“Pretty badass,” Carla said. “You should use him in your sequel.”

“I’ve never even heard of him.” Darcy nudged Sagan aside to read the plaque. “Right, because this guy’s Buddhist. I’m in enough trouble without throwing in stuff from other religions.”

“You’re in trouble?” Sagan asked.

“Kind of,” Darcy sighed. She’d been meaning to talk to Sagan about this today, and she couldn’t ask for a better setting. “You know the first night I was here? When I met Kiralee?”

“Darcy’s on a first-name basis with Kiralee Taylor,” Sagan said to Carla. “It still freaks me out.”

“You shared guacamole with Standerson!”

“Guys, listen,” Darcy said. “That night at Drinks, they were asking about how I used a real god as my romantic lead. And about all the stuff I borrowed from the Vedas. Did you find any of that offensive, Sagan? Like, as a Hindu?”

He shrugged. “It seemed weird at first, but then I figured that it wasn’t a problem, because there’s no Hinduism in your universe.”

Darcy blinked. “What?”

“Well, you know when Lizzie’s trying to find a word that’s better than ‘psychopomp,’ and she googles all those death gods? At first I didn’t get why she never ran into the concept of Yama.”

“Because that would be weird,” Darcy said. “I mean, she’s been making out with him. And he’s not a god in my world, he’s a person.”

“Exactly. So I figured that the Angelina Jolie Paradox applies.”

Darcy glanced at Carla, who looked equally confused.

“The what now?”

Sagan cleared his throat. “You know when you’re watching a movie starring Angelina Jolie? And the character she’s playing looks just like Angelina Jolie, right?”

“Um, yes. Because that’s who she is.”

“No, she’s a regular person in that world, not a movie star. But the other characters never mention that she looks exactly like Angelina Jolie. No one ever comes up to her on the street and says, ‘Can I have your autograph?’ ”

“Because that would mess up the movie,” Carla said.

“Exactly. So when you cast Angelina Jolie in a film, you’re creating an alternate universe in which actress Angelina Jolie does not exist. Because otherwise people would be noticing the resemblance all the time. This is what I call the Angelina Jolie Paradox.”

“You know, Sagan,” Carla said. “You could have named that paradox after any movie star.”

“True. But as the paradox’s discoverer, I have chosen Angelina Jolie, as is my right.”

“I accept your nomenclature,” Darcy said. “But what does it have to do with my book?”

“Well, given that Lizzie’s been researching death gods, and yet somehow never realizes that her boyfriend is an actual death god for, like, eight hundred million Hindus, I assume your book takes place in a universe in which Hinduism does not exist. There’s no other explanation.”

“Fuck. You’re right,” Darcy said. She stumbled backward, dropping onto a dark wooden bench in the center of the room.

“Dude.” Carla laughed and sat beside her, punching Darcy on the arm. “You just erased your own religion. That’s like going back in time and killing Buddha or something.”

“Stop laughing!” Darcy returned the punch. “This is serious!”

“Are you going to get, like, excommunicated?”

“The question is moot,” Sagan said. “We have no one in charge to do the excommunicating.”

“It’s still not okay!” Darcy cried, staring at Yamantaka on the wall and realizing that she and the blue-skinned monster had something in common—they’d both killed Yama, Lord of Death. “I mean, are you kidding with this?”

“Granted, the Angelina Jolie Paradox is not widely accepted,” Sagan said. “It’s more of a conjecture than a theory.”

“Also, it’s very silly,” Carla pointed out.

“But it’s in my head now,” Darcy said, because however ludicrous Sagan’s paradox was, she couldn’t deny that it contained a grain of truth.

Whenever she began to type a story, Darcy felt an alternate universe inside her computer taking form. Some parts of it intersected with her own world, real places like San Diego and New York, but other parts were made up, like Lizzie Scofield or the Movement of the Resurrection. Those connections with reality gave stories their power, and when that realness began to fray and splinter, something broke inside Darcy as well.

She looked up at the painting. A character like Yama, someone borrowed from the Vedas, already had his own stories out here in the real world. And every day, Darcy grew more uncertain whether he was hers to play with anymore.

“You could change his name,” Carla said. “Call him Steve, or something.”

Darcy coughed out a small cry, as if she’d swallowed a bug. “Steve?”

“Okay, an Indian name. She could use yours, right, Sagan?”

“My name means ‘Lord Shiva,’ so not really.” Sagan struck a Bollywood archer’s pose. “But I’m available to play Yamaraj in the movie.”

Darcy shook her head. She could no more change Yamaraj’s name than she could Lizzie’s, or any of the characters. It was too late for that. Besides, filing the serial numbers off a stolen car didn’t mean you owned it.

“You guys are killing my brain.”

“And I haven’t even told you the paradoxical part,” Sagan said. “The only way not to erase Angelina Jolie is to never cast her in a movie.”

Carla’s eyes went wide. “Which would also erase Angelina Jolie.”

Darcy made a small and whimpering noise.

Carla sighed, and stroked her shoulder gently. “You really think a three-thousand-year-old death god cares what you write about him?”

“Yamaraj is who he is,” Darcy said. “This is about who I am.”

CHAPTER 20

JAMIE KEPT LOOKING AT MY scar. Not the one on my forehead, where the stitches had almost dissolved, but the oval of reddened skin that descended from my left eye, tracing the shape of a single tear.

“Can I touch it?” She was already reaching out.

I leaned closer across the Formica table. We were eating breakfast at a diner before our first day back at school, a celebration to mark the start of our final semester.

“Does it hurt?” she asked.

“No. It’s kind of like a chemical peel, a really small one.” Her fingertip was a whisper against my cheek. “From the tear gas reacting with water. That’s my terrorism beauty tip: if you get sprayed with tear gas, don’t wash your face!”

All yesterday I’d practiced this line in my head, going for comedy in the face of tragedy. But Jamie was wide-eyed and silent.

I cleared my throat. “Just kidding. I have no terrorism beauty tips.”

“But it is kind of pretty.” Jamie picked up her phone from the table. “You mind?”

I leaned forward, and she snapped a picture from inches away.

Now she was staring at her phone instead of my face. “It’s like a tattoo of a teardrop.”

“That’s what it is. I cried a tear, which left its mark.”

“Whoa, deep. But only one tear? That’s some pretty crappy tear gas.”

I didn’t explain how I’d mostly avoided the gas by willing myself to an alternate reality, one inhabited by ghosts and psychopomps and threads of memory twisting cold and wet and hungry in the wind.

Instead I said, “Can I have the rest of your bagel?”

She pushed it forward, her gaze still riveted to her phone.

* * *

Jamie was the first person I’d called with my new phone, which had shown up the day before, arriving via overnight express. (That was classic Dad behavior: waiting for more than a week to do something, then paying extra to make it happen faster. When I left a message thanking him, he texted back, Thank Rachel. She kept bugging me. Also classic Dad.)

Jamie had announced that she was picking me up for school an hour early, because we had so much to catch up on, and we’d wound up heading to breakfast here at Abby’s Diner.

This was much more fun than Mom driving me to school. Between Mindy and Yama and having a strange new reality to explore, I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed my best friend.

“I think it’s really cool how you never went on TV,” Jamie was saying.

“Mom made that decision, I guess. I never even thought about doing an interview.”

“Would you have wanted to?”

“It’s not like I’ve had time.” There’d been skills to learn, after all. Afterworlds to conquer. “I didn’t even practice my Spanish over winter break. For once Mom didn’t make me.”

“Poor Anna,” Jamie said. “She must still be freaking out.”

“Pretty much.” It didn’t help that she’d found me sleeping in a closet two nights ago, with a knife as a teddy bear. “She’s tired all the time these days. Like she never really recovered.”

“Was it weird, her and your dad seeing each other in Dallas?”

“He didn’t come.”

Jamie froze for a second, then she placed her fork down firmly. “What the actual f**k?”

I shrugged. My dad’s behavior was always freaking people out, but I was used to him. “He doesn’t deal well with stuff like this.”

“Who the hell does? I know he’s weird, but that’s beyond crazy. And after you got this close to getting . . . crap. I wasn’t going to ever say that out loud. I suck.”

“Hey, I know I almost died. It’s okay.”

“Sorry.”

I shrugged. “We’re all freaked out.”

“Not just us. Air travel’s down, like, eight percent. And when the Feds searched the houses of those gunmen, they found all kinds of explosives and other scary shit. Like they were planning something really big. Everyone says the FBI is going to raid the cult’s big compound soon.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Been keeping up with the news?”

“Obsessively!” Jamie cried, loud enough that heads turned. Her gaze dropped to the table, and she began to adjust her knife and fork. “I hope that’s not weird. It’s just that when you didn’t answer my emails, I had to get my info from somewhere.”

“I know. And you’re really awesome to not be mad at me.”

Jamie was still staring at her silverware, and I could see that she was feeling everything at once: relief that I was alive, anger that I’d taken so long to get in touch, horror that the world was so random and deadly.

“It’s my fault you haven’t had a chance to process,” I said. “It was selfish of me, hiding like that.”

“Don’t be silly. You’re the one who was terrorized,” Jamie said to her half-finished omelet.

“I get to be silly. And I get to hide, too. But I choose to get over myself now.” I handed her one of my french fries. “See? Selflessness.”

She took the french fry and ate it solemnly. “You can talk to me about what happened, Lizzie. Or about anything. You know that, right?”

“Of course.”

She reached for another of my french fries. “Your mouth just did that thing it does when you’re lying. How come?”

I looked away from her, letting out a sigh. “Maybe because I just lied. There are things I can’t talk to you about. But it’s only because I can’t talk about them with anyone. Okay?”

I realized why I’d waited so long to call Jamie. It had nothing to do with being traumatized by terrorists or hiding from my weird new fame. It was because of how badly I wanted to tell her everything.