Plague in the Mirror Read Online Free

catching sight of what looks like the market loggia and the small fountain housing a big bronze statue,
Il Porcellino,
that she remembers seeing in the guidebook. Children flip coins into the water, some climbing on and caressing the boar. She remembers reading that if you feed it a coin, landing it in the grille below its snout, you’ll have good luck.
    The air is slightly cooler by the fountain, and she sits enjoying its faint mist on her cheek and arm for a moment, dragging her hand across the murky, greenish surface. The market stands are beginning to open now, so she wanders north, nodding at the smiling vendors with handbags, colorful scarves, and jewelry to sell. Nothing seems a match for her mom, though May stops to admire beribboned boxes of marbled paper. It’s beautiful stationery but not special enough, so she makes a mental note to come back if she can’t find a more unique offering.
    The city is really waking up now, with women in fashionable suits clacking past on heels and children clustering outside idling cars en route to school. She heads back toward Piazza della Repubblica, crossing under an arch and trying to avoid the crowds gathering outside sidewalk cafés where waiters in red jackets bustle back and forth.
    Then, on instinct, she veers off course completely. She can always fish out her map and find her way back to the apartment later. She’s always been like this — at least since her parents learned to let her be independent on trips — willing to be lost. It makes her late a lot and frustrates other people, but it’s led to adventures over the years, like the time she wandered into a street cordoned off by a film crew in Montreal and got to watch them shooting a car chase. It’s also led her into some bad neighborhoods.
    She walks a long, long time until she’s in view of one of the old medieval walls snaking and climbing along the city’s edge. Unlike some cities she’s visited, Florence never seems far from the wide open, and because it’s a hilly street, she can see green in the distance.
    May stops to rest on a stone bench near the entrance to a residential courtyard, her gaze shifting to the early-morning light cupped inside it, a buttery, soft light saturating the white sheets and women’s silky slips hanging at haphazard angles on laundry lines. She sees glimpses of green in the courtyard, too, a massive climbing flower vine on a trellis, potted lemon trees, a jumble of terra-cotta flowerpots filled with plants. The golden light filters through their colors like a kaleidoscope, hypnotic.
    And that’s when May sees her. The girl from the dream.
    She’s standing among the rustling sheets, barely visible, a milky shadow of a girl identical to May, a girl who flickers and fades as she shifts position. May can’t ignore her. They’re looking right at each other.
    The ghost girl stops just shy of the courtyard gate, out of view of others passing on the street. She waves May over.
    May shakes her head, her heart loud in her ears.
    The girl parks a phantom hand on a phantom hip. “Have you
no
curiosity?”
    Home in Vermont, pinned on the corkboard over May’s desk, is one of her favorite quotes — by Dorothy Parker — about how curiosity cures boredom but there’s no cure for curiosity. Her parents fed her that line of thinking all her life, and old habits die hard, it seems, because May
is
curious, insanely curious, though she won’t say so yet. Not to this girl or anyone. It’s easier to stay under the radar, in Pityville, where no one expects much.
    She hesitates.
    “You do wonder, don’t you? Where I come from? Why I look like this?”
    This?
May thinks.
Me. You look like me exactly. Only you’re not real.
    The sun’s movement is beginning to affect the light. May can almost see a bar of morning brightness trailing the tops of the shuttered stucco buildings around the courtyard. She manages to open her mouth, breathing out the word, a question. “Yes?”
    The girl’s