Afterworlds

  “Oh,” Darcy said, wondering if her middling last name had doomed her to shelving oblivion. “What’s your book called?”

  “A Parliament of Secrets. Does that sound boring?”

  “No, I love collective nouns. Like a parliament of owls, right?”

  “Yes!” Annie’s face broke into a smile, and her phone came up. “I’m tweeting this.”

  “Congratulations,” Darcy said. “On your book deal, I mean. Not on tweeting this.”

  “I’m so glad I found you! We’ve been looking for more sister debs.”

  “We?”

  In answer, Annie propelled Darcy across the room to meet three more debutantes from the Class of 2014. They were all as bubbly as Annie, most of them meeting each other for the first time in person. They’d been on an email list together for months, exchanging advice and gossip and ironclad rules of publishing, none of which Darcy had ever heard before.

  “If you don’t make a bestseller list in your first week, you’re doomed!” was one.

  “Blurbs don’t work anymore!” was another.

  “You should make sure that the quotable lines of dialogue in your book never exceed a hundred and forty characters!” seemed at best debatable.

  “Your website should get at least a thousand hits a day before your book comes out!” was the scariest.

  The strange thing was that the four of them seemed to be in awe of Darcy. They’d read about her deal in Publisher’s Brunch, and had gleaned how much Paradox had paid.

  “Do they, like, roll out a red carpet when you come to the office?” one of her new sisters asked. Her name was Ashley, and her novel was a dystopian set on Mars.

  “Not exactly,” Darcy said, laughing. When she’d come to New York in March to meet Nan and Moxie, all the carpets at Paradox had been industrial gray.

  “Maybe you can blurb me!” another of them joked, and Darcy didn’t know what to say to that. She was suddenly glad that Publisher’s Brunch hadn’t given her age. Her sister debs were all in their midtwenties at least.

  Again, the little black dress was feeling too big, as if Darcy were shrinking inside it.

  “Isn’t this fun?” Annie asked as she handed Darcy her third beer.

  “Sure,” Darcy said, staring at the drink warily. “But you guys all know so much. I haven’t really figured out anything yet. Like, what should I do to promote myself?”

  “Everything.”

  As that word twisted itself into Darcy, she drank carefully, casting her eyes around for Kiralee Taylor. Being teased by Kiralee and Coleman had been frightening, but it had filled Darcy with a prickly, shivery joy. Her sister debs’ zealousness was generating only formless terror.

  “Everything? As in . . .”

  “As in do you have a blog at least?”

  “Just a Tumblr. But I never know what to post. I mean, should I just talk about myself?”

  “We could interview each other!” Annie exclaimed.

  “Okay.” Darcy tried to smile. “First question: Do you really think it matters where my name falls in the alphabet?”

  “Everything matters,” Annie said.

  There was that word again. As Darcy took another long drink to consider it, she spotted Kiralee, who was in the corner with a tall young woman who Darcy hadn’t met, both of them laughing as if nothing mattered. Maybe they would let her stand near them.

  “How old are you, anyway?” Annie was asking.

  Darcy hesitated, and the silence stretched until it was impossible not to make a joke of it. “My agent and I are keeping that a secret,” she whispered.

  Annie’s eyes widened. “Good idea! You can do a big reveal of your age. Like a cover reveal, but years!”

  Darcy could only nod. With her third beer under way, her feet seemed disconnected from the floor, as if gravity were sputtering a little. She’d always wanted to try Guinness, which contained something called “isinglass,” which sounded magical to Darcy, even if it was made from fish bladders.

  She realized that lunch had been hours ago, and dinner lay in a distant and uncertain future.

  “Excuse me a second,” Darcy said, and made her way across the room.

  Kiralee was in a corner of the bar by the jukebox, an old-fashioned one, almost as large as Sodapop’s birdcage and alight with red and yellow neon tubes. Some sort of liquid pulsed inside them, as if the jukebox were a living creature. Kiralee’s friend looked only a few years older than Darcy, and wore a crisp white button-down shirt under a black linen jacket.

  “Mine’s only two-fifty a month,” Kiralee was saying. “And it’s very secure.”

  “I could almost afford that,” the younger woman said.

  Darcy moved closer, testing the bubble of the conversation. The two didn’t seem to notice her at first, but she had to be brave. Like Nisha kept saying, she was an adult now.

  Kiralee shrugged. “Everything’s cheaper out in Brooklyn.”

  “I know,” her friend said with a sigh. “There’s nothing in Chinatown for less than four hundred a month.” She glanced at Darcy and smiled, which seemed like an invitation.

  “Are these those rent-controlled places?” Darcy asked. “All the apartments I’ve seen online are at least two thousand.”

  They both stared at her for a long moment, and then Kiralee’s face broke into a smile. “We’re talking about parking spaces, darling. Not flats.”

  “Oh. Right.” Darcy drank from her beer, hoping that it was too dark to see the blush galloping across her face. “Parking spaces.”

  A hearty laugh was bubbling out of the younger woman. “That’s one way to save money. Just live in a parking lot!”

  Darcy laughed along, wondering if she should head back toward Annie and the others, where she belonged.

  But then Kiralee placed a kindly hand on her shoulder. “Have you two met? This is Imogen Gray, another of you endless debutantes.”

  Imogen smiled, extending a hand. “Darcy, right? Hindu paranormal?”

  “That’s me.” They shook hands. “Seems like everybody here knows who I am.”

  “Oh,” Imogen said. “I guess I just assumed, because you look . . .”

  Darcy stared at her, taking a beery moment to understand. “Hindu?”

  “Um, yes?” Imogen’s eyes had widened a little.

  Darcy smiled, trying to look reassuring. All the other writers she’d met tonight were white except Johari Valentine, a science fiction writer from Saint Kitts. “No worries. What I meant was, it’s weird how everyone knows about Afterworlds.”

  “Death gods are the new selkies,” Kiralee said.

  Imogen rolled her eyes. “What she means is, it’s nice to see some new mythologies explored. So your book’s set in India?”

  “No, mostly in San Diego, where my protag lives. And in the underworld, of course.”

  “Of course.” Kiralee clinked glasses with them both, toasting the underworld. “So here’s a tricky question for you. Does your Vedic death god speak English? Or does this girl from San Diego speak Hindi? Or Sanskrit, I suppose?”

  “No. She’s white.” For a moment, they both looked at her, as if this needed explanation, and Darcy added, “Is that weird?”

  Kiralee spread her hands. “Not at all.”

  “It’s just, I wanted to have an Indian guy as the love interest, a guy who looks like Muzammil Ibrahim.” They both gave her another questioning look, and Darcy felt embarrassed and young. “He’s a Bollywood actor, a model, really. He’s the hot guy who was never in the paranormals I read when I was little, you know? But I didn’t want it to be about me wanting him.”

  “You wanted every girl to want him.” Kiralee was smiling again. “So you chose a white girl from California.”

  Darcy suddenly wished she had drunk less, even as she took another drink. “Pretty much?”

  “Makes perfect sense.” Kiralee swirled her ice. “In a problematic way. But life is problematic, so novels must be too.”

  “That’s really deep, Ki
ralee,” Imogen said.

  “But yeah, Yamaraj speaks English,” Darcy said, because she wanted to show that she’d thought about this. “It’s called Afterworlds, plural, because there’s lots of them. And each afterworld has a raja or a rani in charge, a living person who can cross into the spirit realm.”

  “Is that from the . . . ?” Imogen frowned at her drink.

  “The Vedas? Not really. It’s just a thing I made up.”

  “That’s what we novelists do,” Kiralee said. “Make things up.”

  “That’s for sure,” Darcy said. In the chaos of last November, she’d never kept straight what she’d made up and what she’d lifted from scripture. “Anyway, Yamaraj’s afterworld has lots of people from India, who speak languages from all over the subcontinent—Gujarati, Bengali, Hindi. English gets used as the common tongue down there, just like in real-life India.”

  “Ah, the language of the colonizer.” Kiralee’s expression brightened. “There are some interesting things you could do with that.”

  “Right,” Darcy said, though she suspected she hadn’t done any of them. She’d made Yamaraj speak English for the most practical of reasons, so that he and Lizzie didn’t have to mime their undying love. “The hardest thing is making him sound old-fashioned; it just makes him sound unsexy.”

  “Old-fashioned?” Imogen asked.

  “He was born, like, three thousand years ago.”

  “And hooks up with a teenager?” Kiralee tsked a few times. “Such a thing has never been done!”

  Imogen laughed at this. “Except all the vampires ever.”

  “Well, he’s still seventeen, really.” Darcy took a sip of beer to marshal her thoughts. “Because time passes differently in the . . . crap. Is it creepy?”

  Kiralee waved a hand. “As long as he looks seventeen, nobody gets squicked. And as for English, everyone speaks English on TV, even the bloody Klingons. Why shouldn’t Hindu death gods?”

  “You’re babbling, Kiralee,” Imogen said. “Klingons speak fucking Klingon. There’s a language institute and everything. They’re translating the plays of Shakespeare!”

  “Right, I forgot. You can obliterate the cultures that told the first stories, but Elvish and Klingon must be maintained at all costs!”

  Imogen turned to Darcy. “Just ignore her. Kiralee hassles everyone about this stuff. But it’s only because she’s always in trouble herself.”

  Kiralee shrugged. “As a whitefella who plunders indigenous mythos, I’ve had my share of squabble, all of it richly deserved. But at least I pass on my wisdom by hassling you young people.”

  “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. . . .”

  Da
rcy 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!”