After less than fifty feet of sneaking, a damp, foul breeze emerges from somewhere nearby and wafts across us. It smells like old meat and human suffering, and it leads us without much trouble to a rusted, weed-choked grate set in the earth.
I wave my hand and whisper, “Voilà. A back way in.”
Eva squints sourly at the sewer grate. She sniffs. “It must be nice. Being the protagonist.”
I give her my cheekiest smile and say, “It suits you.” It comes out more sincerely than I intended, and Eva’s eyes flick to mine, then away.
I haul the grate aside and shimmy down the hole, landing with a fairly repellent plop. The water （it is not water） is sludgy and cold, running halfway up my thighs. It feels like an obvious moment for Eva to cut and run, but she lands beside me without fuss and strides onward, looking—just for a moment, in the dark—a little like a hero.
* * *
WE WADE THROUGH the muck for just long enough that I’m starting to worry that these sewers function as actual sewers rather than plot devices and don’t lead anywhere useful, but then we hear things echoing off the wet stone walls: cries and pleas, the miserable clink-clink of chains dragging across stone floors. The unmistakable sounds of a castle dungeon.
There’s a grate directly above us, casting a sickly shard of light across Eva’s face. I nod upward. “This is our stop.”
We slither out into a space that looks like a slightly larger version of the sewer we just left, except that there are greasy torches spitting along the walls and cells with iron bars for doors. Most of them are empty, and some of them contain … pieces … that I refuse to look at long enough to identify. We pass a cell with actual, live occupants, but my heart sinks when I see that they aren’t children.
But one of them is a tall woman with a proud arch to her nose and warm brown skin. The others are slumped listlessly against the walls, but this woman is on her feet, reaching through the bars to wiggle a shard of bone in the lock. Her hair is twisted neatly away from her face.
She gives us a wary once-over as we approach the bars, but apparently we don’t look like a threat or salvation. She returns her attention to the lock, manacles clanking softly against the bars.
“You’re Red’s mom, aren’t you.” I don’t say it like a question, because it isn’t one.
At the sound of the word Red her eyes snap to my face. “Where is she? Who are you? Did they catch her?”
I hiss the word “chill” between clenched teeth, just as a broad-shouldered man stands and sets a hand on the woman’s shoulder. She chills, reluctantly, but her eyes are a pair of knives pressed to my jugular.
I decide to be blunt and quick. “The huntsmen took her a few hours ago.”
The woman closes her eyes. The big man grunts as if he’s taken a physical blow.
“It’s okay, we’ll save her.” I look up and down the dungeon, wishing for my bobby pins. “We’ll, uh, we’ll find a guard and steal the keys—”
I’m trying to comfort her, but Red’s mother isn’t listening to me. She’s speaking in a calm voice to the big man behind her. “Looks like we’re out of time, love.”
He sucks air through his teeth. “It’ll be loud. Bring them down on us.”
“Let them come.” Something in her voice makes me think of snapping bones, blood on the walls.
The man tears a seam at the hem of his shirt and withdraws a waxy twist of paper. He unwinds it to reveal a mound of grainy black sand, which he pours neatly into the keyhole. I have the somewhat humbling suspicion that I’m not necessary in this story, that I’m lucky I even got a speaking part.
The woman raises her hands and seems to recall, at the last moment, that Eva and I exist. “Stand back,” she says. We do.
She strikes her manacles against the bars, sending showers of angry white sparks over the lock. Once, twice. All the prisoners are standing now, watching her, murmuring to one another. I can feel the weight of their hope like a physical thing, urging her on. I wonder how many of their children were stolen.
On the third strike, a tendril of smoke leaks from the keyhole. Shortly afterward I find myself lying flat on my back with a shrill ringing in my ears. The air smells hot. I think one of my incisors is loose.
I sit up to see Red’s mother stepping through the mangled remains of her cell door, black smoke trailing her limbs. She’s followed closely by the big dude （Red’s dad? I don’t want to make assumptions about heteronormative family structures in alternate universes, but the way he shadows Red’s mom suggests he belongs to her） and the rest of the villagers. They flock silently around her as if they’re waiting for a command, which I guess they are. Red’s mother sends the oldest and youngest villagers down into the sewers and assembles the rest into rough formation. She nods once to me, like a commander acknowledging a new recruit, and sets off, heading upward out of the dungeons and into the castle itself.