Afterworlds (30 page)

Maybe he couldn’t see the little girls, but what if he could feel them out there staring back at him, soaking in his memories? Needing him?

What if these moments late at night made him happy?

“Fuck this,” I said. This was more than I could bear. More than I could live with. Not just for Mindy—this was for me now.

I stood up and walked away, my anger shredding the door like tissue paper, the walls and furniture rippling before me. I sliced my way out of his house and was in his backyard ten seconds later.

The moment my feet left the edge of his property, I let myself fall through the earth, out of the flipside, and down into the River Vaitarna. The current was wild and furious, as angry as I was. It flowed so fast that the shreds of lost memories were nothing but a cold spray against my skin.

As soon as I figured out how, I was going to give the police enough evidence to bust the bad man. And if that proved impossible, I’d make Yama help me, whether he wanted to or not. And if that didn’t work, I was going to end the bad man myself and then tear his soul to pieces.

CHAPTER 23

DARCY AND IMOGEN CONSUMED THE
city.

They waited for ramen until the day’s writing was done, because a food blog had claimed that noodles tasted better after midnight. (It was true.) At a Southern restaurant near Imogen’s apartment, they gorged on raw fluke that had been marinated in lime and blood orange juice. They bought unknown delicacies wrapped in lotus leaves and ate whatever was inside, no wimping out allowed. Once they waited an hour for fancy milk shakes, because the evening’s sweltering heat demanded them.

Most days they left Nisha’s budget in glorious tatters in their wake.

When Darcy was being more sensible, they went to art galleries instead. Imogen had worked at one for her first year here in New York, and knew the artists, the galleries, and best of all, the gossip.

But it was writing together that Darcy loved most. It was as demanding as anything she’d ever done, facing those clueless sentences she’d written as a high school student. They seemed to drip with everything she hadn’t known back then, as embarrassing as old pictures of herself in middle school.

And yet there was something smooth and easy about writing with Imogen—a rightness, like arriving home. Mostly in the big room, surrounded by windows looking out across the sawtooth rooftops of Chinatown, but also on the familiar confines of Darcy’s futon, or in Imogen’s bedroom with her roommates on the other side of a thin wall. It didn’t matter where, really. What mattered was the connection, the space formed between the two of them, a slice cut from the universe and made private and inviolable.

Sharing the act made it all entirely new, the difference between reality and a postcard, between cheap headphones and a live band in a packed house, between a cloudy day and a total solar eclipse.

Imogen changed everything.

*  *  *

“What’s that thing where . . .” Darcy’s words started as a murmur, and faded.

“More information needed.” Imogen didn’t look up from her screen, her fingers still tapping.

“When hostages fall in love. With the bad guys.”

“Something syndrome. It rhymes.”

“Stockholm!” Darcy cried, as triumphant as a cat coughing up a feather.

Rewriting could be huge and philosophical, a single sentence requiring a fundamental rethink of what stories were meant to do.
But sometimes it was more like completing a crossword, the right letters in the right order, fitting and clicking.

“That’s the one.” Imogen was still typing. She seemed never to stop, even on days when she claimed to have written only a dozen decent sentences. Every thought flowed directly from her brain onto the screen, if only to be excised a moment later. The delete key on Imogen’s laptop was faded, worn in its center like the stairs in a monastery.

Darcy, on the other hand, preferred to gaze at her screen rather than fill it. She thought her sentences first, then murmured and mimed them before committing herself to keystrokes. Her hands acted out the gestures of conversation, her expressions mirroring her characters’ emotions. She closed her eyes when the theater in her mind was populated by setting and characters, or when she was merely listening for a missing word.

“Sun’s coming up,” Imogen said, and closed her laptop.

Darcy kept typing, wanting to finish off the chapter that introduced Lizzie’s best friend, Jamie. Nan had asked for longer scenes with Jamie, to give Lizzie more to hang on to in the real world. But Darcy’s brain was wearying, and her gaze drifted out the window.

Down on the street, deliverymen unloaded fish in styrofoam boxes from a rumbling truck as dawn edged into the sky. True to her word, Imogen never wrote while the sun was up, which had turned Darcy’s waking hours upside down. She was still amazed at the drama of sunrise, how quickly a hint of pink overhead jolted the streets of Chinatown into busyness.

Imogen was making tea. This was ritual now, three weeks into their writing together, eating together, everything together. Darcy
should have closed her laptop at this point, or finally written a post for her dusty and windblown Tumblr. But another ritual had established itself in these few minutes while Imogen was away in the kitchen.

Darcy opened a search window and typed,
Changed her name to Imogen Gray.
This phrase was so simple and obvious, but she’d never tried it before.

There were no exact matches, just a scattering of hits about
Pyromancer
, less than two months away from publication.

“Crap,” Darcy whispered, and salved her disappointment by looking at the images the search had found. A few unfamiliar photos appeared from a reading in Boston last year, when Imogen’s hair had been longer.

When the teakettle began to sing, Darcy closed the window and cleared her search history. She’d never
promised
not to search the internet for Imogen’s old name, but this was still a guilty business.

It was just so strange, not knowing her first girlfriend’s name.

Some days Darcy felt as though she didn’t know anything, not if she was a real writer, or a good Hindu, or even whether she was still a virgin. Annoyingly, Sagan had proven correct: the internet had more questions than answers. Was it a night together, fingers, a tongue, or something intangible? Or was “virgin” a word from a dead language whose categories no longer made sense, like some ancient philosopher, brought back to life, asking if electrons were earth, water, air, or fire?

Darcy’s hypothesis was simpler than that: the real world worked differently than stories. In a novel you always knew the moment
when something Happened, when someone Changed. But real life was full of gradual, piecemeal, continuous transformation. It was full of accidents and undefinables, and things that just happened on their own. The only certainty was “It’s complicated,” whether or not unicorns tolerated your touch.

*  *  *

It was hours later, in the early afternoon, that Darcy woke up.

It was still a surprise sometimes, finding Imogen beside her, and she stared at her girlfriend, noticing new things. Two cowlicks in Imogen’s unkempt hair that reared up at each other, like crossed swords in a duel. The white marks left by her rings, growing gradually more pronounced as the summer tanned her hands. The freckles rising on Imogen’s shoulders now that it was hot enough for sleeveless T-shirts.

Maybe it was certainty enough, knowing these things.

Darcy reached for her phone and checked her email.

“Hey, Gen,” she said a moment later, nudging and prodding. “Kiralee wants to have dinner with us. Tonight!”

The reply was gummy with sleep. “Had to happen.”

“What do you . . . ,” Darcy began, then realized: “She’s read my book.”

Imogen rolled over, stretching her mousing wrist as she did every morning.

“Did she tell you anything?” Darcy asked. “Does she like it?”

All she got in answer was a shrug and a yawn, even as another dozen questions cascaded into her mind. How brutal were Kiralee’s critiques? Why had
Afterworlds
taken her almost a whole month to read? Did she know that Darcy was already rewriting, that whole
chapters had been replaced? Was it a good sign that they’d been invited to dinner?

But Darcy knew that these questions were all desperate sounding, so she boiled them down to the most important.

“Do you think she’ll start with praise?”

Imogen groaned and rolled over, pulling Darcy’s pillow over her head.

*  *  *

Kiralee Taylor had summoned them all the way out to Brooklyn, to a restaurant called Artisanal Toast. The walls were covered with paintings of toast, photographs of toast, and a giant mosaic of Jesus made from actual toast. The matchbooks that Imogen had scooped up at the entrance had pictures of toast on them.

After a few minutes of searching the menu, Darcy frowned. “Wait. They don’t actually serve toast here?”

“Dude,” Imogen said. “This is the dinner menu, not breakfast.”

Kiralee nodded. “They aren’t fanatics. Where do you think we are, Williamsburg?”

Darcy shook her head, because that wasn’t what she’d been thinking. Mostly, she was nervous about what Kiralee thought of her book, and wondering whether she would be able to eat at all. A piece of toast sounded good about now.

Waiters arrived and effected a swift makeover of the table—copper chargers were removed, silverware adjusted, napkins unfolded and placed on laps. It seemed all very crisp and efficient to Darcy, as intimidating as waiting for a critique to begin.

But it was Imogen who Kiralee questioned first.

“How are the
Ailuromancer
rewrites?”

“At the spring-cleaning stage.” Imogen’s gaze drifted about the restaurant, unmoored and unhappy. “I’ve emptied all the closets out onto the floor. The rugs are hung and waiting to be beaten. In other words, a mess.”

Kiralee patted her hand. “It has to get worse before it gets better. And what about that awful title?”

“Paradox is back to wanting the -mancer suffix for all three books, but they hate everything except
Cat-o-mancer
. Which
I
hate.”

“There’s felidomancy,” Darcy said. “Which also means cats.”

“But isn’t much better, is it?” Kiralee said. “I’m sure you’ll think of something, dear. Just keep pondering and the title fairy will show up one day. Have you started book three?”

Imogen shrugged. “No pages yet.”

“Ideas? Notions? Inklings?”

“Well, I had this one . . . phobomancy.”

“
Phobos
as in fear?” Kiralee leaned back into her chair and took a long, silent look at the Jesus made of toast. Finally she smiled. “You can make some serious magic out of fear. And it’s easy to relate to. Everybody has a phobia or two.”

Darcy nodded in agreement, a little surprised, a little confused.

Imogen leaned forward now, her hands moving as she spoke. “The setup is pretty straightforward. The protag starts off with a bunch of crippling phobias—crowds, dolls, spiders, and small spaces. Then one day she gets trapped in a closet, and has to face her claustrophobia head-on. Getting through that gives her the key to defeat her other fears, one by one. And as she does, she gains her magic. At first she can only
see
other people’s phobias, like auras or something.”

“But eventually she can control them.” Kiralee’s eyes were sparkling. “Could be a ripper.”

“Really awesome,” Darcy said. “And so
well thought out
.”

The last words came out sharper than she’d meant them to, and Imogen turned to her with a hint of apology in her eyes. “Yeah. I’ve been mulling it for a while.”

Darcy looked down at the table, surprised at the sharp feeling in her stomach. First she’d spent all afternoon nervous about dinner, and now this. “It’s a great idea, Gen.”

And it was. But in their three weeks of writing together, Darcy had run every
Afterworlds
decision, every worry, every inspiration past Imogen, who in return had shared the details of her own rewrites. But Darcy hadn’t heard a single word about phobomancy.

Kiralee Taylor’s opinion was more
important
than her own, of course, because Kiralee had written a half-dozen nearly perfect novels. But why had Imogen kept this idea a secret until now?

Darcy felt her hand being squeezed beneath the table.

“Some things need to stay inside for a while,” Imogen said softly. “I don’t even realize I haven’t told anyone about them, until they pop out.”

“Sure.” Darcy willed the sting of her jealousy to fade. Kiralee had to be thinking she was pathetic. “You should talk to my little sister. Nisha’s got some great phobias.”

“Like what?” Kiralee asked brightly.

“She’s afraid of ice skates,” Darcy said. “Raisins in cookies, and car batteries. She says it’s unnatural for batteries to be square instead of round.”

“Whoa,” Imogen said, pulling out her phone to tap some notes.

“This could be the beginning of a whole new trilogy,” Kiralee said. “With phobias instead of mancies.”

“Don’t tempt me.” Imogen was still typing, her metal rings flashing.

“Nisha’s also scared of dogs in sweaters,” Darcy said. “And socks. Not dogs in socks,
all
socks.” She smiled, happy to be contributing to this perfect idea. Even in her rush of jealousy, there had been something exciting, almost sensual, about having heard it direct from Imogen’s lips.

At least the other two were pretending her hissy fit hadn’t happened.

“You could combine both trilogies with a book called
Mancyphobia
,” Kiralee said.

“I know you’re just trying to be annoying, but that actually doesn’t suck.” Imogen put down her phone and raised her water glass. “To
Phobomancer
!”

Darcy followed suit, but Kiralee shook her head. “Toasting with water is bad luck, darlings. Wait for the wine.”

As they obediently lowered their glasses, Imogen mumbled, “Talk about phobias.”

“Superstitions are an entirely different trilogy, my dear.” Kiralee opened her menu. “Now, let’s eat family-style. I’ll order, shall I?”