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Looking up, Isobel found herself staring into her twin’s expectant gaze, the likeness between them complete, right down to the slanted scar on her cheek.
Again, Isobel scrambled backward, bumping into yet another version of herself, this one almost doll-like in her pink party dress from the Grim Facade.
“I found you,” the double whispered, words she’d once uttered to Varen.
A hush fell over the hallway.
Isobel spun—and saw that her classmates had all disappeared. In their stead, a dozen of her own faces watched her with unblinking stares.
She saw herself dressed in the ebony version of the party dress, her features shell-shocked. A stream of crimson ran down the duplicate’s arm to soak the satin ribbon tied to her wrist.
Another replica had on her blue-and-gold cheer uniform. Yet another wore a pink robe and pajama pants—the same haphazard outfit she’d worn the night she’d climbed onto the ledge outside her window to meet with . . .
The truth, more disquieting than the clones themselves, struck her with stomach-twisting alarm. The versions of herself before her represented each different way Varen had seen her. Each way he remembered her.
“Go away,” she ordered. “All of you. Now.”
The face of the Isobel who held the stack of papers crumpled first, collapsing inward. The double’s arm fell as it disintegrated, and the white leaflets slipped free, spilling across the floor. Then the edges of the duplicate’s body curled in, collapsing like the remains of a burnt offering.
Pink Party Dress Isobel went next, bursting to cinders. One at a time, the others followed suit, and her legion of look-alikes dissipated to dust. Ash floated to the floor, coating the spotless linoleum and powdering the lockers in the leftover gray-white grime of whatever essence had allowed them to exist in the first place.
Freed from their stares, Isobel turned in a circle—wondering, as the sun-filled windows dimmed, if being alone wasn’t a thousand times worse.
Glancing down at her feet, she caught sight of her name scrawled across the scattered papers, written in an unmistakable hand.
She wrapped her arms around herself, gripping her sides when she saw that the ink wasn’t violet but red.
Bloodred.
Close by, one of the fluorescent lights popped, going dark. Then the intercom system cut on with a shriek of feedback.
“-ode red,” a man’s voice echoed through a blast of static. “I repeat. Th-s is a -ode r-d.”
In unison, the classroom doors slammed shut with a resounding bang.
Another light popped, echoed by the tinkle of glass. Then another, and another—getting closer.
She shut her eyes just before the final light, the one right above her, snapped off with a smash.
“Wake up,” she told herself out loud, wanting to open her eyes and be in the real world—her world. Someplace where she could hide from this person she didn’t know anymore. Who had forgotten who she was. And who he was too.
Lost. Lost. Lost. The word echoed in her head.
Then the far-off sound of door hinges creaking long and low startled her, and Isobel’s eyes flew wide again. She wasn’t at home, though, and she wasn’t back in her bed. She was still in that awful hall, facing windows filled with black tree trunks back-lit by a violet glow.
“Cheerleader.”
She felt his breath stir the hair by her ear and, whirling, suppressed the urge to scream, covering her mouth with a quaking hand.
Varen’s black eyes bored into her.
He took a step toward her, forcing her back. Her heels crunched over the shriveling papers bearing her name, and they crushed to powder.
As he advanced on her, Isobel continued to retreat, hypnotized by that all-consuming stare, yet still aware that the walls surrounding them had begun to transform, drawing in tighter, shooting taller.
The floor beneath their feet became carpet and the ceiling smoke.
One after the other, clinking chandeliers dropped through the murk, falling to hover just overhead. Their dim violet flames cast Varen’s wan face in an alien glow, rendering him unrecognizable.
