Afterworlds

“Yamaraj,” I said. “I told Mr. Hamlyn his name, kind of by accident.”

Yami stared at me a moment, then raised her teacup and blew across it. Steam coiled from her lips.

I could hardly breathe the heavy, blood-scented air. Mr. Hamlyn had trailed me to New York because he knew my name.

“I didn’t know not to. Nobody told me!”

“My brother didn’t tell you.” Yami closed her eyes. “Because you’re a distraction. Because he didn’t want to scare you with all the rules of the afterworld. Because you turn him into a fool, just by existing.”

I shook my head. Yama had told me many times that names were important here, just not clearly enough. Maybe after three thousand years, it seemed obvious to him. You couldn’t explain everything to clueless novices, after all. There was too much they didn’t know.

My mouth was suddenly dry. I reached for my teacup, but it was empty except for steam.

“Only memories,” Yami said. It took me a moment to realize that she meant the tea. Memories were all they had in the underworld, like when children play at tea parties with empty cups.

“How many children?” I said.

“Three, so far.”

“What can I do?”

Yami shook her head, as if I was being as thick as the air. “You said you kissed him, and you know his name.”

“Of course! We’re connected.” I stood up on shaky legs. “I’ll call him, or track him, or however it works.”

Yami held up a hand. “Wait for Yamaraj. This is his justice to serve.”

CHAPTER 37

THE DARKNESS SPILLS DOWN THE valley and across to the distant hills, a blanket of midnight. No campfires are in sight, and in dry season there are no bright slivers of freshet to reflect the sky. But Darcy Patel spots a single bright coin flicked into all that velvet—a waterhole.

Her dry tongue scrapes across sorely fissured lips, but she makes no haste, first measuring out the stars of Corvus and Crux. She has to keep a straight path to reach that patch of wet silver before the sun rises again. The last seventeen days have brought an avaricious heat, taking the expedition’s oxen, the convicts, and the freemen in that order. The native guides wisely slipped away a week ago.

Her course determined, Darcy stumbles down the ragged slope, setting a thirsty pace. The night is long, her eagerness tempered by hard falls from watching the constellations overhead instead of looking to her own feet. Empty runnels crisscross the valley, and her muscles soon burn with every dusty scramble down and up again. The scent of jerky from her pack simmers in her head, but her mouth is too parched for dried meat to do her any good.

In the coldest moment of the night, just as the horizon has begun to glow, a glimmer of water appears ahead. At first, Darcy doesn’t dare believe in it. But the ground grows softer under her feet, and her nose catches traces of hook-leaf and mint bush in the air.

She hears a splash in the distance, perhaps a rock wallaby down for its first drink of the day. But fresh meat is a concern for later—at this moment Darcy is made of thirst. She’s already running, falling to her knees in the red mud. As her face touches water, she shivers with passion. The sores on her lips finally cool, the cracks in her throat stealing the first gulps before they can reach her stomach. It is a full minute before she’s had her fill, and tries to rise up from the mud’s embrace.

But the mud will not let her go.

Darcy pushes herself up on her elbows, but that’s all she can manage. Her arms, her legs are trapped by some insuperable viscous force. Even stranger, inches in front of her face, the water is sliding away. Something huge is stirring beneath her, the land itself lifting up.

She hears splashing all around and cranes her neck. In the rosy light of dawn a dozen wallabies retreat in all directions, fleeing whatever the great lump of mud beneath her has become.

The sucking grip on her arms and legs softens, and Darcy manages to struggle to her feet. For a moment, she stands upright on a swelling hill of mud. But suddenly the red earth beneath her turns to treacle, and she’s sinking into living, pulsing warmth. Slow and inexorable, the mud covers her knees, consumes her body, and finally fills her lungs.

As the red earth enfolds her, Darcy hears a shudder deep inside it, a rumble of ancient gasses at its core, a sound almost like a word. . . .

Bunyip.

* * *

Darcy woke with a start, gasping for breath, thrashing in the tangled sheets. It took her long moments to realize that she was safe and sound in her own bed, not suffocating in the sacred, hungry mud of an outback waterhole.

It had been ages since she’d had the bunyip nightmare. But lying here in a sheen of sweat, Darcy perfectly recalled the Kiralee-inspired night terrors of her early teens. And in that moment she realized that the black oil in Afterworlds was suspiciously similar to the living red mud of the Taylor mythos.

Funny that Kiralee had never mentioned that. Had she even noticed? Or was she simply used to being borrowed from?

Imogen lay curled on her side of the bed, undisturbed by the nightmare. It was only nine in the morning, hours before she usually stirred. In the five weeks since sending off Afterworlds, Darcy had stopped staying awake all night, sometimes going to bed as early as two a.m. But Imogen still wrote till dawn, trying to make the first draft of Phobomancer too astounding to ignore. Their sleep schedules were gradually falling out of sync.

After all this hard work . . .

Darcy slid out of bed, put on a bathrobe and slippers, and padded to the kitchen to make coffee. It was Imogen’s percolator waiting on the stovetop, Imogen’s brand of espresso in the fridge. Their possessions were entangled, their tastes entwined. But on mornings like this, when Imogen was still asleep and Darcy was alone in the early March chill, she felt fallen.

Cast out of YA heaven, and living with Audrey Flinderson.

She measured the grind, filled the percolator, and watched the flame bloom. As she waited for the gurgle of coffee, Darcy warmed her hands over the heat.

In some other universe, she’d chanced on another part of the diary—a research note, a plot idea, or one of Imogen’s ridiculous pen names. The Darcy in that world was still blissfully ignorant, no doubt excited to face a new day of writing. But this Darcy hadn’t typed a single word of Untitled Patel.

The night before, not for the first time, Imogen had caught her staring out the window, brooding. Imogen had closed her laptop with a sigh and said, “There’s nothing wrong with flailing after you finish a novel. It’s just postpartum depression. But the cure is to start the next one.”

This wasn’t bad advice—Untitled Patel was due in less than six months. But Darcy was still wrung dry from her final days of rewriting. She’d thrown away all her previous efforts and gone in a new and crazed direction. She’d sent her characters to hell, sliced them up, and killed one of her favorites. And she’d left Yamaraj finally feeling like a proper death god, wounded in his heart and freighted with eternity.

The result wasn’t exactly a happy ending.

The weird thing was, both Moxie and Nan Eliot loved it. Darcy should have been celebrating . . . after all that hard work.

But Imogen hadn’t read it yet, not in the endless weeks since Darcy had finished. She kept delaying, saying she needed to focus on the first draft of Phobomancer. Once that was done, she could give Darcy’s new ending her full attention.

Or maybe she was sick of hearing about it. Sick of everything Darcy Patel–related.

Maybe it was all just hard work now.

The coffee burbled and sputtered on the stove, promising solace and caffeine. Darcy poured, cupped the warmth of the mug with both hands, and joined her laptop at the writing desk in the big room.

Waiting in her in-box was an email from Rhea:

Hey, Darcy! Attached are the copyedits and style sheets for AFTERWORLDS.

We fast-tracked these edits, and Nan says that if you can get them back to us by Friday, the advanced copies at BEA can be copyedited. Yay!

A glimmer of excitement stirred in Darcy, her gloom lifting. There was something pleasingly official about being copyedited, and frightening as well.

She opened one of the style sheets. It was a list, the names and attributes of every character in Afterworlds.

Lizzie: 17, short for Elizabeth, white, only child, hair color unknown

Yamaraj: appears 17 (3000?), Indian (brown skin), crooked eyebrow, beautiful, brother of Yami

Darcy frowned. The details of her protagonists seemed so sparse and flat. Surely Lizzie’s hair color was mentioned somewhere in the book. She opened the file and did a quick search on the word “hair,” but discovered only that Lizzie’s was long enough to push behind her ears when wet.

“Crap,” Darcy said aloud. Then she read the next description.

Jamie: 17, has car, lives with father

“ ‘Has car’? That’s it?” she cried out. No hair color, no brothers or sisters? No particular race? Hardly anything at all. But as Afterworlds had unfolded, Jamie had grown into someone quietly amazing. Not just a friend, but a touchstone of normal life that kept Lizzie from leaving the real world behind.

And she was nothing but a cardboard silhouette.

“Fuck!” Darcy yelled.

“Hey,” said a sleepy-looking Imogen from the bedroom door. “Are you yelling at yourself?”

Darcy nodded. “Copyedits. Turns out I suck at characters.”

Imogen scratched her head, sniffed the air. “Is that coffee?”

* * *

They sat across from each other at the desk, perusing printouts of the style sheets.

“This timeline rocks,” Imogen said.

“I know, right?” The copyeditor had sifted through Afterworlds for every reference to time (Was it a school day? Nighttime? How many weeks had passed?) and put them all into one place. Darcy marveled that she hadn’t made so obvious and useful a document herself.

Another document, the Paradox in-house style guide, was more arcane than helpful, though. Paradox demanded serial commas, and wanted “recalled dialogue” to be set in italics. Numbers one hundred and below had to be spelled out, but for anything higher numerals were used. Unless the number appeared in dialogue or was a big round number, like a million. There were so many issues Darcy had never thought about. But these decisions, at least, had been made for her.

When Darcy turned to the manuscript itself, she found the tricky questions, the judgment calls. There seemed to be hundreds of queries, several on every page. Darcy drifted through the document, reading the copyeditor’s notes at random.

“What does this mean, Gen? ‘Can’t hiss without sibilant.’ ”

“Where is that?” By now, Imogen had her own copy of Afterworlds open on her laptop.

“When Lizzie’s in her kitchen with Mr. Hamlyn.” Darcy followed the dotted line leading from comment to text. “The paragraph that says, ‘“Be quiet!” I hissed.’ What the hell does ‘without sibilant’ mean?”

“It means there’s no s in ‘Be quiet.’ ”

“Oh. You can’t hiss something if there’s no s in it?”

“I can. Be quiet! ” Imogen hissed, her voice sinking into a fierce whisper, her neck muscles tensing, her teeth bared like a snake’s.

“Whoa,” Darcy said. “You totally hissed that.”

She created her own little comment box, and typed “stet.” Kiralee had taught her this word, a magic spell for making edits go away.

“One down, a million to go.” Darcy read further. “Okay. Here’s a note that says, ‘You seem ambivalent about ghosts. Are they people or not?’ ”

“Wait. The copyeditor queried the whole moral dilemma of your book?”

“Yeah. But she’s right, Gen. Lizzie keeps worrying about Mindy being a real person. But when those five little girls disappear, it’s no big deal!”

Imogen shrugged. “That’s because they’re minor characters, like the guys in war movies who die in the background. Novelists are evil psychopomps, basically. We treat a few characters as real, but the rest of them are cannon fodder.”