Afterworlds (40 page)

“There’s no rush.” He was looking down at me, his brown eyes glittering in the dark.

I reached up and touched his right eyebrow, the little crook of it warm beneath my fingertip. I traced the curve of his shoulder, the hardness of bone and muscle beneath silk. My fingers prized open his top button, widening the triangle of luminous brown skin.

In one supple motion, he slipped the still-buttoned shirt off over his head.

My breath caught. I’d never been with him in the real world before, without the soft gray light of the flipside, or the fire and spark of the river’s currents. There was no light except the shine of our skin, as if nothing existed beyond the edges of us.

He leaned forward and held his lips against mine with an impossible stillness, as if the moment had frozen, time itself unraveling. The only thing moving in the world was the breath between our lips. Suspended in that perfect instant, I ached for more.

He brushed a fingertip feather-light against the side of my neck, and I felt my own pulse rise up to meet his heat. My heartbeat gradually steadied in that long, still kiss.

When finally our lips parted, my breath shuddered a little. He stayed close, his eyes locked with mine, and for a moment the spell was too intense. I had to break it with a whisper.

“Do you ever sleep, Yama?”

“Sometimes.”

I swallowed. “What do you dream about?”

“This,” he said.

A soft cry stuttered out of me. It felt as if his fingers had found a loose thread inside me, and were pulling, making me fray and unravel. The leftover nervous energy from all those sleepless nights went scattering across my skin.

My hands reached up, my fingers deep in the thick waves of his black hair. I held him there, his eyes meshed with mine, his gaze sinking deeper into me every time a sigh trembled in my lungs.

Soon the loose thread had tangled into a knot, which Yama drew slowly tighter and tighter. The fear that had wound itself into my muscles was burning away at last, turning to something bright and sharp and hungry. The weight of all those undreamt dreams pounded in my head, crashing and breaking apart, my whole body arching against him.

In the end I nearly came apart, and for a moment all of me was lost, shattering into countless pieces like the memories of a ghost on the river. And I didn’t care if I’d been born cursed, sullied and marked by death, because it had brought me here into Yama’s arms.

He showed me how to sleep again, like Prince Charming in reverse, though back in the airport he had woken me with a kiss as well.

Maybe his lips cured everything.

CHAPTER 29

THERE WAS ANOTHER PRESENTATION AT
Avalon High, and then another at a different school ten miles away, the entrance of which was also tricky to find. So it was late afternoon when Anton drove the three of them back to the hotel for a rest before the bookstore event that night.

Perhaps it was jet lag, or the adulthood-lag of having been in high schools all day, but when Darcy reached the hotel room she fell onto the bed, fully clothed.

It was a solid hour later that she awoke to find Imogen beside her, stripped down to a tank top and boxers and banging away at her laptop.

“You didn’t sleep?”

Imogen’s fingers kept moving. “Are you kidding? Book birthday. Must blog. Must tweet.”

“Oh, right.” With all her morning’s labors, Darcy had somehow
forgotten that
Pyromancer
was sweeping into the world today. “You’re in print, Gen! You are a legit published and printed author.”

“I know, right? Can’t quite believe it.” At last Imogen’s typing paused. “I mean, there were those copies at the schools today. But do you really think there are thousands of them sitting on bookstore shelves? What if there was some kind of glitch? What if it isn’t really happening?”

Darcy put a hand on Imogen’s bare shoulder. “It’s real, Gen.”

“But how do I
know
?”

“Um, because your publishing company told you? And they have this, like, huge building in Manhattan.”

“Good point. That building
is
pretty big.” Imogen pushed a stray strand of hair out of her face and looked up at Darcy. “It’s probably just a passing case of impostor syndrome.”

“Is that a real thing?”

“Of course.” Imogen typed a few keystrokes and spun her screen around. Among the clutter of a dozen open windows was a Wikipedia article.

Darcy scanned the first few paragraphs. Impostor syndrome was pretty much what it sounded like—believing that everything you’d accomplished was luck, or cheating, or fraud. Dreading that it would all be taken away once your fakery had been revealed.

“Crap. This isn’t you, Gen. It’s
me
!”

“It’s every writer.” Imogen turned the laptop toward herself again and stared at the screen. “Okay, reading this was a bad idea. Can you get a syndrome just from looking it up?”

“This one, you can.” Darcy reached out and gently pushed the laptop closed.
“But the cure is to go onstage in front of a hundred rabid Stanley David Anderson fans. They don’t let impostors do that.”

Imogen nodded at this simple wisdom. “After all, how bad can a roomful of Standerson fans be?”

“Never bad.” Darcy pulled Imogen closer to kiss her, and whispered in her ear, “Just intense.”

“Oh, Stanley texted while you were asleep. He wants to meet for an early dinner downstairs.”

Darcy looked at her own phone. Nisha had texted with the message:
Hope you’re having a good tour—364 days till publication!

She sighed and jumped up from the bed. Her clothes felt sticky from having been slept in. “I’ll shower first.”

They cleaned up and dressed, Imogen in a crisp white shirt and leather jacket, lots of metal on her fingers. Darcy lofted onto her toes to straighten the shirt’s collar, which had crumpled in the suitcase. She wore her little black dress, the one she’d been given the night they’d met. Surely there was some good luck left in it still.

*  *  *

The hotel restaurant was decidedly nonillustrious. TVs hung from the ceiling, blaring sports in all directions. The vinyl seat of the booth squeaked like a baby seal as Darcy slid into it, and the menu was full of dishes grandiose and generic, like “the International Cheese Experience.” This phrase, Standerson pointed out, was more than half a haiku.

After they’d ordered the least greasy food they could find, he asked, “Had either of you ever done a school visit before?”

Imogen laughed. “I never thought I’d be in a high school again, and Darcy’s barely out of one.”

“Well, I salute you both.”

“Much as I love praise,” Darcy said, “I’m still mad at you for volunteering me.”

Standerson held up his hands. “That was your publicist! You think she emailed the librarian by accident?”

“I can be mad at you both equally,” Darcy said. “But it was fun, kind of. I liked the battle of the story elements.”

“Because you won,” Standerson said.

Darcy made a
pfft
noise. “You got way more applause.”

“Nobody won,” Imogen said. “Because the victory didn’t go to plot, or character, or conflict. It was all about
setting
.”

The other two stared at her.

“High school,” Imogen explained. “Where else would the interlocking, interdependent elements of narrative be reduced to adversarial comparisons, when in practice they rely on each other to make a coherent whole?”

Darcy shrugged. “In every love triangle ever?”

“Both your points are valid,” Standerson said. “And you should keep doing the school events with us, Darcy. There’s no better research than interacting with our constituency.”

Imogen laughed. “Darcy
was
our constituency, like, five months ago.”

Darcy ignored this and asked, “What’s the worst question you ever got?”

Standerson gave this a moment’s thought, then said in a theatrical voice of doom, “ ‘Where do you get your ideas?’ ”

“That one’s easy for Darcy,” Imogen said. “She steals them.”

“I do not!”

“What about my closet scene?”

Darcy looked down at the table, her cheeks heating up. “That was an accident.”

“Trouble in YA heaven?” Standerson asked, his eyes lighting up. “Spill me the beans.”

“Do we have to?” Darcy pleaded.

“Yes.” Imogen turned to Standerson. “So
Pyromancer
’s the first book in a trilogy.”

He nodded. “It’s awesome so far.”

“Thanks . . .” The compliment flustered Imogen for a moment, but she managed to continue. “The second one just went into copyediting, so I’m starting book three—
Phobomancer
. It’s phobias instead of fires. The protag is claustrophobic, and it was supposed to open with her trapped in a closet. Great, right? So I tell my girlfriend here about the idea”—Imogen flicked Darcy’s shoulder—“and she rewrites one of
her
scenes so that
her
protag gets trapped in a closet, complete with claustrophobic panic!”

“That was a coincidence!” Darcy cried.

“I thought you said it was an accident,” Standerson said.

“It was both! A coincidence because I’d already made a big deal about Lizzie’s father’s closet being fancy, and Mindy sleeping in closets, so using a closet made perfect sense. And it was an accident because I didn’t realize what I was doing. Plus, Gen, you admitted it was way better than my first version, where the old man just shows up and whisks Mindy away.”

“Yes, it was better,” Imogen said. “But it was
my scene
!”

“But
your
new scene is better too!” Darcy turned to Standerson. “Now her protag starts out trapped in the trunk of a car! Much scarier, right?”

Imogen didn’t argue, just ripped a tiny piece from the corner of her placemat.

“We all steal,” Standerson said. “The trick is to steal from regular people, not other novelists.”

Imogen nodded. “My first girlfriend was a pyromaniac, and I can’t remember half the lines I stole from her.”

“Ariel was real?” Standerson leaned forward, his eyes alight. “Tell me about her.”

Within moments, he and Imogen were in a deep discussion of Imogen White,
Pyromancer
, and the intersections between the real and the fictional. Soon they were arguing character and plot all over again, and planning what to say at tonight’s bookstore event.

Darcy huddled in her corner of the booth, happy to listen. But the shame of her scene stealing lay hot on her skin. The closet idea had been so perfect for Mindy’s kidnapping, and the writing of it so easy. Not until she’d read the words aloud to Imogen had she realized that the whole concept had been pilfered.

Maybe that was the price of loving someone: you lost your grasp of where they ended and you began.

*  *  *

The event that night was downtown, in a smallish bookstore with two levels. The place was already crowded by the time Darcy, Imogen, and Standerson arrived. The ground floor was full and there were more kids upstairs, looming over the small stage, their legs dangling between balcony rails.

Not wanting Standerson’s arrival to start a riot, the store manager was waiting outside to take him around to the freight entrance. But Imogen insisted on coming in through the front door. Nobody recognized her or Darcy, of course, and they were free to wander and observe.

Of course, they went to see Imogen’s books first. There was a pile near the door, the flame-red cover dazzling in quantity.

“See?” Darcy said, straightening the top of the pyramid. “You’re not an impostor.”

“I could still be a
really good
impostor.” Imogen’s fingers glided across one of the covers, reading the embossed letters of the title like braille. “But if so, these are excellent forgeries.”

Darcy rolled her eyes and dragged Imogen away into the crowd.

Standerson’s fans were abuzz—with anticipation and with each other. Most wore name tags with internet handles, so online buddies would recognize them in the flesh. Spontaneous friendships were popping up, lubricated by T-shirts decorated with Standerson’s catchphrases and covers. A whole community was face-to-face with itself at last, and seemed dizzily happy about it.

“Aren’t you nervous?” Darcy asked.

Imogen looked up from the photography book she’d been leafing through. “I always feel safe in bookstores.”

Darcy laughed. “So it really
is
all about setting.”

“That appears to be the theme of the day.”

“Well, I’m nervous for you.”

“As long as it’s not contagious.” There was the barest twitch in Imogen’s eye.

“I won’t say another word.”

They mingled in silence, Darcy taking the measure of the crowd. They were almost all teenagers, and the adults looked more like Standerson fans than chauffeuring parents. They were maybe three-quarters female, and about as diverse as the students that day had been—a California mix of Hispanic, white, black, and Asian, including a few kids from the subcontinent. But all of them had decided to come
here
, to a bookstore, on a cold and drizzly Tuesday night, when they could be at home with a thousand channels or the whole internet at their fingertips. When Standerson had called them a “constituency,” it had sounded odd to Darcy, but maybe it was the right word after all.

Ten minutes before seven, Anton appeared and took Darcy and Imogen to the break room. The bookstore owner introduced herself, and Anton delivered the smoothest pitch for
Afterworlds
that Darcy had ever heard, picked up from their random conversations in the car and polished to perfection. The owner listened raptly and asked Darcy a half-dozen questions, none of which were how old she was, and Darcy found herself forgiving all of Anton’s erratic driving.

And then, quite suddenly, it was time for Standerson and Imogen to take the stage.

“Okay. Nervous now.”

“You’ll be great.” Darcy hugged her, squeezing tight for luck.

A moment later, a cordon of bookstore staff was leading the three of them out into a rush of gasps, tears, screams, and squees. The crowd had transformed into a conduit, an engine pumping fannish fervor into the room. Darcy was placed to one side of the bookstore’s stage, only an arm’s length away from Imogen
and Standerson. The stage was only two feet high and a few yards across, and the crowd pressed close.