Plague in the Mirror Read Online Free Page B

she’s blundered into something extraordinary, impossible, and it’s hers. It might be scary, but it belongs to her alone. “Weren’t there other generations? You said something about 1347? If what you say is true, our . . . soul had other lifetimes, right? Maybe lots. Between mine —”
    “Enough. Do you suppose you have earned my secrets? I assure you, you have not.” The ghost girl’s voice is clipped, but her smile’s indulgent. “I found you. That is all. And I offer to show you my Florence in turn. Do you accept?”
    With dread before and behind her, May floats a moment in the ensuing pause, outside herself. “All right. Yes.”
    “Then follow carefully.”
    May rises from the bench like a sleepwalker and crosses to the archway. She trails Cristofana into the rustle and hush of the courtyard, into a tunnel of swaying, pale laundry shot through with light, toward an empty stone corner at the courtyard’s far edge — and then out again, with her head roaring.
    May feels hollow and nauseous, held in check by gravity only. Cristofana, on the other hand, is solid, all color and hard line. She’s delighted with her trick. She applauds it, right there in what appears to be an alleyway behind an abandoned shop.
    Luckily, this street at the edge of the city is even more deserted in Cristofana’s world than it was in May’s. As her twin marks a course, a sideways 8 on the stone near where the portal must stand — the sign for infinity? — May juts out first one arm and then the other, and her arms are a luminous outline. She looks just as Cristofana did on the other side . . .
a pale shadow of myself . . . without will or action or substance.
    But there’s no time for astonishment.
    Cristofana’s off like a shot, navigating winding streets and alleyways at the edge of the old city, moving with a stealth and grace that seem remarkable now that she’s flesh and bone.
    May floats after, faint and amazed, through the gate and along the river.
    As they traverse the city’s undeveloped edge, Cristofana points out the rolling green hills beyond, where sheep graze and men stoop in fields, where distant, soldierly rows of olive groves cast stark shadows and larks swoop overhead. There’s not an airplane in sight. It’s profoundly quiet, even this close to the center of the city. The sky’s a rich blue laced with cottony clouds. May’s afraid to touch anything — afraid of what
without will
really means — but she can’t get over how beautiful Old Florence is, an alien, slimmed-down version of the city she’s only just getting to know back with Gwen and Liam. For the moment, she’s happy observing.
    Without a word, they work their way back along angular, cobbled streets full of strutting roosters and rooting pigs, and soon there are people everywhere, though no buzzing mopeds or bleating horns, no blinking streetlights or shining glass.
    May can’t help glancing down at her arms from time to time, pivoting them in front of her, milky-transparent in the shade but mostly not visible at all. She seems to fade completely in direct sunlight. When she finally finds the nerve to run her hand along a wall, her fingers pass effortlessly through stone and brick. She still feels hollow and sick to her stomach, a little headachy, but also light and free, more like water than flesh. Emboldened, she tries walking through a closed door. It works, and she turns on her heels in what looks like an empty peasant’s hovel lined with straw, and she walks out again, giddy with success.
    Smiling at these antics, Cristofana cautions, “Stay in the sunlight. Remember, it confuses others to see you . . . what there is to see.” She squints at May as if taking mental measurements. “They think they see a ghost.”
    They come out into the open sunlight of a different piazza — long, rectangular, columned — surrounded by looming stone towers, some almost eighty feet high and shadowing wooden stalls, pavilions, carts, benches,