by Lily Markova
When I reach the ocean, Chase is dozing on the shore, using his backpack as a pillow and his jacket as a blanket. Krystle is standing on the pier, her willowy silhouette motionless and dramatic against the chaos of heaving and churning waves.
I shake Chase awake and hand him a couple of chocolate bars and a bottle of green tea—all stolen, of course, from the least starved-looking artist I’ve spotted in the Levengleds today. “If you die of hunger, the ocean will launch you into some black hole instead of the living world.” I catch him up on Terry Vox.
“So you’re saying Dude is a girl?” Chase asks, dumbfounded, once he’s finished chewing. “Wicked. Odd. Dude was like a baby brother to me: fools around and keeps trying to give you a heart attack but still is of sentimental value.”
“I think she misses you.”
“Why didn’t he—why didn’t she tell me?” Chase rubs his forehead, which is creased in thought. “She could have thrown her badge at us, she could have written a detailed letter explaining it all. . . .”
“She didn’t know that someone had come to the site of the fire and built a monument in her memory,” I suggest. “She couldn’t see it. She didn’t know we’d be able to find her photo and help her get her looks back.”
“Um, if you will guard the ocean and make sure it stays put. . . . I suppose I’ll go and say good-bye, in case this actually works,” says Chase. “I mean, three years together and everything, right?”
Kai
India is gone. The last time I saw her was in the Drunk Dead when Krystle brought along Freya and Chase to celebrate something. Haven’t seen them around since then, either. I hear they’re spending all their time on the beach now—Freya, Chase, and Krystle. Don’t know what they’re up to, but so long as Krystle’s involved, the business has little, if any, chance of ending well—for me, at least.
When India didn’t come home that morning, I didn’t worry too much. If she had been stuck in an erased building, Remy would have faded away at the very same moment. Sometimes I regret linking them this closely together, but there’s not much I can do about it now. Nothing can be destroyed in Immortown, and that includes my drawings, so what is painted can’t ever be reversed.
This is hardly the first time my sister has gone missing, but she always comes back a couple of days later—she can’t afford to be away from Remy too long. Not this time, however: It’s been a week, and still no word from her. Nobody seems to have talked to her since that party. Remy started to grow weaker three days ago.
He’s horrifying to look at now—lying on India’s bed, staring at the ceiling map and wearing thin. From time to time, he lights a cigarette, and then I can see the smoke swirling inside his chest. If he got up and looked at me, I’d even be able to see the fireplace on the other side of the room through his eyes. We both understand that this is exactly what’s happening to India right now. No matter how angry she is with us, she would never deliberately put herself in danger knowing that she’s risking someone else’s life, Remy’s life.
I ordered her to come back. I painted her again and again—next to Remy, next to me, bright, strong. But she wouldn’t listen, as if it were 1963 all over again and I couldn’t do anything to save her, again. All the while Remy was getting worse and worse.
“Come on, bud, got to take a walk,” I say, pulling him up a bit and drawing his arm around my shoulders so he can lean on me. “That’ll cheer you up.”
I drag us both outside and trudge on, bending under the considerable weight of Remy, who can barely move his legs. Having thus single-footedly ploughed our way to the Drunk Dead, I deposit my load at the base of the beer-barrel door and slide down the wall beside him.
“Fresh air’s not doing you any good, then?” I tell him, lighting a cigarette with a numb hand.
Remy goes completely limp. In the twenty minutes it took us to reach the bar, he’d transcended ‘deathly pale’ and turned twice as white as a ghost. Either India’s condition is deteriorating more rapidly now. . .or, in these past twenty minutes, she and Remy had grown physically father apart. I stub the cigarette out on a wet red-brown cobblestone. The cigarette gives a smothered hiss but soon regrows to its original length from the filter tip, becomes intact again, as do my long-suffering lungs.
“You know, it just occurred to me we haven’t checked on the guys at the other end of town in ages. What do you say, Remigo?”
Remy offers no insightful comments, of course, only contributing a stifled groan of protest to the conversation. I pick him up under the arms once more and haul him back down the street. The closer we are to the central gates, the better he seems to be feeling. Soon enough, he can walk on his own—and about time, too: Another minute or two of this, and someone would have had to carry us both.
“Here,” Remy says, pausing as we’re about to pass the Last Shelter. “She must be in there—I can feel she’s close.”
Inside, I take a red candle from a wall sconce and shine its light around the lobby. Unsurprisingly, there is nobody here. Freya and Chase must be still throwing picnics on the beach, and the little invisible hotel fixture they call Dude has probably perished of ennui and oblivion. The candlelight picks Remy’s face out of the darkness—focused, bloodless, but not translucent anymore. This means India must be very, very close.
“Check the second and third floors,” I say. “I’ll take the upper two.”
Remy shakes his head. “The basement,” he says, in an ominous tone.
At this, we dart toward the stairs leading up to the rooms, skirt them, and unlock the square hatch set in the floor under the staircase. I lower the candle and peer into the opening.
“She’s here!”
“India!”
Remy jumps down into the vault, which is cram-full of trash that has been piling up here for half a century. He removes the black ribbon from around India’s mouth, unties her hands, and slowly, wincing, draws the silver knife out of her stomach. Brought back to consciousness by this renewed pain, she starts screaming. I try to remain composed, but seeing India like this again makes me want to burn something. Someone. I picture her dying here over and over, returning to life and passing out again, and the candle crumbles in my fist. Somebody’s in for hellfire.
“I’m sorry it took us so long,” says Remy, as he rocks my weeping sister in his arms as if lulling her to sleep.
“I thought I was going to fade away here, all by myself.” Clutching at Remy, India looks at me over his shoulder. “Kai, I’m so sorry for the things I said to you. You know I could never bear to lose you, right? And you, you. . .” She buries her face in the side of Remy’s neck again.
“Who did this to you?” I ask, my teeth barely unclenching, jaws glued together by anger.
“Freya Aurore,” whispers India, and she unleashes another wave of sobs.
My jaws unclench easily this time, and remain unclenched for a while. I. . . What?
***
On our way home, I tell the other two that Freya and Chase are alive. “Seek and destroy” is written in bold capital letters all over Remy’s face, but India is too scared to confront Freya just now and refuses to let Remy leave her side. As we pass through Monet, I spot Tom on his usual bench and ask him to go and fetch Krystle.
“I don’t get it,” I say, once we’re all settled in India’s room. “I thought Freya and I—I thought we’d come to a sort of weird understanding. Why would she want to hurt you?”
“I don’t know, Kai,” says India, sniffling. “I must have peeved her off really bad at the party. . . . I mean, all I wanted was for her to just spend some time with me, now and then. . . .”
India still won’t let go of Remy, never more than a step away from him, white-knuckled fingers ever clasped around his sleeve. I contemplate the photograph showing a moment of India’s earliest travel experience, with our parents holding the two of us—a baby and a toddler—in their arms. This photograph saved Freya’s life when she first met my sister. No one can harm India without havin
g to face the consequences, not even Freya.
“Well, if you ask me,” says Remy, and I’ve never seen him so livid before, “it’s too much of a luxury, staying alive in Immortown this long. Is she still on the beach? What is she doing there, Krystle? Looking to be drowned?”
“The night it happened we were in the Drunk Dead,” Krystle says. “Next day, our precious princess complained that the crowded bar had nearly driven her out of her mind and she’d passed out in the corner—woken up a few hours later, still there. She didn’t mention any kidnappings or murders, though, nothing odd in general, except for the hangover.”
Remy sneers. “Very odd indeed, someone’s hungover after blacking out in a bar. Unprecedented.”
“Exactly, Prickett, seeing as she didn’t drink,” says Krystle, regarding him coolly. Seems to me that tomorrow, India and I will be searching the Shelter’s basement for pieces of a thoroughly dismembered Remy.
India’s forehead wrinkles. “Freya said, ‘He cares for you, and you can’t even appreciate it.’ She said I was the only obstacle on her way to my br—hang on!”
She springs to her feet, finally releasing Remy, slides open the top drawer of her nightstand, pulls out a stack of magazines, and starts tossing them aside on the bed, one by one.
“Got it! I think Freya didn’t attack me!” India exclaims, wiping the tears from her cheeks and brandishing an open magazine at us.
Remy rolls his eyes. “What are you talking about? You can’t go on defending her after she almost erased you! Need I remind you that your girl crush stabbed you and left you to re-live your original death over and over again?”
But India seems to be well on her way to recovery, for she ignores him. “Kai, remember how she called you Alex?” Ignoring my grimace, too, she jabs her finger at a couple of lines in the interview that Remy read to us when I first brought Freya to India’s room. “Wants to be her characters, and not simply play them. . . . Astra believes everyone Alex cares about stands in her way. . . .”
A doubting snort comes from the bed, where Remy’s frown is barely visible amidst a mountain of discarded magazines. “Are you implying that all this time, we’ve been dealing with Freya who went bananas and thinks that she’s Astra?”
“No, that’s not likely. Sometimes she was so sweet. . . .” says India, pouting. “She even looked different when she asked me to walk her to the hotel. . . .”
“Different? How?” I cut in, reluctantly revisiting the night Freya kissed me. She seemed different then, too.
“I can’t explain, but she didn’t look like herself. Something must trigger her. . .distract her, make her lose focus. . . .”
I managed to suppress Chase’s consciousness when his girlfriend’s sentimental admission that she still wasn’t over him confused the idiot and put him out of action for a bit. If Freya has a weak spot, it’s her brother.
“Crowds,” I say. “She loses control when she’s in a crowded place.”
It’s not rare for people harboring a tragedy that won’t let them go to escape from reality and into their artificial worlds. Everything we create with our imagination can come to life and console us. Our roles, books, paintings—they can take on a life of their own and make us last forever. That is why we’d better think hard about whether it’s a good idea to create them, and harder about whether if it’s a good idea to kill them, because they might avenge themselves, as they did on me. They can still go on living within us. Astra became an all too significant part of Freya.
“If she suddenly transforms into that soldier boy, we’re all dead. Deader, I mean,” says Remy, flourishing his jaded dagger. “I suggest we not cut her any slack just because she’s mentally deranged. I say we kill her and keep her in a basement until she fades off. And can somebody explain to me why it is that Immortown still doesn’t have a prison?”
Krystle laughs. “What is to be considered a crime in a place where dozens of murders are committed on a daily basis, overlooked by everyone including the victims themselves, and where the essentials are stolen from the neighboring town?”
I barely listen to them, as Freya’s words echo in my mind. “These unfinished paintings. Don’t you want to complete them? Don’t they haunt you?”
“She won’t transform into anyone else,” I say. “I don’t think Freya is just as obsessed with her other characters. Astra is the only role she hasn’t finish with. . . .”
“But she has,” says India slowly. “I once asked Freya to tell me about the ending of the movie. I really wanted to know, but Mr. Nylander had announced that no work on Moth Madness would be resumed until Mitch got well and they found out what had happened to Freya. She says that according to the original version of the script, Astra was supposed to set a fire in the lighthouse, and she and Alex were supposed to burn there together, but Nylander changed his mind. Freya must have immersed herself so deeply into Astra’s character by then that it didn’t suit her. I mean, the whole plot centers around the fact that Astra only wants one thing: to make sure no one can take Alex away from her.”
“So when Aurore and that comatose kid were rehearsing in the lighthouse, she still wasn’t quite herself,” concludes Krystle. “She started the fire.”
“But they both made it out alive. We have to help her,” says India, looking around at the rest of us pleadingly. “If she thinks that Kai is Alex, and the only way to break away from the role is to finish playing it—”
“But then they would have to die, that psycho and Kai—for good.” Remy’s face screws up. “Brilliant plan. Killing Freya a few times would be my pleasure, but what are we going to do with this problematic bastard here, seeing as he’s technically both already dead and immortal?”
“Remy,” says the problematic immortal bastard that I am. “I’ll take care of this, but I’m going to need lots of silver paint and a very big pane of glass. Can you get that from Levengleds for me?”
“Obviously,” he answers, without too much enthusiasm. “Dunno what you’re up to, but I remain of the opinion that murder is way more effective than art—although I wouldn’t mind giving her and the hotel guy a couple of tats while they’re still alive. It’s so inconvenient to be a tattoo artist when you’re dead and surrounded by self-healing ghosts. Never mind that—it’s just inconvenient to be dead.”
“Un-Kai-damn-believable,” mutters Krystle, burying her face in her hands.
Freya
“I didn’t miss anything, did I?” says Chase, panting. “Dude—I mean, Terry—promised not to call me back to Immortown if we did get out, and in return, I allowed her to visit me sometimes in my sleep. I also managed to talk her into occasionally showing up in places stuffed full of ghosts so she won’t start fading away again. I mean, I’ll try to remember her the way she’s become, of course—come on, Freya, what’s with the long face? Did we miss our flight?”
“I couldn’t have,” I say, addressing Krystle, who has just filled me in on what I allegedly did to India; Demon Mitch is looming behind her. “It couldn’t have been me. I was in the Drunk Dead the whole time. I don’t remember anything.”
“Because that wasn’t you,” Krystle says softly. “But you need to get out of here, as quickly as possible.”
Chase swallows and looks from me to Krystle. “What happened?”
“I’m not going to run,” I say firmly. “I’ll talk to India. Maybe she made that story up because she’s upset with me. . . .”
“You can’t go to the Skarsens’,” snaps Krystle, all softness gone, which is good, because softness looks unnerving on her. “Kai’s furious, and he’s plotting against you—he’s blindfolded himself and is drawing something really big. . . .”
“Great. I’m toast.” If Kai Skarsen believes I hurt his sister, I’d better get ready to burn in hell. But how could he think that after what he’d told me, I’d hurt India at all, much less kill her the way she had killed herself? Oh God, what if he takes his revenge on me through hurting Iver? “No. He will have to let me expla
in—I didn’t do it!”
I begin to storm off, determined to make Kai listen to me, but Krystle grabs my arm and swings me around.
“You’re forgetting Remy is there, too,” she says. “If he catches you first, surely you don’t expect him to be creative about neutralizing you?”
She has a point. I rip my arm from Krystle’s grasp, glaring at her, but I remain on the pier. It won’t matter whether Kai believes me or not if Remy kills me at least once before I get to either of the Skarsens.
“But what if he—”
“Iver is safe,” she interrupts. “I won’t let anything happen to him.”
I peer into her eyes, then nod, my anger subsiding. Krystle cares about my brother, too. And if Kai still hasn’t erased the witch, he must care about her. I’ll have to trust that he will leave Iver out of this by extension.
“Now can anybody tell me what on earth is the matter?” says Chase.
“Sure. Sorry,” I say, turning to him. At least I know he’ll believe me. “So, apparently, I’m a psychopath now. . . .”
***
The days fly by, and the ocean remains where it is. Remy still hasn’t come looking for me, and I don’t feel any strange symptoms indicating that Kai’s mysterious new painting is meddling with my mind. This unsettles rather than soothes me—I doubt he would just let this go. That he hasn’t recklessly struck yet means Kai is being patient and cold-blooded about the elaborate punishment Krystle says he’s preparing for me.
Chase has set up a tent on the shore, and we take turns sleeping in it so one of us is always watching the ocean and can alert the other when the erasure begins. We decided it would be easier to jump off the pier than walk into the ice-cold water from the beach. Sometimes Chase builds a campfire, and Krystle then casts fearful glances at the flames while he and I warm our hands and exchange ideas on the first things we’ll do upon returning to Levengleds. Chase says he will hurry straight to Aria’s and never leave her again. And I just want to go home. See Mom. And Mr. Nylander. Confess that I ran from the burning room at the top of the lighthouse, leaving Mitch to die. And at the same time, I quake every time I imagine that one day, there will come a moment when I’ll have to jump, abandon my brother. I’m not sure I’m ready to go without first speaking to Iver, but Krystle stays deaf to my appeals and refuses to take me to him.