Afterworlds

I looked at the unsettled ground. “So what did Mr. Hamlyn bury here?”

“A few smashed bottles of pills, evidence of a struggle. When they find your victim, he’ll be an old man who had a heart attack in his sleep, rolled out of bed, and landed hard. Nothing worth investigating, and even if they dust for fingerprints, Mr. Hamlyn polished the shovel. He and I have a wager. Will my brother choose his people, or you?” Yami sighed. “Mr. Hamlyn thinks rather highly of your chances. I’m not sure why.”

I stared at her. “But why did he bother making a bet with you? Why didn’t he just . . . eat you?”

“His tastes are rather specific.” She held out her hand, showing me a soft scar in her gray skin. It was a half-moon shape, and I remembered the shard of bone that had cut through her. “I may have died young, but it was in terrible pain.”

“Right. I’m sorry.”

She nodded, receiving it like an apology that was her due. Then she reached out and brushed my scar, the tear-shaped one on my cheek. Her fingertips had a fiery spark, like a snap of static electricity, sharper and meaner than her brother’s.

“It’s unfortunate, this path you’ve taken, Elizabeth.”

“I didn’t really have a choice.”

“You’ve made a few.” Yami sighed gently. “Sometimes I wonder whether my brother was right to follow me. My parents lost two children that day.”

“But you want him to stay with you now?”

“Lord Yama chose his path.” She stood. “Choose yours, Lizzie. Life is priceless.”

She snapped her fingers, and droplets fell to the grass around us, glittering like black diamonds.

Before she could depart, I said, “You’re probably right. He won’t abandon you, or his people. Not for me, anyway.”

Yami stared at me a moment, then shrugged before she slipped away.

“If I knew the answer for certain, it wouldn’t be a proper bet.”

CHAPTER 41

IT STARTED SLOWLY AT FIRST, long days of staring at her computer screen with nothing to show for them. But Darcy forced herself to stay at her desk, hour after hour, until the words at last began to come. For a week they dripped, like water from a broken tap, but gradually they came faster, until whole chapters flowed onto the page each day. She reached the terrific speeds she had back in that fateful November eighteen months before, and then surpassed them.

In the end Untitled Patel consumed her, drowning out her own dramas in the clamor of Lizzie’s continuing story, and that of a ghost who was mistaken for someone else. Darcy lost herself in scene structure and syntax and semicolons, in plot and conflict and character, the elements of story contesting with each other for space on the page. She sprang up in the middle of the night to write, not because she was afraid she would forget her ideas, but because her head would explode if she didn’t write them down. She wrote straight through her nineteenth birthday, and hardly noticed.

The month passed quickly in the end, at such a gallop that she hardly felt the absence at the center of her days, the empty chair across from her. She never grew weary of store-bought ramen, or worried about money and the other fleeting details of real life. And as the middle of May approached, she found herself completing the first draft of her second novel, the sequel to Afterworlds. It was messy, downright chaotic at the end, and still untitled, but there was time to fix all that.

As far as Darcy could tell, it was a real book, or close enough. There were even flickers of the juice. And a week before BookExpo America, she emailed it to Moxie Underbridge and collapsed into several days of sleep.

* * *

Books were free here. It was magic. It was huge.

Darcy had woken up early, anxious about her first public event for Afterworlds, a signing of advanced readers’ copies at BEA. Her nerves had only sharpened when a chauffeured car arrived to take her uptown and deposit her in front of the Javits Convention Center.

Inside, the main hall was vast and buzzing. The ceiling was a hundred feet above her head, and the rumble of thirty thousand booksellers, librarians, and publishing pros shivered in the air. Darcy felt small and overwhelmed.

But books were free here.

Some were piled in modest stacks of twenty, and some laid like bricks to form book forts big enough to hide inside. Some were handed to you if you showed a flicker of interest, and some were arranged in spirals, almost too pretty to ruin by taking them. Almost.

Half an hour before her signing, the empty duffel bag that Darcy had brought was already overloaded, and she cursed herself as a neophyte. She could have brought a duffel bag full of duffel bags instead.

Of course, how would she lift all those books? How would she even read them all?

Still, they were free. Not just the YA novels she’d been able to scam out of her fellow authors over the last year, but historicals and cookbooks and category romances, thrillers and science fiction and even graphic novels. All of their publication dates were months away, and they all had that beautiful freshly printed smell.

By the time Rhea called her and told her it was time to meet at the Paradox booth for the signing, she had almost forgotten to be nervous.

* * *

At one end of the cavernous hall was the signing area, a cattle yard of stanchions guiding hundreds of people toward a long row of authors. Giant numbers hung above each aisle, lending a stamp of order to the industrial-size muddle of the crowds.

Debut author Darcy Patel, signing her novel Afterworlds, had been assigned aisle 17. She approached the signing area in the tow of Rhea, who had kindly stuffed the duffel bag full of free books into the nether regions of the Paradox booth. Darcy was wondering how many Paradox bags she could scam.

“There are self-pubbed romance writers on both sides of you,” Rhea was saying. “They’ll have long lines, but nothing crazy. You were supposed to be next to this former child actor signing his self-help book, but we managed to get you moved.”

“Because his huge line would embarrass me?” Darcy asked.

Rhea shook her head. “We just don’t like movie stars next to our authors. It’s distracting. Their heads are too big!”

She led Darcy behind a giant black curtain, into the setup area for the signings. Boxes were piled everywhere, and a fully loaded forklift whirred past as they made their way toward the rear entrance to aisle 17. Darcy was wearing the cocktail dress her mother had given her on that first day in Manhattan. The dress had always brought her luck, but it felt out of place here among the freight and scurry of backstage.

“Good news: your books made it.” Rhea pointed at a stack of boxes covered with Paradox logos and the words “Afterworlds—Patel.” “What kind of pen do you sign with?”

“Um.” Darcy tried to remember the sage advice that Standerson had given her last year. “Uni-Ball . . . something?”

“Vision Elite? Jetstream? I prefer Bic Triumphs.” Rhea was rummaging in her bag. “Take three of each, and a Sharpie for casts, show bags, and body parts.”

“Thank you.” Darcy meekly accepted the handful of pens.

“We’ve got five boxes to get through. That’s a hundred copies, give or take.” Rhea knelt and slid a box cutter down a seam of tape. The folds leaped open, revealing the familiar cover, which now wore both Kiralee’s and Oscar Lassiter’s blurbs.

Darcy knelt beside Rhea. A single advanced copy had arrived at apartment 4E a week ago, but it was staggering and wonderful to see her novel in quantity. The real books didn’t come out until September 23, four whole months from now, but these advanced copies were somehow more precious. Each was marked: NOT FOR SALE.

“A hundred of them?”

“Yep. That’s about thirty seconds per customer.”

Darcy looked at Rhea. “Am I really going to have that many people? I mean, who’s heard of me?”

“A ton of people downloaded the galley. There’s buzz.” Rhea smiled. “And these are free, after all.”

Darcy swallowed. What if you gave away your books for nothing, and still nobody came?

The appointed time arrived, and Darcy found herself in front of the black curtain, perched on an unusually high chair behind a signing table. Rhea was at her side, stacking up copies of Afterworlds, and in front of Darcy stretched a line of people who actually wanted her signature.

But it wasn’t a very long line—maybe twenty-five people. Not a hundred, surely.

“Ready to go?” Rhea asked, and Darcy nodded dumbly.

* * *

The strange thing was, a lot of them had already read Afterworlds.

“I downloaded that galley the first day,” said a librarian from Wisconsin. “My teens just love anything with terrorism. Can you sign it, ‘Congratulations Contest Winner’?”

“Great first chapter,” said a bookstore owner from Maine. “But I was hoping there’d be more about the death cult. Those cults are a real problem, you know?”

“I love ghost romances,” said a blogger from Brooklyn. “Lizzie should have got with that FBI agent, especially after he died. Which was kind of her fault.”

There were more comments and suggestions, and much polite praise. But already the reactions were so varied, and sometimes a little strange.

“There’s a sequel, right?” asked a bookseller from Texas. “Lizzie and Mindy should start solving other people’s murders. It would be so cute.”

Darcy smiled and nodded at everything that was said to her, signing her name with the new autograph she’d been practicing all week. The D was huge and sweeping, sprawling across the full title page, swelling with pride.

But signing here in this convention hall somehow had the feel of business, with none of the glamour, intensity, or love of Standerson’s events. Not that Darcy had earned such adulation yet, but part of her was impatient for actual teenagers to start reading her novel. These were gatekeepers. She wanted zealots.

And there weren’t enough of them. Only twenty minutes into Darcy’s hour, the line trickled down to nothing. She tried to keep the last man talking, but he hadn’t even wanted a dedication, only a signature, and soon he was gone. For an uncomfortable moment Darcy and Rhea stared at each other, saying nothing.

“Crap. Should I just sneak away?”

“Of course not! Just don’t sign so fast. More people will show up. They’ll drift over from the other aisles.” Rhea smiled. “In fact, here’s two more.”

It was two of Darcy’s sister debs, Annie and Ashley. They wore matching T-shirts emblazoned: 2014!

“Hey,” Darcy called as they approached. “Sister debs!”

The smile crumpled on Ashley’s face. “My book got bumped till next spring. I’m not really your sister deb anymore.”

Annie put a comforting arm around her. “I told you, you can still wear the shirt.”

“I’m so sorry,” Darcy said. “But thanks for sending me Blood Red World. I loved how complicated the politics were. And those make-out scenes on Mars! Would low gravity really work that way?”

“I hope so.” Ashley was staring at Darcy’s pile of books. “How was your signing? You must have been mobbed!”

“Mildly,” Darcy said. “But everyone was really nice.”

“Your cover’s so great,” Annie said, picking up a copy of Afterworlds. “I love the whole roiling smoke thing!”

“Teardrops are the new black,” Ashley added.

“Thanks.” Darcy wondered if their covers were out. She hadn’t kept up with any cover releases in the last two months, nor had she ever pursued the promised interviews with Annie, or put anything else on her Tumblr. She was a bad sister deb, and felt a sudden need to make up for it. So she said, “I’m nineteen, by the way.”

“That was my guess!” Ashley began a dance. “Score!”