“Zosia…”

The hair on the back of Zofia’s neck stood up. Someone was calling to her. And the voice did not belong to Laila.

When Zofia looked up from her boots, she saw something that should not have been possible, and yet every one of her senses confirmed that it was true. A figure stepped out of the lake, and Zofia recognized her sister immediately.

Hela stood before her, her pale hand stretched out. She wore the same thin shift she’d worn on her sick bed. Water dripped off her sleeves. Her gray eyes looked bruised with sleeplessness, and her hair looked sweat-dampened, clinging to her neck.

“I called to you for help, but you didn’t come. Do you not love me? Did you not get my letter?”

Guilt closed around Zofia’s throat like a cold hand.

“I lost it,” she found herself saying.

“How could you?” sobbed Hela.

No. Wrong. This is wrong, whispered something in Zofia’s mind. She forced herself to look up, prepared to count the stalactites on the cave ceiling. Instead, she saw the white paint of her uncle’s townhome in Glowno, the fracture left in the corner by the window from heavy rain that summer. Zofia spun around, expecting to see her friends and the shore, but they were gone, and all she saw was the wall with framed portraits and pictures of her uncle’s family.

“Zosia?” called Hela. “I will forgive you if you hug me.”

Zofia turned back around.

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

She looked down at her feet, part of her mind expecting to see dark water lapping at her boots. But she saw only the frayed carpet that once led to Hela’s sick bed, and when she looked up, she saw her sister coughing softly into her handkerchief, her pale hand outstretched.

She must go to her.

Zofia took one step forward, then flinched from a sudden cold.

Had she left one of the windows open in Hela’s room? Hela did not like the cold. The window, however, was closed tightly, and yet for some reason Zofia imagined she could hear Laila’s voice carried to her on an invisible wind, her voice raw as if she were screaming, and yet Zofia only felt it as a whisper:

“There’s something in the water.”

PART IV

26

ENRIQUE

One moment Enrique was crouched on the ground, tracing the drag marks. How was it possible? Even if natural changes in the ecosystem had shifted the skeleton, it should not have left marks like this. As he bent down to study it, a fine spray of water soaked his jacket, hitting his neck.

Enrique shivered, annoyed. Séverin needed to move more carefully in the lake shallows. He turned once more to the ground when he saw something strange … bits of gravel bounced on the silt. A low vibration sang through the bottoms of his shoes. It was as if the earth were bristling.

Séverin grabbed his shoulders, hauling him to his feet. The Forged beeswax blocked out sound in Enrique’s left ear, while the right was so heavily bandaged that even a scream registered as a low muffle.