“Give me a second,” she said. She closed her eyes again and let herself sink down into the experimental theater in her brain, the place where she imagined scenes. She saw the airport attack again, with Lizzie right there in the middle of it, but this time in the gray of the flipside.
As the silence stretched out, Imogen remained quiet, long past when Nisha or Carla would have spoken up to offer advice. And gradually Darcy let the certainties of what she had already written fade into smoke and mist, until finally her eyes popped open and she said . . .
“Tear gas!”
Imogen kept her gaze level, staying silent.
“When the police get to the airport, they start by shooting in tear gas. So when Lizzie wakes up, she’s in a cloud.”
“So she’s coughing?” Imogen asked carefully.
Darcy shook her head. “The flipside has its own air. So Lizzie thinks she’s in heaven, until she sees Yami staring at her through the mist.”
“Creepy little sister in heaven. Nice.”
Darcy smiled, her mind’s eye still in the scene. “But what looks like heaven is really hell—dead bodies all around her, half hidden by the mist.”
“And before she sees them and freaks out, Yamaraj is there to help!”
“And he says exactly the right thing.” Darcy took a drink of coffee to pull herself back into the real world, her mind ringing with possibilities. But what she’d envisioned wasn’t just a fix, it was a whole new chapter. “Shit. So Nan points out this problem in one paragraph, and I have to write thousands of words to fix it? That’s not fair!”
“All’s fair in love and art.”
“And this letter has five more pages!”
Imogen was laughing now. “Guess that’s why you get paid the big bucks.”
* * *
They kept going all afternoon, for another hour on the roof and then down in the big room, at the desk with both their laptops open. Thankfully, most of Nan’s comments didn’t demand as much work as the first one. Some were positively niggling.
“Do I really use the word ‘veins’ too much?” Darcy asked.
“Kind of.”
Darcy frowned. “Where the f**k else is Lizzie’s adrenaline supposed to be? In her armpits? And why do you keep agreeing with Nan?”
“She’s a good editor.” Imogen held up her hands in surrender. “But it’s your book. You get the final say.”
“I asked Moxie about that once, and she said it depends.”
“Only on how brave you are,” Imogen said. “If you disagree on something big, Nan can threaten not to publish your book. And I guess she could actually not publish it. But remember: she can’t make you write a different novel.”
“That’s reassuring. Kind of.”
“Don’t worry. No one’s going to cancel your contract on the ‘veins’ issue.” Imogen tapped at her laptop keyboard. “Here we go . . . search and replace ‘veins’ with ‘penguins.’ Oh, look: ‘187 replacements made.’ ”
“I used ‘veins’ 187 times? Are you serious?”
Imogen was laughing. “Yeah, I think my protag had anger coursing through his veins last night too. You got into my head, girl!”
“Sorry. I suck at writing.” Darcy frowned. “Um, exactly why did you replace it with ‘penguins’?”
“So when you do the rewrites, you won’t miss it.” Imogen tapped her trackpad, and the swoosh of sent mail sounded. “You’re welcome.”
Darcy reached across to take Imogen’s hand, and felt the warmth of her skin, the cool metal of her rings. “Thanks. Not for the penguins, but for being here. You make up for bad writing humiliation that’s coursing through my penguins.”
“One more page to go.” Imogen’s eyes flashed. “Will it be a last dollop of admiration? Or a final devastating edit?”
Darcy groaned as she scrolled to the final page of the letter. It was half-full, containing a single paragraph that looked forbiddingly dense.
“This better be praise,” she said, and began to read.
A moment later Imogen leaned back and sighed. “That figures.”
“Don’t tell me you agree with her!”
“No, I hate the idea.” Imogen drummed her fingers on the desk. “But I was worried this might happen.”
Darcy read the paragraph again. It was a long and rambling explanation, more about sales and sequels than storytelling. But there was a firmness to it, a certainty in Nan’s convictions that made Darcy feel young and small and defenseless.
Her editor wanted a happy ending.
“Crap. I thought I nailed those last chapters.”
“I thought so too.” Imogen was staring at her laptop.
“Then why did you expect this?”
“Happy endings are popular. Do you not watch movies?”
“Yeah, but that’s movies,” Darcy groaned. “Books are above all that!”
“No business is above money.”
“But I never thought I’d have to . . . Wait, hang on. The ending of Pyromancer is way darker than Afterworlds. Did Nan ask you to change it?”
“No. She loved it.”
“Crap! Is this because I’m younger than you? So Nan thinks she can push me around?”
“I doubt it.” Imogen pointed at her laptop screen. “See what she says here? ‘We have very high expectations for this book, Darcy, but we won’t be able to live up to them without Sales fully on board.’ ”
“What does that mean?”
“It means they’re paying you three hundred thousand dollars, and now they want their happy ending.”
* * *
They lay together on Darcy’s futon, Imogen holding her from behind.
Their bodies fit perfectly like this, two continents pulled apart eons ago but now rejoined. Though her head still spun from the ed letter, Darcy could feel every detail of Imogen behind her—the leanness of her arms, the pulsing ghost of her breath. Lying here like this was new enough to be sublimely distracting.
But it was impossible for Darcy to surrender to her body, because her brain buzzed with strategies—arguments against Nan’s dictates, a dozen possible happy endings, tragic speeches to give if her book were canceled. And under the rest, the hum of worry that this was all her fault.
“It’s because I’m a hack, isn’t it?”
Imogen shifted, tightening her arms around Darcy. “What’d you say?”
“Pyromancer is edgy right from the beginning. And Ariel just gets more gnarly and complicated as you go, all the way to the ending.”
“So you read it?”
“Yes! Sorry!” Darcy cried, realizing that in her excitement this morning, she had forgotten to say so. “Finished it, right after Carla and Sagan left. It was amazing, and gritty, and real. And nobody randomly shows up to save Ariel when she gets in trouble. Especially not some dorky death lord who lives in a palace.”
Imogen chuckled. “You’re going to fix the palace.”
“It’s too late now. Nan sees this as a happy-ending book, and so does Sales.” Darcy burrowed backward into Imogen’s warmth. “You get to keep your messy ending, because your characters are messy and complicated, and you don’t borrow death gods and make them dorky. Because you’re a real writer.”
“Seriously, this again?”
“You know what I mean. Nobody expects Pyromancer to have some big Disney ending.”
“Because nobody expects it to sell a million copies, no matter how it ends. Sales doesn’t worry about working-class pyromaniacs who lust after their gym teachers.”
“Then they’re stupid. You’re going to sell millions.”
“Shush,” Imogen said, pulling Darcy closer.
“But it’s so awesome.”
“Thank you, but shush.”
They were silent for a while, Darcy wondering what to do next. Call her agent? Fight to the death? (The death of her contract? Her career?) Or did she really have to start writing a happy ending for Lizzie and Yamaraj?
“Doesn’t Nan understand that my book is about death?”
Imogen’s sigh was warm against the back of Darcy’s neck. “Maybe that’s why. You start with so much tragedy, she wants it to end happily.”
“That’s stupid.”
“All happy endings are kind of stupid.” Imogen pulled down the collar of Darcy’s T-shirt and kissed the top of her spine, sending a shiver through her.
Darcy squirmed in Imogen’s arms till they were face-to-face. “Do you think we’re going to have a happy ending? Or would that be stupid?”
“We as in us?” Imogen considered the question, a wary look on her face. “I think it might be too early to think about endings.”
“I wasn’t thinking about endings,” Darcy said, which had been entirely true until a moment ago. But now that she’d started, it was hard to stop. What did a happy ending even mean in real life, anyway? In stories you simply said, “They lived happily ever after,” and that was it. But in real life people had to keep on living, day after day, year after year.
What were her chances of spending her whole life with the first person she’d ever really kissed? Darcy rolled away and brought her knees close, wrapping her arms around them.
“Fetal position, huh?” Imogen said. “Thought this might happen, so I saved you some good news.”
“Glad to hear I’m so predictable. What’s the news?”
“When Pyromancer comes out, I’ll be touring with Standerson.”
“It’s official?” Darcy sprang out of her ball and rolled over to face Imogen again. “He’s going on tour with you?”
“Well, technically I’m going on tour with him.” Imogen’s smile was growing as she spoke. “Not all twenty cities, of course. But we’ll be on the same stage every night for a week.”
“That’s amazing!” Darcy leaned forward and they kissed properly for the first time that day. The pressure of Imogen’s lips, the play of her tongue, all of it soothed the tightness in Darcy’s stomach. She wondered why they’d waited so long.
When their mouths parted, Imogen was still smiling.
“I can’t believe you!” Darcy shook her head. “You kept that secret from me all day?”
“Like I said, thought you might need it. Dessert goes last.”
“You do realize that dessert-goes-last and happy-endings-are-stupid contradict each other, right?”
Imogen shrugged. “One’s a strategy. One’s a philosophy. No contradiction.”
“Whatever,” Darcy sighed. “But you and Standerson! All because of my party!”
“Glad I showed up,” Imogen said. “For that and other reasons.”
As Darcy laughed at this, a fugitive memory crossed her mind. She’d been a little drunk, and so much had happened that night. But in the days since, one moment of the party kept popping back into her head.
“You said something weird that night.”
“That I was hot for your book?”
“Weirder. You said that ‘Imogen Gray’ was your pen name. You were just kidding, right?”
Imogen’s smile faded at last. “No. It’s true.”
“So that’s not your real name?”
“Not the one I was born with.”
Darcy frowned. “But it’s something close, right? Like, Imogen Grayson?”
Imogen shook her head. “There’s no point guessing. I don’t tell people my real name.”
Darcy sat up. “Why the hell not?”
“It’s no big deal.”