by Naomi Hughes
“That memories don’t make a person,” I answer. “That choices do. And,” I say, holding out his phone between us, barely daring to breathe, “this doesn’t look like Matthew’s choice to me.”
He swallows. He stretches out a hand and lifts the phone away, careful not to touch me. He stares at the screen. “But I’m him,” he says, though the words are softer now and they rise at the end like he’s asking a question.
The hope is spreading and twisting, but I force myself to wait. To stay where I am, to keeping talking, to see if the theory takes root. “When I found you at the fountain a few minutes ago, you were confused.”
He’s still looking at the phone. “Two minds in one body. It was … a struggle.”
“And who won?”
He raises his head. He watches me.
“You told me to do it, back at the warehouse. To use you up,” I say. “You faced your fears, and Matthew never could, not even at the end. Maybe that made you stronger than him. And now you’re the one making the decisions, and all that’s left of him are memories.”
He tests the idea. He weighs it, balances it, totals it up, and considers the sum. His expression turns hopeful instead of horrified.
Then his gaze focuses over my shoulder. A smile spreads across his face and my heart flops over in my chest, because he’s never looked more like Quint. I turn around to follow his gaze; he’s looking at the window. A fat pigeon is strutting across the sill, fluffing its wings. It pecks at the bricks, finds nothing of interest, and flaps off to a nearby tree with a disgruntled coo.
It leaves behind a feather.
I stand on tiptoe and stretch my fingers between the bars to reach it. It’s long, ash gray, light as hope in my hand.
I think it means redemption.
Quint checks his watch and looks back at me, his expression brilliant as the sun. “Cam, it’s been two minutes. It didn’t happen.”
It didn’t happen. The end of my world has ticked past, just another unremarkable second, and we’re still here. Somewhere on the base, my mother is alive. Somewhere in the city, my dad and brother are well and whole. My future is intact, reset. It’s anything I want it to be, anything I can make it.
Quint gets up. He stands next to me to look out the window, and if I close my eyes I can imagine it’s still my old ghost standing there, insubstantial but certain, tied to me like he’s always been.
I keep my eyes open.
The feather tickles my palm. Quint is watching me. His smile is gone now, and a question has replaced it.
I hold out my hand. I offer him the feather, and answer it.
EPILOGUE
THREE WEEKS LATER
WHEN QUINT ARRIVES, I’M PERCHED at the top of the subway stairs, bare feet tucked beneath me, the tattered hem of my prom dress pooled on the steps. It’s a few minutes past midnight, and a trickle of late-night passengers step around me on their way to the subway. Beyond the barred windows of the train station, the late spring moon is rising.
My back is to the door that Quint comes through, but I feel the moment he spots me. The change in the air is like a current switching on; the night goes from fuzzy and lethargic to something that feels like holding your breath in the space of half a second.
He pauses, watching from the doorway. I don’t say anything. After a long moment, he crosses the wide open space and moves toward me, steps painfully slow.
He sits at my side, careful to leave six inches between us. “Hi,” he says. His gaze slips in my direction. Three weeks of confinement at the Washington base have left their stamp on his expression—uncertain, vulnerable, a little bit haunted.
Or maybe it’s just me.
I’m holding a cream soda in each hand. I toss him one and he catches it, turning the glass bottle over and examining it like it might contain some kind of secret message. “We’re celebrating,” I inform him.
He arches a brow. “My graduation to house arrest?” He shifts after he says it, self-conscious, and I catch a glimpse of the black tracker around his ankle. The agency was forced to release him yesterday by order of the Army higher-ups who are investigating the experiment, but he’s still only allowed to go a few miles from his new apartment. Now that he’s a military whistle-blower, his life will probably never be easy again. I don’t think he regrets it, though. I think that, finally, Quint is at peace with his choices.
“No,” I answer. “I decided to accept my scholarship at State. Pre-med degree, here I come.” I clink my bottle against his and down a gulp. Still uncertain, he follows suit. “Also,” I continue, “the panic disorder treatment I’m doing means I have to ride this damn subway for another half hour while tolerating the anxiety, and I need the fortification. Kyle wouldn’t buy me anything stronger, so this’ll have to do.”
Quint presses his lips together against a smile and glances over his shoulder at my family. Mom waves from her spot in front of the ticket booth, her new pearl earrings glittering in the fluorescent light.
She laughed last week when she opened the gift-wrapped jewelry box. It had taken me a while to find a pair that looked exactly like the ones she’d given up for me when I was thirteen, and she recognized them immediately.
She put the earrings on with a rueful smile. “That awful manager hurt you, and I wanted to make you feel better. And I kind of wanted you to think I was a badass too,” she admitted.
I tucked her chestnut hair behind her ears. “You’re my badass,” I told her, and we squeezed the life out of each other in the mushiest hug ever.
Next to Mom at the ticket booth, Dad gives an exaggerated yawn and a thumbs-up. Kyle is sitting in a chair next to them, clad in his agency uniform, feet propped up on the ticket booth and hands behind his head like he doesn’t care how I’m doing—but every time I return to this stop I spot him cracking open one eye to make sure the panic isn’t dragging me under.
It is, but I’m letting it, and the result is kind of like realizing I can breathe underwater—accepting the fear instead of running and hiding and denying lets me prove to myself that I can handle it, and because of that fragile newfound confidence, the panic hasn’t been escalating to nearly the levels it used to. I still hate it, and I still feel helpless a lot, but there’s a light at the end of the tunnel now. Literally, in this case.
Quint is fiddling with his bottle and not looking at me. “Your mom said you wanted me here,” he says, almost like it’s a question.
He has good reason to wonder at my motives. Mom went to visit him a couple times over the last few weeks, but I never accompanied her. I needed time to figure out how I felt. When you’ve been through so much with someone, sometimes it’s hard to separate the experience from the person. It’s even harder when that person was actually two people, and when one of them was a mass murderer.
“Yep,” I say, but don’t elaborate because I’m still getting the words I want to say right in my head.
He glances over, taking in my tattered, paintball-splotched strapless dress. “How are you not cold?” he asks.
“Oh, I’m freezing. But two rides back I accidentally left my very fancy and expensive wrap on my seat, and some lucky subway rider has probably snatched it.”
He shrugs out of his hoodie—gray, soft, a little bit worn around the edges—and drops it over my head. “Should I even ask what happened to your shoes?” he wonders, but I can’t answer for a moment, because the hoodie is warm and enveloping and it smells like …
Pine.
He notices my expression. “What?”
I clear my throat. “It smells,” I say, and then can’t continue.
He blinks. “I swear I washed it yesterday,” he says, and I swallow a laugh.
“No,” I try again. “It smells like pine. Not like mint and metal.”
He processes this statement, then looks away. The silence is heavier than before.
I return my gaze to the steps. “I lost one shoe at the stop on Maple ten minutes back,” I tell him. “Tripped over a curb and t
he whole heel came right off. I figured I might as well lose the other one, too. I tried to tell Mom I’d rather just wear my Converse and jeans to the dance earlier. Can’t go home to get them now, though, not without ruining my exposure exercise.” I wave a hand at the subway below.
“Oh,” he says, still looking at my dress. “Was it … prom night, earlier?” I hear the question behind the words—he wants to know if I had a date, but he’s not sure it’s his right to ask.
“Yeah. I was supposed to go stag, but I ended up ditching it anyway. Kyle’s home this weekend, so I dragged him out to play some paintball instead, and then I realized what today was.”
“Three weeks,” he says.
Three weeks since the explosion that didn’t happen. Three weeks that we experienced twice—once with him tied to me, and once after we reset the space-time continuum. Tomorrow is the first day I haven’t already lived.
I burrow a little deeper into his hoodie. “It felt right, being here. Doing this part of the treatment tonight.”
He’s turning the bottle over and over in his hands, expression tight as he stares down the steps. It was only a few feet from here that he told me I’d end up killing my brother just like I’d killed my mother. And it was only a few yards in the opposite direction that another version of him planted a bomb that leveled a city block, and changed the course of my life forever.
“I told your mom everything,” he says suddenly, and the words are low and urgent, tripping over each other like he’s not sure how long I’ll listen. “I wrote it all down for the court case she’s helping with, for the people in Washington who are thinking about shutting the agency down. They’re planning an initiative to make sure Leratonium never gets misused again.”
“She told me,” I reply, but he doesn’t seem to hear.
“I destroyed all my original research, everything I didn’t release to the public. I made sure the agency couldn’t access any of the calibrations, the formula. And I never answered their questions. None of them.”
I lift my bottle of cream soda and take a deep gulp because I need fortification for this moment too, and then I turn to Quint. “Shut up,” I tell him. “There’s something I want to say to you.”
He blinks. In his hands, the bottle stills. Then before I can go on, he drops one hand in his pocket, pulls something out, and, after a moment’s hesitation, offers it to me.
A pigeon feather. It’s slightly crinkled, but beyond a few bent barbs it looks exactly like it did the day I gave it to him.
The words I’d finally figured out die without reaching my lips, because they weren’t right anyway. Only one thing can be, for this moment—with the world narrowed to a split second, to a choice, to a feather in the hand of a boy who was once my hallucination and then my ally and then, against all logic, the person I fell for.
I lean over. I look at him—green eyes bright, hesitant, questioning—and kiss him.
Electricity. Vertigo. I’m standing at the top of a theme park zip line, stepping out over the empty air.
He lifts a hand and touches my cheek. His fingertips are warm and solid and, when the kiss ends, he leans his forehead against mine and inhales like it’s the first breath he’s ever taken.
“If you break her heart, I’ll kill you,” Kyle calls lazily, and the moment is over.
I lean away, smothering a grin. “Careful,” I call over my shoulder. “You’re in danger of looking affectionate.”
I look back at Quint, who’s now sitting very still and staring at me. I wait to see what he’ll say. Whether he’ll kiss me again.
But he swallows and touches his now-crooked glasses, searching for words. “I … I still have Matthew’s memories.”
My grin fades. “I know.”
“It’s confusing. I want to, God, I want to, but I don’t know if I can—if we can—” He spreads his hands, helpless.
“I know,” I say, because I do. It’s why I never visited him, why I could never bear to call or write. He’s the boy I fell for, but he also has all the memories of the boy I hate most. And yes, it’s hard and terrible and confusing—but in some strange way, it also feels right. Because don’t we all have to live with the shards of ourselves? With all those bits of our souls that we hate, all the puzzle pieces we’d rather hide from?
I take a breath, searching for a way to tell Quint how I feel about everything that’s happened between us, the conclusions I’ve come to. “I killed him,” I say at last.
He looks up sharply.
“Matthew,” I go on. “I stole his soul and watched him fall. And yeah, I picked him back up again, I did my part to save him—but all my actions were based on guesses, on best-case scenarios, and it could’ve gone the other way just as easily. And at the end of the day, he’s gone anyway. What does that make me?”
Quint frowns. He reaches out, hesitates, and then tucks a strand of hair behind my ear. “Complicated,” he says softly. “But a good person anyway.”
I put my hand over his, trapping it. “Yeah,” I say. “Same as you.”
His smile is slow but unguarded, crinkled at the corners, lighting him up from the inside. “And … you’re okay with complicated?”
“I’m okay with you. When you’re not being a jackass and/or a manipulative bastard.”
He snorts. “I can’t make any promises.”
“Shut up,” I order, and kiss him again.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
ALTHOUGH THIS BOOK IS a work of fiction, the anxiety Camryn deals with is a very real experience for many teens. If her struggle resonates with you, please know that you are not alone.
For help with panic disorder or any other form of anxiety, you can visit calmclinic.com. Between the hours of 6–10 p.m. Pacific Time, teenagers can also call Teen Line at (800) TLC-TEEN ([800] 852-8336) to talk to teen volunteer listeners trained to provide support for those dealing with anxiety, depression, bullying, and a wide range of other issues.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THE MAKING OF THIS BOOK was a long, roundabout, and exhausting/exhilarating process, and there were so many people who helped turn it into an actual Book-Shaped Thing. Some of them helped me improve my story through critique, some advocated it to their connections in the publishing industry, and some I cheerfully conned into babysitting for me so I could get some writing done (sorry, hon). I owe so much to all of them.
First and foremost, I have to thank my agent, Kira Watson, who was the best possible champion Afterimage could’ve had and one of the first people to truly believe in it. I promise I’ll name a villain after you someday!
Thanks to my awesome editor, Lauren Knowles, who caught all of the wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey mistakes left over from when this story’s timelines were even more complicated, and the team at Page Street Publishing, especially Rosie Stewart, badass designer extraordinare! I’m so thrilled I got to partner with you all in the making of this book. I also want to give a shout-out to Ashley Hearn, who helped introduce Afterimage to Lauren Knowles, and who is a pretty stellar editor herself.
Thanks to my critique partners: Casey Lyall, Chelsea Bobulski, and Alicia Jasinski. Buy their books, these ladies are seriously amazing writers! Thanks also to the incredibly generous authors who put in a good word for me while Afterimage was out on submission: Wade Albert White, Jennifer Park, and N.K. Traver. And an extra big helping of thanks to Brenda Drake, author and creator of the Pitch Wars contest, which changed my life five years ago when I first started seriously writing and set me on the path to where I am today.
This story got read by so many people over the last few years. Without their thoughtful critique and constructive criticism, Afterimage would be a much shabbier version of itself. There were a few amazing ladies in particular whose notes were instrumental in the development and revision of Afterimage: Lydia Sharp, Jennifer Hawkins (my medical expert!), and Serene Hakim.
A big thank you to Kate Brauning, whose editorial mentorship meant the world to me and vastly improved my writing and revising
skills as well as my editorial ones.
Thank you to my real-life friends, who help keep me surprisingly sane on a daily basis: Britton, Becky, Janette, Lisa, and Shawna.
While brainstorming the science-y-ness of this story, one book in particular came in very handy: Physics of the Impossible by Michio Kaku. I also have to give credit to Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, a thoroughly fantastic show that gave me the first nugget of an idea for the concept that would become Afterimage. And while we’re at it, let’s have a huge, geektastic shout-out to some of the awesome TV shows and movies (some of which I totally Easter-egged in this book) that inspired part of this story’s tone and themes: Doctor Who (which is only the best TV show ever, and in case you’re wondering, I’m an 11th-Doctor girl), Avatar: The Last Airbender, Marvel’s Doctor Strange and Captain America movies, Pacific Rim, Harry Potter, BBC’s Sherlock, Stargate: Atlantis, Mythbusters, Star Wars, and Pushing Daisies.
When I was researching the panic disorder element of this book, The Panic Attacks Workbook by Dr. David Carbonell was hugely helpful. I want to thank Andrea as well—her advice and support brought me out of a dark time with my own anxiety, and she provided valuable feedback for elements of this story.
I also want to thank my favorite author, who has had a huge impact on my writing, as well as on how much time I spend not doing the dishes while re-reading her books: Megan Whalen Turner, author of the immeasurably amazing Queen’s Thief series.
And of course, I have to thank my family. My husband Caleb distracted our adorable, small daughter for countless hours while I hid in various locations trying to write and revise this book (Dear Caleb: If you would just put in a lock for my office door that our child can’t pick with her tiny but surprisingly dexterous fingers, this would all be much easier), plus he lent me his scientist’s brain whenever I needed it for world-building questions. Thanks to my brother Nathan. Kyle is totally not based on you, just in case you were wondering. Thanks to my parents, who will finally be allowed to read this book now that it’s published and they can’t convince me to take all the cursing out. And thanks to Steve and Ronda, who have always supported me.