Plague in the Mirror Read Online Free Page A

laugh is less amused than pitying. She stares back as if weighing every last one of her private options; the delay is maddening, and finally May can’t stand it anymore. There’s a roiling in her head, like a storm building. “Well, where do you come from?”
    “I won’t tell you,” she challenges. “I’ll show you. You are ready?”
    “Ready?”
Are you crazy?
May looks around . . . for a way out, a witness, a sane bystander. The street is strangely deserted.
    “Come.” The girl — May remembers her calling herself Cristofana — holds out a hand and drops it again.
    “Will I look like you if I go?”
    “You already look like me,
bella. Esattamente.
”
    “I mean, will I be a ghost?” May can’t believe she’s even having this conversation.
    “Will you know the difference?”
    Staring back at the girl, she thinks,
How do you know?
It’s infuriating but also flattering, in a way, since everyone else, even Liam, would rather pretend May is fully present — a former, better version of herself — and not, in fact, a hollow automaton going through the motions. Her tired mind is playing tricks on her. “Is it safe?” she asks. “It can’t be safe.”
    “Do you always carry on so?
I
am proof of this. Living proof.”
    “If you call it living, Ghost Girl.”
    Cristofana steps closer, her phantom basket swaying. “Spoken like a true authority.”
    May won’t get up and back away. Part of her, the curious, scientific part, would like to reach out and see what happens.
    If someone asked her to describe the ghosting precisely, she’d tell them it’s like looking at a black-and-white photographic negative. Before digital, Gwen used to keep a darkroom, and when Liam and May were old enough, she taught them how to develop the long reels of film and make prints. On her ghost twin, the areas of definition or shadow, what would be the blacks in a final print, are bleached; the highlights/whites and midtones/grays are transparent.
    “Long ago,” the haughty stranger says, “in the year of our Lord 1347, I caught a sparrow in my hands and sent it through my
portone
— you have this word?
Doorway,
I think — to test this magic. In the bird flew and out again two hours later, still with the same piece of straw in its beak.”
    Tell her no.
“If I could actually see you, I’d call you nuts,” May complains, resorting to sarcasm to mask her fear.
Just no.
“But you must have turned sideways or something and the not seeing you part has me doubting myself —”
    “You are bitter company,
bella,
a great disappointment to me, but I have picked you and have no one else to share my story with.”
    “But
why
me?”
    “Your soul remembers what you do not — and shone for me like a star in the dark of time. There is only one of it and two of us, but you live in this layer of time and I in another. A soul exists in many layers; the soul’s container or likeness in only one.”
    “We share one . . .
soul
?” And now May identifies that unfamiliar stirring inside: foreboding, dread.
    “It would very much amaze you, what can be accomplished with our wills.”
    Does May have a will? Real and unreal are seriously mixed up at the moment; they have been since she arrived in Florence, since home ceased to be a refuge and people started flinging untenable choices at her.
    “I am a pale shadow of myself . . . without will or action or substance. I can affect nothing here.”
    May looks away, lowers her voice. “Can anyone else here see you?” She feels the dread coiling now, like a dragon, all through her body.
Don’t give yourself away. Don’t start shaking.
    “If they do, it is as you see me, as a ghost. They doubt their eyes and hurry past. I try not to be seen. It confuses them and draws attention. You I enjoy confusing.”
    “Clearly.”
    “And yet I like you.”
    “I can’t say the feeling’s mutual.” But a smile twitches on May’s lips. There’s a rush in all this, a crazy rush. Like it or not,