“Pretty serious,” Imogen said. “But it’s got more to do with Bunyip than you. It’s her book that everybody loves, but it’s the one she has the most regrets about.”
Darcy frowned. “What do you mean, exactly?”
“Okay, so it takes the mythology of an ancient culture, and uses it to frame a colonist girl’s angst about her first kiss. Which is tricky enough. But then all the aboriginal characters, who are actually from that culture, don’t really appear in the last half of the book.”
Darcy thought for a second. “Whoa. I didn’t even notice.”
“Yeah. Because it’s all about that first kiss.”
“Which is such a great kiss,” Darcy said. “And the funny thing is, if Kiralee hadn’t stolen that myth, I wouldn’t know about bunyips at all.”
“That’s the power of Story. And with great power . . .” Imogen spread her hands. “Kiralee doesn’t want you to feel the same way about Afterworlds in fifteen years.”
“Or sooner.” Darcy was already nervous about her mother reading the book, and now she had another eight hundred million people to worry about.
“But you’re a Hindu,” Imogen said. “Isn’t it your culture?”
“I modeled Yamaraj on a Bollywood star, which shows how much I know about Hinduism. I’m worried he turned out more hot than serious. For a lord of the dead, I mean.”
Imogen shrugged. “Well, you’ve still got rewrites.”
“There’s only good rewriting,” Darcy murmured. She still couldn’t remember who’d said that first.
The waitress brought the check then, and Darcy waved away Imogen’s battered wallet and paid with cash. With a tip, the bill was more than twice her Nisha-approved daily allotment, but the noodles had been very good indeed.
“Do you want to read it too?” Darcy asked as they headed for the door.
“Of course. I’ll send you Pyromancer.” Imogen scooped up a handful of matchbooks with the noodle shop’s logo on them and shoved them in her pocket. “Ready for more whimsical apartments?”
“Sure,” Darcy said. “Thanks for showing me this place.”
“The best way to know a city is to eat it.”
* * *
“I’m a tin soldier. Steadfast,” Darcy said tiredly. But the word had lost all meaning. Maybe she would use it somewhere in her rewrites, just to remind her of this endless day.
They were approaching their sixth apartment since eating. The first two had been in the Meatpacking District, one across from a FedEx garage, whose rumbling trucks Darcy could feel when she pressed a palm against the walls, the other on a street that smelled like meat. The next three had been soulless white boxes in the glass towers surrounding Union Square. It was the sort of neighborhood that Annika Patel would approve of, but Imogen had warned that nothing written in such a sterile place would ring true.
So they’d headed down to Chinatown in the clearing rain. They were met in front of a corner building by an Israeli man named Lev, who had a Russian accent and wore a three-piece suit. He led them up a wide staircase that, instead of doubling back at the landings, just kept climbing in the same direction, like the steps of a Mayan temple. Without any key fumbling, Lev opened the door of apartment 4E.
It was the largest Darcy had seen yet, occupying half the floor of the building. The ceilings were at least twelve feet high, and two walls had rows of windows looking down onto the street corner below. A glimmer of pale sunshine had appeared in the sky, a glaring leak in the clouds. It angled through the windows to ignite a galaxy of dust suspended in the air.
“You could roller-skate in here,” Imogen said with quiet awe.
“It was dance studio.” Lev gestured at the mirrors along one wall. “But you can take those down.”
Darcy stared at herself in the mirrors; she looked tiny with all this open space around her. She went to the nearest window—the glass was mottled with age, bulging in the bottoms of the panes like a slow liquid. The buildings across the street were garlanded with fire escapes covered in leftover raindrops, dripping and sparkling. The floor creaked as Darcy walked from window to window, looking out at Chinatown.
“Where does that hall go?” Imogen asked. It was beside the apartment’s front door, in the corner opposite the two walls of windows.
“There are two changing rooms for dancers.” Lev wiggled his finger for them to follow. “And a kitchen, not very big.”
The two changing rooms weren’t big either. Each had a row of lockers along one wall, and between the two rooms was a bathroom with a shower.
Imogen stood in the hallway. “You could make one a bedroom, the other a closet. You’ll be the only person in Manhattan with a shower connecting to your closet.”
“No,” said Lev. “I have seen this before.”
“I didn’t bring that many clothes,” Darcy said. Though, of course, she could always ask her parents to drive up with more. And she planned to buy clothes here in New York, of course, once she’d decided what writers wore. She’d forgotten to take notes at Drinks Night, too overwhelmed with everything else.
Lev showed them the kitchen last. It was the smallest room in the apartment, but Darcy didn’t see herself cooking much. She wanted to go out and eat the city until she knew it in detail.
“How far is this from your place?” she asked Imogen when they were back in the big room.
“Five minutes’ walk? We’d be neighbors if you lived here.”
Darcy smiled back at her, then looked at her printout of apartments. Her heart squeezed a little when she saw that this was one of the places with no listed price.
“Is this lease even legal?” Imogen was asking Lev. “I mean, a dance studio would be zoned for business, not residential.”
“It was illegal as dance studio,” he said with a shrug. “Now is legal again.”
Darcy didn’t care. The very fact that she could live in New York, in this apartment, hardly seemed real. Legality was an afterthought.
She took a slow breath. “How much?”
Lev opened a green leather binder, the spine of which crackled. “Thirty-five hundred. Utilities included.”
“Crap,” Darcy said, and two things clicked inside her. One was a hopeless feeling of falling through the floor, the other was the certainty that she could write here. That she had to write here.