She narrowed her eyes, a professor who suffers no fools. “Did you know that the great alchemists set out to prove the existence of God?”
“Good luck there.”
“Oh, but we’ve already done it,” she said with a smug little smile.
There was an eerie thickness to the atmosphere all of a sudden.
“You’ve proven the existence of God?” I laughed. “How?”
“By proving His opposite.”
For a split second, I thought I felt something moving underneath the ground, something enormous and powerful like a freight train. But I couldn’t have. I must have imagined it.
“This is making me feel strange,” I said, looking into my cup. “Is it acid?”
“Just herbs,” said Aspen.
“No, there is something else in here. Something pharmaceutical.”
“Do you know the etymology ofpharmaceutical?” Aspen asked suddenly.
“Of course,” I said, trying to get the words out, but my tongue felt thick. “Frompharmakon.”
“Meaning poison… orspell.” She held my gaze a moment too long and then dropped it.
Things were spinning now. I could barely make sense of the world around me, and yet rising up inside me was a certainty that I didn’t need any of this. Suddenly I stood up.
“This is bullshit,” I said, and I could feel myself slurring, hear the words coming out all wrong. “I’m the boss of myself, and I’m… I’m the boss of you people, too.”
I started for the door.
“Lexi, go after her,” I heard Aspen say.
I lurched toward the door, opened it, and stepped…
… directly into my uncle’s apartment in New York.
“Holy shit,” I whispered, in utter shock. I knew it wasn’t really happening, that I was just tripping, but I could have sworn that I was in Paloma’s room. I could even smell her perfume.
I walked through the door and out into the hall, but when I turned a corner, I saw someone sitting at my work desk, papers spread out all over.
“No,” I whispered, starting down the hall toward her, but suddenly she turned, and I froze in place.
It was me. Pale and terrified, the other me stared down the hall directly at me.
“Hello?” she said, her voice shaking. “Who’s there?”
“No,” I whispered. “This isn’t real.”
Shaking, I walked toward my reflection. She sat at the desk holding a pen. Her hand shook, but she put her pen to the paper and hurriedly drew four symbols. They were all images from the tiles I’d found—the disintegrating rectangle, thecrescent moon, the stylized S, and a square divided into four parts.
I leaned over her shoulder, my breath moving the hairs on the back of her neck so that they stood on end.
Suddenly the other me stood up, knocking over her glass, orange juice spilling everywhere.
“What the hell?” I jumped back and sprinted back to Paloma’s bedroom, and instinctively I flung open the door to her closet. When I stepped through to the other side, I was…
Outside in the woods… the night was warm, and the sky glittered with stars. It felt oddly romantic, like something beautiful could happen at any second. I kept moving, and soon I was out of that darkness, only to emerge onto the path of a thousand fireflies. No, not fireflies—lanterns. I was on the lantern-lined path that led through the switch grass, the soft glow lighting up the night like the entrance to a mystical realm.
