One of the kids lifts her chin, body braced against the wire as if she’s hoping to get in one last punch before they carve her for the table. I spend half a second admiring the sheer guts of her, and then Red sees her mom.

  All the fight runs out of her like cheap dye, leaving her looking like what she is: a frightened girl who wants her mother. Her lips shape a word I don’t know and then her mother is on her knees beside the cage, hands jammed through the wire, and her father is smashing his boot against the lock again and again, and if the guards weren’t already on their way, they are now.

  “Be quiet.” Eva’s strangled whisper arrives long after the ship has sailed. The lock shatters. The children crawl out, some of them still dazed, some of them beginning to cry in sudden, shocking bursts. Red vanishes between her parents, their arms interwoven, their heads bent together. The shape of them—this family trapped in this god-awful horror movie of a world, surrounded on all sides by bad endings, still clinging stubbornly to one another—makes my heart twinge, so I look away.

  When I’m done blinking back a weird wave of tears, Red is standing in front of us. She looks from me to Eva and back. “You came after me.”

  I consider explaining that actually her mom and dad had the whole thing pretty much in hand, but I figure we should get points for effort. “Yep.”

  Her eyebrows are crimped in the middle. “But you don’t even know me.”

  “Nope.”

  “Why?” This time, for whatever reason, she addresses the question to Eva.

  “Because…” Eva flounders, looking around the kitchens as if hoping to find another zombie snake-tarantula to fight rather than finish this sentence. Her eyes skate across mine. She ends quietly, with a wry twist of her lips that isn’t half as disdainful as she’d like it to be. “Someone had to.”

  Red hugs her then, which makes Eva’s face do several complicated contortions. It lands on a fixed expression that reminds me of a school calculator that’s been asked to perform too many impossible functions and is reduced to flashing ERROR on the screen. She makes eye contact with me over Red’s head, a clear plea for help that I pretend not to see.

  I always like this part. The happily ever afters that come after are too sweet for me, like grocery store frosting, but this moment right here, when you feel the relief of a bad ending averted, a wrong righted—this is the good shit.

  (I give a mental middle finger to Zellandine, because I’m not running, I’m being helpful, even if Red’s parents didn’t really need my help.)

  Eventually, Red’s mother comes to collect her, pausing to give us a dignified nod.

  The room empties as the villagers disappear back down the stone steps, led by Red and her family. I watch them go, still full of that heady, giddy pride.

  I can tell from Eva’s expression—eyes dark, lips slightly parted, head tilted back—that she feels it too. “It’s nice, isn’t it?” I murmur.

  “What is?”

  “Being the good guy.”

  She snorts at me, but her eyes catch mine. I’m smiling brazenly up at her, wondering a little dizzily what it would be like to kiss her for real, on purpose rather than out of necessity, when a voice behind us says cliché-ly, “Well, well, well.”

  And I know that I have a very few seconds to act. I could run. I could turn and fight. I could prick my finger on the tip of my own knife and hope I fall out of this B-horror movie of a universe. Instead, I do what I’ve always done when I’m cornered, what I always will do. I text Charm.

  In the moment before hands close around my arms and my phone is dashed to the floor, crashing into a dozen useless plastic pieces, and this shitty story takes me in its jaws again, I manage to type nine characters and press send: atu 709 sos

  7

  A CONFESSION: I was totally expecting her to be ugly. Which is pretty fucked up of me, but in my defense, Western folklore persistently and falsely equates a character’s physical appearance with their inner morality, so like, it was a pretty safe bet that the evil cannibal queen would look like Anjelica Huston after she peels off her mask in The Witches.

  But when her goons wrench my arms behind my back and spin me to face her, it turns out she’s not ugly at all. She is, in fact, one of the least ugly things I’ve ever seen (yes, including Prim, who is so beautiful that people squint and blink when they talk to her, like they’re trying to have a conversation with the sun). The queen is young and doe-eyed, with long, soft lashes and gently rounded cheeks. Her skin is the phosphorescent white of a Renaissance angel, and her lips are a bright, arterial red, as if she’s just eaten a bowl of fresh cherries or, perhaps, the raw hearts of stolen children.

  I think, intelligently: Huh. And then I think, slightly more intelligently, my stomach sinking fast: I know who you are. “You’re—Snow White!” I’m aiming for a nice j’accuse! moment, but it’s clear from the expressions around me that I’m literally the only person who didn’t know.

  Snow White smiles at me. It’s a very good smile, sweet as springtime, but her voice is pure ice. “You may address me as Your Majesty.”

  My eyes move of their own accord to Eva. She’s putting up a much better fight than me, struggling against three huntsmen as they wrestle her wrists behind her back. One of them knocks the backs of her legs and sends her crashing to her knees. Another buries his fist in her hair and wrenches her face upward, baring the fragile column of her throat. She doesn’t look much like a queen compared to Snow White—her face is hard and plain and a little too old, her teeth bared in bitter fury—but looking at her, I feel a big, weird rush of loyalty.

  “Sorry,” I tell Snow White. “I’ve already got one of those.”

  Snow White’s sweet smile doesn’t falter when she orders her men to strip us of our belongings and lock us up, awaiting punishment for our crimes against queen and country.

  So here I am, in the dungeons again. Naturally.

  I’ve seen a decent number of dungeons in the last five years, but these are among the least pleasant. It’s the meaty smell of human remains, probably, or maybe the gelatinous burble of the sewers beneath us, or maybe the extreme unlikelihood of our escape. Both our arms are shackled above us and the huntsmen took everything up to, and partially including, our clothes. I’m barefoot and hoodie-less, shivering sporadically in my T-shirt, and Eva’s kidney-colored gown is gone. All she’s wearing now is one of those shapeless, colorless under-dresses that I’m pretty sure is called a shift, or maybe a chemise, laced up the front with a limp green ribbon. It ought to be at least a little bit sexy, but it just makes her look small and vulnerable, like something recently shelled.

  “Okay, so.” I cough wetly. “That could have gone better.”

  Eva’s head is tilted back against the wall, her eyes closed. She doesn’t respond, so I add a small, insufficient, “Sorry.”

  She exhales in the manner of someone who is counting slowly to ten before replying. “You’re sorry.” Her eyes are still closed. “You forced me to accompany you on a mad, doomed mission to rescue a girl I barely know who didn’t even need rescuing. You promised me a way out and I risked everything to get it, as I always do—” She pauses, perhaps to count to ten again. “And now I’ll die, just like I was always going to. But you—you’re sorry.”

  “I mean, I’m also going to die, by the way.” Well, probably, depending on how pissed Charm is, and whether she remembers the Aarne-Thompson-Uther index, and whether I can get my hands on the damn mirror again. “So yeah, I’m sorry. But honestly, it feels like you’re failing to take responsibility for your own actions here? Like, maybe if you hadn’t decided to murder a kid for the crime of being hotter than you, everything would’ve turned out great. You could’ve lived to a ripe old age in your own world.” I try and fail to keep a green thread of envy out of my voice. I can’t imagine the privilege of a long life, but I know I wouldn’t waste it with petty, vaguely un-feminist villainy. I’d—

  I snap the sentence in half, but the images come anyway, unbidden: Mom’s roses blushing in spring, family game night, Charm forcing us all to get matching tattoos on her thirtieth birthday. And—maybe, someday—a place of my own: a houseplant, or even a pet, a daily commute, a savings account because I would have something to save for. A whole life that I’d never have to leave.

  I’m breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth, trying not to cry, when Eva says dismissively, “You don’t know what happened.”

  I lose the pattern of my calm breathing. “You know that red book of fairy tales you found? It belongs to me—belonged, I guess, since you left it behind in your stupid world. My dad gave it to me when I was a kid and I read it at least fifty times and then got a folklore degree and read it fifty more times. I promise, I know how the story goes.”

  “Of course you do,” Eva says to the ceiling. Her voice is mocking, almost smug, as if no one could possibly understand her.

  “Hey, I’ve got nothing but time.” I try to spread my arms invitingly and succeed only in rattling my chains. “If you want to give me a long, sympathetic speech about your motivations, be my fucking guest.”

  Eva answers whip-fast and vicious. “Or maybe you could just think for two consecutive seconds. My Snow White was a pretty little girl who sang to songbirds and trusted old women selling apples. I am a witch and a queen who has devoted her life to the accumulation of power. If I’d wanted to kill her, don’t you think she would be dead?”

  I open my mouth, and then close it slowly. Fairy tales are riddled with illogical coincidences and obvious plot holes, but most of us learn to skip over them, like you skip the squeaky step on the staircase. “Okay, I’ll play,” I say. “Why didn’t you kill her?”

  Eva is looking at me now, her mouth framed by those bitter lines, her freckles like pinpricks of blood in the dim light. “Because I didn’t want to. She was only a child, and I’m not a monster.” A defiant lift of her chin. “But I couldn’t allow her to stay, either. She was the king’s only legitimate heir, and I’d failed to give him any others. After he died, but before she came of age … I had power. Real power—not whispers behind the throne or politicking in the shadows, like my mother had before me. I alone sat on the throne, I alone wore the crown. I was the queen.”

  It’s the kind of line the scheming, power-mad queen might deliver in a fantasy novel, but Eva doesn’t look mad. She looks wistful and sad, like a woman recalling the golden days of her youth. “And I knew all of it would vanish the second my stepdaughter married. Or maybe sooner—there were already nasty rumors that I was a witch rather than a woman, that I’d murdered Snow White’s father.”

  “But, like…” I run my tongue over my bottom lip, trying to decide if there’s a tactful way to ask and resolving that there isn’t. “Did you?”

  Her shoulders move in what I interpret as a shrug, although it’s hard to tell at this angle. “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  Eva’s eyes harden. “I already told you. Everything I did, I did to survive.” Her lashes shutter. “My husband married me because I was young and he needed heirs. When I failed to give him any, he was…” A hideous, weighty pause here. “… Displeased.”

  Oh, Jesus. I’m suddenly sick of these faux-medieval worlds and their shitty gender politics, all the pretty stories we tell about ugly worlds. A terrible sympathy crawls up my throat and lodges there, just behind my tongue. “You’ve used that word twice now. Failed.” I fumble in my grab bag of therapist terminology and emerge with a pathetic “You didn’t fail.”

  Eva has met my insults and jabs with bared teeth, but now, when my voice is low and sincere, she flinches. “What would you know about it?”

  I meet her eyes. “Well, for starters, I can’t. Get pregnant, I mean.” She stares at me for a long time, her eyes wide and suspiciously glassy. I give her my best manacled shrug, because she strikes me as the kind of person who would be forced to kill me if I saw her cry. “Bodies are a real roll of the fucking dice, dude.”

  She swallows. “They—yes.” She swallows again, visibly compartmentalizing, wrenching her story back on the rails. “Anyway. The princes began to arrive before she was fifteen. They lounged around my castle, eating from my table while they wooed my stepchild and plotted to take my throne. She was so young … but they came anyway. Every hungry second son who wanted a kingdom of his own.”

  Eva’s eyes are narrowed now, her jaw firm. “So I did what I had to. I chased Snow White away, sent her running into the forest pursued by the only man I was certain would never harm her. Berthold came back with that pig’s liver, thinking himself so clever, and I thanked him so prettily.”

  I recall Berthold’s handsome, affable, slightly stupid face. I suppose if I genuinely wanted someone assassinated, he would not be my first choice. It occurs to me that the queen must have known he wouldn’t hurt me, either, if I tried to escape.

  Eva continues on a long sigh. “I’d hoped never to hear from Snow White again. But she didn’t run far enough, and soon there were whispers about a pretty girl hidden in the woods, and the princes were circling like damned vultures, and I thought—if she were dead, or seemed to be dead, they would desist.” Another sigh, even longer. “It seems I underestimated their appetites.”

  Now feels like the moment to apologize or sympathize, or, ideally, to stroke her straggling hair away from her face and press my lips tenderly to her forehead. But we’re six feet apart and she probably hates my guts. “Look, Eva—Your Majesty, I—”

  “All I wanted was power.” Her lips make a bitter shape. “I know how I must sound, what you must think of me, but I only mean power over myself. Power to make my own choices, and arrive at my own ends.”

  “It’s called agency.” And they said my humanities degree would never come in handy. “It’s like, the power you exert over your own narrative.”

  “It’s what protagonists have, then.”

  “Sometimes even protagonists don’t get much of it. I mean, did you read Little Brier-Rose in that book? My story sucks ass.”

  “Yes, I read it. It does indeed ‘suck ass.’” She pronounces the phrase with aristocratic precision, and I make a mental note to teach her more modern swears, provided the two of us survive our forthcoming execution. “But at least it belongs to you. Your name is right there in the title. The only name I have is”—her voice hitches, like a thread catching a stray nail—“the one you gave me.”

  And, God help me, she sounds genuinely grateful. For a mean little nickname I invented just to annoy her. This strikes me as so backwards and awful that I find myself talking, the words falling out in a guilty, desperate tumble. “Charm—she’s my best friend—well, she was, until I screwed it all up—she says the key is narrative resonance.”

  A flare of hope in Eva’s eyes, quickly snuffed. “The key to what?”

  I take a short breath. “Moving between worlds.”

  Eva says nothing, her eyes burning with the same desperate hunger that sent me tumbling into Prim’s world in the first place, that keeps me skipping from world to world like a stone across the cold surface of the universe. I find myself looking away, unable to stand the sight of so much hope, even secondhand. “So, the universe is like a book, right? And each world is like a page. And if you tell the same story enough times, you can bleed through to another page.”

  “You mean—I must write down my own story?” Eva looks like she would open a vein and use her own blood as ink if I told her to.

  “No, not literally.” Although the thought loosens something in the back of my skull, a question I’d been ignoring. I keep ignoring it. “You have to enact a familiar part of your plot. And then you can sort of slip between worlds and go somewhere else.” Charm is way better at explaining this stuff than me. I miss her, suddenly and fiercely, the way I haven’t let myself in six months and thirteen days. Or, if I’m being honest, five years.

  I swallow a knot of snot. “But like, it only works in your own story, usually. I’d only ever zapped into other versions of Sleeping Beauty until you and your magic mirror landed me here.”

  “So…” Eva closes her eyes. “We need the mirror.”

  “I think so, yeah.”

  “Why? It’s just a mirror I enchanted to show me the truth.”

  My chains give an uncomfortable rattle. “I think—well, Zellandine thinks that the universes are getting squooshed together?” I applaud my own use of the passive voice. “So your mirror maybe slipped a little into other stories, and showed you other truths.”

  I can feel Eva studying me. “It’s your fault, isn’t it? That’s what that fairy meant. The worlds are merging because you won’t finish your story.”

  “Excuse me for not wanting to stand around and wait to die.”

  “Oh, I quite understand.” Her tone turns acidic, blackly triumphant. “But then, I’m the villain.”

  I don’t say anything in my defense, because there’s not much to say. Maybe I’m the villain too.

  Eventually, I feel Eva’s bitterness drain away. “The mirror showed me you, out of all the possible people in all the universes.” It sounds almost like an apology. “Why?”

  “Well, what were you doing at the time?”

  “I was looking into the mirror, obviously.” She adds, far less sharply, “Wishing for a way out.”

  “Well.” I remember standing in that hotel bathroom, on the run from another happily ever after that wasn’t mine. “So was I. As it happens.”

  She meets my eyes then, and something passes soft and silent between us. A wordless understanding, a sympathy so profound it approaches symmetry. It makes me think I was wrong, and the mirror in the hotel bathroom showed me my own reflection, after all.

  “When you kissed me—” Eva begins, and my heart does a maneuver that feels like jumping off a high dive. “It wasn’t desire. You were just trying to trigger this narrative resonance, weren’t you?”

  My heart belly flops. “Yeah. It didn’t work.”

  “So, without the mirror … we’re stuck here.” Her voice is ashen.

  “Looks like it.”

 

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