Of all the celestial projectors on the market, none were more powerful than the Heavensend Elite. The two-ton, glass-eyed, million-dollar lumicaster could throw a photorealistic sky over any indoor environment, no matter how large. The console offered a wide variety of day and night modules, everything from sunshine to storm clouds to an aurora borealis with meteors.
Every Friday morning, the elders convened in the council chamber and chose the following week’s weather for the underland. Elder Sunder preferred an eternally pleasant climate. Elder Howell insisted on variety. Elder Rubinek was adamant that the climate stay true to the seasonal calendar. Elders Kohl and Tam didn’t give a flying fig, and traded their votes for political favors.
At two P.M. on Thursday, thirty-six hours after the battle in the clock tower, Sunder convened an emergency conference and demanded the cheeriest sky imaginable. The clan had just lost five of its children, and the people needed sunshine. Not next week. Now.
An hour later, Amanda cracked her blinds and winced at the overbearing brightness. White light gleamed off every stone and window, pricking her through her tinted glasses. Her corneas were still recovering from Harold Herrick’s flash attack. She didn’t need this now.
Squinting, she peeked across the street and saw Heath on the porch of the vacant cottage, his studious attention focused on his song sheets. He only worked outside when Hannah and Jonathan were . . . occupied. That was good. Amanda didn’t want them getting wind of what she was doing. She’d quietly brought four people to her house, and it wasn’t to talk about the weather.
Her guests watched her solemnly as she sat down to join them. They all looked miserable in their own little ways. Carrie was meek. Mia was livid. Theo was downright morose. Zack was the most distracting of all. He sat forward in a love seat, struggling to shuffle a deck of cards. Every time they spilled from his stiff and palsied fingers, he’d mutter a curse and scoop them up again. Though Amanda sympathized with his plight, she still wanted to throttle him. She was mad at him for reasons that had nothing to do with the playing cards.
She took off her sunglasses and sighed. “Well, I guess we can start.”
The others looked to the crumpled scrap of paper on the coffee table, the reason for their secret meeting. By now everyone in the room was familiar with its incendiary message:
Don’t trust Jonathan. He’s not who he says he is.
“For the record, I don’t buy it,” Amanda said. “If you had seen him in that clock tower—”
Carrie clucked her tongue. “Awful.”
“He’d been stabbed three times. He was on the verge of organ failure, yet all he cared about was getting others to safety. Even the best liar in the world couldn’t act in that condition. He’s a genuinely good man. I believe he’s exactly who he says he is.”
“Of course he is,” Mia snapped.
She’d come to the meeting in a bathrobe and slippers, her hair still wet from the tub. The long hot soak had done little to relax her. She looked ready to maul someone.
“The whole thing is bullshit. I could have told you that from the start.” She turned her scornful gaze onto Carrie. “This is exactly why I asked you not to read those notes.”
Carrie shrank away. “I’m sorry, okay? I’m really, really sorry.”
The playing cards spilled out of Zack’s hands again. Amanda closed her eyes and took a deep breath.
“The message still bothers me. If it’s right and I’m wrong, then we’re in a lot of trouble. I just want to make absolutely sure—”
“I’m sure,” Mia said. “I’m telling you, the note’s a lie. All she does is lie.”
“You are her,” Amanda countered. “If she’s lying, then you’re the one I’m worried about.”
Mia covered her eyes, groaning. She couldn’t handle one more conversation about the girl she was, would be, might be, or shouldn’t be.
Carrie touched her arm. “Look, we’re only concerned because the Mia we know would never play a trick like that.”
Amanda shook her head. “Worse than a trick. It was an attack. It was designed to hurt Jonathan and everyone who cares for him. Why would she do that?”
“I don’t know!” Mia looked to Theo. “Who are you worried about, me or Jonathan?”
He shifted his legs on the coffee table, his brow creased distractedly. Amanda hated dragging him into this mess, as he had much bigger things to worry about. Everyone in the village was talking about his epiphany in the God’s Eye, the earth-shaking vision that he could no longer remember. All he knew was what he’d told Hannah to tell him: Find the orphans. All of them.
He shrugged at Mia. “I don’t know. I think Amanda’s right about Jonathan and I think Carrie’s right about you. That’s a harsh note, even for the Mianati.”
Zack laughed. “Mianati?”
“What, too cheesy?”
“Too sinister. You make it sound like they rule the world.”
“What would you call them?”
“The Mianut Gallery.”
Theo glared at him. Zack threw his hand up. “Fine. The Mialstrom.”
“No.”
“Miasma?”
“Yes.” Theo shook a finger at him. “That’s the one.”
Amanda felt the flesh on the back of her neck tighten. Mia rose from her chair. “Well, this was fun. Thanks for having me.”
“Wait,” Zack said. “Aren’t you going to ask me who I’m worried about?”
Mia narrowed her eyes, steeling herself for another bad pun. “Who are you worried about?”
“Semerjean.”
The others stared at him, expressionless. Zack jerked his head at the note. “Come on. I can’t be the only one who read that and thought ‘Pelletier.’”
“You’re not,” Amanda said. “But if you think Jonathan is secretly—”
“Forget Jonathan. Let’s look at this from the other side. We know Semerjean wears a mask and disguises his voice. He wouldn’t do that if he didn’t want us recognizing him. I think it’s time we started asking why.”
Mia sat back down with a cynical sneer. “You’re saying you believe Rebel now.”
“Believe him? No. But when it comes to the Pelletiers, I’m willing to listen. He hates them just as much as we do, and he’s given them a lot of thought. He actually made a few good points to me.”
“When was this?” Theo asked.
“Yesterday. He, uh . . .” Zack tossed a nervous look at Amanda. “He visited me.”
Everyone felt the cold new air around Amanda, though only she and Zack knew the cause of it. She’d gone to the vivery last night to check on him, only to find him in deep conversation with two former enemies. While Rebel was content to lean against the wall, Mercy had crawled into bed with Zack. She lay at his hip like a conjoined twin, massaging his fingers with the loving care of a wife. A nurse.
Amanda had never felt as foolish as she did at that moment, standing in the doorway with her mouth hanging open. She figured she was the last person in the underland to learn about their romance. If Zack wanted to shack up with an old foe, a woman who’d once tried to kill Amanda, that was his choice. But he could have at least told her. He could have shown her that respect.
Theo looked between them. “Uh, do you two need a minute to—”
“Yes,” said Zack.
“No,” said Amanda. “What did Rebel say?”
Zack sank in his seat. “He used to think that Semerjean was posing as one of us.” He motioned to everyone but Carrie. “I mean us. The orphans. The ones who know who Batman is.”
Amanda wound her finger. “But then?”
“But then he realized it doesn’t make sense. The Pelletiers are playing a bigger game. It’s not just us they’re trying to manipulate, it’s the Gothams.”
He sheepishly looked at Carrie. “Sorry. Does that word bother you?”
“No. I’m still stuck on Batman.”
“I’ll tell you later. The thing is, Rebel’s right. If the Pelletiers were going to plant a mole, they’d put him in a position of maximum influence, a place where he could manipulate both us and the Gothams.”
Theo balked at the implication. “You just narrowed it down to one guy.”
“Peter.” Amanda stared at Zack in disbelief. “You think Semerjean is Peter?”
“I don’t. I’m just telling you what Rebel thinks.”
Zack took a nervous peek at Mia, who remained perfectly still in her seat. Droplets of water dawdled down long hair strands. Her dark eyes never left his.
Carrie chuckled. “Come on. Peter’s no Pelletier. He’s lived here my whole life.”
“But not his whole life,” Zack said. “He came here as an orphan with no traceable history.”
“He has a brother,” Amanda reminded him. “A son.”
“Adopted brother. As for Liam, I have no idea. I just know the Pelletiers play head games, and I don’t mean ‘tap your shoulder from the other side.’ They’re four-dimensional mindfuckers. They have temporal tricks we don’t even know about.”
Zack frowned at Theo’s laughter. “Look, even if you don’t take the long view, remember that Esis is a surgeon from the year Whatever. She could have the tools to make anyone look like anyone. Who knows? Maybe there really was a Peter and the Pelletiers killed him. Maybe the one we have now is . . . not who he says he is.”
Amanda shook her head, horrified. “Do you have any idea how crazy you sound?”
“Our baseline for crazy got moved a long time ago. It’s not like we haven’t been fooled by a fake Peter before.”
Carrie gestured at Theo. “You have an augur right here. If Peter was tugging you, wouldn’t—”
“No,” said Zack.
“No,” said Theo. He tapped his temple. “The Pelletiers put a ring in my brain. Some kind of selective fogger. I can’t see crap when it comes to them.”
He turned a hard eye on Zack. “Doesn’t mean I believe you.”
“I’m not the one saying it! I’m just playing—”
“—Rebel’s Advocate,” Amanda said.
Zack laid his cards on the coffee table. “Call it what you like, but there are four ugly truths I can’t get around. Number one is the fact that the Pelletiers wanted us to get to Peter. They gave us a van and a whole lot of money to reach him. Do you deny that?”
“No,” Theo said. “It’s still not proof.”
“No, but it’s troubling. Fact number two is that nobody saw Peter on that aerstraunt when Semerjean was running around.”
“I did,” Amanda said. “I was right there with him when Semerjean killed Ivy’s brother.”
“You were shot in the back with a twelve-gauge,” Zack reminded her. “You were barely conscious. Did you actually see Semerjean kill Bug? Did you see him save Peter?”
Amanda scowled at him. “You’re still reaching.”
“Three: Rebel tried every trick in the book to draw Azral and Esis out of hiding that day. He’d set a ton of traps, but they wouldn’t take the bait. It wasn’t until Ivy shot Peter that they showed up with a vengeance. And the first thing they did, the very first thing—”
Mia closed her eyes. “Goddamn it, Zack . . .”
“—was heal him.”
“Enough!”
She hurled her teacup, shattering it against the fireplace. Zack barely had a chance to view the bouncing shards before a furious Mia eclipsed his view.
“What is wrong with you?”
“Look—”
“He’s saved your life over and over again! He saved your life in Seattle!”
“I’m not saying—”
“You are saying it! Don’t hide behind weasel words. You’re trusting the man who killed your brother over the man who saved your life. That’s pathetic, Zack. You should be ashamed of yourself!”
Zack’s steel-gray eyes held Mia like chains. “You don’t even remember, do you?”
“Remember what?”
He snatched her note from the coffee table and brandished it in front of her.
“Fact number four,” he said. “You got this exact same message about Peter.”
Mia’s eyes bulged. Her righteous wrath fled her in an instant. Zack was right. It had been one of the very first notes her future self had sent her, a vague and cryptic warning about a man she had yet to meet.
Don’t trust Peter. He’s not who he says he is.
She waved a portal into the air and vanished. Carrie shot to her feet. “Mia, wait!”
“It’s okay,” Theo told her. “She’ll be back.”
Zack flicked his hand at the teacup fragments. The pieces jittered on the floor until, one by one, they all snapped together and the cracks melted away.
While Carrie returned the cup to the kitchen, Amanda and Theo kept their cool eyes on Zack. He scooped up his playing cards and resumed his clumsy shuffling.
“You think I like doing this? You think I want Rebel to be right?”
“What do you want?” Amanda asked.
A grim chuckle escaped him. Amanda knew the sound all too well. It was the noise he made when he was censoring a joke, one of his patented funny-but-truisms that exposed his rawest feelings.
“The Pelletiers have been screwing with us for months on end,” he said. “They’ve been messing with your life since you were a little girl. I don’t know about you, but I’m sick of their bullshit. For once, I’d like to know the punchline before they spring it on us.”
He stared at her defiantly. “And if you were seeing someone, I wouldn’t want to know.”
Amanda put on her glasses and looked out the window again. She had at least six retorts lined up, half of them profane, but she suppressed every one of them. She didn’t even have the strength to be angry with him anymore. She feared the Pelletiers broke him even more than she realized.
“Maybe this is all part of their game,” Theo mused. “They want us to suspect each other, mistrust each other.”
Carrie returned from the kitchen, nodding. “Maybe these notes aren’t even Mia’s.”
A portal opened by the front door. Mia returned to the living room with her prophecy journal in hand. She sat back in her seat and began flipping through the pages.
“I got two notes about Peter that day,” she said. “The first one told me not to trust him. The second one said just the opposite. I don’t remember the exact words but . . . wait . . .”
She found the message she was looking for on the second page of her journal.
Disregard that first note. I was just testing something. Peter’s good. He’s great, actually.
Mia stared at the message, her heart pounding wildly. She’d assumed those contradictory notes were nonsense, just another prank from her future self. But now two words leapt out at her with fresh new context. Testing something. Testing something . . .
Her mouth fell open. She let out the breath she’d been holding. “Oh my God . . .”
The others watched in rapt attention as two long-standing mysteries converged in her head. They fit together like a lock and key, solving each other with a simple click.
She looked to her friends in stammering wonder. “I know what she’s doing.”
—
Mia needed a minute and a full glass of water before she could explain herself. Her mood had become bubbly, loopy, as if she could break out in giggles at any moment. She paced in front of the fireplace, only occasionally stopping to check the confounded expressions of her audience.
“Okay, let’s pretend for a minute that Rebel’s right, that someone we know is Semerjean. And let’s say Future Mia found out who it is beyond a shadow of a doubt. What’s the first thing she’d do?”
“Warn you,” Theo said.
“Right.” Mia snatched the paper scrap with Jonathan’s name on it. “But she wouldn’t write this vague shit. She’d spell it out for me in big letters. ‘Don’t trust Jonathan! He’s Semerjean Pelletier!’ And she wouldn’t just write it once. I’d be getting that note dozens of times. Hundreds. Trust me. I know her.”
Carrie laughed, perplexed. “We trust you.”
“But the Pelletiers don’t. If they have a spy, the last thing they’d want is for Future Me to blow his cover. And if they have a way to stop Theo from learning the truth, they must have a way to stop me.”
Amanda saw where she was going with this. She’d spent many a morning helping Mia clean up her portal refuse—all the colorful little paper sticks, all the countless flakes of ash.
“The burning notes . . .”
Mia pointed at her. “The burning notes. I never understood why some of the papers caught fire before I could read them. Now I’m thinking it’s—”
“—censorship,” Zack said. He blinked at her, astonished. “They’re reading your mail.”
Mia nodded. She pictured Azral and Esis sitting at a kitchen table, sorting through her dispatches, laughing at the silliest ones. No, it wouldn’t be that simple. They probably had some automated system that scanned her notes in transit and burned the ones with forbidden information.
But the news came with an upside. Carrie was the first of Mia’s friends to see it.
“Peter and Jonathan are both innocent,” she said. “If either one of them was Semerjean—”
“—their notes would have burned,” Theo said. He gawked at Mia. “That’s exactly why she sent those notes. She was testing the filter.”
Mia fought a maniacal cackle. All these months, she thought her future selves were nothing but a gaggle of loons. But some of them still had their wits about them. Some were even clever enough to use the Pelletiers’ trick against them.
Zack tapped his leg in contemplation. “She must have sent a note like that for everyone she knows. Theo, Amanda, David, me.”
“And the one that catches fire . . .” Carrie recoiled. “You think that would work?”
Theo was skeptical. The stunt seemed almost embarrassingly obvious, like reverse psychology. Then again, he knew from painful experience that smart people weren’t immune to dumb tricks. It was easy to kick a man’s shin when his head was in the clouds.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Seems worth a try, if only for peace of mind.”
Mia scoffed at his choice of words. Evan had recently told her that she was one of the Pelletiers’ least favorite Silvers. Now she was about to challenge them in a way that no one had before. Even if she managed to beat their system, all she’d get for her trouble was some devastating news about someone she loved and trusted. This was a sucker’s game from the start to finish. There would certainly be no peace of mind.
—
At midnight, Mia ran out of excuses to stall. She sequestered herself in her bedroom with a pad, a pen, and a strawberry blender. And then she got to work.
By the time she finished, an hour later, she was ready to cry. She didn’t want to face Zack or Theo or anyone else in her circle. There was only one person in the world she wanted to see.
Carrie leapt up from the sofa as Mia teleported into her living room. She had no trouble reading the anguish in her eyes and lips, her drooped posture, her everything.
“Oh shit,” Carrie said. “Is it David? It’s David, isn’t it.”
Mia shook her head. “His note didn’t burn.”
She dropped onto the couch, exhausted. “None of them burned.”
Mia had sent thirty-three messages to the past, each one a warning about someone in her life. “Don’t trust Hannah. She’s not who she says she is.” “Don’t trust Liam. He’s not who he says he is.” “Don’t trust Mercy . . .” “Don’t trust the Mayor . . .” One fake warning for everyone she knew. She even gave Peter and Jonathan a second chance to incriminate themselves. Nothing. The papers traveled through time without a spark of interference.
Carrie cocked her head. “Okay, well, isn’t that good news?”
“It’s no news,” Mia said. “All it proves is that the Pelletiers are too smart for me.”
“Yeah, or maybe all this Semerjean stuff is horseflakes. Maybe he just wears a mask because he’s ugly.”
On a better night, Mia might have laughed, but her emotions were still too raw. With every fake note, she’d imagined a world in which the warning proved true. What if the Peter she loved was just an elaborately crafted cover identity? What if David had been sneering at her behind her back this whole time? What if the real Zack Trillinger was still rotting away in a Pelletier dungeon? What if the one they rescued was . . . not who he said he was?
But none of those scenarios hurt as much as the one right in front of her. Carrie had piercing blue eyes, just like Semerjean’s. All it would take was a little illusion and a whole lot of tempis to make her look like a formidable man. The thought had been horrific enough to make Mia’s fingers quiver. She could barely push Carrie’s note into the temporal portal.
Carrie sat down next to her and held her by the hands. “Aw, sweetie, don’t feel bad. That could have gone much, much worse.”
“I know. I’m just . . .” She closed her eyes, stuck for words. “I don’t want to deal with it anymore. The notes, the warnings, the Past Mias, the Future Mias. I never asked for that power and I never wanted it. I wish I could just . . .”
“What?”
“I wish I could just travel.”
Carrie tucked her legs beneath her and turned her whole body toward Mia. “Hey. Look at me.”
Mia twisted in her seat and matched her lotus pose, until they were both sitting kneecap to kneecap. She saw the gorgeous expression on Carrie’s face—a soft, slanted grin that made her look ten years older.
Carrie raised her injured wrists. “I got a taste of the life you guys live and it nearly killed me. I mean I knew you had it rough but . . . God, Mia. You’ve been fighting for your life from the minute you got to this world. You’ve barely had a chance to catch your breath.”
Mia lowered her head. Carrie cupped her cheeks and raised her back into eye contact. “You want to be a traveler, then be a traveler. Go around the world, see all the things you never got to see. If anyone’s entitled to live the life they want, it’s you. There’s only one thing I ask.”
“What’s that?”
“Take me with you,” Carrie said. “Wherever you go, for the rest of your life, just bring me along and keep me close. Because that, my dear . . .”
She brushed a warm hand down the side of the Mia’s face. “That’s the only life I want.”
They sat together in perfect silence, hands clasped, their bodies locked in a delicate stasis. Mia found it ironic that two girls who’d dreamed of traveling the world together couldn’t seem to venture beyond the confines of the sofa, as if a fragile thing would shatter if they spoke or moved a muscle.
After a long, breathless moment, Mia reached her arm through a portal and turned off the overhead lights. In the darkness, hands clasped, they leaned forward into each other. Their lips touched, and then suddenly Mia’s world became perfect. There were no past or future selves to be found in the shadows, no friends, no fears, no Semerjeans or Evan Randers. Her universe had become a small and cozy thing, and it was beautiful. If there had been any doubt left about what she wanted from life and Carrie Bloom, it died right there on the couch.
As the village clock rang the two A.M. hour, the girls stopped kissing and fell back onto the cushions. They traded soft, tender words for another forty minutes—secret thoughts, secret fears, all the things they’d never dared tell each other—until fatigue finally got the better of them.
Soon the darkness was pierced by a twinkling coin of light, then another, then another, then a hundred others. Within moments, Mia’s portals filled the room like stars. Rolled-up scraps of paper flittered in from a hundred different futures. Every one of them carried the same dire message. Every one of them burned.