For Adrianna to win, she had to catch me and do whatever was necessary to “open” me. Given our previous encounters, I was more than reasonably sure that “opening” was a painful process. It might not be fatal in the wood, but that didn’t mean I would enjoy it. I definitely wouldn’t enjoy being trapped in this snowy, story-clad wonderland, knowing Adrianna was somewhere in the waking world, wreaking havoc with my hands. So I couldn’t let it happen.
For me to win, all I had to do was stay away from her until Jeff got tired of waiting and kissed me awake. I didn’t know why he hadn’t done it already, but as I kept reminding myself, time was funny in the wood. Maybe I’d only been under for a few minutes, and this was all happening with the speed of a particularly vicious lucid dream.
The wind blew past my ears, carrying the ghost of Adrianna’s voice. I couldn’t tell what she was saying, but the warning was clear: she was getting close. I dove forward, losing my footing on the snowy ground, and belly-flopped through the entry to the maze. There was no snow inside, just hard-packed, icy ground. I landed hard enough to knock the wind out of myself, and quickly found myself presented with another problem as I began sliding forward like a kid at a water park. The ground wasn’t slanted, but still I slid, skidding around a corner and impacting with a dead end wall. I lay there in a heap, trying not to wheeze.
There was no mud on my nightgown, despite my inglorious arrival. Black, white, red: those were the only colors allowed to me. Anything else would have contradicted my story.
The wind wasn’t blowing inside the maze. For the first time, I could hear everything. I heard footsteps. I heard an exasperated sigh. And worst of all, I heard Adrianna say, “You’d favor her over me this much? We’re both your children. You ruined the both of us. What makes her so special, that you would try to help her get away?”
If the wind answered her, I didn’t hear it. But I heard Adrianna snort.
“Fine, then,” she said. “You can change the world to suit yourself, but you can’t save her. All you’ve done is push her one step closer to the mirror.” Then came the footsteps, stalking into the maze, prowling slow and easy as a jungle cat.
The dead end where I was so inelegantly sprawled didn’t leave me anywhere to hide. I looked frantically around before compacting myself into the corner, pressing my head back against the icy walls in an effort to hide as much of my hair as possible. I clapped one strawberry-sticky hand over my mouth, hiding my lips. There was nothing I could do about my eyebrows and lashes, and I didn’t dare close my eyes. If I couldn’t see her coming, I thought I might go mad.
The footsteps paced by, accompanied by rippling reflections on the glacial walls. Adrianna either hadn’t seen the cul-de-sac I’d fallen down, or had assumed I was too smart to hide this close to the entrance. Either way, I heard her walk away and started to relax. I could run the other way now. Maybe I could make it to the hazel wood, or to the rose fields of the Rose Reds, and hide among a different story. She’d never think to look for me there. I could wait out the rest of my nap in peace.
I got carefully to my feet and crept back along the way I’d slid. There were no marks on the ground. The icy floor of the maze didn’t take footprints or, apparently, bellyprints. That was a good thing when it came to not being followed. It was a bad thing when it came to being sure I was going in the right direction.
Then I came to where I was sure the entrance to the maze had been, absolutely sure, and it wasn’t there. Instead, a blank ice wall stood across the path, barring me from escape. I stopped where I was and stared.
“Please tell me this is a joke,” I said.
The wall of ice didn’t disappear. Either I’d gone the wrong way, or—but no. There was something on the ground, a little speck of red that didn’t fit in with the monochrome world around it. I knelt, picking it up.
It was a strawberry top, white as snow, but with a few faint traces of strawberry pulp still clinging to it. This was where I had entered the maze, and where the whiteout wood had—for whatever reason—closed the door behind me.
“Thanks a lot,” I muttered, and turned to face the labyrinth.
If I was going to escape, I was going to need to find another way out.
# # #
The walls weren’t all identical. I realized that fast, when my eyes adjusted to their new, frozen world and started picking out the subtle details. Some of the walls had a wave pattern worked into their bases. Those were the ones that led north to south. Others had a faint series of cracks running along their centers, like they had been hit lightly but repeatedly with a small hammer. Those were the walls that led east to west.
It should probably have been difficult to tell the cardinal directions here, in this virtually featureless maze, but somehow it was easier than ever, like the wood was trying to provide what guidance it could. The hazel wood was to the east, and when I faced that direction, I could smell floor polish and glass cleaner and char—the distant shadows of a place built around soot and cleanliness. If I could find the eastern edge of the maze, I could scale the wall and tumble to safety, like a black and white Alice falling down the rabbit hole.
Don’t mix your stories here, I scolded myself silently, as I crept along one of the north-south walls. I hadn’t seen any sign of Adrianna since she’d walked past my hiding place, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t lurking. The sealed door kept us both inside the maze. There’s no telling what you could change.
It couldn’t be as simple as a thought. If it were, every reimagining that made Snow White a vampire would have left me anemic and yearning for a rare steak. But I was a living incarnation of the narrative trapped in the sleeping heart of my own story, and I didn’t want to find out the hard way how much I could revise. Skin as white as snow was inconvenient. I burned too easily, and was probably putting my dermatologist’s kids through school. I was also used to it. It was the story I knew.
Something tapped against the ice up ahead. It was a faint sound, almost not there. In a louder world, I would have missed it entirely. In the silence of the maze, it echoed like a bell. I froze, looking around me for a moment before ducking through the nearest opening and pressing myself against the wall, becoming still and silent.
The footsteps began barely a second later.
“You can’t run from me forever, little doorway,” said Adrianna. She sounded annoyed now. I was running harder than she had expected, and she didn’t like it. “You should stop while you can, while there’s still a chance that I’ll have some mercy on those fools you call friends. They don’t all have to die. Their lives are in your hands.”
I said nothing. I didn’t move.
“Where’s the gratitude? Where’s the ‘thank you, Aunt Adrianna, for letting me grow up in my own body, instead of here in the wood’? I could have taken you the day you were born, you know, and no one would have known the difference. I would have grown up in your place. Instead, I let you have your life, at least long enough to learn how much you didn’t want it. The world isn’t easy on the fairy-tale girls.”
Was it my imagination, or were her steps slowing?
You couldn’t have taken me, I thought, like yelling at her in my mind could somehow make her back away. My story wasn’t active. I didn’t come to the wood. I wasn’t yours.
I was in the wood now. Carefully, I began inching away from the sound of her footsteps, staying up against the wall. My bare feet made no sound on the icy ground. I barely noticed the cold anymore; it was just one more feature of my environment, of no more or less importance than the ground beneath my feet or the wall against my back. That probably wasn’t a good thing. I was sinking deeper into my story with every step I took, and unless I could find a way out, I was going to be trapped here.
Jeff, I’m sorry; I should never have asked you to help me eat the apple. I’d thought I could handle it. Snow White’s crimes were supposed to be beauty and innocence, not hubris. I guess everyone gets to interpret the story in their own way.
�
�Don’t you want to talk to me, little doorway?” Adrianna’s tone was cajoling. She sounded almost reasonable, which was the most terrifying part of all. “I could tell you about your mother, what she was like when she was my Rose Red, and she loved me. We’re not so different, you and I. We were meant to be sister-stories, and we both lost the girls we loved when they walked away from us. My sister left me to be a Sleeping Beauty. Yours left you to be a man. I wonder, which was the greater betrayal? At least mine remembered she was meant to be my twin. She remembered that the face in her mirror was mine too, and she didn’t change it to get away from me. How much did you hurt your sister, that she changed her face to stop seeing you in the mirror?”
The desire to turn around, run back to her, and scratch her eyes out was almost unbearable. I forced myself to keep moving. Gerry isn’t here: he doesn’t hear the things she’s saying about him, and none of them are true, you know none of them are true. He didn’t transition to get away from you, he did it so he could be who he was always supposed to be. You know that, you know that.
I’d always known that, but hearing her say those things still made my heart ice over. This cold, I could feel. This cold had been with me ever since the person I thought was my sister and the other half of my unwanted story had explained to me, haltingly, that he was my brother, and whatever story he was going to live through, he was going to do it on his own. I loved him. I respected who he was. I had supported him every step of the way. I just wished that so much of who he was hadn’t depended on leaving me behind.
“I’ll make her pay, if you give me what I need,” said Adrianna. Her voice was closer now, even though I still couldn’t see her, even though I still seemed to be alone in my corridor of ice. “I’ll make her understand that the worst thing a sister can do is leave you behind.”
Every time she misgendered Gerry my jaw clenched a little harder. I kept inching away, wishing I had a weapon, wishing I had something I could use to make her stop.
“You’re not going to get away, little doorway. No matter how hard you try to run from me, you’re not going to get away. It would be better for both of us if you’d just stop trying.”
If I stayed here any longer, I was going to start screaming. I wouldn’t be able to help myself. Knowing that the sound might give me away, I turned and ran down the icy corridor, fleeing from the sound of her voice. I kept running long past the time when her laughter had dropped away behind me, replaced by the familiar silence. I wasn’t getting tired or winded, at least not yet, and the more distance I could put between the two of us, the better. I didn’t know whether it was our shared story or her bitter understanding of human nature, but Adrianna was pressing my buttons with remarkable skill. I couldn’t let her catch me. I couldn’t let her get anywhere near me. So I ran.
The farther I went, the more I resented the maze. It had seemed like a safe haven when it first appeared, but I’d been safer out in the whiteout wood, where at least there had been black trees to disguise my hair, and soft snow for me to dig traps in. Here, everything was frozen solid, and I had no weapons, and I had no options apart from continuing to flee. I couldn’t fight back. There was nothing for me to fight back with.
I thought wistfully of all the fallen branches out there in the whiteout wood, wishing I had thought to carry one—or hell, an armful—with me into the maze. And I kept running, right up until an arm jutted out from behind a wall and clotheslined me across the throat.
I collapsed in a heap, choking and wheezing. Even here, at the heart of my story, I needed to breathe. I was still retching and trying to get my feet back under me when Adrianna stepped into view, a smug smile on her pretty face.
“Hello, darling,” she said. “Did you miss me? I can see from the way you’re glaring that you must have. No one feels that neglected by an absence they didn’t feel. Well, don’t worry. We’re going to be together from now on, at least until we’re never together again—although in a small way, I suppose we’ll always be together.”
She reached down and grabbed my hair, hauling me up. I struggled as best as I could, still wheezing, trying to grab for her hand. Adrianna sighed.
“If you’re going to be like that about it,” she said, and hauled back her free hand and punched me in the throat. Everything went red as my air supply was cut off, and then everything went black, and I went away for a while.
I didn’t dream. Dreaming was apparently not a priority in the whiteout wood, which was already half dream in and of itself. Instead, I simply ceased to be aware of my surroundings until some unknown, unknowable time later, when I came back to my senses just as abruptly as I had left them.
The first thing I noticed was the ground, which was passing underneath me. The second thing was my position. I was slung over Adrianna’s shoulder in a fireman’s carry, my wrists and ankles tied with strips of fabric. I could see my hands if I tilted my chin down at the right angle. They were bound with what looked like a piece of my shift. It was a good use of the materials she had available. It still made me want to punch her in the eye. Maybe both eyes, just so she wouldn’t start looking asymmetrical.
“Oh, good: you’re awake.” Adrianna sounded perfectly pleased with herself, and why shouldn’t she have been pleased with herself? She had won. She’d knocked me out, and now she was carting me off to Grimm-knows-where, to have her way with me.
There had to be a way out of this. “Put me down,” I said.
“No.”
So much for the easy way. “Adrianna, you don’t want to do this.” We were still in the maze: When I twisted, I could see the icy walls to either side. That struck me as both a good thing and a bad thing. We hadn’t gone far, but if I managed to get loose, it wasn’t like I would have anyplace to run. We’d just wind up right back here again.
“See, that’s where you’re wrong,” she said calmly. “I most certainly do want to do this. I’ve been thinking of nothing else for years. I’ve missed the real world. This place has no character. Or rather, it has just one character, and I’m tired of her. There’s only so much Snow White I can take before I start wanting to claw everybody’s eyes out. Don’t you find the same, little doorway?”
I said nothing.
“You can hate me if you like—I won’t deny you that right—but you know I’m telling the truth, just like I know that twenty years from now, you’re going to do the same thing I’m doing now. Some dumb little doorway is going to come along, holding herself closed as tightly as she can, and you’re going to blow her open and take her for your own.”
“You’re getting disturbingly close to using rape metaphors here, lady, and I’d appreciate it if you’d cut it the fuck out.” Swearing at her felt good, like it was allowing the smallest fragment of my hatred and anger to find a target. Suddenly, I understood Sloane a little bit better. “I’m never going to be like you.”
“Why, because you’ve always been such a good princess?” The walls dropped away around us as Adrianna stepped into a clearing. There was no warning before she shifted me off her shoulder and dropped me ignominiously to the ground. At least there was snow here, instead of hard-packed mud: I hit hard, but not hard enough to knock the wind out of me.
Adrianna moved before I could react, kicking a clot of snow into my face. I coughed, trying to blink it out of my eyelashes.
“You’ve never lived up to our story,” she said. “At least I was a good princess, before my stupid sister decided she didn’t want me anymore. What have you ever done but try to press the once upon a time out of yourself?” She kicked another clot of snow in my face.
I pushed myself up onto my elbow, glaring at her through the haze of white. “Pick a narrative, will you? You’re tormenting me because you’re my aunt and you feel like my mother abandoned you—which I’m still not sure I believe, by the way.” Except I did believe it, because Adrianna looked like me. It wasn’t just coloring. I shared my coloring with everyone in the whiteout wood. It was the shape of her face and the angle of her smile, t
he way she moved her hands and the slope of her shoulders. We were family, she and I. No matter how much I wanted her to be a liar, I couldn’t deny that we were related. “Or you’re tormenting me because you think it’s fun. Or you’re doing it because you don’t think I do a good enough job of living up to our story. Just pick one!”
Adrianna stared at me. Then her eyes narrowed, and her stare became a look of raw, unfiltered hatred. “You still think you’re better than I am, don’t you? Just because you fought the story for longer than I did.”
“That’s the fourth reason you’ve given for doing what you’re doing,” I snapped.
Adrianna paused, a confused expression flitting across her face. Pressing the palm of one hand against her temple, she said, “No, that can’t be right. I only have one reason. I gave up on being good because my sister gave up on being with me. I want your skin because I want my life back, and leaving you here is the kindest thing I can do. That’s my reason. Those other things . . . I don’t know where those other things came from.”
I looked at her silently, and was afraid that I might know.
Tanya had said—or the wood had said, speaking through her—that she no longer dreamt. When Adrianna had knocked me out before, I hadn’t dreamt either. I’d just gone away. Dreams were necessary for humans to stay sane. The wood was a dream all by itself, and maybe that could sustain us for a while . . . but for how long?
Adrianna talked like someone else’s reasons were creeping into hers. Maybe they were. She wasn’t the first Snow White to have gone bad, just the first I’d met. The others had been consigned to magic mirrors, locked away where they couldn’t hurt anyone else. The wood was capable of communicating with its “children.” Were the mirrors?
Indexing: Reflections (Kindle Serials) (Indexing Series Book 2) Page 16