He gestured for me to follow. Somehow I raised myself to my feet, staggering after the boy.
“Olivia?” I heard above me.
My stomach lurched. It was Patrick.
He’d spotted that I’d escaped, and it wouldn’t take long for him to work out where I was. Smoke billowed down the hole after me. The Longing was ablaze.
I moved as fast as I could after the boy through the cave, toward a rocky chamber that narrowed until my shoulders rubbed against the side.
A thin strip of daylight fell into a pool of water ahead. It marked the end of the cave, nothing but sky and ocean. The boy was a few steps ahead of me. He turned and looked back at me before closing his eyes and crossing himself. Then he jumped.
I stood on the lip of the cave and looked down at the water below. It didn’t look terribly deep, maybe three feet. And there was no splash. No ripples to indicate where the boy had fallen. And yet I’d seen him jump. Perhaps Finn was right; maybe he was a ghost.
I took a breath and stepped forward, the shock of the cold water knocking the air from my lungs.
It took a long time for me to surface. It felt like the water was holding me, looking me over, deciding whether or not to give me back to the earth. And then it let go, and I surfaced.
I broke the surface and gasped. I remember the current pulling my legs, dragging me into the bay. I felt cold sand brush against my cheek, my body shaking from shock. I remember thinking that Patrick must have done to Saffy and Clover what he’d done to me. I wanted to die then.
Heavy boots crunched across the sand toward me. Patrick, I thought. Come to finish me off. I opened an eye to look up at him.
“You bastard,” I whispered.
But the man staring down at me wasn’t Patrick.
“Liv?” he said, astonished.
LUNA, 2021
I
“Luna! Stop!”
Luna hears a shout. She turns to see a figure moving up the hill through the trees, her arms waving above her head. Cassie runs up to Clover and pulls her away from the tree.
“What are you doing?” Cassie shouts, holding Clover behind her. She looks Luna over. No sign of a knife or a rope.
Luna stares, her memories swamping her. She feels as though she’s underwater.
“I . . . I wanted to remember,” she stammers. “I remembered my mother tying me to a tree, and lifting the knife . . .”
“But doing the same to Clover won’t change things,” Cassie pleads.
“I wasn’t,” Luna says, turning to look at Clover, who has sat cross-legged at the base of the tree, twirling a sycamore seed. “I was . . . retracing my steps. I needed to fill in the gaps. And I thought . . . if I came to the forest, the place I feared most . . . it would happen.”
“And has it?” Cassie asks cautiously.
“I think I understand what happened,” Luna says, a catch in her voice. “I think I know why Clover is seven years old.”
II
They sit in Cassie’s car, the doors locked, Clover watching a movie on Cassie’s phone with headphones.
“You’re saying the shark somehow made it back to sea?” Cassie says, replaying Luna’s story of the basking shark in her mind. “You’re saying he came alive again?
Luna shakes her head. “I saw him die. I think what happened was that when I went through the cave, I went back a day. A day in time.”
Cassie presses a hand to her forehead. “But . . . if that’s the case, then all the so-called wildlings were just kids who went through the cave . . .”