Afterworlds

by Scott Westerfeld

  But as Jamie and I headed for the school’s front entrance, I saw a black sedan parked in the street, a lone figure inside watching the students file past.

  “Hang on a second,” I said to Jamie, and crossed the strip of lawn between parking lot and street.

  The driver’s-side window hummed down as I approached.

  “Hey, Special Agent.”

  “Good to see you, Miss Scofield.” Elian Reyes was wearing his usual dark suit and sunglasses, and his tie was bright red today.

  “It’s good to see you too. But, um . . .”

  “To what do you owe the honor of this visit?” His smile gleamed for a moment in the morning sun. “Nothing serious. My agent in charge was concerned about your first day of school.”

  “Anything I should know about?”

  He gave a little shake of his head. “No new intelligence, Miss Scofield. Simply an abundance of caution.”

  “That’s nice of you guys. But my friend saw something about that death cult on the news. Like, the FBI is going to raid their headquarters or whatever.”

  “That’s a rumor, Miss Scofield.”

  “Right.” I smiled. “Which you can neither confirm nor deny.”

  “One I can’t give you any inside information on. Down here in Southern Cal we mostly deal with drug trafficking. A little high-glamour terrorism is always exciting, though.”

  “Glad I could help with that.” Behind me, the first bell rang. I turned to look back, and saw Jamie watching us with widened eyes. “Oh, crap.”

  “Friend of yours?” Agent Reyes asked.

  “Yeah. And now she probably . . .” I groaned at my own stupidity. “She probably thinks that you’re my new boyfriend.”

  He lowered his sunglasses a little, his brown eyes narrowing. “Your new boyfriend?”

  “My secret boyfriend that I just told her about. Long story, highly awkward.”

  “I agree. Feel free to disabuse her of this notion, Miss Scofield.”

  “I’ll get right on that.” The beginnings of a blush were creeping across my cheeks. “Um, that was the bell. I have to go to school now.”

  He nodded. “Let me know if you see anything unusual today.”

  “I already put your number in my phone.” I saluted and turned away.

  As I started back toward the front door, I noticed that more people than just Jamie had watched me talk to Special Agent Reyes. Just perfect.

  “Hot indeed,” Jamie said as I reached the door, a leering smile on her face. “But you said you hadn’t been practicing your Spanish.”

  “No way! I mean, maybe he is kind of hot. But he’s not . . .”

  “Hispanic?”

  I groaned. “You’ve got this all wrong.”

  She hooked her arm through mine and led me inside. “Right. He’s some other hot secret guy in a totally government car who happens to be following you around.”

  “Yes! That’s it exactly.”

  “Sure, babe.”

  A clump of sophomores was watching a little too keenly as we walked past, and I heard my name whispered, but Jamie silenced them with a hard glance.

  “Neophytes,” she muttered.

  I thought about trying to convince Jamie of the nonboyfriend status of Special Agent Reyes again, but there was no point. She’d seen him with her own eyes, after all, which beat an invisible psychopomp any day. At least now she wouldn’t think I was crazy enough to make someone up.

  “Thanks, Jamie.”

  “For what?”

  “For listening to me. For trusting me.”

  She squeezed our linked arms tighter. “I repeat: just be careful.”

  I nodded, content to let Jamie guide me to our first-period acting class.

  It was strange. Our conversation might have been littered with half-truths and misunderstandings, but talking to Jamie had helped me make sense of everything that had happened. I’d never understood why Yama had been so hesitant at first, saying that I should forget him. But maybe brand-new ghosts became attached to him all the time, like ducklings imprinting on their mother. And he’d been worried about those little girls imprinting on me. . . .

  But that wasn’t what had happened between us, was it?

  From the first moment I’d seen him, Yama had been so beautiful, so necessary. Not because I was traumatized, but in spite of the awful things happening around us. From our first kiss in the airport, he’d become a part of me. I could still feel his lips against mine, and he’d heard me when I’d called his name.

  Our connection was real, and talking about it with Jamie had only made it more real, no matter how many times I’d had to lie.

  CHAPTER 21

  IT WAS ONLY TEN DAYS after her first real kiss that Darcy Patel received her first real editorial letter. It seemed fitting that she share both with the same person.

  “It’s here!” she shouted into her phone.

  “Hang on,” came Imogen’s sleepy voice, then the sound of teeth being brushed, then spitting. “You mean your ed letter? About time.”

  “I know, right? This book comes out in 428 days!”

  “How do you even know that?

  “Nisha texted me this morning.”

  Imogen laughed. “That’s handy. What did Nan say?”

  “I haven’t read it yet. I need you here!” Saying this made Darcy feel pathetic, and a little annoyed that she had to ask: “Can you come over?”

  “I might be able to squeeze you in,” Imogen drawled, but then added: “Forward the letter to me. See you in five.”

  * * *

  Fifteen minutes later, they sat on the roof of Darcy’s building, phones and muffins in hand. Darcy was still in pajama bottoms and a T-shirt, but Imogen wore a crisp white shirt and a full complement of rings on her fingers, having proclaimed that editorial letters were serious business. She’d brought two coffees and muffins from the Chinese-Italian café downstairs.

  “So far, so good.” Darcy was scanning the letter’s opening paragraph. “She still loves the first chapter.”

  “Nan always starts with praise.” Imogen flicked her thumb across the screen.

  “Hey! That’s my praise. Don’t scroll past it!”

  “Save the praise till you need it. Dessert goes last.”

  Darcy rolled her eyes. “Says the person eating a muffin for breakfast. Why are we doing this on the roof, anyway?”

  “To maintain perspective,” Imogen said, gesturing toward the skyline.

  Darcy didn’t even ask what that meant. She had eyes only for the email. The next paragraph was about chapters two and three, when Lizzie was in Yamaraj’s underworld palace after the airport attack.

  There was a distinct lack of praise.

  “Crap. She hates it.”

  “No she doesn’t.”

  “She says it’s all exposition!”

  “Well, that’s kind of true.” Imogen wadded up her empty muffin paper and placed it beside her coffee. “But I like Yamaraj’s origin story. Revengeful donkeys are awesome!”

  “Thanks,” Darcy said softly. The donkey story was one of the few things in the book that she had come up with on her own. It had nothing to do with Yamaraj of the Vedas, or her mother’s murdered friend. It had come out of nowhere, it seemed, a tale from another era.

  But Nan had a point. For two whole chapters Yamaraj and Yami sat in their palace explaining the rules of the afterworld to Lizzie, a giant block of exposition, just like every writing how-to book told you not to do. How had Darcy not noticed it before now?

  She felt a tremor in her hand, and a fight-or-flight reflex in her stomach. Suddenly she hated those two chapters.

  “Maybe if they explain things later,” she said slowly, keeping the quaver from her voice. “Then Lizzie has to figure the afterworld out on her own, and it makes Yamaraj more mysterious at first.”

  Imogen nodded. “Mysterious is good. He’s a death god, after all.”

  “Yeah. About that . . .”

  It took a moment to sa
y more. Darcy wondered when exactly she’d decided to borrow a character from her religion. Maybe those stories from the Vedas had always been in her head. Maybe it hadn’t even been conscious.

  But at some point Yama had gotten mixed up with all the other stories in her head, and he had blended with Bollywood actors, manga boyfriends, paranormal romance hotties, and even the handsome princes from Disney movies. . . .

  “Shit. That’s it.”

  “What is?” Imogen asked.

  “The fact that Yamaraj takes Lizzie to his palace. It’s dorky. Dudes with castles are so Disney.”

  “He’s a raja of the afterworld,” Imogen said. “What else would he live in, a bungalow?”

  Even in her anguish, Darcy made a note to herself that she liked the word “bungalow,” even if she wasn’t quite sure what it meant.

  “Okay, he does have a palace,” she admitted. “He’s got a whole city. But Lizzie can’t just hang out there and drink tea. Not till later, when everything’s going wrong, and the underworld is serious and scary and weird. Yama has to be a proper death god.”

  Imogen looked up from her phone. “Does this have to with what Kiralee said?”

  “Not just her. My friend Sagan kind of freaked me out.” The Angelina Jolie Paradox seemed too silly to explain to Imogen, but Darcy had to try. “By making Yamaraj a character, it’s like I’m erasing him from scripture. But getting rid of him would erase him too. So all that’s left is making him real. I owe him that much.”

  “You owe every character that much,” Imogen said simply.

  “Right, sure.” The strange thing was, from that first day of writing last November, Darcy had imagined Yamaraj’s beautiful underworld palace. But she’d never been to India, and her vision had been cobbled together from movies, cartoons, and websites for fancy hotels in India. “I really loved that palace scene. But it’s too dorky, isn’t it?”

  “Kill your darlings,” Imogen said, reaching out to trace a line down Darcy’s bare arm. It sent a shiver through her, a kind of relief, the feeling of a broken darling leaving her system.

  She switched her phone to a notes app and typed with one thumb: Exposition later. Palace scarier. Yama more mysterious. Her hand still trembled a little, and her breath was short, but it was no longer a fight-or-flight reflex. It was the buzz of ideas burning in her head, and of being here with Imogen in the spot where they had first kissed.

  Canal Street rumbled with authority below, and the city seemed huge and steadfast around Darcy.

  She kept her voice even. “This was a good idea, working on the roof.”

  Imogen answered with her lips, brushing them lightly against the side of Darcy’s neck. She smelled of coffee and ginger, and a touch of starch from her crisp white shirt.

  The kiss set off another shiver in Darcy’s stomach, which tangled with the flutter of anxiety and caffeine. She wanted to turn and kiss Imogen full on the lips, but there was a momentum in her thoughts, and in her body, that she couldn’t squander.

  “So I have to figure out where Yamaraj takes Lizzie. Where would they go, if not the underworld? Somewhere dark and scary.”

  For a long moment, neither of them said a word. Darcy thought of all the settings in the book—the ghost school, the windswept island, the mountaintop in Persia. Which was the bleakest and scariest, most befitting an introduction to a death god?

  It was Imogen who broke the silence. “Why do they have to go anywhere?”

  “You mean . . .” Darcy’s voice faded. Everyone loved the airport scene, so maybe she didn’t have to leave it behind. “But there’s a terrorist attack going on.”

  “If you want scary, that’s a good thing. And if Lizzie’s thought herself over to the flipside, she’s invisible, and bullets can’t touch her.”

  Darcy closed her eyes for a moment, imagining the scene: Lizzie waking up with bloody bodies on the floor around her, the terrorists blazing away at TSA agents and SWAT teams. She’d panic and bounce back into the real world. And get shot.

  Unless, of course, Yamaraj was there to keep her calm.

  “Of course, Lizzie has to know she’s in another world,” Imogen said. “Otherwise there’s no genre transition.”

  Darcy’s eyes opened. “No what?”

  “You know, that moment when Lizzie realizes she’s not in Kansas anymore, and the reader does too. Your book starts as a terrorism thriller, but then Lizzie wills herself into another genre. For me, that was the first moment that had the juice.”

  Darcy felt herself relax a little, happy to be back in the land of praise.

  “Give me a second,” she said. She closed her eyes again and let herself sink down into the experimental theater in her brain, the place where she imagined scenes. She saw the airport attack again, with Lizzie right there in the middle of it, but this time in the gray of the flipside.

  As the silence stretched out, Imogen remained quiet, long past when Nisha or Carla would have spoken up to offer advice. And gradually Darcy let the certainties of what she had already written fade into smoke and mist, until finally her eyes popped open and she said . . .

  “Tear gas!”

  Imogen kept her gaze level, staying silent.

  “When the police get to the airport, they start by shooting in tear gas. So when Lizzie wakes up, she’s in a cloud.”

  “So she’s coughing?” Imogen asked carefully.

  Darcy shook her head. “The flipside has its own air. So Lizzie thinks she’s in heaven, until she sees Yami staring at her through the mist.”

  “Creepy little sister in heaven. Nice.”

  Darcy smiled, her mind’s eye still in the scene. “But what looks like heaven is really hell—dead bodies all around her, half hidden by the mist.”

  “And before she sees them and freaks out, Yamaraj is there to help!”

  “And he says exactly the right thing.” Darcy took a drink of coffee to pull herself back into the real world, her mind ringing with possibilities. But what she’d envisioned wasn’t just a fix, it was a whole new chapter. “Shit. So Nan points out this problem in one paragraph, and I have to write thousands of words to fix it? That’s not fair!”

  “All’s fair in love and art.”

  “And this letter has five more pages!”

  Imogen was laughing now. “Guess that’s why you get paid the big bucks.”

  * * *

  They kept going all afternoon, for another hour on the roof and then down in the big room, at the desk with both their laptops open. Thankfully, most of Nan’s comments didn’t demand as much work as the first one. Some were positively niggling.

  “Do I really use the word ‘veins’ too much?” Darcy asked.

  “Kind of.”

  Darcy frowned. “Where the fuck else is Lizzie’s adrenaline supposed to be? In her armpits? And why do you keep agreeing with Nan?”

  “She’s a good editor.” Imogen held up her hands in surrender. “But it’s your book. You get the final say.”

  “I asked Moxie about that once, and she said it depends.”

  “Only on how brave you are,” Imogen said. “If you disagree on something big, Nan can threaten not to publish your book. And I guess she could actually not publish it. But remember: she can’t make you write a different novel.”

  “That’s reassuring. Kind of.”

  “Don’t worry. No one’s going to cancel your contract on the ‘veins’ issue.” Imogen tapped at her laptop keyboard. “Here we go . . . search and replace ‘veins’ with ‘penguins.’ Oh, look: ‘187 replacements made.’ ”

  “I used ‘veins’ 187 times? Are you serious?”

  Imogen was laughing. “Yeah, I think my protag had anger coursing through his veins last night too. You got into my head, girl!”

  “Sorry. I suck at writing.” Darcy frowned. “Um, exactly why did you replace it with ‘penguins’?”

  “So when you do the rewrites, you won’t miss it.” Imogen tapped her trackpad, and the swoosh of sent mail sounded. “You�
�re welcome.”

  Darcy reached across to take Imogen’s hand, and felt the warmth of her skin, the cool metal of her rings. “Thanks. Not for the penguins, but for being here. You make up for bad writing humiliation that’s coursing through my penguins.”

  “One more page to go.” Imogen’s eyes flashed. “Will it be a last dollop of admiration? Or a final devastating edit?”

  Darcy groaned as she scrolled to the final page of the letter. It was half-full, containing a single paragraph that looked forbiddingly dense.

  “This better be praise,” she said, and began to read.

  A moment later Imogen leaned back and sighed. “That figures.”

  “Don’t tell me you agree with her!”

  “No, I hate the idea.” Imogen drummed her fingers on the desk. “But I was worried this might happen.”

  Darcy read the paragraph again. It was a long and rambling explanation, more about sales and sequels than storytelling. But there was a firmness to it, a certainty in Nan’s convictions that made Darcy feel young and small and defenseless.

  Her editor wanted a happy ending.

  “Crap. I thought I nailed those last chapters.”

  “I thought so too.” Imogen was staring at her laptop.

  “Then why did you expect this?”

  “Happy endings are popular. Do you not watch movies?”

  “Yeah, but that’s movies,” Darcy groaned. “Books are above all that!”

  “No business is above money.”

  “But I never thought I’d have to . . . Wait, hang on. The ending of Pyromancer is way darker than Afterworlds. Did Nan ask you to change it?”

  “No. She loved it.”

  “Crap! Is this because I’m younger than you? So Nan thinks she can push me around?”

  “I doubt it.” Imogen pointed at her laptop screen. “See what she says here? ‘We have very high expectations for this book, Darcy, but we won’t be able to live up to them without Sales fully on board.’ ”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means they’re paying you three hundred thousand dollars, and now they want their happy ending.”

  * * *

  They lay together on Darcy’s futon, Imogen holding her from behind.