“Really?”
“Much prettier, too. It has gargoyles! Come on.”
But as I turned to leave, a whisper floated at the edge of my hearing, a half-formed word from the blackness of the closet’s depths.
I froze. “Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?” Mindy asked.
I peered back into the darkness, listening for five slow breaths.
“Nothing, I guess.” But a chill had settled on my skin, and as I turned to face the closet door again, it looked very solid.
I reached out and touched it. The wood felt hard and real.
“Oh, shit-stick.”
Mindy’s hand grasped mine. “What’s wrong?”
I stared at the door. From the other side, it had seemed a trivial barrier. But from here inside the closet, it felt impenetrable, suffocating. How had I ever convinced myself that solid objects could be willed away?
A cold trickle of claustrophobia was rolling down my spine, a reminder of what it had felt like when I was little. “It’s okay. Just . . .”
I heard the whisper again, wordless and soft from the back of the closet.
Slamming my eyes shut, I strode forward. But just as I’d expected, as I’d known would happen, my foot collided with the door.
“Crap.” I took hold of the inside handle. I could feel the metal, sleek and cool, but of course my ghostly body was incapable of moving anything in the real world.
“It’s okay, Lizzie. You know how to do this. Just don’t think about it.”
“Please don’t say anything.”
I took a deep, slow breath, and flattened my palm against the wood. I tried to push it through, but the door remained solid and unyielding.
My breath grew short and fast, but panic couldn’t throw me back into the real world. My body was three thousand miles away.
A huge and awful thought came crashing down on me. What if I was stuck in here? My spirit cut off from my body forever . . .
Then we heard it, a noise from the darkness in the depths of the closet, from somewhere behind the back wall. It sounded like rusty scissors opening and closing, traveling along the smooth wooden floor beneath our feet.
It was the old man in the patchwork jacket. It had to be.
I made two fists and turned to face the darkness. “You again? Seriously?”
The darkness didn’t answer. Not even a scratching noise. But Mindy’s whimpering seemed to crowd the space around us.
“Please, Lizzie,” she begged. “Let’s just leave.”
I didn’t tell her that I couldn’t leave. I didn’t want to say aloud that the old man had trapped me here in a web of my own panic.
“It’s okay. I’m not afraid of him.” I was only afraid of the four walls, heavy and solid around me.
But fear only made me angrier. I hadn’t brought a knife, but as I stared into the darkness, I was ready to punch and kick and bite. Mindy clung to me, shivering, and for a moment the only sound was our breathing.
Then a whisper came. “I want you in my pockets, little girl.”
“Let’s just run,” Mindy said. “Please, Lizzie!”
“Just stay here beside me.” I tried to keep my voice steady, but the air was thick in my lungs, the closet pressing in. My panic needed somewhere to go, and turned to a shudder traveling down my body.
“I want your secrets, little girl,” came the old man’s whisper.
Mindy’s fingers were a vise around mine, her breathing as fast as a rabbit’s.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I won’t let him hurt you.”
“I’m getting closer.” The voice was almost in my ear.
“Lizzie!” Mindy cried, pulling me backward, away from the darkness. But the door stopped me, solid and unyielding, and Mindy did what was natural to her.
She ran.
The moment I felt her slip away, I turned and called her name. I beat my fists against the door, telling her to wait, to stay in here with me.
But she was gone, along with the presence that had occupied the closet with us. He wanted her, not me.
“Mindy!” I called again, my voice raw. No answer.
I had to escape this closet, so I threw my mind back to the first time I’d done this trick. Covering my eyes with shaking hands, I imagined the tower around me unbuilt, the walls unpainted, the apartments empty shells, the wiring and plumbing exposed . . .
When I let my hands drop, there was no closet door in front of me, no closet at all, not even a floor beneath my feet. Only the skeleton of a building, I-beams and girders in a grid, the cold gray city visible in all directions.
“Crap,” I said as I began to fall.
But I wasn’t tumbling down like someone thrown out a window. I was feather light, wafting slowly into the yawning pit of the building’s foundation. And as its blackness surrounded me, I willed myself through the brittle surface of the world and down into the River Vaitarna.
A moment later my feet rested on its broad, empty plain. All my panic was gone, turned to anger, but I had no idea how to find the old man.
Except to say, “Yama, dammit. I need you.”
CHAPTER 27
SUMMER FADED RELUCTANTLY, WAITING TILL mid-September before the heat no longer made garbage bags sweat and leak. But finally cool tendrils of air crept in through Darcy’s open windows at night, and the skies turned the deep blue of autumn.
The two of them kept at their rewrites, Imogen sending Ailuromancer to her publisher a few days before her tour. The book remained without a decent title, but Paradox had given her a deadline of early next year for that.
Darcy finished her Afterworlds rewrites, except for the new ending, the thought of which still paralyzed her. She tried writing an essay about her troubles, if only to have something to post on her empty Tumblr feed, but it just seemed like complaining. Finally she told Moxie, and a call to Nan Eliot won her an extension till late November.
November . . . the month when Darcy had written a whole novel. Of course she could manage a new ending. And in the meantime, touring with Imogen and Stanley Anderson would surely clear her head.
* * *
Darcy and Imogen arrived at JFK almost two hours before departure time, dutifully wielding one carry-on bag and one backpack each. Standerson had warned that any checked baggage would be lost on their first flight and would never catch up. Disobeying Standerson didn’t seem like a good idea.
The first flight was the longest of the tour, all the way to San Francisco. From there, they would wind their way across the Southwest and Midwest, ending up in Chicago. (Standerson, of course, would keep going for a whole month, with other hopeful young Paradox authors joining him along the way.)
Darcy waited for departure in a state of excitement, then demanded the window seat and stared down at the passing terrain, trying to read the giant glyphs of highway cloverleaves and radial irrigation. The country was so big. It was strange to think that tomorrow copies of Pyromancer would be emerging from cardboard boxes in stores all across it, along with electronic copies shooting down wires and scattering through the air. And in almost exactly a year, her own Afterworlds would do the same. . . .
Imogen was taking notes, as always, in case she ever needed to write a scene in a plane. She’d taken photographs of the emergency evacuation card, the layout of the cabin, even the texture of the seat fabric. Watching Imogen do research—especially for a book she wasn’t even writing yet—only made Darcy twitchier.
“Have you never been on an airplane before?” Imogen finally asked.
“Of course. But not on tour.”
Imogen smiled, prying Darcy’s hand away from the armrest between them. As their fingers interlaced, she said, “Save some energy for tomorrow, and the six days after that.”
Darcy played with her seat belt, feeling sheepish and young. “Are you still glad you asked me along?”
“Of course,” Imogen said. “But this is just the first of many.”
* * *
Stanley Anderson was waiting for them in San Francisco Airport, having arrived from Kentucky an hour before. He was sitting near their gate and reading a copy of Pyromancer.
Darcy found it odd to see him sitting there alone, with no one paying any attention to him. His humblest online remark generated a hundred responses in minutes, and at her party an expectant bubble of attention had formed around him, everyone glancing over their shoulders to check that he was real. But here in SFO he was just another traveler, dressed comfortably in sneakers, jeans, and a baggy army jacket.
He looked up as they approached. “You made it!”
“Sorry we’re late,” Darcy said.
“It’s never the passengers’ fault.” He slipped Pyromancer into an oversize coat pocket and telescoped out the handle of his luggage, a rolling carry-on bag the color of a green highlighter pen. “Besides, I kind of like airports. All these signs telling us where to go.”
He pointed to one above his head: TAXIS AND LIMOS.
As they followed him, Imogen made wide eyes at the top edge of Pyromancer sticking up from Standerson’s pocket. The book was dog-eared a third of the way in, roughly the point when Ariel Flint was gaining her fire-starting powers.
“You’ll love our driver,” Standerson said. “I get the same guy every tour. He’s been a media escort for thirty years and knows all the gossip. Make sure he tells you about the time he set Jeffrey Archer’s jacket on fire. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t an accident.”
“Whoa,” Darcy said. She’d known that they would have drivers taking them around, but “media escorts”? It sounded very illustrious.
“But there’s something you should know about Anton,” Standerson continued. “He can’t drive.”
“As in drive a car?” Imogen said.
“Then how do we get around?” Darcy asked.
“In his car.” Standerson shrugged. “I mean, he can drive, legally. He’s just not very good at it anymore. He’s sort of losing his eyesight, and coordination, and focus. But he’s got so many awesome stories!”
“Like a realtor who can’t use keys,” Imogen said. “But more dangerous.”
“He has had a couple of wrecks lately, which is kind of scary,” Standerson said, then brightened. “But it’s a well-known fact that if you die on tour, you go straight to YA heaven!”
Darcy looked at Imogen. “There’s a YA heaven?”
“Of course,” he said. They were passing down a long, tunnel-like hallway leading to the luggage area, and the lighting was slowly shifting colors around them. It was just some sort of software company ad, but it felt very mystical as Standerson’s voice dropped low. “It’s very nice up there. Every writer gets their own little bungalow, and they all lie around in hammocks swapping writing tips. There’s a nightly discussion about world-building. Plus lots of drinking.”
Imogen laughed. “I saw this thread on your forum. Doesn’t everyone get their own research team, complete with historian, martial arts expert, and consulting surgeon?”
“That sounds nice,” Darcy said as they reached an escalator headed down. “But what if you’re not actually in print at the time of your grisly car accident? Do you still get into YA heaven?”
“That’s a tricky one,” Standerson said. “Do you have any blurbs yet?”
“One from Oscar Lassiter, and Kiralee Taylor is waiting for the rewrites to decide.”
“Oscar and Kiralee? Goodness. Then heaven ye shall find!”
Darcy was oddly relieved at this news.
The baggage claim area opened up below them, hundreds of bags parading on a dozen carousels. It looked stressful and chaotic, and Darcy felt virtuous for having all her luggage already in hand. She made a mental note to follow all of Standerson’s touring advice.
From the bottom of the escalator, a large man in a dark green suit was waving at them. He held a handwritten sign that said ANDERSON, and the two greeted each other with smiles and handshakes.