Afterworlds

“You get in trouble for your books? But they’re so . . . inspiring!” After reading Dirawong, Darcy had done her sixth-grade final project on the Bundjalung people. “I mean, it feels like you believe everything you write. You’re a lot more respectful than I am about the Vedas.”

Kiralee laughed. “Well, I never used anyone’s god for purposes of YA hotness.”

Darcy stared at her.

“Not that I’ve read your book.” Kiralee put her hands up in surrender.

Imogen rolled her eyes. “It’s different when it’s your own god, Kiralee.”

“I guess so,” Darcy said, but that was a tricky one. The only statue of Ganesha in her parents’ house sat on her dad’s computer, and had magnetic feet, and she’d rejected her family’s vegetarianism when she turned thirteen. “Anyway, Yamaraj isn’t really a god. He’s the first mortal to discover the afterworld, which gives him special powers. He’s more like a superhero!”

Darcy was cheating here too. In the earliest scriptures, Yamaraj was mortal, but later he became a deity. That was the thing about the Vedas. They weren’t one book but hundreds of stories and hymns and meditations. They had everything—many gods or one, heaven and hell or reincarnation.

But in Afterworlds, Yamaraj was just a normal guy who’d discovered, more or less by accident, that he could walk among ghosts. Wasn’t that what mattered? Or had the words “hot Vedic death god” magically replaced the novel itself?

Imogen was smiling. “He’s only a superhero if he has an origin story.”

“He does! With lightning and everything!”

“Radioactive spider?”

“More like a donkey,” Darcy said. “That’s not from the Vedas, though. I ignored a lot of stuff, like the hymn where Yamaraj’s sister is trying to sleep with him.”

“That’s so YA!” Imogen said.

“I’m so not going there.” Darcy stared at the bottom of her glass, where there was nothing but foam. “Do you think I’m going to get in trouble?”

Kiralee placed her own drink on the jukebox and put a heavy arm around Darcy. “It’s not as if you’re some whitefella, plundering away.”

“That would be your specialty,” Imogen said.

“Look who’s throwing stones!” Kiralee cried. “Your work is hardly free of scandal.”

Imogen let out a sigh. “Right now my work’s free of everything, including a plot. I can’t find a decent mancy to use.”

“What’s a mancy?” Darcy asked, relieved that the conversation was finally moving past the plundering of religions. It had opened up questions that her drunken brain wasn’t fit to consider.

“Imogen’s debut is about a teenager who sets things on fire,” Kiralee said. “Pyromancy! And she thinks I’m bad.”

“Hey, I just glamorize burning shit down. That’s way better than cultural appropriation.” Imogen turned to Darcy. “My protag starts out as a pyromaniac, a kid who plays with matches. But then she develops gnarly fire powers, and it turns out she’s from a long line of pyromancers.”

“I knew a kid like that in middle school,” Darcy said. “No superpowers, but he was always lighting toilet paper on fire.”

Imogen smiled. “My first girlfriend was a pyro, too. In my trilogy, all the magic systems are based on impulse control disorders.”

“Right.” Darcy had thought that Imogen was her own age, perhaps a little older. But she was already thinking in trilogies, while Darcy had seen only glimmers of Untitled Patel.

The thought struck Darcy again: What if there had been only one novel out there for her madly typing fingers to stumble upon?

“The first one’s called Pyromancer, of course,” Imogen said. “But my publisher hates the title for book two.”

“Can you blame them?” Kiralee cried. “Ailuromancer!”

“What the hell does that mean?” Darcy asked.

“Cats.” Kiralee laughed. “Cat-lady powers!”

“Get us drinks.” Imogen pulled an old leather wallet from her hip pocket and slipped out two twenties. Kiralee plucked them away and headed toward the bar, and Imogen turned back to Darcy. “It means precognition with felines. Like reading chicken innards.”

Darcy’s eyes widened. “Your hero chops up cats?”

“Eww, no. Ailuromancy is about reading the way they move, the twitches of their tails.” Imogen’s hand swept through the air in a graceful curve, as if stroking the back of a sleeping feline. “My protag can listen to a cat’s purr and know things, like when you hear random words in the crashing of waves.”

Darcy’s eyes followed Imogen’s hand. Sliver rings crowded her fingers, a skull-and-crossbones decorating her pinkie. “That’s pretty awesome.”

“The magic works fine, but everyone at Paradox hates Ailuromancer as a title. They want to call it Cat-o-mancer.”

“That’s even worse than Ailuromancer.” Darcy’s three Guinnesses made a mess of the word. “But hey, we have the same publisher.”

“Who’s your editor?”

“Nan Eliot.”

“Me too!”

Darcy frowned. “But how do cats fit in with pyromania? Pets aren’t a disorder.”

“Are you kidding? My protag’s mother is a full-blown cat lady. He’s growing up in a cat-filled garbage house. His clothes smell like cat piss, and nobody talks to him at school. Social services is closing in. . . .”

Darcy was nodding. “And then he gets gnarly powers?”

“Precognition, and a bunch of other catty stuff as well—balance, climbing, hearing. He goes from shoplifting to being a legit cat burglar.”

“Did you know cats don’t have taste buds for sweetness?”

“Really? Cool.” Imogen pulled out her phone and began to type. “They also don’t get jet lag, because they sleep so much.”

“Makes sense. In my book, they can see ghosts!”

Imogen smiled. “Don’t think ghosts exist in my world. But maybe. I’m starting rewrites this week.”

“Me too.” Darcy felt a smile on her face. Had she just had some slight influence on Imogen’s novel, just by being here and half knowing something about cats?

Maybe that made up for the fact that she was plundering her parents’ religion for purposes of YA hotness. Darcy took a slow breath, letting that thought slide away again.

“But I have to come up with a mancy for book three.” Imogen swiped her phone a few times, then read from the screen. “There’s hundreds of them: austromancy, spheromancy, nephelomancy. The only hitch is, they’re all crappy powers. But I guess it’s not fun if it’s not tricky.”

Darcy contemplated these words. In her experience, tricky was mostly hard, not fun. If she’d known how tricky it would be to write a character traumatized by a terrorist attack, who had to process the horror of a massacre across four slow-moving and depressing chapters, she would’ve chosen a more peaceful way for Lizzie to think her way into the afterworld.

Everyone loved that first chapter, but it had made all the ones after it a lot trickier.

Kiralee returned, a trio of drinks clustered between her hands. “I was just having a think at the bar, and I may have solved your mancy problem!”

“Oh, great. Another one.” Imogen lifted two of the glasses from Kiralee’s grasp and handed the Guinness to Darcy. “Let’s hear it.”

“Why not have book three be about a flatumancer?”

No one said anything for a moment.

“Does that word mean what I think it means?” Darcy asked.

“From the Latin, flatus.” Kiralee’s eyes were sparkling. “It’s a license to print money!”

“So you’re suggesting,” Imogen said carefully, “that the finale of my impulse-control-disorder-based dark fantasy trilogy should be about a character whose farts are magic?”

“Well, her farts wouldn’t have to be inherently magic. But couldn’t one control magical forces by farting? It’s an act of willpower, after all. And it requires a certain purity of spirit.”

“I hate you,” Imogen said.

Kiralee turned to Darcy. “What’s a better name: Fiona the Flatumancer or Freddie the Flatumancer?”

Darcy, trying not to laugh, was unable to reply.

“I think they’re both equally good,” said Imogen. “In that neither is good.”

“But wait,” Darcy managed. “What do you do with flatumancy? I mean, besides the obvious?”

“Well, I haven’t worked out the entire magic system yet.” Kiralee waved her drink vaguely. “But the spells will all have evocative names: the Cushion Creeper, the Air Biscuit, the Brown Zephyr, and of course the dreaded Secretary of the Interior!”

Even Imogen was laughing now. “Sounds like those spells all do pretty much the same thing.”

“Only because I haven’t mentioned the Flaming Flabbergaster!”

“You plagiarizing cow!” Imogen cried. “The Flaming Flabbergaster is clearly pyromancy!”

“Pyro-flatumancy, yes,” Kiralee said, maintaining an air of absolute dignity. “But let’s not be pedantic.”

“No, let’s not,” Darcy said, and the three of them clinked and drank.

* * *

The night went on like this, a mix of serious talk, utter bullshit, self-promotion, and slumber-party giddiness. It seemed to last all night, and yet it was still before ten when Darcy looked around and realized that YA Drinks Night was ending. The bar had grown crowded, but now it overflowed with random nonwriters who had wandered in. She recognized only a handful of faces.

Her new friends began to congregate in a last cluster.

“Anyone fancy sharing a cab to Brooklyn?” Kiralee asked.

Someone did, a writer of gothic g*y romances who lived in Mississippi and was staying with friends. Darcy’s quartet of sister debs was organizing dinner at a pizza place nearby, but she felt too dizzy from her four beers (or was it five?) to go anywhere but home.

“Do you know the way back to Moxie’s?” Imogen asked her.

Darcy found herself short on bluster, and told the truth. “No idea. But it’s across from Astor Place. A cabdriver will know where that is, right?”

“That’s only ten minutes from here. I’ll walk you.”

“Sorry to be clueless.” Darcy had reached the stage of drunkenness when apologies and promises were frequent. But Imogen only smiled.

They said long, gushing good-byes to everyone and walked out into the night.

The warehouses seemed to have grown larger since sunset, and the streets felt empty and dramatic, like a film set through which they had been permitted to wander after hours. The air was cool against Darcy’s skin, which felt fevered from hours of writerly blather.

Imogen pointed. “Ghost building.”

Darcy looked up and saw the discoloration on a high expanse of brick before her, a silhouette of a building torn down decades ago. The angle of the roofline was visible, and the jutting shape of a chimney. Above was a ghost billboard—a faded ad for a car repair shop, ancient enough that the phone number had letters at the start.

“My protag can see ghosts,” Darcy said.

“Of course. He’s a death god.”

“Not him. The other one—Lizzie.”

“Seriously?” Imogen asked.

“Seriously what?”

“Your protag’s name is Lizzie . . . and yours is Darcy?” Imogen began to laugh. “Jane Austen much?”

Darcy came to a halt. “Oh, f**k.”

“You didn’t realize?”