The five of us rush into the hallway and I grab the princess’s sleeve. “Primrose! We need to get back to the tower. Can you lead us there?”
“I-I don’t know. I’m not asleep, so I don’t know if the curse—”
“You were always fighting it before, right? So it could only take hold of you when you were sleeping. Now I need you to stop fighting.”
Primrose looks like she’s considering telling me that’s not how it works, that it’s impossible, but she pauses. Her eyes flick around to the four interdimensional sleeping beauties gathered around her, armed with swords and spears and space-blasters, and I watch her recalculate her definition of what is and isn’t possible.
She closes her eyes. Charm gives her hand a small, encouraging squeeze.
I didn’t realize how tense she was, how constantly on guard, until I watch her let it all go. Her shoulders fall. Her arms loosen at her sides. When she opens her eyes, they’re the deep, haunted green of undersea caves.
She looks at each of us in turn, dreamy, almost drunk. “Follow me.”
9
WE FOLLOW HER. Up staircases and down corridors, running through deep pools of shadow and beams of dust-specked sunlight, cries of alarm sounding behind us.
I run with the others at first. But something’s gone tight and funny in my chest, as if my organs are held in a pair of clumsy fists. My lungs are sacks of wet sand and my pulse is a clock tick-tocking in my ears. Not now, I plead with it. Please, give me a little more time.
I would laugh at myself if I had the breath to spare. It’s what I’ve always wanted, what I’ll never get.
My legs weaken, starved of blood and breath. The other beauties stream past me and I wheeze behind them, too breathless to call for help, even to swear. The gap between us widens. They round a corner ahead and I’m deciding whether to limp faster or rest for a moment against this friendly-looking wall when I hear Charm’s voice say, “Everybody hold the fuck up. Where’s Zin?”
I lean against the wall, letting the chill of the stones seep through my T-shirt. A vast pair of boots appears in my vision. “Oh, hi Brunhilda. If that’s your … actual…” I have to pause mid-sentence to gulp air. I’m not a medical professional, but that seems like a not-great sign. “… name.”
“It is Brünhilt.” A hand settles on my shoulder, wide and warm. “May I?” It’s the first time I’ve heard her speak. Her voice is surprisingly high, like a hawk calling in the distance.
I’m pretty sure I nod because the next thing I feel is a pair of arms gathering me up and armor grating against my cheek. My body jars with every step but the pain is harmless, almost pleasant, compared to the ache in my chest. Bruises fade, after all.
Charm’s worried face swims above me. “Zin?”
“It’s fine,” I assure her, but my breath whistles weirdly in my throat. She doesn’t look comforted.
Clanging sounds echo up the corridor, booted feet and armored legs moving closer. “Let’s just go, okay?” I don’t hear Charm’s answer, but Brünhilt starts moving again. I try to look up once or twice to see how close the guards are and whether we’re going fast enough, but everything jounces and rattles and hurts so I give up, lolling against Brünhilt instead. There’s a soupy, suffocating lethargy spreading from my extremities, inching up my limbs, tugging me toward sleep.
I tell myself a story to stay awake. Once upon a time there was a princess cursed to sleep for a hundred years.
I open my eyes and catch the blurred gleam of Primrose’s hair as she leads us up the winding tower steps, her spine stiff and her crown high, a princess refusing to go gently into her own good night.
Once upon a time she asked for help.
And I answered her. All of us did. We followed the lonely threads of our stories across the vast nothing of the universe and found our way here, to this tower, to save at least one princess from her curse. I’ve always resented people for trying to save me, but maybe this is how it works, maybe we save one another.
I become aware that Brünhilt has stopped climbing just before Charm says, tentatively, “Zin?” I try to respond but succeed only in making a sound like a plunger in a clogged sink. “Was there supposed to be something up here? Like, say, a spinning wheel?” Charm’s voice is strung tight.
I struggle out of Brünhilt’s arms and stand on fizzing, trembling legs. Her hand hovers at my back, ready to catch me, and I don’t trust myself enough to pull away. I blink around the tower room. There’s nothing but smooth flagstones and five sleeping beauties, their expressions reflecting five variations of “Now what, bitch?”
There’s no spinning wheel. Even the busted remains of the one Harold smashed are gone, neatly swept away by some fastidious guard. Shouldn’t it have magically reconstituted itself in our absence? My plan was to prick my finger on something and fall asleep and hope that was enough to send us back into the whirling multiverse—but what the hell am I going to do now?
Distantly, I hear the thudding of boots on the winding tower steps. We don’t have long, and if we’re captured there won’t be any secret pacts or miraculous escapes. I picture the ’90s heroine forced into skirts and deprived of her sword; Brünhilt in chains; the space princess peeled out of her chrome and silver armor, stuck forever on a single planet rather than sailing among the stars. Primrose, trapped in her silk sheets; Charm, unable to save her.
I wanted to save us all from our stories, but I should have known better than anybody: there are worse endings than sleeping for a hundred years.
Pain pops in my kneecaps, sharp and sudden. My teeth clack together. It’s only when I hear Charm swearing that I realize I’ve fallen to the floor. I feel her arm bracing my shoulders, Primrose kneeling at my other side. I want to tell them I’m sorry, that I tried my best, but the tightness in my chest is suffocating me. My pulse has lost its steady tick-tocking rhythm, thundering like hooves in my ears. Darkness nibbles at the edges of my vision.
The floor tilts toward me, or maybe I tilt toward the floor, and then my cheek is plastered against cold stone. I blink once, staring hazily at the boots and slippers and bare feet of the beauties around me. I guess I get a theatrical death after all, sprawled at the top of the tallest tower, pale and fragile as any Rackham princess, but a lot less lonely.
I see it in the half second before my eyes hinge shut: a slender shard lying on the floor. A single splinter of dark wood that might once have belonged to a spindle. It wasn’t a spinning wheel in the original version.
I feel my lips peeling back over my teeth in a bloodless smile. I’ve read enough fantasy novels to recognize a last chance when I see one. This is the part where I rally my final strength, calling on reserves of fortitude I didn’t know I had to reach my numb fingers for that splinter. With my dying breath I will prick my finger and pull us all into the space between stories, and all the beauties will weep with gratitude and admiration as they escape into whatever new narratives they choose, and I will fall into my final sleep knowing I’ve done something worthwhile—
Except I don’t have any secret reserves of strength. There’s no amount of conviction or hope or love that can keep my overstuffed heart from stopping or my oxygen-starved brain from going gray.
My hand barely brushes the splinter when my vision turns the final, empty black of a theater screen just before the credits roll. I feel myself falling down, down into the kind of sleep that has no dreams and never ends.
The last thing I hear is my own name, spoken in a voice that sounds like a heart breaking. The last thing I think is how ironic it is, how fucking hilarious, that Charm should spend her life trying to save me, and I should die trying to save her, and both of us would fail.
10
I FIGURE I’M dead. Again.
True, there’s a grayish light glowing through my eyelids and stiff sheets beneath my skin, but I chalk that up to the random sensory misfirings of a dying brain. Ditto for the soft squeaking of orthopedic tennis shoes on waxed floors and the distant beeps o
f machines. It’s the smell I can’t seem to ignore: hand sanitizer and human suffering. Surely no version of heaven has hospital rooms.
I open my eyes. There’s a paneled ceiling above me. A whiteboard with the name of my nurse and a smiley face written in blue marker. The intrusive chill of oxygen tubing beneath my nose and the prickle of an IV in the crook of my arm. The window is one of those unopenable, industrial affairs, nothing at all like the arrow slit of a castle tower.
I know my regional hospital rooms: I’m in the ICU of Riverside Methodist Hospital on the north side of Columbus.
It occurs to me that one explanation for the seven days I spent trapped in a fairy tale is that I collapsed on the night of my twenty-first birthday and have spent the past week hooked up to an IV, furiously hallucinating about hot princesses and un-wicked fairies. That maybe I’m actually in one of those bullshit Wizard of Oz stories where the girl wakes up in the final chapter and everyone assures her it was all a dream.
But then—why is there a slender splinter of wood held tight in my fist? I press my thumb against my own fingertips, feeling for blood or bruises; there are none.
“Hey, hon.” The words are rough with exhaustion, cracked with relief.
How many times have I woken in a hospital bed to the sound of my father’s voice? How many times have I turned my stiff neck to see my parents perched at my bedside with new worry lines carved into their faces, cardboard cups of watery coffee clutched in their hands?
“Hey.” My voice sounds like it’s coming from inside a rusted pipe organ, a flaky wheeze. “Where’s my Prince Charming?” It’s the same joke I always make when I wake up from my surgeries and procedures. Usually Dad pulls a wounded, “Am I not charming?” face and Mom rolls her eyes and tousles his hair in a way that tells me she, at least, is thoroughly charmed.
This time they both burst into tears. Dad is the established crier of the family—he was asked to “get a grip or leave the theater” during the last twenty minutes of Coco—but this time Mom is crying just as hard, her shoulders heaving, her knuckles pressed to her eyes.
“Hey,” I offer rustily. “Hey.” And then somehow they’re both on the bed next to me and our foreheads are mashed together and I’m crying too. I spent the last week (or maybe the last five years) trying not to let the weight of their love suffocate me. It doesn’t feel very suffocating right now.
I clutch them a little closer, tucking my head into the hollow place right beneath Dad’s collarbone the way I did when I was little, when my death was far away and neither of us were very afraid of it. We stay like that for a while, shuddering and snuffling at one another, Mom smoothing the hair from my forehead.
Questions intrude, scrolling gently across my brain like the banners behind planes at the beach. How did I get here? How am I not dead? Am I still dying?
I don’t really care about most of them. There’s only one thing (five things, technically) I care about. I pull back from my parents. “Is Charm around? Or…” I don’t know how I’m going to finish that sentence—or any other mythical figures/Disney princesses?—but I don’t have to.
The curtain between my bed and the next is flung back with a dramatic flourish, and there she is: five-and-a-half feet of attitude, a bleeding heart with bleached hair. Charm. She gives me a smile that’s aiming for cavalier and landing closer to desperately relieved, then tugs someone else around the curtain. She’s tall and slender, with enormous eyes and fragile wrists that extend several inches beyond the sleeves of Charm’s leather jacket. It takes me far too long to recognize her.
“Primrose? How—”
A helpless, giddy smile slides across the princess’s face as Charm swaggers to the foot of the bed and sits casually on my ankles. “Morning, love.”
A throat clears on the other side of the curtain and someone says, “There’s a three-visitor limit, folks!” in the cheery, steely tone of a nurse on a twelve-hour shift who is not interested in a single ounce of back talk.
Mom and Dad stand. “We’ll give you all a minute,” Dad stage-whispers, and they edge around my princesses and out into the hall, taking their cardboard cups with them.
I push the button that buzzes my bed upright. “Hi.”
“Hi,” Primrose answers carefully. “How are you?” She sounds like a tourist who has memorized the local phrases from a guidebook.
I resettle the oxygen tubing beneath my nose. “Alive. So, you know. Pretty excellent.” As I say it, I realize it’s true: I’m tired and a little stiff, but my heart is thumping steadily in my ears and my lungs are filling and emptying easily, casually, as if they could keep doing it forever. Hope flutters again in my chest, a habit I can’t seem to quit. “How did we get back?”
“You fell into an accursed sleep,” Primrose answers seriously. I guess that’s fairy tale–speak for a hypoxic coma brought on by advanced amyloidosis. “And I…” Primrose blushes and I find myself mesmerized by the blotchy fuchsia of her cheeks; I hadn’t thought it was possible for her to look anything less than perfect.
“And she kissed you. You!” Charm shakes her head in mock disgust. “Which was enough to trigger the narrative resonance between universes, I guess. Apparently fairy tales are flexible about gender roles.”
A cursed girl sleeping in a tower; an heir to a throne bending to kiss her. And if the heir was a princess instead of a prince, and if it’s more like awkward sexual tension between them than true love, well, stories are told all sorts of ways, aren’t they?
I run my thumb along the splinter in my hand, the slender last hope which had done exactly nothing to save me. “And the others? What happened to them?”
Charm makes a mystical woo-woo gesture with her fingers. “They took their exits on the cosmic highway between worlds, man.” I kick her and she relents. “We all got sucked together into this whirling darkness—the void between universes, I guess—and the other princesses each chose a story to step into. The cryogenic space lady and the Viking lady went home, I think, but the short-haired girl with the sword went elsewhere. She struck me as the adventurous type.” I picture her crashing headlong into some other unsuspecting sleeping beauty, a headstrong protagonist out to wreak merry havoc, and feel a weird lurch of something in my stomach. Regret, maybe, or envy.
Primrose finishes the story. “Charmaine took you to this world, and I followed. We landed in the tower of an abandoned castle”—the guard tower of the state penitentiary, I assume—“and Charmaine summoned assistance”—called an ambulance?—“because you wouldn’t wake up. I thought for a time that you might be…” Dead.
“Yeah, me too,” I tell her. “I will be soon, statistically.” I try to say it with a shrug in my voice, the way I used to, but I can’t quite pull it off. There’s still a hot spark of hope caught in my chest, scorching my throat.
Charm frowns at me. Tilts her head. “Didn’t they tell you?” she asks, and the hope catches fire. I can’t speak, can’t breathe, can hardly think around the bonfire of my own desire, twenty-one years of suppressed hunger for more: more life, more time, more everything. For the first time in my life I let myself believe I might, somehow, be cured.
Right up until Charm says, “I mean, it’s not like you’re cured or anything, but—” and the fire goes out like an ember beneath a boot. I don’t hear the rest of Charm’s sentence because I’m busy wishing I could rewind the world and linger in the radiant ignorance of two seconds ago, when I thought my story had finally changed. It’s a good thing I already used up my tears for the year.
I stare fixedly, carefully at the wall as Charm stands and shuffles through a pile of folders and clipboards on the bedside table. She produces an oversized sheet of plastic and waves it in front of me. “It’s still pretty rad, don’t you think?” Her voice is soft but shaking with some enormous emotion, barely contained. Joy?
I look at the X-ray in her hands. For a long second I can’t tell what I’m seeing; it’s been years since I’ve seen my lungs without the white knots and tang
les of proteins inside them. Now there’s nothing but ghostly lines of ribs hovering above velvety darkness, clean and empty, just like the pictures of healthy lungs in Charm’s textbooks.
She holds up a series of smaller photos beside it. Ultrasounds. I see my heart, my liver, my kidneys. A caption in blocky capitals reads Findings: normal.
I stare at the images for two seconds, then three. I blink. “I don’t understand.” My voice is a whisper.
“Zin—the proteins are gone. All the stuff that’s been accumulating in your organs is just…” Charm snaps her fingers. “The doctors checked your identity like four extra times because they were sure you couldn’t be the same girl. They have no idea how it happened.”
She gives a smug little toss of her bangs that makes me ask, “But you do?”
Charm smiles at me with the gleeful enthusiasm that usually precedes a science lecture. “Well, I have a theory. I think when you travel to another dimension—which is a real thing that happened to us, by the way—the laws of physics, of reality itself, bend to match that universe.”
“I thought the laws of physics never bent. I thought that’s why we call them laws.”
Charm sniffs. “Well, maybe they’re more what you’d call guidelines, than actual laws. Anyway, the rules of Prim’s world are different than ours.” My brain, which is still processing the immensity of those clean X-rays, pauses to waggle its eyebrows and say, Prim, eh? “In her world there are wicked fairies and magic knives and probably unicorns. In her world, kisses lift curses.”
I mull this over for another string of seconds. “But not in this one, huh?”
Some of the fervor leaks out of Charm’s face. “No, not in this one. They took about fifty samples and confirmed that your RNA is still fucked. You are still officially diagnosed with Generalized Roseville Malady.”
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