Afterworlds

I was a senior. My transcripts had already been sent off to colleges. People like me were supposed to blow off their last semester. That I had a really good excuse would only make it easier.

  Jamie was waiting for me in the hallway outside.

  “Hey.” She greeted me with a tiny wave, looking guilty. I’d almost forgotten that she’d spilled the beans about my secret boyfriend.

  I gave her a hug. “Hey, yourself. Sorry I disappeared like that.”

  “I get why you needed space, but Anna was totally freaked out. I had to tell her something.”

  “It’s okay, Jamie.”

  “So I don’t suck for telling her about your boyfriend? It’s just, I thought it would be better if she knew you had a place to go. Instead of thinking you were driving around all night doing crazy stuff.”

  A laugh forced its way out of me, because “doing crazy stuff” didn’t begin to cover it. Jamie took the sound as forgiveness, and we hugged again.

  When we pulled apart, she still look worried. “You were saying all that weird stuff, about grim reapers. What was that?”

  “Nothing.” I shrugged. “It was just the bad news about my mom, freaking me out.”

  “So how sick is Anna?”

  “I’m not sure.” It occurred to me that I could have spent the morning googling MDS instead of my own crimes. But I was about as good a daughter as I was a criminal. “Her blood’s messed up.”

  “Like leukemia?”

  I shook my head. “It’s something I’d never heard of before. She says it’ll take a long time to treat it. And a long time before we know if she . . .”

  My voice faded. Saying all this aloud had made me unsteady on my feet. The second late-bell rang, and the hallway emptied around us.

  Jamie put a hand on my shoulder. “Should you even be at school today?”

  “Mom was pretty sure,” I said.

  “Oh. You must be totally busted.”

  “Yeah.” We hadn’t had any specific conversation about punishment, but Mom had taken my new car to work today. I was fairly certain that I wouldn’t be driving it anytime soon. “But, whatever. Even if she grounds me till I’m eighteen, that’s only three months.”

  Jamie smiled. “Your rebellion was well timed. She must want to meet your mysterious boyfriend.”

  “Thanks to you.”

  “Does that mean I get to meet him too? Finally?”

  I stared at her. “So that’s why you told her?”

  “Never.” She crossed her heart. “But I’m glad I did. Anna needs to know stuff like that, especially now.”

  “I guess so.” I wondered what the chances were of Yama sitting down for dinner with us. Especially after I’d confessed my murder to him.

  Jamie took my hand and led me toward my first class. “You two need to stop hiding stuff from each other. You know that, right?”

  I nodded, unable to say more. There was so much now that I would never tell my mother, or Jamie, or anyone else here in the overworld. It didn’t feel as though I could ever be completely honest again.

  * * *

  That night Mom and I cooked together, and we talked a lot too. Not about her disease, but about my father, the person he’d always been. The odd thing was, we hadn’t talked about Dad in any serious way since he’d left us.

  “He sees people as pieces in a game,” I said at one point, thinking of Mr. Hamlyn, too. “Like we’re here just to amuse him.”

  Mom frowned at this, almost as if she wanted to come to Dad’s defense. But she only shook her head and said, “I’m sorry. I was young.”

  We wound up staying up late, my mother sharing a glass of her wine with me. We toasted to how great the rest of the year was going to be, because we’d clearly had our share of disasters already. Mindy watched us from her corner the whole time, happy to be part of the family, so I didn’t bring up anything about my mother’s childhood. Now that Mindy had finally forgotten what had happened thirty-five years ago, it seemed cruel to remind her.

  By the time Mom sent me off to bed, Mindy was full of energy. She wanted to take the river to New York City and spy on my father.

  “Some other night. I need to see someone.”

  “You mean your pomp boyfriend?” She shrugged. “He can come too if he wants.”

  It took me a moment to understand—this was the new Mindy, unafraid of bad men. But the things I had to explain to Yama weren’t for her ears.

  “Not tonight. I’ll be back before dawn.”

  Mindy grumbled a little, but finally headed off to roam the neighborhood by herself, a fearless little ghost.

  I stood in the middle of my bedroom and slipped across to the flipside, ready to face Yama and confess what I’d done. But as the magic words from the 911 call faded in my mouth, I heard a voice floating on the rust-scented air of the afterworld.

  “Elizabeth Scofield . . . I need you.”

  It sounded like a young girl, maybe Mindy’s age. My heart froze—what if one of the five girls I’d freed still existed, and still wanted me? But then the words came again, and I heard the faint accent in them, like Yama’s.

  It was the ghost of his sister Yami.

  * * *

  The river knew what to do.

  I’d always wondered how Yama arrived so quickly when I called him. But the river’s current was driven by connections, by desires. The Vaitarna was roiling with my need to know why Yami’s voice had called me instead of her brother’s. The moment I released myself to the current, it took me, furious and spinning.

  It had to be a simple reason, nothing horrible. Hadn’t my mother decreed that there would be no more disasters this year?

  I swirled to a halt in a part of the river that I’d never seen before. The familiar formless plain stretched in all directions, but the sky was wrong. Instead of starry black it was the red of a fading sunset, rusty and muted. It was strange seeing a wash of color above the boundless gray.

  Yami stood there waiting, her large eyes dissecting me.

  “Long time no see,” I said.

  “We’ve both been occupied.” Her hands adjusted the folds of her gray skirt. “When my brother chooses to neglect his people, someone has to take his place.”

  “Right.” Yama had said something about his sister not approving of us. “Sorry if I’ve been distracting him.”

  “I doubt that,” she said.

  I frowned. “I haven’t been a distraction?”

  “You have. But I doubt you’re sorry.”

  All my clever rejoinders foundered on the fact that she was right.

  “Yami, why did you call me? Is your brother okay?”

  “He regrets that he can’t come to you. His people need him.” She paused a moment, weighing her words. “They are besieged.”

  “Wait. You mean, there’s a battle down there?” I shook my head. “The underworld has wars?”

  “Something smaller than a war, but equally deadly. A predator.”

  It took a moment to understand the word. But when I did, monsters came to mind. “Okay. That’s scary.”

  “Lord Yama is not afraid, but perhaps you can . . .” She held out her hand. “My brother will explain.”

  “You’re going to take me to the underworld?”

  Yami’s reaction was to raise an eyebrow, as if I wasn’t worth a yes.

  Yama had told me about his home, how beautiful it was. But the thought of going that far down into the underworld scared me. The few stray ghosts at school still made me uneasy. I couldn’t imagine a city of thousands.

  I looked up at the strange bloodred sky. “We’re close, aren’t we?”

  “This is the deepest part of the river.” When I still hesitated, Yami snapped the fingers of her outstretched hand, and a single drop of black oil fell from them. “Come, girl. Or don’t you want to go to hell?”

  “Nice of you to put it that way.” I stared down at the spreading black pool between us.

  “Pardon my English,” she said with a smile. “Do you prefer
‘Hades’? It isn’t a bad place, you know. Just a quiet one.”

  “With predators.”

  She nodded. “At the moment. But my brother seems to think you can help.”

  It was hard to argue with that, and I needed to see Yama and tell him everything that had happened in the last two days.

  I reached out to take her hand.

  * * *

  We went farther down, deeper than I’d ever gone.

  The light was different here. A ruddiness infused everything—the sky, the ground, Yami’s skirt and blouse—the color almost vivid compared to the endless gray of the flipside. The air was different too. My lungs had to work hard to take it in, like being in a small room full of cut flowers whose scent was rust and blood.

  We alighted on a balcony that overlooked a skyline of jumbled shapes. The buildings didn’t match, more a collage than a city. They seemed to have been plucked from every epoch, from stone hovels to columned mansions to towering modern apartment blocks. A panopticon of windows stared back at me, reflecting the bloodred sky.

  It was magnificent, like a city constructed over thousands of years with nothing ever torn down. Like every city that had ever existed on earth put together.

  “Who built all this?”

  “It is remembered, not built.”

  Ghost buildings. Of course.

  I stepped to the edge of the balcony and leaned out over the city of the dead. We were only a few stories up, and I could see that the edges of the structures were blurred, the details indistinct. Faded memories given form.

  And it was lifeless. The wide avenues stretched out empty in all directions. No litter stirred in the low and constant wind. There were no vehicles, no traffic lights.

  “Where are all the people?”

  “Where they usually are when there’s a wolf at the door. Inside.”

  I turned to her. “A literal wolf? The ghost of an animal?”

  Yami shook her head, but didn’t speak, as if she wanted me to guess.

  I wasn’t in the mood. “Where’s Yama?”

  “Yamaraj is out there, where he’s needed. He’ll return when he can.”

  “You said I could help. How?”

  Yami thought about this for a moment, and then she said, “Shall we have tea?”

  She went inside through the balcony doors, which were as wide and tall as a soccer goal, leading me into a room as big as my entire house. A huge patterned rug lay at its center, surrounded by dozens of cushions. Candled chandeliers hung above us. As we entered, men in knee-length robes and loose trousers stepped forward from the shadows, lighting the branches of the chandeliers with smoking tapers. These servants were as gray-skinned as Yami—ghosts, of course. They didn’t talk, though one met my eyes with an expression of disquiet, then looked away.

  Yami settled on one of the cushions and pointed to the one across from her.

  “Sit, girl.”

  “My name is Lizzie.”

  “You should show more respect for your name, Elizabeth. Names are important here.”

  I didn’t sit down, taking in the beauty of the room around us. The arched ceilings were painted in russet curlicues, held up by carved and fluted columns, and the candles in the chandeliers flickered like stars above us.

  Then Yami said, “The predator takes only children.”

  That made my knees buckle. I sat, unable to speak for a moment, staring at the rug, which was woven in a pattern of zigzags, diamonds with interlocking vertices. It made my vision pulse with my heartbeat.

  Only children.

  Yami clicked her fingernails, and two servants stepped forward again. Instead of burning tapers, they had silver trays in their hands, each with a steaming teapot and a small porcelain cup with no handles. Yami watched them work, thanking each by name as they served us. A smell like roses and burned sugar filled the room, making the air even thicker.

  “The predator,” I said. “It’s one of us, a psychopomp.”

  She nodded, waiting for more.

  “And the children . . . they all died peacefully, with their parents caring for them. Back when they were alive, I mean.”

  “So it’s the man who troubled you before.” Her words came slowly, clearly. “The one who sent my brother a message.”

  I nodded. I’m hungry—a warning.

  “How did you lead him here, girl?”

  “Why would I do that? I’ve never even been here before!”

  “How else would he have made a connection to my brother?”

  “A connection?” I tried to remember what had happened in the basement, the night Mr. Hamlyn had given Mindy back. “I kissed his hand, but I told Yama about that.”

  “Think harder, Elizabeth.” Yami pronounced every syllable of my name.

  I closed my eyes, and heard Mr. Hamlyn’s voice again.

  I want you to tell your rather impressive friend something. What’s his name again?

  And I’d answered.

  “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 m
oment 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.