Afterworlds

by Scott Westerfeld

  “For me, too. Maybe I’ll finally nail this scene.”

  “So what was it like back there?”

  Imogen thought a moment. “It smells like a car, but greasier. And it’s really uncomfortable. I guess we’ve spent a hundred years engineering car seats, and they soak up all that momentum pretty well. Trunks, less so.”

  “Lucky I didn’t crash, then.” Darcy spun the coaster in front of her, wishing she had a beer to put on it. “But Clarabella wouldn’t be worried about comfort. She’s just been kidnapped.”

  “Yeah, but being back there makes you feel like luggage. Scared luggage. You can’t see out, so you’re just tossed around without any warning.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be silly. I forced you to kidnap me at emotional gunpoint.”

  Darcy smiled. “At last a confession. Did you get carsick?”

  “Too much adrenaline.” Imogen rubbed her neck. “And there was a draft in there—all that cold night air hitting me in the face. I could hear the tires against the road, and feel how the asphalt changed texture on the bridge.”

  As the beers arrived, Darcy considered these details. They had a realness that was missing in Imogen’s current draft.

  “To research,” she toasted.

  “Research!” Imogen drank and pulled out her phone, grinning as she tapped notes to herself.

  Darcy took a long first drink, wondering what research her own draft was missing. Should she lock herself in a closet? Visit the dunes of White Sands? Go to an airport at midnight and wander the empty corridors? Or a gun range where people were firing automatics?

  She looked around the ramen place, noticing the jar of pickled eggs on the counter, the pale blue Christmas lights strung along the ceiling beams. The world always had more details than you could remember, more than you could even see, and a thousand times more than you could ever write down. You were always deleting and forgetting far more than you could express in words.

  It was that moment that she remembered what Imogen had told her tonight, which her mind still rejected as unreal. It seemed impossible that Pyromancer was tanking. Surely it had sold millions of copies, and this was all some accounting mistake that would be cleared up by morning.

  As Darcy watched Imogen tapping at her phone, she mulled her outrage and disbelief, and also felt a small, formless fear growing inside her. It was the merest piece of something larger, a tentacle creeping beneath the door.

  What would happen when her own book came out?

  Nisha had texted today: 323 days till publication! Nervous yet?

  Imogen looked up and saw Darcy’s expression. “I bummed you out, didn’t I?”

  “No. I’m just angry at the world for being stupid. And . . .” A shuddery breath. “This might sound kind of selfish, but I’m also scared. If your book can’t find an audience, what’s going to happen to Afterworlds?”

  Imogen put her phone down and reached across the table. “Who knows? It’s just random sometimes, I guess. Or maybe it is my superobvious flame-red cover, or the girls kissing, or the dread mention of cigarettes.”

  “Ariel doesn’t even smoke!”

  “But she hangs out in the smokers’ den, as I foolishly mention on page one. But you don’t have any red flags to worry about.” When Darcy sighed at this, Imogen added, “And not because Afterworlds isn’t gritty and real! It’s just that you stayed away from the obvious hitches.”

  “Except an unhappy ending?”

  “You’re going to nail your ending, happy or not.”

  Darcy put down her beer. “This is crazy. I should be comforting you.”

  “I don’t need comforting,” Imogen said. “I need a killer opening scene. And a decent title for book two.”

  “Fucking Cat-o-mancer,” Darcy said, casting an accusing glance at the giant plastic creature in the corner. The little engine inside was still making its arm wave, beckoning good luck, or prosperity, or whatever plastic cats were supposed to bring. “What’s Japanese for ‘cat’?”

  Imogen thought a second, then shrugged and tapped at her phone.

  “Neko,” she said a moment later.

  “Neko-mancer?”

  Imogen laughed. “Manga fans might get it, but Paradox’s marketing department?”

  They tried other languages—Gatomancer, Chatomancer, Katzemancer, Maomancer—which produced amusement, but nothing useful, title-wise.

  Two bowls of noodles arrived, steaming and fragrant. Darcy warmed her hands against her bowl as Imogen snapped apart both sets of chopsticks.

  “At least I got noodles tonight,” Darcy said.

  “And I got an opening.” Imogen lifted a piece of pork from the bowl and blew on it. “Maybe you should borrow all my scenes, so I have to write better ones.”

  Darcy groaned. “I’ll never steal your ideas again, I promise!”

  “Once a klepto, always a klepto,” Imogen said with a shrug. “Hey, it’s not like I hate thieves. I just wrote a whole book about a cat burglar.”

  “Wait,” Darcy said, her first bite frozen halfway to her mouth. A lighter was clicking somewhere deep in her brain, trying to ignite.

  Imogen finished chewing. “What?”

  “Your protagonist in Cat-o-mancer, you just called him a cat burglar.”

  “He’s a thief with catlike powers. So?”

  Darcy waved a hand for silence. She stared into her bowl, willing her mind to penetrate the thickness of the broth, the tangle of noodles and shredded pork.

  “Catlike powers . . . which he uses to steal things.”

  “Did someone say your sleeper-agent code word?”

  Darcy shook her head slowly, until finally her disordered thoughts clicked into place. “Kleptomancer,” she said softly.

  Imogen paused a moment, then put her chopsticks down.

  “You know, that’s . . .” A longer pause. “That’s pretty good.”

  “Because ‘klepto’ is a real word!” Darcy cried. “Everyone knows what a phobia is, and what a pyromaniac is. But none of those other titles meant anything.”

  “And kleptos are obsessive-compulsives.” Imogen stabbed her chopsticks into her bowl and swore. “How did I not think of that?”

  “You got too obsessed with cat ladies.” Darcy smiled at the giant plastic cat.

  Imogen lifted her bowl with both hands and bowed. “Thank you for your inspiration, Neko-chan.”

  “Hey! No praise for inanimate objects while I’m sitting right here!”

  Imogen turned her beaming smile on Darcy. “Thank you, too, my love.”

  “You really like it,” Darcy murmured, and felt her debt for the stolen scene finally lifting. “I guess you owe me a title.”

  “How about a name instead?”

  Darcy shook her head. “A name?”

  “Audrey Flinderson,” Imogen said softly.

  It took a long, confused moment for Darcy to understand. “Is that your real . . . I mean, your old name?”

  Imogen nodded.

  Darcy waited for something to change, for her inner machinery to shift so that Imogen became Audrey. But nothing happened.

  Imogen was Imogen.

  “So I can look you up now? Online and stuff?”

  “You can.” Imogen shrugged a little. “But you might not want to.”

  Darcy stared into her ramen bowl, wondering if she could expend an effort of will and cast the name away, like a dream forgotten on awakening. It didn’t seem likely.

  “Were you really that bad?”

  “I was mostly pretty good. But when I wrote mean things, they traveled farther and stuck around longer. That’s kind of how the internet works.”

  “Are you trying to be cryptic?”

  “No, I’m succeeding.” Imogen took a thoughtful drink. “But I should have told you my name earlier. I should have trusted you. I’m sorry.”

  A little stab of pain went through Darcy. “I thought you did trust me. Like, always.”

  “You were younger than me. Y
ou still are. And like I said, changing my name is one of the best things I’ve done.” She took a slow breath. “But I’m trusting you now, that it won’t change the way you see me.”

  “I promise it won’t, Gen.”

  “The funny thing is, I kind of thought you already knew.”

  Darcy frowned. “Your name? How could I?”

  “We were on tour together for a week, on a plane almost every day.” Imogen waited for a reaction, didn’t get one, and went on. “And you have to fly using your legal name, you know?”

  “Crap,” Darcy said. Sneaking a look at Imogen’s ticket had never occurred to her. Of course, she’d never dug through Imogen’s wallet either, or hired a private detective. This was what she’d wanted. To be told.

  Imogen was trying not to laugh. “I guess it’s good you don’t write spy thrillers.”

  “Very funny.”

  “You’re going to google the hell out of me, aren’t you?”

  “Probably.”

  “Thought so,” Imogen sighed. “Just remember, the things we write, they aren’t always really us.”

  CHAPTER 32

  WE SAT ON AN OUTCROP of rock, black and sharp-ridged. that rose up from a white sea. The surface of the snow was frozen into glass. Wind-borne flurries uncoiled across it, the high sun casting halos in them, like gray rainbows. The mountains tumbled jaggedly away in all directions, down into parched and sandy valleys.

  I didn’t have a jacket, just a sweater, but from the flipside I felt only tendrils of the cold. Still, the sight of that bright expanse of snow was enough to make me shiver.

  “You’ve got a thing for bleak places,” I said.

  Yama smiled. “It might be bleak, but it’s almost silent.”

  Almost silent. That meant a few people had managed to end their days up here, maybe unlucky mountain climbers haunting the peak where they’d died. I hadn’t seen any ghosts wandering around, but Yama could hear their voices in the stones. This was his mountaintop in Persia, one of those desolate places that Yama needed to stay sane. How long would it be before I started needing them too?

  I shook off that thought.

  “I’m worried about Mindy. She spent all day in her closet.”

  “She’s been afraid for a long time.”

  “This is the worst I’ve seen her.” When I’d checked on her that evening, Mindy had been crouched in the deepest corner, behind the dresses hung in dry-cleaning plastic. Her hair had been tangled, her clothes unkempt. “Her voice sounds softer. Like she’s fading away.”

  “She can’t fade, Lizzie. She has your memories of her to keep her together, and your mother’s.”

  “But what if she decides she doesn’t want to exist, because it’s too scary?” I turned from the snow-bright view to face him. “Can ghosts make themselves disappear? Like, spectral suicide?”

  He shook his head. “She’ll go back to the way she was. Ghosts aren’t really affected by what happens to them. They only change as the memories of the living change.”

  “Then why is she totally traumatized?”

  “Because of what happened years ago. That’s still part of her.”

  I turned away from Yama. I could see what he was saying—Mindy was still eleven years old, still afraid of the man who’d murdered her so long ago. But I hated the idea that she was trapped with her fear forever. It didn’t seem fair to give the bad man that much power.

  And if the afterworld kept ghosts frozen in time, what would it do to me?

  “We can change, right?”

  “You and me? Of course.”

  “But do you feel seventeen? Or really old?”

  Yama shrugged. “I’m not sure what ‘seventeen’ feels like. I was fourteen when I crossed over, almost old enough to take a wife.”

  “Now, see, that’s just creepy.”

  “It was the way of my people.” He said this a lot.

  “Your people and mine are different.” I said this a lot too. “But you don’t really seem much older than me. You seem seventeen. Of course, that’s probably what your people called middle-aged.”

  His crooked eyebrow rose, carrying a challenge. “In my village, people went from young and healthy to old and frail in a few seasons. There wasn’t enough middle age to have a word for it.”

  “Okay, that sucks.” It wasn’t fair to make fun of people who’d lived in the late Stone Age, but sometimes it was just too easy.

  “It takes some getting used to,” he said. “Losing time. You’re already days younger than you should be.”

  I blinked. That was a weird thought, that on my eighteenth birthday I’d be cheating, not really as old as my driver’s license claimed. But much stranger was that I could live forever if I wanted.

  “Mr. Hamlyn told me he never comes out of the afterworld. Like, he’s worried he could die of old age any minute.”

  Yama sat up straighter. “He told you his name?”

  “Yeah.” I took a slow breath, realizing it was time to go into detail about how I’d rescued Mindy. “That was one of his conditions for letting her go. I had to learn his name.”

  “He wants you to call him.”

  “He thinks I’ll want to, for some reason.” I scratched my arms. Mr. Hamlyn’s weird energy was still on me, like phantom insects. “He also made me kiss his hand, to make sure we’re connected. Was that some kind of trick?” I tried to laugh. “I mean, does he get my firstborn now?”

  Yama smiled a little, put an arm around me, and answered with a kiss of his own. The warmth of his lips danced on my skin, erasing for a moment the lingering taste of the old man. The touches of freezing air softened around me.

  When we pulled apart, he said, “It was no trick, but it’s odd. Why does he think you’ll want to call him?”

  I just shrugged, not even wanting to guess. “His last demand was that I deliver a message to you: ‘Tell him I’m hungry.’ Does that make any sense?”

  “It sounds like a threat.”

  “But he’s scared of you.”

  “Of me, but not my people.” Yama’s voice faded a little. “I protect the dead, and he preys on them.”

  I waited for more, but Yama was lost in thought. As the silence stretched out, I started to wonder if I should go. Sometimes in these desolate places of Yama’s, I felt like an alien, a cactus transplanted to the tundra. It was midnight back in San Diego, noon here in Persia, and a jet lag fuzziness was hitting me.

  “I can see why psychopomps don’t bother with sleep.” I leaned my weight into Yama, closing my eyes.

  He held me. “You still need to sleep, Lizzie. It will keep you from changing too quickly.”

  “We’ll go in a minute,” I said, but in the end it was longer than that.

  * * *

  When Jamie drove me home from school the next day, we found a strange car in the driveway. It was a two-door. Sleek, dark red, and very shiny.

  “Looks like your mother has company,” Jamie said as we pulled in.

  “She’s supposed to be at work.” I looked up at the house. “Till seven.”

  “Okay. Weird.” Jamie stared at the mystery car. “Those are dealer plates. You think she bought a new car?”

  “Are you kidding?” I stepped out, looking around for anyone the car might belong to. No one was waiting at the front door. Nobody was in sight at all. “Since my dad left, we haven’t even bought new towels.”

  “That’s too bad.” Jamie was out now, walking around the car. “It’s a pretty sweet ride.”

  “Yeah, but why is it here?” I pulled out my phone. “I’m going to call Mom.”

  “Hang on.” Jamie reached over the hood and pulled something from the windshield. “It’s a note, Lizzie. For you.”

  She came around the car and handed it to me—a blue envelope. My name was written on it, but nothing else.

  “Open it!” she cried.

  “Okay,” I said, but part of me was afraid. Something weird was going on.

  I tore the envelope open,
and a single piece of paper slipped out. It was a printed-out email, from my father to a Chrysler dealership here in San Diego. A passage in the middle was highlighted in yellow.

  Dear Lizzie, this is for you, because of everything you’ve gone through . . . I had to stop there and stare at the car. Seriously?

  “It’s from my dad.”

  “I knew it!” Jamie cried. “The second I saw the dealer plates, I knew that this was some kind of terrorism-related guilt gift!”

  I shook my head. “No way. My dad wouldn’t do this.”

  “Clearly he has. What else does it say?”

  I stared down at the paper, which had turned everything I’d thought about my father completely sideways. But as I kept reading, everything turned sideways again.

  . . . especially now with your mother’s diagnosis. I wish I could do more.

  They’ll slip the keys under the door. Love, Dad.

  “No,” I said softly.

  Jamie was still laughing, her fingers stroking the curving lines of metal. But my mind went rushing back to two nights before, when I’d been making ravioli with Mom. What she’d said about my father: You’ll need him one day.

  This is what she’d been talking about.

  “My mom’s sick.”

  It took a long, twisting moment for Jamie’s laughter to fade. “She’s what?”

  I held out the piece of paper, unable to speak. Jamie pulled it from my hand and read, her expression showing everything I was too shocked to feel.

  “What diagnosis? What’s he talking about?”

  I shook my head.

  “But you’d know, Lizzie! I mean, your mom would never tell him anything before she told you.”

  “She said something the other night,” I managed. “About me needing him.”

  “No way.” She crumpled the paper in her hand. “He must be fucking with you.”

  I wanted to believe Jamie, but my mind was still flashing back to everything Mom had said two nights before. Jamie doesn’t want to talk about herself. She wants to be there for you.

  My mother hadn’t meant Jamie. She’d been talking about herself.

  “She thinks I can’t take it,” I said softly.

  Jamie shook her head. “Even if she’s hiding something, Anna would have told him not to tell you! Not even your dad would just forget something like that.”