
- Chapter 38
- Chapter 39
- Chapter 40
- Chapter 41
- Chapter 42
- Chapter 43
- Chapter 44
- Chapter 45
- Chapter 46
- Chapter 47
- Chapter 48
- Chapter 49
- Chapter 50
- Chapter 51
- Chapter 52
- Chapter 53
- Chapter 54
- Chapter 55
- Chapter 56
- Chapter 57
- Chapter 58
- Chapter 59
- Chapter 60
- Chapter 61
- Chapter 62
- Chapter 63
- Chapter 64
- Chapter 65
- Chapter 66
- Chapter 67
- Chapter 68
- Chapter 69
- Chapter 70
- Chapter 71
- Chapter 72
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Lil flops back into her pillow. “What’s the point? He’s not coming back. Neither of them is coming back.”
She doesn’t look up again, so Amy and I creep around the bed to the curtain on the far wall. I lift it up, and Amy follows me into the room.
A bathroom. The toilet’s unflushed and the sink is stained. We move quickly to the side, where another curtain blocks a doorway.
This is Harley’s room—or, at least, it was until he moved out to live in the Ward. There are traces of what the room used to be—a narrow mattress against one wall, a small nightstand that still holds a clock—but clearly in the years since he left, the room has become something of a storage space for his family. I maneuver past the boxes until I see what we came for: Harley’s painting, Through the Looking Glass.
“It’s beautiful,” Amy breathes. I suppose she’s right, but when I see it, I only remember the way it really happened, not the way Harley painted it.
The painting is vividly bright, even though in my memory everything was dark: the water, the mud, her eyes. Five figures stand at the top of the painting, looking down into the pond—me, Harley, Victria, Bartie, and, behind us, Orion. Harley had used some sort of reflective paint on the surface of the pond—but just beneath the mirror-like surface of the water, a girl swims, floating on her back, her laughing eyes peering up toward the surface. Koi swirl around her fingers, and a lotus plant’s roots tangle in her loose, thick black hair.
“He really liked koi,” Amy says.
“They were Kayleigh’s favorite.”
I can taste the murky pond water. I can feel the clamminess of Kayleigh’s skin. I can see the bloated way her face squished under Harley’s touch.
“Let’s look for the clue,” Amy says gently, pulling me away from the edge of the pond. “It’s probably on the back, like the other one.”
I lift the canvas up to the light, then flip it over.
“Look,” Amy says.
A rectangle is sketched in light ink on the back and, in the center of it, another tiny mem card. I pry it off with my fingernail. Another message is written on the back of the painting in the same faint handwriting as the first clue:
1, 2, 3, 4. Add it up to unlock the door.
“Does he mean the door on the fourth floor of the Hospital? The one that leads to the elevator that goes down to the cryo level?” I ask.
“I don’t think so. He told you about that door; he knows I’ve seen what’s behind it. If he left these clues for me to find, then he must mean one of the other locked doors.”