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  He looked at himself in the mirror and shook his head. All the items he was wearing were new, hung in the wardrobe for the time that they might be the order of the day, and he could see why he hadn’t worn them before. It was the kind of look that Andy had been more likely to pull off; it all fit Joe’s body a little too tightly.

  Still, it would do.

  Joe changed outfits so often to fit in with his work that he no longer knew what his style was. Jeans, a T-shirt, and sneakers made up an anonymous look that he wore most often, but he had no idea how he would dress if the pressure wasn’t always on to blend in.

  The truth was he had no idea who he would be if it weren’t for YETI.

  He spent a little time working gel into his hair to achieve a look that accompanied his outfit, consulting Google for pictures of the shaggy cut that fit.

  Then he looked at himself in a full-length mirror, called the person reflected there a rude name, and set out through the front door and into the world.

  He saw Mrs. Meakin on the stairs and she gave him a look that was equal parts concern and pity. A downstairs neighbor, Mrs. Meakin was in her fifties and the kind of busybody who managed to always be on the stairs when someone was passing.

  She either had a motor function problem or a wonky mirror, because her lipstick skills had all the subtlety of the Joker’s.

  She’d heard about Andy—the official story, anyway: that he had been in the wrong place at the wrong time and had been killed in the cross fire of a gang war—and she really didn’t know how to bring up the topic, so she just stood there and gave him what she probably thought was her compassionate look.

  “Hi,” Joe said as he passed.

  “I was just checking for the mail,” Mrs. Meakin said. “It seems to get here later and later every day.”

  Joe nodded, not sure if that was true or not, or if he cared or not, and made his way to the front door before she plucked up the courage to ask him anything personal.

  CHAPTER SEVEN: CHASING SHADOWS

  Uncle Alex walked her into the station and watched as she went through the ticket barrier to the platform. She waved to him as she headed for the platform for the London train.

  It was already there, waiting.

  She found a seat by the window, pretty much fell into it, and sat there trying to stop her head from spinning.

  The day had been too dramatic, too surreal, and for a second it felt like she was having a panic attack—breathing too fast and jagged, heart pumping hard but wrong somehow, sweat on her brow, and a sick taste in her mouth—but she concentrated on slowing her breathing, calming herself down, and by the time the train got started she was feeling almost in control.

  Her life had never been boring or average, but today’s developments had her wishing—only for a couple of seconds, but that was more time than she had ever spent on such thoughts before—that her life was normal.

  More normal, at the very least.

  In just a few short hours, everything about her life had suddenly been thrown up in the air. She still had no idea how the pieces would look when they had finished falling.

  So she tried not to think about it all and watched as the flat, green landscape spilled past the windows. Horses and sheep chewed at grass turned lush by recent rains; farmhouses stood like silent sentinels; tiny villages flashed past and were gone.

  Within twenty minutes she realized that she was bored.

  But with the day she’d just had she would’ve said boredom was impossible. Even getting the train had been a nervy process: the hypervigilance approaching the station; the cautious entry into the foyer; the relief that men in dark suits didn’t have the place on lockdown.

  Ani turned away from the window and looked around.

  The car was three-quarters full, and about a half of that number was studying their smartphones or working on iPads and laptops.

  It suddenly made her feel like she was missing a limb.

  Her computers, an Apple laptop and a Windows desktop—she was an equal opportunity geek—were both at home, and her phone was safely disabled until she bought it some new SIM cards.

  Before cell phones and laptops, Ani had no idea what people used to do to fill the time on long journeys. Watching the countryside pass by had limited appeal.

  Maybe you were supposed to use journeys to get some thinking done, but, to be honest, thinking was about the last thing in the world Ani wanted to be doing.

  She didn’t want to think about the men looking for her and secret files, and she certainly didn’t want to think about what had happened to her when she was listening to that stupid file at Uncle Alex’s.

  Of course as soon as she decided not to think about it, her mind would think about nothing else.

  There had been something utterly terrifying about the experience, something that was still raw, still ugly, still … there … in her head. She caught flashes of it when she closed her eyes—of the way those things squirmed their way into the parts of her that made her who she was. She thought she could still sense their hunger for her mind, and their disappointment that Uncle Alex had shut off the sound before they could devour it completely.

  She felt trapped in something that she could not see the shape of, and that scared her.

  Ani suddenly, and not for the first time in her short life, feared for her very sanity.

  And that fear opened a door to an event in her past.

  Her mind slipped back to one of the worst memories she carried with her.

  It’s summer break and she’s been out all day, practicing falling over on her backside in front of friends at the skate park at Jesus Green.

  She’s been working on landing an ollie for weeks now but those attempts have all been on her own, on the flat, and most of them have been performed while stationary.

  This is the first time she’s taken it out to the park.

  To do it on a slope.

  While moving.

  In front of people.

  An hour—and many bruises and a multitude of aches—later and she’s landed maybe three ollies, earning her enough high fives and slaps on the back that it’s actually been worth the pain and embarrassment.

  She’s feeling pretty good about herself when she reaches the front door, although the aches are tightening up and the bruises already coming into full color. Mastering the ollie opens up a whole new level of skateboard tricks, and she feels—finally—that she’s well on her way to becoming a proficient rider.

  She knows that something’s wrong the moment she opens the door. Even before she sees what is waiting in the hall.

  Not a sixth sense, exactly, but more like a fifth-and-a-half sense that is really all the other senses screaming out in unison that there is something off about the atmosphere of home today; about the way the air feels charged with something; about the way her mom isn’t calling out her name like she always does when she hears Ani come into the apartment.

  Ani steps through the door with a weird feeling; a nervousness that is based on nothing but the opening of a door, the sensing of an atmosphere, and her mom’s failure to call out a greeting.

  Then she steps into the hall.

  The leaden feeling that is developing in her stomach tightens by three or four notches.

  The full-length mirror that hangs in the hall has been smashed to pieces, leaving only the dark wooden frame on the wall, which has become an art display for some bad eighties wallpaper.

  There is no mirrored glass at all in the frame, not even small pieces trapped in the frame edges.

  Ani narrows her eyes, thinking that some of the glass should remain, and then she sees what’s on the floor farther up the hall and confusion takes hold.

  Twenty or more stacks of mirror pieces have been carefully arranged on the hall carpet, and as she gets closer she can see that each pile is made up of mirror fragments of roughly the same size, as if someone has smashed the mirror and then spent time—quite a lot of time, actually—gauging the size of the shar
ds and arranging them, carefully, into ordered stacks.

  Ani parks her board on its tail against the wall, wheels pointing outward, and calls, “Mom?”

  There’s no reply.

  The silence becomes almost deafening.

  A red, raw fear settles inside Ani then in that single moment. The first cut of a mental scar that she still carries around with her today.

  She knows that something is wrong; something deeper and more destructive than just a shattered mirror. She doesn’t know how she knows, but she does. Even before she ventures farther inside, something is telling her that each step is taking her toward something that will change her life forever. That she is crossing a line that can never be uncrossed.

  She takes the steps slowly but surely, ignoring the doors to the left and right, heading straight for the one at the end.

  Again, she doesn’t know how she knows that that door is the one she needs, any more than she can explain why a few piles of broken mirror glass should fill her so full of fear.

  Her mom is in the kitchen standing at the sink with her back to Ani and seems completely unaware of her presence.

  “Mom?” Ani asks, her dry throat making it into more of a croak than a question.

  Her mom just carries on doing whatever it is she is doing at the sink.

  Ani takes a step closer, and suddenly she can hear the sounds that her mom is making, so quiet that they were barely discernible when she was farther away.

  “Stupidstupidstupid,” Ani’s mom is whispering to herself, over and over again as she scrubs at something in the sink with a wire pan-cleaning brush. “Why are you always so stupid? Stupidclumsystupid.”

  “MOM?” The urgency of Ani’s own voice surprises her; it sounds like it belongs to someone she will grow up to be, rather than the twelve-year-old kid she is.

  “Stupidstupidwhyareyousostupid?” her mom mutters, her words pushed together in a harsh tone full of self-loathing and anger.

  She scrubs harder with the brush. Muttering.

  “Mom, you’re scaring me,” Ani says, and then she is directly behind her mother and she can see into the sink and there are no pans or plates there, just her mother’s hands, and she’s scrubbing at them with the brush, swapping the brush over when she has drawn more blood from the hand she is working on.

  Her mom’s hands are raw and bloody and don’t have much skin left on them, like it’s just meat that sits at the end of her wrists.

  Ani screams but her mom continues to scrub away at the mess in the sink, and Ani tries to stop her, grabs hold of her arm, and tries to wrench it out the way of the wire brush, but her mother is strong and resists, and suddenly they are struggling against each other and it’s then that her mother finally turns to face her.

  The fight goes out of Ani immediately and she lets go and just stares, uncomprehendingly, at her mom’s face.

  If Ani didn’t know better, she’d think that someone else was standing before her—an evil twin maybe, or someone wearing a mask—but that was just the stupid stuff that came from stories.

  It was her mom.

  That was what made it so much more terrifying.

  Because it would be better if the woman in front of her was an imposter, someone who was pretending to be her mother; because that would mean the insane look in the woman’s eyes belonged to an imposter, too.

  Lé Sang—her name later anglicized to Sandy Lee, the surname Ani had retained at the request of her father, partly as a reminder of her mother’s heritage, and partly because Ani Lee sounded a whole lot better than Ani Murch—had escaped the war-torn country of Vietnam as one of the “boat people” in the 1980s when she was still a child, and Ani knows that her mom had lived through a lifetime’s worth of bad stuff before arriving in the UK.

  What she knows of her mother’s journey from a village just outside Hanoi all the way to Cambridge has been pieced together from overheard snippets of conversation, and from a few details that her dad has kind of let slip to explain some of her mom’s darker moods.

  Her mom, of course, never speaks of her journey, but she always carries it with her. You can see it in the set of her face, a kind of wary watchfulness that never relaxes. In the way she carries herself, making herself as small as possible, as if to avoid unnecessary attention. But, most of all, you can see it in her eyes.

  They are haunted eyes that have seen too much, as if the world—with all its pleasures and treasures—is nothing more than a distraction from an interior landscape that sees very little daylight.

  Ani has heard the story of young Lé Sang’s escape from communist forces intent on placing her and her family into one of the forced “re-education” camps—camps where people went, but rarely came out unchanged.

  If they came out at all.

  Ani’d heard about the desperate escape, the two-hundred-plus-mile walk the family had endured to reach the coast, and the discovery that not only was the boat they were gambling their lives on barely seaworthy, but that the escape plan consisted of nothing more than aiming the boat toward a major shipping lane and hoping that they were 1) spotted, and 2) rescued.

  And she knew that her own grandfather did not survive the voyage, dying of hunger and exhaustion just days before a French freighter spotted the boat and effected a rescue.

  So Ani is used to seeing the silent, guarded, perpetual pain in her mother’s eyes; but today that pain is gone. It has been replaced with anger and shame and all the colors of madness.

  Ani realizes that now, when her mom looks at her, she is seeing a stranger. Maybe it’s a ghost from the past, replayed by memory, amplified by time and her inability to talk about the things she’s seen; but Ani feels a slice of herself wither and die to be on the receiving end of such a look.

  Her mom starts making a strange sound: somewhere between a whimper and a scream—a combination Ani would have believed impossible if she wasn’t hearing it now.

  Pain and fear and rage intertwine in that terrible sound, and it goes on and on. It doesn’t even look like her mom is breathing. Ani steps toward her and that’s when her mom raises her hands to defend herself from an attack.

  Ani suddenly feels very sick.

  Her mother has taken most of the skin from her hands with the wire brush and they are tattered and red and dripping with blood.

  And that’s not even the most awful part. It takes a couple of seconds for Ani to process exactly what that is.

  But when she does, it is the worst thing that she has ever seen.

  Dozens of the thinnest, cruelest slivers of mirror glass have been systematically driven into the flesh of her mother’s arms, arranged in perfectly spaced rows from her wrists to her biceps. A grid of horror that would almost look like acupuncture if it weren’t for the raw redness of the wounds.

  Ani has heard about self-harming—there’d even been discussions at school and the concept had been so alien to her that she’d been sure she misheard the teacher, naïvely thinking she’d said “cell farming,” much to the amusement of the class—but seeing what her mother has done to herself brings it all home to her with crushing force.

  That her mom has been in such pain and no one has noticed, that she’d suffered in silence for so long that she and her dad had just stopped noticing, it’s all too much for Ani. She wants to reach out, to take her mom in her arms and try to take away even a fraction of the hurt, but she sees the “you’re a stranger” look in her mom’s eyes.

  “Mom. It’s Ani. Your daughter.” She says these things calmly, matter-of-factly, but no recognition creeps into her mother’s eyes. “It’s okay, Mom. Everything is going to be all right.”

  It sounds hollow even as she’s saying it. How, exactly, was this going to be okay? Ever?

  Her mom’s brow furrows and it looks like she’s reaching out for Ani, spreading her arms upturned toward her. Ani feels a sense of relief. Maybe recognition didn’t show in her eyes, but this is an open, welcoming gesture, and Ani goes to take a step toward her mother again
.

  And that’s when her mom suddenly smacks her hands into her own shoulders, closing up her arms at the elbow, and drives those glass spikes even deeper into her arms.

  At the hospital the doctors had called it a “psychotic break,” and though other names had come along to better describe her mother’s condition, that was the one Ani always remembered.

  Clung to, even.

  Because if it had been a break, then that meant that it had been a sudden thing without any warning, like a lightning strike or a tsunami. That meant that it couldn’t have been predicted, prevented, or even noticed.

  She clung to it because it was so much better than thinking that there had been signs, like those “danger of death” plates on electricity substations, or the biohazard logos you saw on TV shows, and the people closest had just ignored them. Or that they had let her mom’s mind fall apart, piece by painful piece, without taking the time to notice.

  Her mom had been admitted, and now resided long-term in the local psychiatric hospital, Fulbourn, ruled to be a danger to herself, and maybe to others. Ani’s dad had told her that the chances of her mother ever being allowed out were very slim. She no longer recognized Ani or her husband. She was hard-pressed to recognize her own reflection in the mirror.

  Mental illness, Ani had since learned, was often hereditary, and she lived with a nagging fear that whatever had happened to her mother could just as easily happen to her.

  Sitting on the train, thinking about the sound that had tried to invade her mind from a .wav file suddenly made her realize how close the boundary between sanity and madness actually was, and how easily it could be crossed.

  For the first time in her life, Ani suddenly thought that insanity might not be such a bad thing. Because if what had happened to her was real, it made madness seem inconsequential by comparison.