Chapter 26 · Mom Isn't Down There

The voice echoes up from the well again.

"Ivy. Come home."

I don't move. Ninety thousand people are watching me stand at the edge of a pit that shouldn't exist under Seattle. My claws are still out. My eyes are still gold. The stream chat's going so fast I can't read individual lines anymore—just a blur of emojis and all-caps and people tagging news outlets.

Leah's gun is on the ground between us.

"That's not her," Leah says. Her voice is flat. Empty. "You know that's not her."

I do know. I've known since the voice started. Mom never called me Ivy—she used my middle name, the one I don't tell anyone. And the cadence is wrong. Too smooth. Like someone reading a script they memorized phonetically.

But it sounds so much like her.

"What is it?" I ask.

Leah doesn't answer right away. She's staring at the well opening, and her hand is shaking. Not the controlled tremor of someone holding a weapon too long. This is different. This is fear.

"Echo," she finally says. "That's what Gray Protocol called it. A resonance entity. It finds something you want and it—it wears it. Puts it on like a mask."