The End and Other Beginnings Read online

  Edie sighed, bobbed her head to the music, and pretended to be holding a fishing pole. She cast her invisible line, and Chris became the fish, flapping wildly as she pulled him in. Then she fell against him, so embarrassed she couldn’t help but bury her face in his shoulder. But it was all right, because in the middle of her spasm of humiliation, Arianna and all her friends had come to join them, and now she was camouflaged by a whole crowd of fools.

  It took another song to get comfortable, and then Arianna was spinning in circles around her, and Jacob was dragging a handkerchief across his sweaty forehead, and Chris was trying to teach her how to do the electric slide, even though it didn’t work with the music. She kept tripping over her skirt, and her legs were sticky with sweat, but it didn’t matter, none of it mattered except how widely he smiled at her.

  Sometime in the middle of one of those songs where they shouted commands at you—Edie’s favorite, because she didn’t have to think of her own moves—she spotted Kate at the edge of the dance floor, trying to coax Lynn to join her. Kate was in silver—no, not just silver, but a dress made of duct tape that wrapped around her from chest to knee. Lynn was in red, like Edie.

  Edie caught Kate’s eye, pointed at the duct-tape dress, and gave her a thumbs-up.

  Kate gave her a confused look.

  And Edie stepped to the left and turned, as commanded by the music.

  The song slowed, and the lights went low, so only the starry strands glowed in a net above them. Chris’s hands found her hips, and she put her arms around his neck. They swayed, leaning on each other to recover from the fever of the past few dances.

  She touched her forehead to his, and he was sweaty, his skin radiating heat, but she didn’t mind.

  He had made her feel light, for once. So she tipped her chin up to kiss him. He cupped her cheeks, and they stopped swaying. She crushed the corsage against his chest, toying with the buttons of his shirt, with the perfectly straight bow tie.

  This was it, she knew. The feeling people meant when they talked about love. And it was so easy to love him, so easy to love the person she was when he was around.

  “You look happy,” he said to her softly, over the hum of the music. “For a while, after the accident, it was like . . . like you didn’t feel much of anything. And I didn’t know what to do. But . . . it’s nice to see you happy again.”

  It was nice to feel happy again.

  But she couldn’t get rid of the unsettling thought: What happens when I stop being happy again?

  Kate did not count down her exit from the Elucidation Protocol. Edie jerked from the vision, startled to find herself sitting instead of standing, and wearing jeans instead of a red gown. She ran her hands over her arms, feeling bereft. Lost.

  Such a weird thing to have in your basement, she thought as she looked around for something to anchor her. Along the far wall were bookcases stuffed with books, sometimes two rows deep. This was a house of curious people. Kate’s parents didn’t even mind her comic obsession. Her mother had called it a “feminist undertaking.”

  Kate stood in front of her, and ripped one of the wires away from Edie’s forehead. Her movements were sharp, her brow furrowed. Edie blinked up at her as Kate eased the crown off her head and set it aside. Then Kate took a phone out of her back pocket and thrust it at Edie.

  “Here. Take it, it wouldn’t stop buzzing,” Kate said. She folded her arms.

  “What is it?” Edie said, still feeling out of it. Had she mumbled something while she was under the influence of the EP? Something about Kate?

  “Oh no, this conversation can wait until you’ve checked your texts. Go ahead,” Kate said.

  Edie touched the screen, bringing up the last few text messages. They were all from Arianna.

  Arianna: Well?

  Arianna: Did you choose a boy yet?

  Arianna: Tell me soon, because we need to go dress shopping together.

  She looked up at Kate, still not sure what was going on.

  “Tell me,” Kate said, her voice shaking. “Tell me we didn’t just break my father’s rules, risk me getting in serious trouble, and potentially damage highly expensive equipment so you could pick a prom date.”

  “It’s not . . .” But what? How could she explain that it wasn’t about a prom date, wasn’t about Evan or Chris or dresses or dances? How could she possibly tell Kate about the whirl of panicked thoughts chasing themselves through her brain every second of every day, and the deep ache she felt every time she thought about the future, the past, hell, even the present?

  “God.” Kate closed her eyes. “When you agreed to come tonight, I thought it was because you actually gave a damn about me still. That maybe we could be friends again. And now I find out you would take advantage of me like this, for something so . . . so vapid and shallow and—”

  “You’re so judgmental, God,” Edie snapped. “If you’re not ragging on me for liking makeup, you’re insulting me for caring about prom? Well, excuse me for not waging some kind of eternal war against the Man!”

  “You don’t listen, do you?” Kate’s eyes filled with tears. “I thought we could be friends again! And it’s like you don’t even think of me, don’t even see me anymore, not since . . .” She blinked the tears away. “Do you even like Vim and Vigor anymore? Or did you just come so you could ask me for this?”

  “You’re the one who doesn’t even make eye contact in the hallway,” Edie said. “And you must not know me very well if you think I’m just some airheaded idiot who’s agonizing over a prom dress.”

  “Just go, okay?” Kate shook her head. “Just go, and choose a boy, and go back to pretending I don’t exist.”

  She turned and walked across the basement. Edie listened to her footsteps on the stairs, and above her head, as they crossed the living room. She heard a door close upstairs and knew that Kate would be in her room by now, probably playing music louder than she should, and wouldn’t answer the door even if Edie pounded on it.

  So Edie got her bag, put on her shoes, and left.

  They had been the last ones at the funeral, Lynn, Kate, and Edie. They helped Amy’s aunts clean up, then sat on the couch in the living room, sucking down the last of what Edie mentally referred to as the funereal punch. All day she had been suppressing the horrible urge to laugh. Everything was funny—the priest’s hobbling gait as he went up to the pulpit, the face Amy’s grandmother made when she cried, the off-balance way the pallbearers carried the casket.

  She felt like some of the wires in her brain were crossed to trigger the wrong reactions at the wrong times. As people stood around weeping, she got so angry she thought she might explode, and excused herself. By the time she made it to the couch with Kate and Lynn, she was so exhausted from the wild swells of the wrong emotions that she was numb.

  Then Lynn’s parents came to pick her up, so it was just Kate and Edie, waiting for their rides together, and Edie still couldn’t look Kate in the eye.

  Kate put down her mug, her hand trembling, and said, in a voice so small and so broken Edie almost didn’t believe it belonged to her friend:

  “Do you think it’s my fault?”

  She knew why Kate was asking. Because it had been Kate’s idea to drive to the 7-Eleven, and Kate who had been behind the wheel, and Kate who hadn’t gotten out of the way of the drunk driver in time, and Kate whose whole body was shaking now.

  Edie threw her arms around her best friend, held her tight, and forced herself to say, “No. Of course not.”

  But oh God, maybe she did, maybe she did.

  That night Edie opened the Vim and Vigor folder on her tablet, and scrolled through the images one by one. Kate had been writing this most recent Protectors story for almost a year. It was longer than most books, and she updated it weekly on FandomWorks. Every time Edie thought about giving it up, she found something that made her hold on—a phrase she recognized, a revelation about a character, something small.

  Then a few months ago, she discovered somethi
ng bigger.

  Kate had always teased Edie for being conventional in her “ships”—the couples she was most rooting for in fan fiction, even if they weren’t together in canon. Kate was more interested in nontraditional interpretations of Vim and Vigor—Vim with other women (Transforma, mostly), and Vigor as asexual, or demisexual—and Edie liked to hear about those, too, curious about all the possibilities. (Though it had been difficult to explain to her mother why she had so many sketches of two women kissing on her tablet.)

  But Edie always went back to Vim and Antimatter, the son of their evil nemesis. The early comics showed them potent in their hatred for one another, almost killing each other every now and then. But then Antimatter’s mother had died, and he started to shift, and the passionate hate turned to attraction. Enemies to lovers—one of Edie’s favorite tropes.

  And Kate had written it into her story.

  Her Vigor was asexual, of course—that was Kate’s favorite interpretation of all. But Vim and Antimatter were there, in her fic, the one she had been building for a year. It was almost like she was speaking directly to Edie.

  That was when Edie started sketching again. Trying to talk back.

  Edie paused on a drawing of Antimatter’s gloved hand in Vim’s slender one, their fingers twisting together as something exploded behind them. Maybe she didn’t need to find the right words to say to Kate, or even any words at all.

  Edie opened a blank email, and attached the Vim and Vigor folder. When it uploaded, she typed in Kate’s email address and wrote “I’m sorry” in the subject line.

  Sent.

  It was prom night.

  Edie twisted her arms behind her back to push up the zipper of her black skirt. It was high-waisted, hitting her right below her ribs, and made of a stiff material that disguised the cell phone and lipstick she carried in the pockets.

  She leaned close to the mirror to check the border of her lipstick, which was a vibrant orange-red.

  “So you’re really set on that getup, huh,” Arianna said from the doorway, her arms folded.

  “Not much choice now, is there?” Edie smiled a little. “Come on. Let’s go make precious memories.”

  There were strings of lights across the ceiling, just as she had imagined during the Elucidation Protocol, but none of them were shaped like stars. Instead, they were your standard Christmas light variety, little and twinkling and white. And the centerpieces on the round tables were just white flowers, lilies and carnations. Kind of hideous, actually.

  Edie stood in the doorway and tucked her hands into her skirt pockets. She was scanning the hotel ballroom, at her leisure, watching Chris and his date—one of the cross-country girls, a short, sweet junior named Tonya—do the shopping cart, shoulder-to-shoulder. Evan was nowhere to be found, probably smoking under the boardwalk, if he had come at all.

  Arianna turned back, her arm still looped around Jacob’s elbow. “You coming?”

  Edie waved her on.

  Then she spotted them, standing at the edge of the dance floor, and she remembered the text she’d sent to Lynn and Kate a few days after the incident at Kate’s house.

  Edie: Protectors reunion at prom? ♥ Vim

  She unzipped her leather jacket and tossed it over the back of a chair. Underneath it she wore a garish purple T-shirt with an illustration of Vim on it. The superheroine was flying through the air, her cape rippling behind her and her fist outstretched, jagged energy lines radiating from her body.

  Across the room, Lynn spotted her and waved. She was wearing her Transforma horns and an acid-green dress that clashed horribly with them. She looked like a bottle of radioactive waste, and her lips were dark purple.

  Kate turned, and when Edie recognized the Vigor costume for what it was, she almost cried with relief, because it meant Kate had forgiven her. From the back, the costume just looked like a rippling black coat-dress, but from the front, that bright red bustier was unmistakable. As was the sparkly red eye shadow on Kate’s eyelids.

  They looked insane. Ridiculous. And fantastic.

  She crossed the room just as a fast song started playing. When she was close to Kate and Lynn, she struck the classic Vim pose, and all three of them laughed.

  “Look, I brought something,” she shouted over the music. And she took a tiny picture of Amy out of her pocket. It was attached to a Popsicle stick, and decorated with the neon-yellow Haze headdress. And glitter.

  “That is . . .” Lynn started, eyebrows raised. “. . . dark,” she finished. “Very dark sense of humor you’ve got there, Edie.”

  But Kate was laughing. “Oh God, she would have loved it.”

  Edie grinned, and put it away. She knew it was weird. She hadn’t really brought it for them. She brought it because she thought it might feel good to remember Amy. And terrible. She knew it would feel terrible to remember, too, but sometimes good and terrible could coexist, right? They had to. The same way you could be happy and sad at the same time.

  People were big, and strange, and complicated. So she couldn’t have chosen to spend this night with Evan, who only liked her when she was lonely, or Chris, who only liked her when she was happy. She had chosen Kate, who just liked Edie.

  Kate, who Edie didn’t blame for the accident, then. Not even a little.

  “Let’s go,” she said. “I love this song.”

  1

  TEKA

  My mom had taught me never to refuse food or drink at a person’s house, but when it came to the Storyteller’s tea, I always wanted to forget my manners. It was sickly sweet and floral, like drinking perfume. It even looked like perfume, a transparent light purple.

  I swallowed it in a big gulp, which turned out to be a mistake, because the Storyteller only poured me another cup. In front of me was a mismatched tea set, one cup silver; another, white; a third, yellow and chipped along the rim.

  “I was pleased to hear from your mother,” the Storyteller said. “Even through an envoy, I felt like I could hear her voice.”

  I knew the Storyteller because he had been helping people escape Shotet—and the tyranny of the dictator Lazmet Noavek, and later his son, Ryzek—for longer than I had been alive. And one of those people had been my mother, Zosita Surukta. She had to flee to escape execution, a sentence issued by the sovereign of Shotet himself for the crime of teaching a language other than Shotet to Shotet children. The Storyteller had found her a place on a transport ship bringing goods to the city. She had stowed away between sacks of offworld grains.

  When Ryzek Noavek found out she was gone, he had my brother killed and my right eye cut out. It was bobbing in a jar in the Weapons Hall at Noavek manor.

  “You must have a better imagination than me,” I said. “All I hear when she writes is instructions.”

  I sat on the floor with a low, square table in front of me. The Storyteller’s house was packed with little things. Fragments of glass hung from strings in front of the window, and when the sun shone through them, they cast spots of colored light on the opposite wall.

  “You mustn’t be too hard on her,” he said, rubbing a hand over his shaved scalp. “She has to keep herself safe.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  Someone knocked on the door, and the Storyteller got up to answer. I wasn’t here to meet him, after all.

  The Storyteller stood back to let the woman in. Her hair was a dull brown and tucked behind her ears. She was short, but somehow, she didn’t seem small. Her clothes were fine enough, but simple, suggesting a comfortable amount of money, but not status.

  Her name was Otega. I didn’t know much else about her, except that she could train me to complete my mission:

  I was going to kill Cyra Noavek, sister of the sovereign of Shotet. Better known as “Ryzek’s Scourge.”

  “Your mother told me you’re eager to be a renegade,” she said to me, lifting a teacup to her lips. “But that your anger is a hindrance to you.”

  I decided, then, that I didn’t like Otega.

  “M
y mom’s never had her eye cut out,” I retorted.

  “I take it that means you don’t agree with her?” Otega said. She sat across the table from me, the tea set between us. She had chosen, of all the available cups, the chipped yellow one.

  “My anger makes me focused on what’s necessary, which is eliminating the Noaveks from power,” I said, with heat. “I don’t care about anything as much as I care about that. How is that a liability for a renegade?”

  Otega raised her eyebrows. “For one thing, it makes you hostile in response to simple questions.”

  “I don’t want to talk about my feelings,” I said. “I want to get ready for my mission. If you can’t help me with that, then we’re both wasting our time.”

  “Well, perhaps I should tell you my credentials, then,” she said. “I have worked in Noavek manor for twenty seasons. I helped raise Cyra Noavek, and tutored her until she became too skilled for me. I have been working to remove the Noaveks from power for longer than you’ve been alive.” She tilted her head. “Do you think I can help you with your mission, Teka?”

  I stared at her.

  “Honestly?” I said after a few moments. “I think you should be the one to kill Cyra Noavek, not me.”

  Otega smiled. “My religious convictions are something of an obstruction.”

  “But helping me figure out how to kill her, that’s not an obstruction?” I said. “Seems like following the letter of a law and not the spirit to me.”

  She pursed her lips, and set her teacup down. The Storyteller sat in the corner, sanding down the edge of a wood carving. He shifted the sandpaper back and forth in a consistent rhythm, rocking with the motion. It looked to me like he was meditating.

  “Your mother called in a debt.” Otega’s voice was clear, and her eyes steady. So why did I feel like this was a confession? “And I have to repay her. That’s all this is.”