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CHAPTER FOURTEEN

It was obvious the moment I passed from Tennyson’s side of the wall to hers.

The cave was pitch dark. I shuffled along, keeping a hand on the stone wall beside me. Not only could I see nothing, but there was no sound, either. It wasn’t frightening – I could sense Tennyson in everything around me.

And then, I couldn’t.

The air turned slightly cooler, but that was the only tangible difference. I couldn’t say exactly what else had changed; it was just that the vibe was completely different. There was no Tennyson at all, only her .

I kept moving forward, but more cautiously. I didn’t know what to expect, only that it would be nothing good.

Eventually, my foot hit something. When I felt around, I realized it was some steps. I followed them up, and up. They twisted around in a spiral, and I was pleased that I still had walls on both sides of me because it would have been a heck of a drop otherwise.

Finally, I reached a door.

I did not want to open that door. I had no concept of what might be on the other side, but if I had to take a guess, I’d say something like Mordor. Fire and toxic fumes.

I was beyond surprised when I opened the door and found myself on the street where I’d grown up. It made sense, I supposed. She was me, after all. If our lives hadn’t been similar in a lot of ways, she’d have been born as someone else, probably. If our parents hadn’t met at the same time, or a billion other tiny things that had to happen in the same way. It wasn’t actually something I wanted to think about. It hurt my head.

I walked slowly, trying to note any differences. I knew that it wasn’t literally the street where I’d grown up – it was all in Other-me’s mind, so it was her subjective view. In a way, that made it even more important, because it gave me a sense of how she felt about things.

Sam’s house wasn’t there. It was an empty lot. That made sense, as she clearly hadn’t known Sam or his family in her world. I wondered if that was part of why she’d turned out so bitter and selfish. My own parents hadn’t been the greatest, but I’d always felt safe and loved over at the Spencers’. Without them, maybe I’d have turned out just like Other-me.

When I got to my own house, I stopped in my tracks.

It looked as if nobody had lived there for a hundred years. The windows were all smashed, jagged glass still set in the frames. Upstairs, in my parents’ window, a shredded curtain flapped around in the non-existent breeze.

The front door was off its hinges, but even with the open door, I didn’t want to enter. It looked like something from Silent Hill . Had something happened there, back in her world, or was this just an embodiment of her bad memories?

As I walked up the front steps, something strange happened. I mean, it was all strange – I was walking around in the subconscious of my doppelganger from an alternate reality – but relatively speaking, strange. It was as if I could see my own memories, overlaying what was in front of me, almost like an echo.

As I looked down the hallway from the front door, I could see baby Hamish toddling along, trying to run away from my mother on his chubby baby legs. When I glanced into the living room, there was Fletcher, trying to snatch the game controller away from Liam, and Liam holding it out of reach. Sam and I at the kitchen table, giggling about something as we did our third-grade science project.

It was all so normal, but we were just ghosts, wisps of ghosts. Behind it all, I could still see the black mold growing up the walls, the broken floorboards, the holes in the walls where animals had started to nest.

And I could see her ghosts, too. There were no brothers for her, though. Only a silent mother, staring blankly at the TV. Sometimes my father would walk down the hallway, then fade into nothing. Her ghosts were paler, even more wispy than my own.

I hadn’t seen her, though. No ghost of young Other-me, plotting to subjugate her first-grade class, or doing weird experiments on neighborhood pets. None of that.

I knew where she’d be, though.

I sighed and headed upstairs.

I knew what I’d see when I opened the door of my childhood bedroom. I still saw it in my dreams, sometimes – what I’d seen the night that Sam and his family had vanished. I didn’t want to see it again.

And I didn’t.

The room wasn’t my childhood bedroom at all. It was Other-me’s room at school, back in her world. There were a few differences from what I remembered, but it was pink and frilly, and surprisingly not like a Halloween funhouse, like the rest of the house.

She sat on the bed, facing the door. She’d been waiting for me.

“I felt you,” she said.

I shrugged. “It would be weird if you hadn’t.”

“I’m not going to do your stupid ritual.”

“Okay,” I said. “Should we order pizza?”

She looked as if she was about to argue, but then changed her mind. “Can we do that?”

“I don’t know. It’s your mind.”

“And you’re here to change it.” She rolled her eyes and then stood up, walking over to the door. She closed it, and then opened it again, and there were two boxes of pizza sitting in front of it. “I assume these will have no calories.”

I took the box and opened it warily. She was evil, but was she anchovies evil? Apparently not.

“This is good,” I said, through a mouthful.

“It’s the pizza from my father’s first stronghold. We had this chef who made the literal best pizza in the world,” she said. “Like, literally . My father kidnapped him for that reason and made him cook for us.” She chewed thoughtfully. “I wonder what happened to that guy.”

I could guess, but didn’t want to spoil the amazing pizza by saying it.

As I ate the amazing pizza, I also chewed over what I’d learned about Other-me.

“So, we grew up in the same house, but you had no siblings, no friendly neighbors.”

She nodded but didn’t speak, as she had the mother of all cheese pulls happening.

“My father left when I wasn’t much more than a baby, took me with him. If I had any siblings, I never knew about them.”

That explained a lot. I wondered how she remembered the house, if she’d left it so young. Maybe it was only a vague image in her subconscious, and that’s why her impressions had been so pale compared to mine.

“I’m guessing your father was about as great as mine,” I said.

She shrugged. “It’s not a crime to be ambitious.”

I snorted, then reached for another slice of pizza. “No, but it’s a crime to kidnap, torture, and murder people.”

But then, she had no problem with that, either. That was why I was there.

We finished the pizza in silence, then slumped back on her bed, both rubbing our full bellies. It was uncanny, I thought, watching her from the corner of my eye. Well, it was the literal definition of uncanny, wasn’t it – something familiar but not quite right.

I still wasn’t sure how to get through to her. From the way she talked, it seemed as if she’d never been close to anyone. If she’d honestly never cared about anyone or anything but herself, could I really convince her to do the ritual? She’d be literally losing herself.

I thought back to what Tennyson had said about when we’d first formed our bond. I’d been overflowing with magic at that point. It had been easy to join with him in that way. I didn’t know how to do that with her. Sure, I was in her mind, but I was still removed from her, external. It wasn’t the total mind meld that it had been with Tennyson.

The first time I’d experienced the feedback loop with her had been when I touched her. I figured that was worth a try. What could go wrong?

We lay side by side on the bed, so I simply reached across and caught hold of her wrist.

It was lucky that the pizza hadn’t been real, or I might have thrown it straight back up.

Everything swirled around, as if I were looking through a kaleidoscope. Or was inside a kaleidoscope, maybe. Images flashed around me, so quickly I couldn’t tell if they were my own memories or hers. People, places, most familiar but some not. Everything was distorted, sickly. The only constant was Other-me’s voice in my head, screaming: What have you done?

I wasn’t sure, exactly. The images slowed down for a while, then sped up again. There were moments I recognized now, from my own life. Waking up from my first werewolf transformation, finding Milo covered in blood. The time I’d attacked Fatima in class with my magic and injured her. When I was trying to escape from my father’s laboratory, and had exploded a bunch of his scientists with my brain. All my own darkest moments, mingled in with hers.

And I began to see how easy I could have become her. I had meant to hurt those scientists, I’d wanted to. They’d hurt me, so I wanted to hurt them back. It wasn’t the only time, either. When we’d rescued Harper. Henry. My power could be used to heal, sure, but I’d used it much more often to hurt. As much as I tried to do the right thing, I had a violent, vengeful streak. I couldn’t deny it.

There were moments from her life as well. Violence and anger, yes, but that wasn’t all. She’d cared for Other-Nikolai, genuinely cared for him. She’d kept him safe from her father. Her happy moments were fewer than my own, but she did have them.

Stop it! Other-me yelled. She sounded as if she were crying.

But I couldn’t stop it, I didn’t know how.

The images started swirling faster again, too quickly to make them out. We were spiraling out of control, and I didn’t know how to stop it.

But then something happened to save me. The same thing that always saved me.

Tennyson’s voice cut through everything else, and as soon as I heard it, the world became right again.

Lucy, come back .

So I did.