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  Nicholas cocked a curious eyebrow.

  “And . . .” He looked down at his hands. “You promised you could find out what happened to my mother.”

  Nicholas looked over sharply at Julian from behind the wheel, his brow suddenly furrowed. “What, you think I’ve forgotten?”

  “No, I’m not saying that,” Julian said. “But I mean, that’s why I’m here. I want to find out what happened to her.”

  Nicholas nodded as he pulled the lever on the van’s parking brake. “Of course you do,” he said, “and so do I.”

  “Well, I’m wondering when we’re—”

  “Never fear. I am working on it, Julian,” Nicholas said with an eerily bright sunniness. “But you should know that it requires some . . . finesse.”

  “Finesse?”

  “I need to call in a favor with a certain well-placed person. This kind of thing takes time, but I assure you it is moving forward.”

  Julian nodded to him. “Thank you. Sorry to press it. It’s just . . . It’s important to me is all.”

  “I gave you my word, and I assure you I shall provide,” Nicholas said, opening the door and hopping out. He looked back through the van, toward Julian, his smile now taking on a crooked, conspiratorial bent. “I have big plans,” he said. “For the Burners. For us. We are just getting started, my friend.”

  Julian rubbed his eyes until every little bit of the lingering image of his mother faded away. He hopped out of the van and together the two of them hoisted the garbage bag with his One body up onto their shoulders. It had an odd, sweet-sour, bacony odor. They carried it a short distance to an old fire pit and tossed it onto the coals with a crunch.

  Nicholas and Julian stood beside each other for a moment, looking at the bag. “Think of this as a mental break between the old you and the new you,” Nicholas said. He produced a can of lighter fluid from his backpack and doused the body. “To tomorrow,” Nicholas said. He took a lighter from his pocket and handed it to Julian.

  But before Julian struck the flame, something stopped him. Some strange, powerful urge. Like the feeling that overcame him at the Terrible Twos. An urge . . . to look.

  He couldn’t resist it. Using his keys, he cut a hole in the bag, just big enough to look in and catch a glimpse of his old One face. He saw an eye, blue-black and swollen shut, double its normal size, and then part of his face: purple and battered and ruined. That was enough. Julian had seen enough of his old life. He folded the plastic back over to cover it up.

  He struck a flame on the lighter, and tossed it onto the body. “To tomorrow,” Julian said. The flame caught the lighter fluid in a quick burst. The two boys watched the flames dance for a moment, and then Nicholas put his arm around Julian and they walked back to the van, the acrid scent of his old life wafting into the air.

  On the ride back down the hill, Julian and Nicholas sat in a meditative silence, broken only when Julian’s phone chimed.

  It was a message from Cody.

  “Glad you’re coming. Party Wednesday night, 7:30 p.m. Bardo Books in Poplar. Be there. xx”

  Julian exhaled, and all of the day’s stress left him. He took in a breath of new life, in a new body.

  He turned to Nicholas and allowed himself a small smile.

  Chapter 15

  IS THIS RIGHT? THIS CAN’T BE RIGHT. . . . CAN IT?

  Julian sat in his car looking at Bardo Books across the street. It was a narrow shopfront with a door frame painted in a sort of kaleidoscopic tribal pattern of red, green, and blue.

  It felt later than it was. It was only ten minutes after seven, but it had been dark since after five, now that it was October. This vague disconnect, combined with Julian’s general unfamiliarity with the city of Poplar Heights, made him feel uneasy and anxious, like he had entered a foreign land without a compass.

  He had been watching the door for over ten minutes, waiting for Cody, hoping he could follow her inside and minimize any awkward interactions that might occur if he had to go in alone and look for her. But not a single person had entered or left since he arrived.

  What kind of party is this? he wondered.

  At an old bookstore on a Wednesday night?

  After a few more minutes of hesitation, Julian decided to get out of the car. He tucked his hands into his blazer pockets and walked through the brisk night toward the entrance. There shouldn’t be any reason to sit and freak yourself out about going in alone—not anymore, he told himself. Not when you’re a Two.

  Sure enough, there was no sign of a party inside. It was just an ordinary bookstore—bright, warm, smelling of stale paper, and silent except for the creaking of floorboards. Julian walked up and down the rows looking for Cody, but the only person he saw was a hunched-over old woman, an Eight, who stood still in the back of a row of shelves, staring at a large book she had balanced daintily in her small hands.

  “You looking for the girl?”

  It was the woman behind the counter, peering at Julian from over rectangular glasses. She looked to be in her forties, her hair tied back in a bun. The proprietor, maybe.

  “Yeah. Cody,” Julian said.

  “Try the alley around back.”

  This party was getting stranger and stranger.

  Julian walked along a narrow passage beside the building, stepping gingerly over garbage bags. He listened for signs of a party, for signs of any kind of human activity, but all he could hear was the occasional odd scraping sound, like the scurry of a small animal. He pressed on, rounding the corner to the alley.

  Julian froze in his steps. About a dozen large, rangy cats turned to look at him, and then, at once, they scattered, leaping into the shadows, climbing up scaffolding or scrambling behind garbage cans. Left standing where the cats had vacated, beside a scattered mess of metal pans half-filled with milk, was Cody.

  “Very strange,” she said, looking up at Julian from a notebook. “They’re usually friendly.”

  She scribbled something, then looked up to the fire-escape scaffolding, where a row of cats stared down at Julian imperiously. “They’re observing you from a distance.” As soon as Julian looked at them, the cats leaped away, into the shadows.

  “Weird,” Julian said, feeling embarrassed at the feline attention.

  Cody raised one finger to pause Julian and continued writing whatever it was she was writing in her notebook. Julian remembered the first and only time he had ever seen her before—on a cold night out near the Lake fence, feeding cats and writing in that notebook.

  “Most biologists consider the Lake cat a subspecies of the common domesticated cat,” she said. “But at this point, considering how much time they’ve spent at the Lakes and how that’s warped them, they should be a totally separate taxon.” Finally, she closed her notebook and walked toward Julian.

  “So, Mr. Julian,” she said. “You came.”

  “Yeah. Is this the . . . um, party?”

  Cody stepped in close to him, so close he could smell apple-scented shampoo. She peered at his neck and furrowed her brow, her face tightening into a sour look.

  “You’re a Two now,” she said, her voice laced in disappointment.

  “Oh yeah . . . ,” Julian said, nervously touching the Two on his neck.

  Cody looked at him with big, questioning eyes.

  “It’s sort of a long story,” Julian continued, struggling to fill the awkward silence.

  As he stammered, Cody grabbed her backpack that was lying on a stoop and pulled out a small black device. She returned swiftly to Julian, and without another word, grabbed him by the neck. With her other hand, she pressed the device to his Two tattoo and held it there. Julian flinched and tried to pull away, but she squeezed his neck long enough to hold him in place. Finally, the device beeped, and she removed it.

  “What the hell?” Julian asked, rubbing his neck.

  Cody read the device. “This is an authenticator.” She frowned, apparently disappointed with whatever it was telling her. “That Two is real. And it’s
fresh. Did you do it of your own accord, Mr. Julian?”

  Julian, flummoxed, stepped away. “Do I need to explain myself to you?”

  “Yes, you do. When I invited you here, I thought I was inviting a One. A very old One, who was special because most people who are Ones are just little kids. Except now it turns out you aren’t as special as I thought. You’re just some ordinary teenage Two.”

  Julian frowned, hot embarrassment flushing up his neck.

  “And where did you invite me, anyway? To a back alley full of cats?”

  Cody ignored his question and looked back up at the fire escape. The cats there kept their distance, still in the shadows, but eerily peering at Julian, their eyes iridescent alien dashes in the darkness. Cody scrunched up her face in thought, watching the cats watch Julian.

  “Tell me,” Cody said, and turned back to Julian. “Did you do it for a good reason?”

  “Yes,” Julian said. He forced himself to look her in the face, to be confident in his new Two body. “It was for my family.”

  Cody frowned severely. It dimpled the sides of her cheeks. She nodded to him, beckoning him to continue.

  “Things have been seriously messed up since my mom . . . died,” Julian said. “So I have to do certain things I don’t want to do. But why am I going into this with you?”

  “You mean, like, Nine-dead?” Cody asked matter-of-factly.

  “Yes. Permadead.”

  Cody nodded. Her eyes softened, and something flickered in them—a small shimmer of empathy, perhaps?

  “Let’s go into the basement,” she said, and led him down a small flight of steps to a cellar door.

  That would certainly be an improvement on an alley, he thought.

  But, actually, it wasn’t much of one.

  The basement was one large, open room. Several small groups of people were gathered among stacks of books. Most of the groups were four to five disheveled-looking young people ranging in age from middle school to maybe college age, sitting before an older, more clean-cut person standing at the head of the group—it looked vaguely like a Sunday school session at the Temple of the Nine.

  “What is this place?”

  “It’s retro night,” she said. “The retrograde population keeps growing. And the disease keeps getting worse. Look at all these kids,” she said. “It’s hitting people younger and younger now.”

  Julian puzzled at the sight—retro in teenagers? How had he never heard of this before?

  Cody continued, “Between this and what I’m seeing with the cats, it seems something is changing at the Lake.”

  Julian had read the conspiracy theories on dark corners of DeadLinks—rebirth isn’t always a guarantee; not everyone gets nine lives—but he never took them too seriously. He knew no one who had been touched by that kind of problem. Plus, there were too many people wrapped up in the Lake system. Too much process. Too much bureaucracy. How could it be failing and not a single person had said anything about it?

  “Of course, the Lakes deny there’s a problem and suppress any evidence of it,” Cody said as if she were reading his mind. “Nonetheless, someone has to be the Good Samaritan. That’s what these nice people here are doing. They’re called Friends of the Lake.”

  “You’re one of these Friends?”

  “Not really. I do my own research,” Cody said. “For example . . .” She looked around the room stealthily. “Recently, I’ve been studying the Lake fauna. Animals that have been changed by the Lakes. The electrified fish in Asia, for example, or the virulent cicada populations that bloom every eighteen years and somehow thrive in the cold winters around here. And then, there are the cats . . .”

  “Yeah,” Julian said. “What’s up with them?”

  “I developed a theory when I was working with my previous . . . partner,” she said, choosing the word carefully. “The cats here at our Lake have begun coming back to life, just like people.”

  “Cats with nine lives,” Julian said.

  “Right.” Cody nodded. “Cats having nine lives used to be common folklore. That was centuries ago, before the Summer of Storms, before the Lakes were formed.”

  “And now the legend has become reality,” Julian said. “Why?” Her curiosity was infectious, worming its way into Julian’s brain.

  “I don’t know. But Mr. Julian, I’ll tell you what I do know. These cats here at our Lake . . . each time they come back, they come back smarter. They also become much more risk-averse, less independent, and more . . . focused. It’s like they have some innate knowledge about the new multitudes of their lives. They seem to know that their lives tick down to the last one, just like we do.”

  Okay. . . .

  It suddenly struck Julian that he was in a bookstore basement full of retros, listening to a stranger’s conspiracy theory about creepy Lake cats.

  He became paranoid—the last thing he wanted now was to end up on some watch list. Not after You Never Forget Your First Time.

  Julian nodded absently, and looked out at the room: there must be thirty retros here.

  “You said this was a party,” Julian said.

  Cody gestured to a folding table in the corner with a simple spread of snacks.

  “There are pretzels right there,” she said.

  Pretzels.

  Julian turned to her. “Why did you invite me here?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t have if I knew you were a Two.”

  “You mentioned,” Julian said.

  “There have been rumors of groups of people in the Lake Superior States who have refused to follow the life table. Who are forcing the hand of the Council of the Awakened. I thought, maybe . . . I knew it was a longshot, but I wondered if you might be one of them.”

  “I’ve never heard of them,” Julian said. “I just didn’t want to burn. And you didn’t need to trick me into coming here.”

  She scrunched her face. “Cut me some slack. I mean, I hang out with a bunch of cats after school. Talking to boys isn’t my strong suit.”

  Right.

  He could relate. Well, the old version of him—the One—could, anyway. “So that’s what this was about. You were looking for someone to, I guess, research?”

  “I wouldn’t put it that nakedly,” she said.

  A trophy in the academy cafeteria and a research subject in a bookstore basement. Julian wondered when he would get to be just Julian. No numbers, no subtitles.

  He sighed and looked down at his hands. Even after he set his old life on fire, these were still his thumbs. Still too small, even in his new body.

  “Actually,” he said. “Since I’m here, there has been something weird happening to me that involves a cat.”

  Cody looked at him. “Really?”

  “There’s a specific cat I keep seeing. I’ve seen it in different times and places . . . and even in my memories. It’s almost like it’s been following me. Or . . . kind of haunting me.”

  Cody crinkled her brows and frowned. Those dimples returned to her cheek.

  “Are you sure that it’s always the same cat?” she asked.

  “I’m sure,” Julian replied.

  She grinned. “I knew there was something about you, Mr. Julian.”

  Julian rolled his eyes. “But does it mean anything?”

  “I can’t say. I’d have to verify if it was in fact a Lake cat, for starters. If it was a Lake cat, then well . . . I’m not sure. But I can tell you those cats are aware of something that we can’t sense directly. It’s possible they have some primal insight that we lack. Have you heard of quantum entanglement?”

  Julian shook his head.

  “A function of the many-worlds theory?”

  Julian just looked at her.

  “The basic gist is that the universe is a multitude of worlds. Many dimensions. It’s hard for the human mind to come to grips with this, but what if there were other minds out there that could understand this? Innately? Feline minds, for example.”

  “You’re saying cats are more aware
of the reality of the universe than we are?” He paused. “Who are you again?”

  “I’m not saying that we’re incapable of understanding the true nature of multitudes. It’s just that, as people, we take the normalcy of the world for granted. No matter how you explain it, having nine lives is a strange twist of fate for our species, and a relatively recent one at that. And yet, now it’s a basic fact of the world. An everyday thing. It’s our life. Everything revolves around it. But accepting something as normal doesn’t make it normal. The word ‘normal’ is just a mask. A shield.

  “Because if you think about it for a moment, strange twists of fate are a daily occurrence. Everything we know about the world keeps changing. With every passing day, our world is revised into something new. Even before the Summer of Storms, our lives have always been in multitudes, if you realize that every morning is a new iteration. Every day we walk out into a different place. Every minute, every second is a crossroads. You can go this way or that way. The future is, literally, a multitude. Nothing is normal. Everyone needs a reminder of that. There is no normal.”

  That was for sure—this was so not normal.

  Julian felt someone watching them from across the room. He turned to find a kid glancing over at him: a boy about his age, wearing a camo jacket. He had bright white hair and long, irregular splotches staining his neck. The kid’s eyes were pale blue, and they weren’t just watching—they were examining and evaluating. They reminded him of Nicholas’s eyes. Eyes that were scheming to snuff out lives, one by one. The boy’s left eye suddenly twitched erratically, and the kid shook his head with some kind of tremor.

  Suddenly, he was pushing his way through the crowd, coming for Julian.

  “What are you doing?” he shouted as he approached.

  “What?” Julian said, bewildered.

  Cody grabbed Julian’s arm. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Who are you?” the kid shouted.

  “I—I’m Julian. I go to Lakeshore Academy,” Julian responded.

  Two of the older people in the crowd stepped in front of the kid and gently held him back. As they redirected him toward the other side of the room, the kid kept glaring at Julian—a wicked look on his face.