Afterworlds

by Scott Westerfeld

  “No books for you then, Patel. As your accountant, I declare you officially penniless.”

  “Can I charge you a dollar every time you say ‘as your accountant’?”

  “I doubt it would help,” Nisha said, then came to a halt, staring at an end cap display of a dozen paperbacks, all with the same flame-red cover. “Hey, isn’t that . . .”

  Darcy nodded. It was Pyromancer.

  “Weird,” she said, picking one up. “This wasn’t supposed to be out in paperback till summer.”

  “Is that good or bad?” Nisha asked.

  “Not sure.” Darcy turned the book over. On the back was the old blurb from Kiralee, and also the starred reviews, all the mountains of praise that had never seemed to sell any copies. “But Paradox is still trying, I guess.”

  Whatever the meaning, it felt good to see Imogen’s novel here in quantity at the front of the store. Darcy turned to the author photo on the back cover: Imogen looking happy, her hands tucked safely in the pockets of her leather jacket to prevent head touching.

  A stone formed in Darcy’s throat as she remembered the day of the photo shoot. The Imogen in this picture had spent every day with Darcy by her side.

  “Knock yourself out with that,” Nisha said, and headed off toward the Sparkle Pony pop-up section.

  Darcy opened to the first page.

  Her favorite part of setting fires had always been the matches. She liked the way they rattled, stiff little wooden soldiers in a cardboard box, and the way they bloomed into hot flowers between cupped palms. She loved the ripping, fluttering noises they made as they fought the wind. Even their remains were beautiful—spindly, black, and bowed—after they’d burned all the way down to fire-calloused fingertips. . . .

  The words shivered on the page, just as they had the first time she’d read them. She heard the author’s voice in the cadence of the sentences. For a moment, she expected Imogen to walk up behind her and lay a hand on her shoulder, or a kiss on the back of her neck.

  “Good timing, huh?” came a voice.

  Darcy spun around. It was Johari Valentine.

  “Oh, hi.” They embraced, pulled apart again. “It’s been ages!”

  “I’ve been back home in Saint Kitts.” Johari shook her head. “Couldn’t stand another winter up here. Bad enough, writing about the cold without living in it!”

  “Oh, right. When does Heart of Ice come out?”

  “October.” Johari rapped her knuckles against the wood of the nearest shelf, a little spell to ward off doubt.

  “Mine’s late September,” Darcy said. She glanced at the end cap. “What did you mean, good timing?”

  “Imogen’s paperbacks, they came out just in time.”

  “For what?”

  Johari frowned. “You know, the president’s daughter? The photo?”

  Darcy shook her head. “I’ve been kind of . . . out of it.”

  “Mercy, girl. I must have been out of it too!”

  Johari looked astonished. Apparently nobody had told her about the breakup. It seemed strange that there could be anyone left who didn’t know.

  “What happened?” they both asked at once.

  After a moment of standoff, Darcy sighed and went first. “I haven’t seen Imogen for a while. We’re taking a break, I guess.”

  “I’m so sorry, darling. You two were so sweet together.”

  “We are sweet. It’s just for a while.” Darcy took a steadying breath, trying to heed Nisha’s advice to trust Imogen’s word. “No big deal. But did you say something about the president’s daughter?”

  Johari’s eyes widened. “Yeah, someone took a picture of her walking to the helicopter, and she was carrying Pyromancer. It was easy to tell, because of that red cover.”

  A startled laugh jumped out of Darcy. “That’s kind of funny.”

  “It was, at first. But then some political blog made a big deal out of it, because of the ‘questionable content.’ You know. Girl starting fires, kissing other girls.” Johari chuckled, shaking her head. “Then some news channels followed along, and for a while, everyone was talking about Imogen.”

  “Seriously? How did I miss this?”

  “It was only three days ago? Four? The silly people have moved on to talking about something else by now. But I suppose people who read novels have longer attention spans, because it’s still selling.”

  “Whoa. What a lucky little shit she is.”

  This set Johari, who never swore at all, laughing again.

  Darcy laughed along, already composing a congratulations email to Imogen, and wondering if her good luck was still around after all. Maybe Imogen had just borrowed some of it for a while.

  CHAPTER 40

  THIRTY MINUTES LATER I WAS sitting in a makeshift camp half a mile from the compound. The air buzzed with radios and the rumble of a generator, which powered huge floodlights shining into the trees. The lights were hot enough to melt the snow in the pine boughs above, and a soft, glistening rain misted down into their beams.

  Sitting on my crate, I was close enough to benefit from the warmth of the floodlights, and was wrapped in two mylar blankets. My cuts had been bandaged, and pronounced too minor for me to be taken to the medical tent. I had a mug of coffee nestled between my hands, which a very kind FBI agent had given me. My walking-through-walls magic had made short work of the handcuffs, but nobody seemed worried about that. Maybe it was because I was a half-frozen, half-naked young girl, or maybe because the situation was secure, with no gunfire for the last fifteen minutes. Whatever it was, everyone had stopped pointing guns at me.

  Soon I would slip away, down into the river and back to my warm bedroom. But not until I was certain Yama was okay. I didn’t know where the wounded were being treated. I was afraid to ask, in case someone noticed I was free and handcuffed me again, which would mean taking my hot coffee away. So I sat there just waiting, numbed by all I had seen.

  The freezing cold had reached all the way inside me, joining with the place that had been there since Dallas. I wondered if I would ever be warm again.

  Then I realized that someone was staring at me. I looked up from the depths of my coffee.

  “Oh,” I managed, my heart sinking. The grim reaper that had swept through my life had kept on going.

  “Miss Scofield. How odd to see you here.”

  I nodded. “I guess everything must seem a bit odd to you right now.”

  Special Agent Elian Reyes stared at me, uncertain, confused. But after a moment, he sat down on another crate, and we stared off into the trees together. The cold place inside me, and the real-world cold that had joined it, was dampening my reactions. It all seemed very normal, somehow, sitting with him.

  Of course, comforting the dead was my job now.

  “I forgot you might be here,” I said.

  “I almost wasn’t. It’s only been four hours since I landed in Denver.” He looked down at his hands, as if he didn’t recognize them. “Last one here, first one through the door.”

  I nodded. “It’s all about timing. You miss your flight, and everything turns out different.”

  “You know, I almost did, but for once there was no traffic on the way to LAX.” His laugh was short and dry. “Or maybe if I’d been a little faster on my feet.”

  “Don’t blame yourself, Agent Reyes. Everyone blames themselves.”

  He looked at me. “Are you okay, Lizzie?”

  “Really cold, is all.”

  “Cold? So you’re not . . . like me, are you? But you can see me.”

  I shook my head. “I can see ghosts, because of what happened in Dallas. It changed me. This is my new calling.”

  Agent Reyes was thoughtful for a moment. “You seem a bit young for that job.”

  I nodded in complete agreement, wishing that I was eleven again, not knowing anything about how the world worked. Not about bad men, or the secrets of death, or even that my father would be leaving us soon.

  But there was no going back.
<
br />   “I’m supposed to guide people, I think. I’m not quite sure how exactly, but I’ll try to help you. Though maybe . . . you could help me first?”

  “Of course, Lizzie. I always wanted to help you more than I could.”

  “I guess I knew that.” It took a moment to speak again. “My friend was here, another guide, and he was hurt. They must have taken him wherever the doctors are.”

  “I was just at the med tent.” Agent Reyes pointed into the distance, at another glow among the trees. “Your friend will be there, unless they’ve airlifted him out. I’ll take you.”

  He held out his hand, and as I took it, I let myself slip across. It wasn’t as cold on the flipside, and now I had a ghost to guide me.

  * * *

  Special Agent Reyes and I found Yama in the medical tent, his wrists handcuffed to the metal rails of a stretcher. He still looked pale, and a bag of plasma hung from the IV stand beside him. His wounds were hastily bound in white gauze, with black stitches peeking out from the sides.

  But his eyes were open. “Lizzie.”

  I stepped forward, took his hand. My voice wasn’t working. For a moment, it was tricky keeping myself here on the flipside. The tent was full of wounded agents and handcuffed cultists, and two bodies lay in the corner, sheets pulled over their heads. Agent Reyes’s gaze drifted toward them.

  “Thank you for saving me,” Yama said.

  A strangled laugh forced its way out of me. “I led you into a trap.”

  He shook his head. “That was my mistake. We’re even now.”

  A medic lingered by the stretcher, probably wondering why Yama was murmuring to himself. He fell silent as she flicked a light into each of his eyes, checked the IV bag, and took his pulse.

  “Do you get used to being invisible?” Agent Reyes asked me.

  “Sort of.” I stared at Yama. He had saved me in the airport, and now I’d saved him, but my stupidity had cost the afterlives of three of his people. It didn’t feel even to me.

  The medic moved on.

  “Have the doctors said anything? Are you going to be okay?”

  “They don’t say much to me.” Yama rattled his handcuff against the stretcher rail. “I appear to be in disfavor.”

  “On behalf of the bureau, I apologize.” Agent Reyes looked genuinely sorry. “We don’t have any protocol for spirit guides, I’m afraid.”

  “I won’t be here long.” His eyes turned to me. “I have a city to protect.”

  “Of course,” I murmured. Without Yama to guard them, his people were easy prey. “Can I do anything to help?”

  He nodded weakly. “Yami will call you.”

  I wondered for a moment what Agent Reyes was making of our conversation. But he was staring at the sheet-covered bodies in the corner of the medical tent.

  I turned back to Yama. “I’m not afraid of Mr. Hamlyn.”

  “You don’t need to be. I think he likes you.”

  My breath caught. Yama had heard the truth in my voice when I’d said I wanted to learn from Mr. Hamlyn. The man who had taken his people.

  “I know he’s bad.”

  “One can learn from monsters, Lizzie. After all, I wasn’t the best teacher.”

  “Don’t talk in the past tense, please. You’re not going to die!”

  “No, but I’ll have to stay in my city now. The predator won’t leave my people alone.”

  “You’ll have to stay there . . . all the time?”

  “Every minute I’m away, he’ll hunt them.”

  I shook my head. All those hours we’d spent together, on bleak mountaintops or his windy atoll, were suddenly precious.

  “And my sister was right,” he said. “I’ve been lazy.”

  I swallowed something hard in my throat. “But it’s okay if I visit, right?”

  “Lizzie, you can do more than visit. You can come and live with us.” A slow and beautiful smile overtook his face as he spoke, but I couldn’t answer it.

  Yama’s city was magnificent, but also gray and silent, and I was already so cold inside. I could think myself into the afterworld, and smell rust and blood in the air. Death had been with me from the day I was born, and on top of all that, I was a murderer now.

  What would living in the underworld do to me? Would I forget what sunlight felt like? Or start to hear the voices of the dead in every stone?

  There was so much I’d meant to tell Yama tonight, but there hadn’t been time. Around us, the medical tent was growing busier as more wounded were brought in.

  I reached out my hand and brushed his cheek. With him in the real world and me on the flipside, the electricity of his touch was only a fleeting thing.

  “My mother needs me now.”

  “There’s no rush for you and me,” he said.

  Of course not. Yama planned to live forever. He could wait a hundred years, until my mother was a distant memory, my oldest friends all dead and buried.

  But I couldn’t wait for him. Not for a hundred years, not for a hundred days. Since when was love something you didn’t rush? I leaned forward and kissed him, and the spark of his lips was still there, even through the veil of the flipside.

  But when I pulled away, he let out a gasp.

  “Lizzie. What happened?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You did something.” His voice had gone soft and harsh, and the shouting and bustle of the medical tent came rushing into the quiet.

  He knew. He had tasted it on me.

  “The bad man. I went back to his house.”

  Yama shook his head. The color was draining from his face, as if his wounds were flowing again.

  “He was keeping those little girls there. And his memories were inside Mindy, making her scared all the time. But I fixed it. He’s gone, cut to pieces.”

  “By the predator?”

  “Yes, by Mr. Hamlyn.” My gaze fell to the dirt floor again. It was glistening beneath my feet. The space heaters in the medical tent were melting the frozen ground. “But it was me who killed him.”

  Yama closed his eyes, his face twisting with pain. A hard and bitter moan seemed to leak out from his whole body.

  Yama had sensed murder on me.

  I’d become like the stones that smelled of blood, and whispered with the voices of the dead. Stained, like the rest of the world, except for that moon-shaped sliver of island in the great southern sea.

  “You’ve never killed anyone, have you?” I asked.

  “Of course not.” His eyes opened, glistening with tears. “Don’t you understand, Lizzie? Whatever comes after, life is priceless.”

  I stood there, silent. Almost dying had, in fact, taught me that, but it had taught me too many other things at the same time. All of it was jumbled in my brain now, a mess of strange rules and unexpected horrors. In the end, my anger had won out over the rest of what I’d learned.

  Yama had kept his hands clean for thousands of years, and it had only taken me a month to kill someone.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  Yama gave me one last look of horror, and turned his face away.

  “You should go help Yami.”

  “Of course.” I would have done anything for him. But when I closed my eyes and listened to the still air of the flipside, there was nothing. “It’s just . . . she hasn’t called me yet.”

  “She will soon.” He closed his eyes again. We were done.

  I took a step backward, away from his stretcher. A medic rushed past, running to help with a wounded agent being carried through the open tent flaps. As she passed through me, I felt the spark of her intensity, her resolve to save the man’s life.

  I turned from Yama and walked away.

  Committing murder was so much worse than giving away his name, because it had changed me. All he’d ever wanted was a respite from death. For a few hours on a mountaintop, or a few moments when our lips touched. And now that was gone between us.

  “Lizzie.” It was the ghost Agent Reyes, following me out o
f the tent. “Are you okay?”

  I nodded, still walking.

  “Your friend, I overheard the medics. He’s going to be fine, once he’s got some plasma in him.”

  “Thank you.” My voice sounded broken.

  Agent Reyes stood in front of me, forcing me to stop. “I heard what you were saying to him, about a bad man. That’s why you called me, isn’t it?”

  It took a moment to understand that he didn’t mean a call on the current of the Vaitarna River, or the way this gun battle had called me here to Colorado. He only meant a phone call.

  “Right. When I asked you about serial killers.”

  He nodded. “That wasn’t hypothetical.”

  His gaze was too steady, his gray eyes too sharp, and I had to look away. “I guess you’re not an FBI agent anymore, right?”

  “No. The bureau doesn’t employ ghosts.”

  I nodded. “Well, there was this serial killer, and I helped chop him into pieces.”

  “Is that part of your calling now, Lizzie? Avenging the dead?”

  I shook my head. I had no calling, no purpose. I wasn’t a valkyrie or a spirit guide. All I wanted was to go home. “It was just a mistake, an awful one. But it’s okay. My fingerprints are on the murder weapon, and I texted someone from right in front of his house. They’ll catch me.”

  At that moment, I wanted to be caught. To be punished, not for what I’d done to the bad man, but to Yama. To us.

  Special Agent Reyes’s hand took mine, just for a moment, his expression sad and steadfast.

  “We don’t catch everyone,” he said.

  * * *

  I spent all night in the flipside, sleepless, numb, waiting for Yami’s call.

  Mindy was still full of energy, and took me on a tour of the neighborhood, regaling me with all the gossip she’d picked up over years of spying. She didn’t notice how quiet I was.

  It was unsettling, unreal almost, how much of her personality had disappeared when I’d killed the bad man. As if the deepest parts of her had been erased.

  As if she wasn’t a person anymore at all.

  The hours passed and dawn drew near, and I started to worry about Yami. I knew she didn’t like me very much, but I was all she had to protect her brother’s city. Why hadn’t she called by now?