Afterworlds

by Scott Westerfeld

  “When did you get all religious?”

  Nisha shrugged. “I’m in it for the math.”

  “What math?”

  “Dude. We invented zero. And there’s this mantra from three thousand years ago—it’s just the powers of ten, from a hundred up to a trillion. How cool is that?”

  Darcy raised an eyebrow. “It’s possible that you and I have different interests.”

  “Listen. Dad gave me this book for Hindu kids, and it said that if you burned every copy of the Vedas, the same truths would be rediscovered. That only makes sense if you’re talking about the math.”

  “Huh.” Darcy glanced at the painting of Ganesha. The lights had finally started to shimmer. “That’s what all this is to you? Just numbers?”

  “Just numbers?” Nisha snorted, and her face took on a look of adamantine certainty. “The universe is math on fire, Patel. That’s my faith.”

  Darcy didn’t answer, thinking of Sagan and his Angelina Jolie Paradox. Maybe that was the point of truth—you could erase it all you wanted, and it was there to be discovered again.

  * * *

  For dinner that night, Annika Patel had gone into full Gujarati feast mode, arraying half a dozen small dishes before each place at the table. In addition to the usual okra and chickpeas, there were curries made of ivy gourd and bitter melon. The roti was homemade, as attested by its charred edges and the loud cursing of Darcy’s father all that afternoon.

  Even for Darcy, who had rejected the family’s vegetarianism so long ago, the smells rising up from the table were mouthwatering. And as still more side dishes arrived, she was hit with a pang of missing Imogen. It would have been wonderful to explain the nuances to her, to help her dissect the yogurt-soaked dumplings and steamed taro leaves, and watch her sample the sinus-clearing chutneys.

  To know a family is to eat its feasts, Darcy thought, deciding that next year Imogen would be here.

  She glanced across the table at Aunt Lalana, who had arrived just before dinner. She was looking back at Darcy with expectation in her eyes.

  Great. More pressure.

  “This looks amazing, Mrs. Patel,” Carla said, and Sagan nodded. The two were traditional guests for the first night of Pancha Ganapati, and both were back from a semester of college looking older and wiser. Carla’s hair was cut short and sleek, and Sagan had replaced his glasses with contact lenses. Such superficial changes, but they reminded Darcy that her friends were growing up at least as fast as she was.

  When her mother asked what courses they were taking, Carla launched into a disquisition on the British eighteenth-century novel. “There was this whole genre called the supernatural explained. It’s not even the 1800s yet, but all these writers are already sick of paranormal. So they start writing horror novels where everything creepy turns out to have a logical explanation. Well, sort of logical.”

  “You mean, like every Scooby-Doo ending ever?” Sagan asked.

  “Exactly! They want the genre tropes, but they can’t handle the genre tropes.”

  “Those meddling kids,” Sagan said, tearing a piece of roti in half.

  “I always hated that when I was little,” Darcy said. “Are the books any good?”

  Carla shrugged. “The sentences are crazy long. But it’s like Shakespeare; you get used to it in fifteen minutes.”

  “I suppose Darcy will be an English major too,” Annika Patel said. “Imagine, getting to read novels all day long.”

  There was a quick exchange of glances among the teenagers at the table. Darcy’s college career was still a given, of course. But it wasn’t her mother’s assumption that made Darcy bristle. It was the fact that she already read several novels a week. Maybe she hadn’t plowed through any eighteenth-century gothics lately, but half of what she read hadn’t even been published yet. Surely that was more interesting than being forced to swallow proto-Scooby-Doo.

  She was about to make this point when her mother spoke again.

  “Speaking of novels, I have an announcement.” Annika paused a moment, gathering everyone’s attention, then turned to Darcy. “I finally read your book.”

  There was another pause, another exchange of glances.

  “You were supposed to wait for it to be published!”

  “That’s what I was going to do. But then I realized it wasn’t coming out till next September.”

  “Only two hundred and seventy-six days,” Nisha said brightly.

  “I mean, really,” Annika said. “Does it take eighteen months just to make a book?”

  Darcy’s mind flooded with answers—sales conferences and copyedits, advanced readers’ copies and cover designs—because she’d asked the same question herself many, many times.

  But what she said was: “And you read all of it?”

  “Did you think I wouldn’t make it through?” Her mother laughed. “It takes more than a little violence to scare me off.”

  “She read that first chapter out loud to me,” her father said, all smiles. “Very chilling.”

  “Thanks.” Darcy waited for the rest. Not more praise, but her mother’s recognition of Rajani’s ghost.

  “I loved how they could go anywhere in the world, just by wishing.”

  “The river isn’t exactly wishing, Mom.”

  “I suppose not. But it was clever of you, using the River Vaitarna. I didn’t know you were still interested in religion.”

  Darcy blinked. She’d been thinking about her parents’ faith for the last six months of rewrites. “So you didn’t mind that I used Lord Yama as a character?”

  Her mother waved a hand. “He wasn’t really Lord Yama. He was just some boy.”

  “Oh,” Darcy said. “But what about Mindy?”

  The others were all watching carefully, though only Nisha knew about Annika’s murdered childhood friend.

  “She was cute. And funny.”

  “Funny? And cute?”

  “Because she was such a little 1970s kid. I could just see those braids. And corduroys!” She turned to her husband. “Remember when you used to wear them all the time?”

  He laughed. “I think I’ve still got a pair somewhere.”

  “Um, but there wasn’t anything else familiar about her?” Darcy asked.

  Annika Patel frowned. “How do you mean?”

  Darcy sat there, not sure what to say. Kiralee had been right, of course—it was a terrible idea to talk about Rajani aloud, at least until the series was finished. But Darcy couldn’t believe that her mother had missed the parallel entirely.

  It felt like a failure of her writing. Or maybe her mother simply wasn’t haunted by her past. Maybe she had left all that behind in India.

  “I just thought you might have noticed . . .”

  Darcy couldn’t go on. Bringing up Rajani at a crowded dinner table risked exorcising her from the quiet, gray place in Darcy’s mind where the story had been born. It risked every page of Untitled Patel being somehow different, somehow broken by the revelation.

  But why was her mother being so clueless?

  “What is it, dear?” Annika Patel asked.

  The whole table was staring at her now. She had to say something, anything to protect her little ghost.

  “Um, I have a girlfriend.”

  The moment of silence wasn’t very long, but it felt timeless and huge and echoing. Everyone’s eyes shifted from Darcy to her parents, the only two at the table who hadn’t known already. They looked more baffled than anything else, but to be fair, the statement had been a giant non sequitur. Aunt Lalana was smiling with approval, at least.

  Nisha was the first to speak. “Smooth, Patel.”

  The spell broken, Darcy said, “I wanted to tell you guys. We’ve been together for a while now. I really like her.”

  In a strange way, it felt like her first performance as an author on the stage of Avalon High School. There hadn’t been time to get nervous, so the words she needed had simply appeared in her mouth.

  “A girlfriend? Well, I
didn’t expect that.” Annika Patel’s smile looked skittish for a moment, then settled. “You know we love you, Darcy, always.”

  “Of course I know,” Darcy said, and she always had, but the hearing of it struck her somehow. She skipped a breath, and the lenses of two unshed tears alighted on her eyes, making everyone at the table look sharper, clearer.

  “Salubrious occasion is salubrious,” Sagan said softly.

  Then a puzzled look crossed her mother’s face. “Wait. Was I supposed to get that from reading Afterworlds? Did I miss something?”

  “Not about that. It was just . . .” Darcy didn’t know where to go from there. “Imogen’s really nice and I think you’ll like her. And I’m sorry for taking so long to tell you.”

  Her father spoke up. “You chose the perfect time, Darcy.”

  She smiled back at him, as if she’d told them on the first night of Pancha Ganapati on purpose, and not just because she was a lucky chickenshit. After all, the timing had been perfect.

  She was fine with being lucky—this family, this made-up holiday, this certainty that she was loved.

  This was her faith.

  CHAPTER 34

  MR. HAMLYN WAS ENRAPTURED WITH THE little dead girls, until I explained that they wouldn’t be to his taste. They had not been loved at the end.

  “And you leave me with that?” he asked, pointing at the ghost cowering in the corner.

  The bad man’s spirit had risen up a few minutes after his body had gone still. He was skinnier than I’d expected, in flower-patterned pajamas and white socks. He’d hardly noticed me, too busy staring out at the five little girls in his front yard. Maybe he’d always suspected they were out there, and thought his nightmares were coming true. Or maybe he thought the nightmare was happening now. He hadn’t said anything, just crawled into the darkest corner of the room and covered his eyes.

  “Yes,” I answered Mr. Hamlyn. “I killed him. Now cut him to pieces, please.”

  The old psychopomp looked me up and down, at the dirt beneath my fingernails, the shovel in my hands. His smile grew and grew, until it seemed twisted and wrong, too big for his face.

  “I knew you had it in you, girl.”

  I pointed the blade of the shovel at the bad man’s ghost. “Teach me how to take his memories apart.”

  Mr. Hamlyn gave a theatrical little shudder. “They’re very nasty memories. You should start with something sweeter.”

  “I’m not going to make a quilt out of him. I just want him gone.” I looked out the window at the little girls. “And to set them free.”

  “He’s dead. His memories won’t hold anything for long.” A shrug twisted his frame. “But I suppose we can hurry things a bit.”

  That was when Mr. Hamlyn showed me what was in the pockets of his patchwork coat.

  It was a piece of memory he’d found, something awful. It was so rare, he said, that I could travel the river for a hundred years and never feel one brushing against the back of my neck. But I would certainly notice if that ever happened—the shiver that holding it gave me was very particular, like an eel wrapped around my spine, cold and squirming.

  He said it was like a diamond, forged under unimaginable pressures, so that it cut lesser memories to pieces. Such threads formed only when something unimaginable happened, like the death of a whole city by fire. He had seen it happen half a dozen times.

  “Be very careful with it,” he said. “Anything that can cut a ghost can cut you too, even in the afterworld.”

  It was the perfect tool for psychopomps like him.

  The little girls faded as we worked. The bad man had remembered them best of all, better than their own families, even. As his ghost parted into bright, shimmering strands, the girls dwindled and sputtered, finally departing one by one.

  Free at last, or simply gone.

  I saw more than I wanted to that night, the bad man’s whole grisly career flashing past as his threads pulsed in my hands. But as awful as those visions were, there was something elegant in Mr. Hamlyn’s work. Like a cross between a surgeon and a storyteller, he teased out and sliced away single threads from the tangle of a life.

  But he had no desire to collect anything so foul, and in the end we cast all those carefully cut pieces into the Vaitarna. That’s all the river was—endless millennia of human memories boiled down to black sludge. I wondered how it could smell so sweet.

  “Thank you,” I told Mr. Hamlyn when we were done.

  “There’s no thanks better than being right.”

  I looked at him. “Right about what?”

  “That you would call me.” He smiled. “Though I admit, it was sooner than expected.”

  I started to say that there was no way I’d ever be calling him again. But how could I be sure? My future was up in the air, both as a valkyrie and as a human being.

  Everything changes when you take a life.

  * * *

  It would have been easy to let the river carry me home, but my real body was here in Palo Alto. I couldn’t leave it behind, or my shiny new car, for that matter.

  When I turned on my phone for directions back to the highway, it woke up sputtering: six messages from my mother and fourteen from Jamie.

  Maybe if they’d left only one or two, I would have listened to them. But the thought of all those voice mails growing steadily more anxious made me switch the phone back off. But first I texted them both:

  I’m okay. Will be home this morning.

  The highway was easy to find, and there were plenty of signs pointing to Los Angeles. But my timing was terrible once again. After four hours of driving I found myself approaching LA smack-dab in the middle of morning rush hour.

  It was also breakfast time, and I hadn’t eaten since lunch the day before. Maybe I didn’t need sleep anymore, but here in the overworld food was not optional.

  I stopped at a place called the Star Diner in North Hollywood, choosing it for the parking spot right in front. A mercifully efficient waitress brought me scrambled eggs and toast, which I devoured in about three minutes. Eating simple, ordinary food edged me back toward reality.

  Morning sunlight slanted in through the diner’s picture windows, as if the afterworld didn’t exist. The tables were trimmed in cheery, glittering chrome. Sitting there drinking coffee, I didn’t feel like someone who’d cut apart a ghost last night. I wasn’t sure how I felt, exactly. Not angry anymore, because the bad man was gone, but not triumphant either. I should’ve been exhausted from driving all night, but even that was missing. It was as though I’d excised some part of myself along with the bad man’s memories. Only the cold place remained.

  Then I reached into my wallet to pay, and a business card slipped out. It had a blue seal in the upper left corner, and the name Special Agent Elian Reyes in the center. I remembered what he’d said to me on the phone:

  You should always report murders, of course.

  And that’s what I’d just done: committed murder. What else would you call breaking into an old man’s house in the middle of the night, waking him up, and leaning on his chest until he has a heart attack?

  It hadn’t been an accident.

  The business card was frayed and soft from being in my wallet. I’d memorized the information ages ago, figuring that if you have your own personal special agent, you should know his number. Learning the digits by heart had seemed funny at the time.

  It didn’t seem funny now.

  You should always report murders, of course.

  What would happen next back in Palo Alto? Someone would find the bad man’s body, sooner or later. The police would be called, and couldn’t fail to notice the smashed bedside table and the pills scattered across the floor. They would ask the neighbors if anyone had seen something strange, like a car pulling up at three in the morning. Maybe a wild girl digging up his lawn with her hands.

  As I sat there staring at the dirt under my fingernails, the eggs in my stomach began to squirm. I’d turned on my phone in front of the b
ad man’s house, and sent two texts, and made that collect call from near my house. In a phone company databank somewhere were numbers connecting me to his mysterious death.

  The kicker, of course, was my fingerprints on the handle of his shovel, which I’d slid back into its spot beneath the bed before leaving.

  A dry little laugh forced its way out of me. I wasn’t a particularly clever murderer, was I? Nor was my defense going to be the sanest thing ever heard in a California courtroom: “I did it to free five little dead girls, and so my ghost friend doesn’t have to worry about the bad man ever again.”

  I took a slow breath, letting the fear of being caught flow through me. It was better than feeling nothing. Better than letting the cold place grow until it swallowed up the rest.

  There were so many things I couldn’t change: what had happened to those people in the airport, whatever was wrong with my mother. Last night, at least, I’d done something rather than nothing.

  And you can’t put a valkyrie in jail. We can walk through walls.

  If there was a punishment for what I’d done, it wasn’t going to come from the world of phone records and fingerprints, of laws and prisons. It would come in the transformations taking place inside me. As Yama had tried to warn me on that lonely island: whether ghosts were real or not didn’t matter, what mattered was what we decided to make ourselves.

  I slipped Agent Reyes’s card back into my wallet, and left the waitress a big tip.

  * * *

  My mother was waiting on the front steps when I got home.

  “Nice car,” she said when I got out. I think she meant it.

  “I know, right?”

  We took a moment together, amazed that my father had spent real money on me. I sat next to Mom on the steps, still uncertain how to feel. In trouble seemed wrong, like something for little kids, not murderers. I couldn’t tell whether she was angry, or sad, or exhausted. Or maybe just sick.