She appears to be sleeping now, her blackbird perched on the bedpost, considering her with one worried eye and then the other.
“But you know what they say.” I give the queen a hearty shrug. “If wishes were fishes.”
Eva opens her eyes then, but only to squint at me as if she has a sudden headache. “Then what?”
I consider. “Never mind. The point is, we have to go.”
Her mouth hardens. Her eyes close again. “No, we don’t.”
I’m unpacking and repacking my backpack, dispensing with unnecessary weight. I unzip an inner pocket and lay my phone carefully on the table. “You know,” I say, trying very hard—medium hard—well, a little—to keep my tone polite, “maybe we wouldn’t have to go save a kid from a cannibal queen if you’d put up literally any fight at all, but you chose to sit there while the rest of us—”
Now Eva spins to face me, lips curling away from her teeth. “And what did that get you, exactly?” She closes the distance between us and reaches abruptly for my face. I stare her down, refusing to flinch or look away, but her thumb brushes with surprising softness across my chin. It comes away smeared with glutinous red. “I have tried before to explain my position, but perhaps you did not understand.” Her voice vibrates, thick with emotion. “Everything I have done, everything I will do, serves one purpose: to survive.”
And there is an un-small part of me that understands that, and more than understands it. Sympathizes with it, admires it, even— okay, yes—desires it. （The way she looks right now, her eyes blazing with that bottomless life-hunger, her face lit with an intensity that burns straight past prettiness and toward something far more dangerous … No jury would convict me.）
But I’ve tried just surviving. I spent twenty-one years pouring all my want and will toward it, adhering to a set of rules—move fast, go hard, don’t fall in love, try not to die—that left me with exactly one friend and zero plans. And in the end, none of it mattered anyway. In the end, it was just me and my nonnegotiable illness, and the only reason I survived was because someone else （a couple of someones, technically） saved me.
So I just look at Eva for a while, in all her selfish, ferocious, sexy will to survive, and shake my head. “Fine.” I hold down the power button on my phone and wait for the screen to light up, steadfastly refusing to think why I’m turning it on or who I might call. “But I’m going.”
Eva’s eyes flicker. “Why?”
“Because…”
There are noble ways to finish that sentence （because Red is brave and clever and she deserves better; because the hot nerd on The Good Place was right, and the meaning of life basically boils down to what we owe to each other） and less noble, potentially more honest ways （because as long as I’m saving other people I can forget, briefly, that I can’t save myself; because storming an evil fortress is easier than showing Charm my X-rays and watching her understand, all over again, that I’m not in it for the long haul, that there’s still a trolley barreling toward both of us）。
I finish boringly. “Just like, because. Someone should.”
Eva’s expression remains hard and fixed, like a marble statue titled Monarch Who Is Unmoved by the Pleas of the Peasantry, but there’s an odd wistfulness in her eyes, almost as if she envies me. As if she wishes she, too, were a stupid twenty-six-year-old with the reckless bravery of the terminally ill rather than the predictable villain doing the predictably villainous thing. I think of Zellandine telling me that we don’t get to choose our stories, but we get to choose what we do next.
A very bad idea occurs to me then. I slide my arms into my backpack straps and meet her eyes very squarely. “If you come with me and help save Red, I’ll tell you how to get out of this story.” I lean forward and tap the back of her magic mirror, which is never far from her hand. “For real.”
Eva’s eyes move from the mirror to my face, widening as she realizes I don’t just mean out of this particular version of this story but out of this kind of story more broadly. Out of her own horrible ending, away from the cruel logic of her character arc.
Her face finally moves, and it takes me a moment to recognize the expression for what it is. I’ve seen her sneer, and smirk, and bare her teeth in a dozen cruel grins, but this is the first time she’s genuinely smiled at me.
I’m obliged to blink several times. “So.” There’s an answering smile spreading helplessly across my face. “It’s a deal?”