Afterworlds

by Scott Westerfeld

  Their bodies fit perfectly like this, two continents pulled apart eons ago but now rejoined. Though her head still spun from the ed letter, Darcy could feel every detail of Imogen behind her—the leanness of her arms, the pulsing ghost of her breath. Lying here like this was new enough to be sublimely distracting.

  But it was impossible for Darcy to surrender to her body, because her brain buzzed with strategies—arguments against Nan’s dictates, a dozen possible happy endings, tragic speeches to give if her book were canceled. And under the rest, the hum of worry that this was all her fault.

  “It’s because I’m a hack, isn’t it?”

  Imogen shifted, tightening her arms around Darcy. “What’d you say?”

  “Pyromancer is edgy right from the beginning. And Ariel just gets more gnarly and complicated as you go, all the way to the ending.”

  “So you read it?”

  “Yes! Sorry!” Darcy cried, realizing that in her excitement this morning, she had forgotten to say so. “Finished it, right after Carla and Sagan left. It was amazing, and gritty, and real. And nobody randomly shows up to save Ariel when she gets in trouble. Especially not some dorky death lord who lives in a palace.”

  Imogen chuckled. “You’re going to fix the palace.”

  “It’s too late now. Nan sees this as a happy-ending book, and so does Sales.” Darcy burrowed backward into Imogen’s warmth. “You get to keep your messy ending, because your characters are messy and complicated, and you don’t borrow death gods and make them dorky. Because you’re a real writer.”

  “Seriously, this again?”

  “You know what I mean. Nobody expects Pyromancer to have some big Disney ending.”

  “Because nobody expects it to sell a million copies, no matter how it ends. Sales doesn’t worry about working-class pyromaniacs who lust after their gym teachers.”

  “Then they’re stupid. You’re going to sell millions.”

  “Shush,” Imogen said, pulling Darcy closer.

  “But it’s so awesome.”

  “Thank you, but shush.”

  They were silent for a while, Darcy wondering what to do next. Call her agent? Fight to the death? (The death of her contract? Her career?) Or did she really have to start writing a happy ending for Lizzie and Yamaraj?

  “Doesn’t Nan understand that my book is about death?”

  Imogen’s sigh was warm against the back of Darcy’s neck. “Maybe that’s why. You start with so much tragedy, she wants it to end happily.”

  “That’s stupid.”

  “All happy endings are kind of stupid.” Imogen pulled down the collar of Darcy’s T-shirt and kissed the top of her spine, sending a shiver through her.

  Darcy squirmed in Imogen’s arms till they were face-to-face. “Do you think we’re going to have a happy ending? Or would that be stupid?”

  “We as in us?” Imogen considered the question, a wary look on her face. “I think it might be too early to think about endings.”

  “I wasn’t thinking about endings,” Darcy said, which had been entirely true until a moment ago. But now that she’d started, it was hard to stop. What did a happy ending even mean in real life, anyway? In stories you simply said, “They lived happily ever after,” and that was it. But in real life people had to keep on living, day after day, year after year.

  What were her chances of spending her whole life with the first person she’d ever really kissed? Darcy rolled away and brought her knees close, wrapping her arms around them.

  “Fetal position, huh?” Imogen said. “Thought this might happen, so I saved you some good news.”

  “Glad to hear I’m so predictable. What’s the news?”

  “When Pyromancer comes out, I’ll be touring with Standerson.”

  “It’s official?” Darcy sprang out of her ball and rolled over to face Imogen again. “He’s going on tour with you?”

  “Well, technically I’m going on tour with him.” Imogen’s smile was growing as she spoke. “Not all twenty cities, of course. But we’ll be on the same stage every night for a week.”

  “That’s amazing!” Darcy leaned forward and they kissed properly for the first time that day. The pressure of Imogen’s lips, the play of her tongue, all of it soothed the tightness in Darcy’s stomach. She wondered why they’d waited so long.

  When their mouths parted, Imogen was still smiling.

  “I can’t believe you!” Darcy shook her head. “You kept that secret from me all day?”

  “Like I said, thought you might need it. Dessert goes last.”

  “You do realize that dessert-goes-last and happy-endings-are-stupid contradict each other, right?”

  Imogen shrugged. “One’s a strategy. One’s a philosophy. No contradiction.”

  “Whatever,” Darcy sighed. “But you and Standerson! All because of my party!”

  “Glad I showed up,” Imogen said. “For that and other reasons.”

  As Darcy laughed at this, a fugitive memory crossed her mind. She’d been a little drunk, and so much had happened that night. But in the days since, one moment of the party kept popping back into her head.

  “You said something weird that night.”

  “That I was hot for your book?”

  “Weirder. You said that ‘Imogen Gray’ was your pen name. You were just kidding, right?”

  Imogen’s smile faded at last. “No. It’s true.”

  “So that’s not your real name?”

  “Not the one I was born with.”

  Darcy frowned. “But it’s something close, right? Like, Imogen Grayson?”

  Imogen shook her head. “There’s no point guessing. I don’t tell people my real name.”

  Darcy sat up. “Why the hell not?”

  “It’s no big deal.”

  “Then tell me what it is!”

  Imogen let out a slow groan. “Listen, Darcy. Back in college I wrote a lot of stuff for this indie blog. It was basically a diary: everything I was thinking, everything I was doing . . . everyone I was doing. And after Paradox bought my book, they asked me if I wanted to use a pen name. When I googled myself that night, I didn’t love what I saw. So I decided to keep all that separate from my novels.”

  “Okay, sure. But separate from me, too?”

  “For the moment, yeah.”

  Darcy sat there, wide-eyed, until Imogen took her hand.

  “That’s not who I am right now, is all.”

  “But you didn’t change yourself,” Darcy said. “You just changed your name.”

  “At first, maybe. But it’s a chance to start over, without having to go into witness protection or whatever. Having a pen name gives me a new identity: novelist Imogen Gray. And now that identity is me. Why are you staring?”

  “I don’t know.” Darcy dropped her stare to the futon cover, but had to look up again. It was as if Imogen had announced she was an alien, a shape-shifter, or a flat-out impostor. “This is so weird. I’ve been calling you the wrong name this whole time.”

  “No you haven’t. Imogen Gray is my name.”

  “So you changed it legally?”

  Imogen groaned. “No, but it’s my name.”

  “If I promise not to google it, will you tell me what your real one is?”

  “No. And it’s not any more real than this one.”

  “I thought you wanted me to trust you!”

  “You can trust me, even if I don’t tell you my name.”

  “Can you hear how weird that sounds, Imogen? Or whatever your real name is!”

  “Listen, Darcy.” Imogen let out a slow, exasperated sigh. “You know how it hurts when characters die?”

  This felt like a trick, so it took Darcy a moment to say, “Sure.”

  “That’s because characters are real. Because stories are real, even if they’re fictions. Which means pen names are real too, because novels make their writers into different people. So Imogen Gray is real. That’s who I am. Okay?”

  “It still feels like you’re hi
ding something.”

  “Not any more than you are.”

  “Me?” A laugh bubbled up in Darcy. “I never even kissed anyone before you, Gen. There’s nothing to hide!”

  “Really? So how come when you showed up in New York, you didn’t tell anyone your age? How come you didn’t bring any stuff? At your party Johari asked why this apartment was so empty, and you let her think it’s because you’re some sort of mad author-monk. But it’s because you want to start over.”

  Darcy had to turn away from Imogen’s intensity, and her eyes fell on the select and perfect row of novels on her shelves. There were no books she’d been forced to read for school, no manga series she’d given up halfway through. The bedroom walls were bare of old selfies and boy band posters, shorn of all the flotsam of childhood. Every morning when she walked out into the big room, Darcy breathed the air of a life made from her own choices, without leftovers or hand-me-downs. Nothing here was someone else’s idea.

  Apartment 4E was a blank page.

  “You wanted to rewrite yourself,” Imogen said.

  Darcy stared down at Imogen’s hands. They were twitching, as they always did when she ranted about writing and books. It was crazy to fight with her about this stuff. It was like arguing with someone’s religion.

  “Okay, I get it.” Darcy took a slow breath. “But will you tell me one day?”

  “Of course,” Imogen said. “But right now I need you not to know, because you’re part of what’s making me.”

  “Making you what?”

  “Just making me.” The faintest blush played across Imogen’s cheeks. “I’ve only had this name a year. I’m still a work in progress. You’re part of that now. Maybe the biggest part of that.”

  “Okay.” Darcy took one of Imogen’s tight fists in her hands, and stroked it until the fingers opened. This had been their first fight, she supposed, and now that it was over, something was left bubbling inside Darcy. Relief that the argument was finished, but also a hunger that its passage had opened up. “You’re part of what’s making me too, Gen.”

  “I hope so,” Imogen said, and drew her closer for another kiss, deep and slow and fervent. Darcy felt something kindling inside her, and for the first time wished that they weren’t taking things slow. But she didn’t want to risk two arguments in one day, so she kept that thought to herself.

  CHAPTER 22

  “JUST DON’T THINK ABOUT THE wall,” Mindy said again.

  “You know, that might be easier if you didn’t keep mentioning it.”

  Mindy frowned. “How can I not mention it? You’re trying to walk through it.”

  “Right,” I said. “And how can I not think about it when I’m trying to walk through it?”

  Mindy looked genuinely puzzled by this, and I was reminded again that she was only eleven years old. She’d never mastered the subtleties of psyching herself out. Though, at the moment, my own mental focus was nothing to brag about.

  I stared at the graffiti-covered wall at the edge of the old playground near my house. I’d spent the last hour trying to walk through it the way Mindy could, as easily as strolling through an open door. But all I had to show for my efforts was a bruised knee and a short temper.

  “Maybe if you close your eyes?” Mindy suggested.

  “Tried it.” I pointed at my knee.

  She didn’t answer, just sat there on the wall, deftly managing to look perplexed and smug at the same time.

  Now that I’d spent the last hour trying to do it, ghosts walking through walls made no sense. If you could go through a wall, why wouldn’t you fall through the ground beneath your feet? And then keep on falling through the water table, the earth’s crust, and a few thousand miles of magma until you wound up at the center of the planet?

  But there was Mindy, sitting on top of the same wall that she’d strolled through a moment before. She seemed to make unconscious decisions every second about which objects were solid and which weren’t—the key word of which was “unconscious.” Every time I thought about it, I wound up crashing into things.

  And the problem was much bigger than my bruised knee. Here on the flipside, I was just like a ghost. I couldn’t move anything in the real world, which meant no opening doors. Walking through walls was necessary simply to get around.

  Even if Yama had offered to teach me the ways of the afterworld, I wanted to master some skills without his help. Besides, if I was ever going to find out more about the bad man, I needed to learn how to do this, or stand around waiting for him to open his door to me.

  “Come on, Lizzie. You’ve done it before.” Mindy was swinging her legs, bored now. “You ran through that fence around the scary school.”

  “But that school was from the old days, when there was no fence.”

  “So maybe you should think about the past.”

  “Like, I should imagine dinosaurs in the playground?”

  “Not that far back, silly.”

  Mindy was right—T. rex didn’t haunt. Ghosts emerged from the minds of the living, so only things in living memory could exist in the flipside.

  I turned to face the wall again. It was covered with graffiti, mostly a long mural of a monster eating its own tail, impressive even in shades of flipside gray. The monster wasn’t quite a dinosaur, but it gave me an idea. I took a step closer and placed my hand against the wall, trying to imagine its surface new and untouched.

  For a long moment, nothing happened that I could see. But beneath my palm the texture of the brick seemed to change, the smooth coat of latex paint replaced by something grittier. I pulled away.

  “Whoa,” I said.

  Through an outline in the shape of my hand, I could see an older layer of graffiti, worn and softened by time. As I stared at the hole I’d made, the entire surface of the wall began to simmer and seethe. The monster boiled away, replaced by other images—a glowing pyramid, a laughing clown face, a giant unreadable word in five-foot-high letters—each dissolving in turn, as if the old layers of paint were being peeled away. Across the images danced the tags of a hundred street artists, squiggled signatures piled one on top of another, all of them rewinding backward in time.

  For a brief instant the wall was bare, the mortar still wet and shiny between the bricks. Then at last it faded, and I could see through it to the grassy vacant lot beyond.

  “That actually worked,” I murmured.

  “Make sure not to look at me,” Mindy said.

  I glanced up—and there she was, floating in empty space. For a moment my brain tried to reconcile the realities of past and present, and the bricks shimmered halfway back into place, a mirage uncertain of its own existence.

  “I said don’t look at me!”

  “Shush.” I forced Mindy from my mind and strode ahead.

  For a moment the wall pushed back at me, like a gust of wind tugging an umbrella, and then I was on the other side.

  “You did it!” Mindy shouted.

  I turned back to her with a cry of triumph in my mouth, but madness had erupted behind me. The whole playground was bubbling over into chaos. The poured rubber surface churned, shifting into asphalt and then sand, weeds rippling in its cracks and edges. I saw ghostly streaks of movement, heard peals of laughter and cries of pain. The history of the playground rushed past in a torrent, sounds and smells and emotions. Broken bones and childhood humiliations crackled in the air—everything at once, decades jammed together.

  For a moment I felt something akin to Yama’s electricity coming from inside me, like a battery pressed against my tongue, sparks dancing on my skin. My heart skidded in my chest, and I had to breathe slow and easy to keep myself on the flipside.

  “You okay, Lizzie? You look weird.”

  “I’m fine.” The vision was already fading, the afterworld returning to its usual flat, gray stillness. But the sparks were still there, glitter on my hands.

  I wondered if the things I’d seen were actual scraps of buried history. Were we psychopomps like psychic grave
diggers, exhuming memories and giving them form? Or had the vision been a hallucination?

  It had been a week now since I’d slept. The old man had been right; I didn’t need it anymore. Sleep was just a slice of death, and I’d already eaten my fill. But my dreams were piling up undreamt, sometimes spilling out in daylight. Old taunts and jealousies lurked in the corners and stairwells of my school. I never knew which noises came from the spirit world and which from my imagination.

  For a moment I thought of going home, lying down, and closing my eyes. But I was still buzzing from my vision, too full of energy.

  And I could walk through walls now.

  “We should go somewhere, Mindy.”

  She hopped down from the wall. “Like where?”

  “Someplace far away. Like the Chrysler Building!”

  “But that means going down in the river. It’s too scary.”

  “It doesn’t have to be.” I said. “You’re always saying how bored you are. This would be fun!”

  She shook her head.

  I sighed. “The bad man’s still alive, Mindy. He’s not a ghost. He can’t hurt you.”

  “So what?”

  “So what? You were so happy when I told you!”

  Mindy turned away. “I was. But maybe it would’ve been better if he’d died a long time ago. Because then he would have faded by now.” She turned to stare up at me, her gray eyes glinting. “He must be old, right? Livers die all the time.”

  “He could also last another twenty years.”

  “You mean, he might still be doing bad things?” she asked softly.

  I stood there, for a moment unable to answer. Mindy had died thirty-five years ago, so the bad man had to be middle-aged, at least. But that didn’t mean he’d retired as a murderer.

  “Look, I thought about calling the police,” I said. “But what can I tell them? That I saw the ghosts of his victims in his yard?”

  Mindy stared at the ground. She was only eleven, and didn’t know about evidence and probable cause. She just knew she was afraid.

  “The police didn’t do anything back then, either,” she said.

  “I’m sure they tried.”

  She looked up at me, the usual sadness showing in her eyes. The echoes of what had happened thirty-five years ago were wound up inside her, as inescapable as death. The only way for Mindy to get over her fear was for someone to end the bad man.