“Adrian said the Boston bell was different than the rest. I guess that’s what he meant. They didn’t add the crack. So, it’s not a perfect replica.”

“Actually, it is. A perfect replica of the bell as it was cast, before it was rung.”

She unslung her backpack, reached inside, and retrieved the golden box containing the clapper from the Constitution.

“The Liberty Bell was rung many times over almost a century—and it never sounded right. Maybe because it was never rung in the way that it was intended. A part of it was missing.”

She opened the box and lifted out the clapper, then placed the box back into her backpack. The clapper was heavy in her hands, made of what appeared to be the same bronze as the bell.

She crossed the courtyard to the metal fence. She gave a cursory glance to the plaque hanging halfway up the metal bars, describing the bell and how it had arrived in Boston; then she moved around where the fence met one of the brick pillars, and she was right up next to the bell itself.

She dropped to her knees and peered underneath. To her surprise, there was no clapper inside, just the setting where one should have been attached. She wondered if all the replica bells had come this way, or if the Boston clapper had been removed at some point in the past seventy years. Perhaps people had gotten tired of listening to what had been described as a noxious sound.

It took Hailey a few minutes to attach the clapper from the Constitution to the setting. By the time she stepped back, there were beads of perspiration on the back of her neck, making the breeze shifting over Beacon Hill feel like fingers of ice against her skin.

“Ready?” she asked.

And then she reached beneath the bell, took the clapper in her hand, and gave it a hard swing toward the bell’s bronze interior wall.

The sound hit her like a solid wave, and she rocked back on her heels. The tone was deep and strange and intense, riding right into her bones. Her stomach felt like it was dropping out, and she gasped—she’d never heard anything like it before.

Metal against metal, but something else, something beyond what her ears alone could detect, something that seemed to make the very cells in her body start to vibrate. She looked back at Nick, and his face had gone completely pale, his eyes like saucers. She turned back toward the bell; the clapper had traveled back to the other side of the bronze interior, and a second tone joined the first—the strange noise growing and growing, deeper and more powerful, disturbingly so, riding right through every inch of her body—

“Hailey, look!”