Vicious

by V. E. Schwab

  And when she did, she dreamed of water.

  XXIX

  LAST YEAR

  BRIGHTON COMMONS

  SYDNEY Clarke died on a cool March day.

  It was just before lunch, and it was all Serena’s fault.

  The Clarke sisters looked identical, despite the fact that Serena was seven years older, and seven inches taller. The resemblance stemmed partly from genes and partly from Sydney’s adoration of her big sister. She dressed like Serena, acted like Serena, and was, in almost every way, a miniature version of her sister. A shadow, distorted by age instead of sun. They had the same blue eyes and the same blond hair, but Serena made Sydney cut hers short so people wouldn’t stare. The resemblance was that uncanny.

  As much as they looked like each other, they bore little resemblance to their parents—not that they were often around to provide comparison. Serena used to tell Sydney that those people weren’t their parents at all, that the girls had washed ashore in a small blue boat from some faraway place, or been found in the first-class compartment on a train, or been smuggled in by spies. If Sydney questioned the story, Serena would simply insist that her sister had been too young to remember. Sydney was still fairly sure they were just fantasies, but never entirely sure; Serena was very good at telling tales. She had always been convincing (that was the word her sister liked to use for lying).

  It had been Serena’s idea to walk out on the frozen lake and have a picnic. They used to have them every year, right around New Year’s when the lake in the center of Brighton Commons was nothing but a block of ice, but with Serena off at college they hadn’t had the chance. So it was a long weekend in March, toward the end of Serena’s spring break, and a few days shy of Sydney’s twelfth birthday, when they finally got to pack their lunch and head out onto the ice. Serena wore the picnic blanket as a cape and regaled her little sister with the latest tale of how the two had come to be called Clarkes. It involved pirates, or superheroes, Sydney wasn’t paying attention; she was too busy taking mental pictures of her sister, shots she’d cling to when Serena left again. They reached what Serena deemed to be a good bit of lake, and she tugged the blanket from her shoulders, spread it out on the ice, and began to unload the eclectic assortment of food she’d found in the pantry.

  Now, the problem with March (as opposed to January or February) was that even though it was still quite cold, the depth of the ice was waning, uneven. Small patches of warmth during the days caused the frozen lake by their house to begin to melt. You wouldn’t even notice the change, unless it broke beneath you.

  Which it did.

  The cracks were small and silent beneath a film of snow as the two arranged their picnic, and by the time the sound of splitting ice had grown loud enough for them to hear, it was too late. Serena had just started another story when the ice gave way, plunging both into the dark, half-frozen water.

  The cold forced all the air from Sydney’s lungs, and even though Serena had taught her how to swim, her legs got tangled in the blanket as it sank, dragging her down with it. The icy water bit at her skin, her eyes. She clawed toward the surface and Serena’s kicking legs but it was no use. She kept sinking, and kept reaching, and all she could think as she sank farther and farther away from her sister was come back come back come back. And then the world began to freeze around her, and there was so much cold, and that began to vanish, too, leaving only darkness.

  Sydney later learned that Serena had come back, that she had pulled her up through the freezing water and onto the unfreezing lake before collapsing beside her.

  Someone had seen the bodies on the ice.

  By the time the rescue crew got out to them, Serena was barely breathing, her heart stubbornly dragging itself through every beat—and then it stopped—and Sydney was the cool blue-white of marble, just as still. Both girls were dead at the scene, but because they were also technically frozen, they couldn’t officially be declared, and the paramedics dragged the Clarke sisters to the hospital to warm them up.

  What followed was a miracle. The sisters came back. Their pulses started, and they took a breath, and then another—that’s all living is, really—and they woke up, and they sat up, and they spoke, and they were, in every discernable way, alive.

  There was only one problem.

  Sydney wouldn’t warm up. She felt fine, more or less, but her pulse was too slow, and her temperature too low—she overheard two doctors say that with her stats, she should be in a coma—and they deemed her too fragile to leave the hospital.

  Serena was another matter entirely. Sydney thought she was acting strange, even moodier than usual, but no one else—not the doctors and nurses, not the therapists, not even their parents, who had cut a trip short when they heard about the accident—seemed to notice the change. Serena complained of headaches, so they gave her painkillers. She complained of the hospital, so they let her go. Just like that. Sydney had heard them talking about her sister’s condition, but when she walked up and said she wanted to leave, they stepped aside and let her pass. Serena had always gotten her way, but never like this. Never without a fight.

  “You’re going? Just like that?” Sydney was sitting in her bed. Serena was standing in the doorway in street clothes. She had a box in her hands.

  “I’m missing school. And I hate hospitals, Syd,” she said. “You know that.”

  Of course Sydney knew. She hated hospitals, too. “But I don’t understand. They’re just letting you go?”

  “Seems so.”

  “Then tell them to let me go, too.”

  Serena stood beside the hospital bed, and ran her hand over Sydney’s hair. “You need to stay a little longer.”

  The fight bled out of Sydney, and she found herself nodding, even as tears slid down her cheeks. Serena brushed them away with her thumb, and said, “I’m not gone.” It reminded Sydney of sinking beneath the surface, of wanting her sister so badly to come back.

  “Do you remember,” she asked her big sister, “what you were thinking in the lake? When the ice broke?”

  Serena’s brow crinkled. “You mean, besides fuck, it’s cold?” Sydney almost smiled. Serena didn’t. Her hand slid from Sydney’s face. “I just remember thinking no. No, not like this.” She set the box she’d been holding on the side table. “Happy birthday, Syd.”

  And then Serena left. And Sydney didn’t. She asked to leave, and they refused. She pleaded and begged and promised she was fine, and they refused. It was her birthday, and she didn’t want to spend it alone in a place like this. She couldn’t spend it here. But they still said no.

  Her parents both worked. They had to go.

  A week, they promised her. Stay a week.

  Sydney didn’t have much choice. She stayed.

  * * *

  SYDNEY hated evenings at the hospital.

  The whole floor was too quiet, too settled. It was the only time the heavy panic set in, panic that she would never leave, never get to go home. She would be forgotten here, wearing the same pale clothes as everyone else, blending in with the patients and the nurses and the walls, and her family would be outside in the world and she would bleed away like a memory, like a colorful shirt washed too many times. As if Serena knew exactly what she’d need, the box by Sydney’s bed contained a purple scarf. It was brighter than anything in her small suitcase.

  She clung to the strip of color, wrapped the scarf around her neck despite the fact that she wasn’t very cold (well, she was, according to the doctors, but she didn’t feel very cold), and began to walk. She paced the hospital wing, relishing the moments when the nurses’ eyes flicked her way. They saw her, and they didn’t stop her, and that made Sydney feel like Serena, around whom the seas kept parting. When Sydney had walked the entire floor three times, she took the stairs to the next one. It was a different shade of beige. The change was so subtle that visitors would never notice, but Sydney had been staring at the walls on her own floor enough to pick out their paint chip on one of those walls with ten tho
usand colors, two hundred kinds of white.

  People were sicker on this floor. Sydney could smell it even before she heard the coughing or saw the stretcher being wheeled from a room, bare but for a large sheet. It smelled like stronger disinfectants here. Someone in a room down the hall shouted, and the nurse wheeling the stretcher paused, left it in the hall, and hurried into the patient’s room. Sydney followed to see what the fuss was about.

  A man in the room at the end of the hall was unhappy, but she couldn’t understand why. Sydney stood in the hall and tried to catch a glimpse, but a curtain was drawn in the room, bisecting it and shielding the shouting man from view, and the stretcher was blocking her way. She leaned on the gurney, just a little, and shivered.

  The sheet she was touching had been put there to cover something. The something was a body. And when she brushed against it, the body twitched. Sydney jumped back, and covered her mouth to keep from shouting. Pressed against the beige wall she looked from the nurses in the patient’s room to the body under the sheet on the stretcher. It twitched a second time. Sydney wrapped the tails of her purple scarf around her hands. She felt frozen all over again but in a different way. It wasn’t icy water. It was fear.

  “What are you doing here?” asked a nurse in an unflattering shade of beige-green. Sydney had no idea what to say, so she simply pointed. The nurse took her wrist and began to lead her down the hall.

  “No,” said Syd, finally. “Look.”

  The nurse sighed and glanced back at the sheet, which twitched again.

  The nurse screamed.

  * * *

  SYDNEY was assigned therapy.

  The doctors said it was to help her cope with the trauma of seeing a dead body (even though she didn’t actually see it) and Sydney would have protested, but after her unsupervised trip to the next floor up she found herself confined to her room, and there wasn’t any other way for her to spend her time, so she agreed. She refrained, however, from mentioning the fact that she had touched the body a moment before it came back to life.

  They called the person’s recovery a miracle.

  Sydney laughed, mostly because that’s what they had called her recovery.

  She wondered if someone had accidentally touched her, too.

  * * *

  AFTER a week, Sydney’s body temperature still hadn’t come back up, but she seemed otherwise stable, and the doctors finally agreed to release her the next day. That night, Sydney snuck out of her hospital room and went down to the morgue, to find out for sure if what had happened in that hall was truly a miracle, a happy accident, a fluke, or if she somehow had something to do with it.

  Half an hour later she hurried out of the morgue, thoroughly disgusted and spotted with stale blood, but with her hypothesis confirmed.

  Sydney Clarke could raise the dead.

  XXX

  YESTERDAY

  THE ESQUIRE HOTEL

  SYDNEY woke up the next morning in the too-large bed in the strange hotel, for a moment unsure of where, when, or how she was. But as she blinked away sleep, the details trickled back, the rain and the car and the two peculiar men, both of whom she could hear talking beyond the door.

  Mitch’s brusque tone and Victor’s lower, smoother one, seemed to seep through the walls of her room. She sat up, stiff and hungry, and adjusted the oversized sweatpants on her hips before wandering out in search of food.

  The two men were standing in the kitchen. Mitch was pouring coffee and talking to Victor, who was absently crossing out lines in a magazine. Mitch looked up as she walked in.

  “How’s your arm?” asked Victor, still blacking out words.

  There was no pain, only a stiff feeling. She supposed she had him to thank for that.

  “It’s fine,” she said. Victor set his pen aside and rolled a bag of bagels across the counter toward her. In the corner of the kitchen sat several bags of groceries. He nodded at them.

  “Don’t know what you eat, so…”

  “I’m not a puppy,” she said, fighting back a smile. She took a bagel and rolled the bag back across the counter, where it butted up against Victor’s magazine. She watched him black out the lines of text, and remembered the article from last night, and the photo that went with it, the one she’d been reaching for when Victor woke. Her eyes drifted back to the couch. It wasn’t there anymore.

  “What’s wrong?”

  The question brought her back. Victor had his elbows on the counter, fingers loosely intertwined.

  “There was a paper over there last night, with a picture on it. Where is it?”

  Victor frowned, but slid the newspaper page out from under the magazine, and held it up for her to see. “This?”

  Sydney felt a shiver, somewhere down deep.

  “Why do you have a picture of him?” she asked, pointing at the grainy shot of the civilian beside the block of mostly blacked-out text.

  Victor rounded the counter in slow, measured steps, and held the article up between them, inches from her face.

  “Do you know him?” he asked, eyes alight. Sydney nodded. “How?”

  Sydney swallowed. “He’s the one who shot me.”

  Victor leaned down until his face was very close to hers. “Tell me what happened.”

  XXXI

  LAST YEAR

  BRIGHTON COMMONS

  SYDNEY told Serena about the incident in the morgue, and Serena laughed.

  It wasn’t a happy laugh, though, or a light laugh. Sydney didn’t even think it was an oh-dear-my-sister-has-brain-damage-or-delusions-from-drowning laugh. There was something stuck in the laugh, and it made Sydney nervous.

  Serena then told Sydney, in very calm, quiet words (which should have struck Sydney as odd right then and there because Serena had never been terribly calm or quiet) not to tell anyone else about the morgue, or the body in the hall, or anything even remotely related to resurrecting dead people, and to Sydney’s own amazement, she didn’t. From that moment, she felt no desire to share the strange news with anyone but Serena, and Serena seemed to want nothing to do with it.

  So Sydney did the only thing she could. She went back to middle school, and tried not to touch anything dead. She made it to the end of the school year. She made it through the summer … even though Serena had somehow convinced the faculty to let her do a trip to Amsterdam for credit, and didn’t come home, and when Sydney heard this she was so mad she almost wanted to tell or show someone what she could do, just to spite her sister. But she didn’t. Serena always seemed to call, just before Sydney lost her temper. They would talk about nothing, just filling up space with how-are-yous and how-are-the-folks and how-are-classes and Sydney would cling to the sound of her sister’s voice even though the words were empty. And then, as she felt the conversation ending, she’d ask Serena to come home, and Serena would say no, not this time, and Sydney would feel lost, alone, until her sister would say I’m not gone, I’m not gone, and Sydney would somehow believe her.

  But even though she believed those words with a simple, unshakeable faith, it didn’t mean they made her happy. Sydney’s slow-beating heart began to sink over the fall, and then Christmas came and Serena didn’t, and for some reason her parents—who’d always been adamant about one thing, and that was spending Christmas together, as if one well-represented holiday could make up for the other 364 days—didn’t seem to mind. They hardly even noticed. But Sydney noticed, and it made her feel like cracking glass.

  So it’s no surprise that when Serena finally called and invited her to come visit, Sydney broke.

  * * *

  “COME stay with me,” said Serena. “It’ll be fun!”

  Serena had avoided her little sister for nearly a year. Sydney had kept her hair short, out of some vague sense of deference, or perhaps just nostalgia, but she was not happy. Not with her big sister, and not with the deviant flutter in her own chest at her sister’s offer. She hated herself for still idolizing Serena.

  “I’m in school,” she said.


  “Come for spring break,” pressed Serena. “You can come up and stay through your birthday. Mom and Dad don’t know how to celebrate anyway. I always planned everything. And you know I give you the best gifts.”

  Sydney shivered, remembering how the last birthday had gone. As if reading her mind, Serena said, “It’s warmer here in Merit. We’ll sit outside, relax. It will be good for you.”

  Serena’s voice was too sweet. Sydney should have known. Forever and ever after Sydney would know, but not then. Not when it mattered.

  “Okay,” said Sydney at last, trying to hide her excitement. “I’d like that.”

  “Great!” Serena sounded so happy. Sydney could hear the smile in her voice. It made her smile, too. “I want you to meet someone while you’re here,” added Serena, in an afterthought kind of way.

  “Who?” asked Sydney.

  “Just a friend.”

  XXXII

  A FEW DAYS AGO

  UNIVERSITY OF MERIT

  SERENA threw her arms around her little sister.

  “Look at you!” she said, dragging her sister inside. “You’re growing up.”

  Sydney had barely grown at all, actually. Less than an inch in the year since the accident. It wasn’t just her height, either. Sydney’s nails, her hair, everything about her crept forward. Slowly. Like melting ice.

  When Serena teasingly mentioned her still-short hair, Sydney pretended the look had simply grown on her, implied that it had nothing to do with Serena anymore. Still, she wrapped her arms around her sister, and when her sister hugged back, Sydney felt as if broken threads, hundreds and hundreds of them, were stitching the two back together. Something in her started to thaw. Until a male voice cleared its throat.

  “Oh, Sydney,” said her sister, pulling away, “I want you to meet Eli.”

  She smiled when she said his name. A boy, college-aged, was sitting in a chair in Serena’s apartment—one of the ones usually reserved for upperclassmen—and he stood up at the mention of his name, and stepped forward. He was handsome, with broad shoulders and a firm handshake and eyes that were brown but alive in that glittering, almost drunk sort of way. Sydney had a hard time looking away from him.