The whistle of the bad man’s breath sputtered for a moment, and a tremor passed through the gray bedclothes. I froze, staring at them, my heart pounding sideways in my chest. Even invisible, I felt as though any movement would wake him. I was afraid to breathe.

Though maybe it was the little girls outside troubling his slumber. They were here because of his memories, after all. What if the connection went both ways?

I almost took another look out the window, to see what they were doing. But what if they had come closer, and were peeking in through the curtains at me?

I crept backward across the floor, away from the window and the bad man’s bed. I stood up and walked toward the door, needing to leave this house now.

But the door looked solid before me. I reached out, willing it away. . . .

My finger brushed the wood. I could feel the grain beneath the old paint.

“No,” I breathed. “You’re gone, stupid door.”

It was still there. My slow-building panic had grown too strong.

I pulled back from the door, trying to slow my pounding heartbeat. If I tried to walk through and failed again, it might take me all night to regain my focus. So I sat down on the floor, cross-legged, trying to distract myself with everything I’d learned tonight.

I had the bad man’s name and phone number. More important, I knew about the shovel under his bed, and the desk in the other room with its perfect view of the gnarled little trees, and the gardening supplies in back. . . .

Maybe the bad man hadn’t been so cautious, after all. Maybe there was evidence to tell my FBI friend about, something buried right in the front yard. As I sat there, breathing hard, the rusty smell of death filled my lungs. How had I not noticed it before? I could smell what he had done.

Then I realized that the room had gone completely silent. The bad man wasn’t wheezing anymore.

I stared up at the bed.

He was awake, his head risen from the bedclothes. He was almost bald—only a sparse fuzz of white hair glowed in the streetlights. With one hand parting the curtains, he was looking out the window at the gnarled trees.

Maybe he couldn’t see the little girls, but what if he could feel them out there staring back at him, soaking in his memories? Needing him?

What if these moments late at night made him happy?

“Fuck this,” I said. This was more than I could bear. More than I could live with. Not just for Mindy—this was for me now.

I stood up and walked away, my anger shredding the door like tissue paper, the walls and furniture rippling before me. I sliced my way out of his house and was in his backyard ten seconds later.

The moment my feet left the edge of his property, I let myself fall through the earth, out of the flipside, and down into the River Vaitarna. The current was wild and furious, as angry as I was. It flowed so fast that the shreds of lost memories were nothing but a cold spray against my skin.

As soon as I figured out how, I was going to give the police enough evidence to bust the bad man. And if that proved impossible, I’d make Yama help me, whether he wanted to or not. And if that didn’t work, I was going to end the bad man myself and then tear his soul to pieces.

CHAPTER 23

DARCY AND IMOGEN CONSUMED THE city.

They waited for ramen until the day’s writing was done, because a food blog had claimed that noodles tasted better after midnight. (It was true.) At a Southern restaurant near Imogen’s apartment, they gorged on raw fluke that had been marinated in lime and blood orange juice. They bought unknown delicacies wrapped in lotus leaves and ate whatever was inside, no wimping out allowed. Once they waited an hour for fancy milk shakes, because the evening’s sweltering heat demanded them.

Most days they left Nisha’s budget in glorious tatters in their wake.

When Darcy was being more sensible, they went to art galleries instead. Imogen had worked at one for her first year here in New York, and knew the artists, the galleries, and best of all, the gossip.

But it was writing together that Darcy loved most. It was as demanding as anything she’d ever done, facing those clueless sentences she’d written as a high school student. They seemed to drip with everything she hadn’t known back then, as embarrassing as old pictures of herself in middle school.

And yet there was something smooth and easy about writing with Imogen—a rightness, like arriving home. Mostly in the big room, surrounded by windows looking out across the sawtooth rooftops of Chinatown, but also on the familiar confines of Darcy’s futon, or in Imogen’s bedroom with her roommates on the other side of a thin wall. It didn’t matter where, really. What mattered was the connection, the space formed between the two of them, a slice cut from the universe and made private and inviolable.

Sharing the act made it all entirely new, the difference between reality and a postcard, between cheap headphones and a live band in a packed house, between a cloudy day and a total solar eclipse.

Imogen changed everything.

* * *

“What’s that thing where . . .” Darcy’s words started as a murmur, and faded.

“More information needed.” Imogen didn’t look up from her screen, her fingers still tapping.

“When hostages fall in love. With the bad guys.”

“Something syndrome. It rhymes.”

“Stockholm!” Darcy cried, as triumphant as a cat coughing up a feather.

Rewriting could be huge and philosophical, a single sentence requiring a fundamental rethink of what stories were meant to do. But sometimes it was more like completing a crossword, the right letters in the right order, fitting and clicking.

“That’s the one.” Imogen was still typing. She seemed never to stop, even on days when she claimed to have written only a dozen decent sentences. Every thought flowed directly from her brain onto the screen, if only to be excised a moment later. The delete key on Imogen’s laptop was faded, worn in its center like the stairs in a monastery.

Darcy, on the other hand, preferred to gaze at her screen rather than fill it. She thought her sentences first, then murmured and mimed them before committing herself to keystrokes. Her hands acted out the gestures of conversation, her expressions mirroring her characters’ emotions. She closed her eyes when the theater in her mind was populated by setting and characters, or when she was merely listening for a missing word.

“Sun’s coming up,” Imogen said, and closed her laptop.

Darcy kept typing, wanting to finish off the chapter that introduced Lizzie’s best friend, Jamie. Nan had asked for longer scenes with Jamie, to give Lizzie more to hang on to in the real world. But Darcy’s brain was wearying, and her gaze drifted out the window.

Down on the street, deliverymen unloaded fish in styrofoam boxes from a rumbling truck as dawn edged into the sky. True to her word, Imogen never wrote while the sun was up, which had turned Darcy’s waking hours upside down. She was still amazed at the drama of sunrise, how quickly a hint of pink overhead jolted the streets of Chinatown into busyness.

Imogen was making tea. This was ritual now, three weeks into their writing together, eating together, everything together. Darcy should have closed her laptop at this point, or finally written a post for her dusty and windblown Tumblr. But another ritual had established itself in these few minutes while Imogen was away in the kitchen.

Darcy opened a search window and typed, Changed her name to Imogen Gray. This phrase was so simple and obvious, but she’d never tried it before.

There were no exact matches, just a scattering of hits about Pyromancer, less than two months away from publication.

“Crap,” Darcy whispered, and salved her disappointment by looking at the images the search had found. A few unfamiliar photos appeared from a reading in Boston last year, when Imogen’s hair had been longer.

When the teakettle began to sing, Darcy closed the window and cleared her search history. She’d never promised not to search the internet for Imogen’s old name, but this was still a guilty business.

It was just so strange, not knowing her first girlfriend’s name.

Some days Darcy felt as though she didn’t know anything, not if she was a real writer, or a good Hindu, or even whether she was still a virgin. Annoyingly, Sagan had proven correct: the internet had more questions than answers. Was it a night together, fingers, a tongue, or something intangible? Or was “virgin” a word from a dead language whose categories no longer made sense, like some ancient philosopher, brought back to life, asking if electrons were earth, water, air, or fire?

Darcy’s hypothesis was simpler than that: the real world worked differently than stories. In a novel you always knew the moment when something Happened, when someone Changed. But real life was full of gradual, piecemeal, continuous transformation. It was full of accidents and undefinables, and things that just happened on their own. The only certainty was “It’s complicated,” whether or not unicorns tolerated your touch.

* * *

It was hours later, in the early afternoon, that Darcy woke up.

It was still a surprise sometimes, finding Imogen beside her, and she stared at her girlfriend, noticing new things. Two cowlicks in Imogen’s unkempt hair that reared up at each other, like crossed swords in a duel. The white marks left by her rings, growing gradually more pronounced as the summer tanned her hands. The freckles rising on Imogen’s shoulders now that it was hot enough for sleeveless T-shirts.

Maybe it was certainty enough, knowing these things.

Darcy reached for her phone and checked her email.

“Hey, Gen,” she said a moment later, nudging and prodding. “Kiralee wants to have dinner with us. Tonight!”

The reply was gummy with sleep. “Had to happen.”

“What do you . . . ,” Darcy began, then realized: “She’s read my book.”

Imogen rolled over, stretching her mousing wrist as she did every morning.

“Did she tell you anything?” Darcy asked. “Does she like it?”

All she got in answer was a shrug and a yawn, even as another dozen questions cascaded into her mind. How brutal were Kiralee’s critiques? Why had Afterworlds taken her almost a whole month to read? Did she know that Darcy was already rewriting, that whole chapters had been replaced? Was it a good sign that they’d been invited to dinner?

But Darcy knew that these questions were all desperate sounding, so she boiled them down to the most important.

“Do you think she’ll start with praise?”

Imogen groaned and rolled over, pulling Darcy’s pillow over her head.

* * *

Kiralee Taylor had summoned them all the way out to Brooklyn, to a restaurant called Artisanal Toast. The walls were covered with paintings of toast, photographs of toast, and a giant mosaic of Jesus made from actual toast. The matchbooks that Imogen had scooped up at the entrance had pictures of toast on them.

After a few minutes of searching the menu, Darcy frowned. “Wait. They don’t actually serve toast here?”

“Dude,” Imogen said. “This is the dinner menu, not breakfast.”

Kiralee nodded. “They aren’t fanatics. Where do you think we are, Williamsburg?”

Darcy shook her head, because that wasn’t what she’d been thinking. Mostly, she was nervous about what Kiralee thought of her book, and wondering whether she would be able to eat at all. A piece of toast sounded good about now.

Waiters arrived and effected a swift makeover of the table—copper chargers were removed, silverware adjusted, napkins unfolded and placed on laps. It seemed all very crisp and efficient to Darcy, as intimidating as waiting for a critique to begin.

But it was Imogen who Kiralee questioned first.

“How are the Ailuromancer rewrites?”

“At the spring-cleaning stage.” Imogen’s gaze drifted about the restaurant, unmoored and unhappy. “I’ve emptied all the closets out onto the floor. The rugs are hung and waiting to be beaten. In other words, a mess.”