“Look.” I wet cracked lips. “That’s super awful and traumatizing, and I’m sure you need therapy, but like … Why did you turn into the exact same kind of monster? Why couldn’t you just chill and live happily ever after?” I’m mostly talking at random, trying to give Charm a few extra seconds to pull off a miracle and rescue me, like she always has before. I wonder if, sometime over the last six months, she stopped sleeping with her ringer on.
Snow White’s head tilts, nose scrunching. “It’s not really a happily ever after if it ends, is it?”
I think I say something here—it’s not like that or you don’t understand—but I can’t hear it over the rising noise in my head, the sudden bile in my mouth. Is that what I’ve been doing, these last five years? Trying to outrun my own ending? Throwing away every chance at happiness just because it was fleeting?
I swallow acid. “Every story ends,” I whisper. I don’t even know which of us I’m trying to convince. Eva shifts beside me so that her shoulder is pressing hard against mine.
Snow White is looking at us like we’re very young children; maybe we are, to her. “Well, yours will. But I have a few questions before it does.” She withdraws something slim and silver from her skirts and turns it to face us. For a confused second I think she’s showing us a picture on a phone screen—I see two faces, two sets of desperate eyes—before I understand that I’m looking at a mirror.
My mouth goes dry and sandy. My mind goes perfectly blank. Eva goes very, very still.
Snow White strokes the mirror’s surface with one pale fingernail. “This mirror of yours. It has shown me things. Other lands. Other worlds, perhaps.” I see the future with helpless, ugly clarity: an immortal cannibal wandering from world to world, plucking princesses from their tales like ripe fruit from the trees. She’s warped her own story into a gory horror flick; what could she do to the multiverse?
She asks sweetly, “How do I get there?”
“W-why would you ever want to leave your own world?” Other than the perpetual twilight and freakshow fauna. “You’ve got a great setup here. A lovely, um, lair, and loyal henchpeople.”
Snow White makes a moue. “The villagers are getting restless. They’re a tiresome bunch, always fomenting and resisting. It’s harder and harder to get what I need.” She pinches the flesh of her throat, where the skin has sagged almost imperceptibly. （I have the unhelpful thought that Dr. Bastille would have an absolute field day with this version of Snow White. “The Fear of Age in the Age of Fear: Representations of the Crone in Modern Folk Horror.”）
Snow White smiles her sweet, springtime smile. “They’re nothing at all like the little lambs I see in other worlds. So I will ask you again: How do I get there?”
I don’t answer and neither, somewhat to my surprise, does Eva. Her silence fills me with a weird, reckless pride. “Sorry, I’m just getting the most intense déjà vu, you know? I feel like I was just questioned under torture by an evil queen like, yesterday.”
This provokes a brief, whispered argument with Eva （“Torture is a strong word.” “Well, if the shoe fits.” “If the shoe fits what?” “God, never mind.”）， at the end of which she clears her throat and says audibly, “I’m sorry I hurt you. I shouldn’t have.”
It feels like the sort of apology you make because you’re pretty sure it’s your last chance. I move my hand so that my fingers cover hers, because I’m pretty sure she’s right. “It’s cool,” I say inadequately.
Snow White is watching us closely, looking from our faces to the place where our hands touch. She makes a resigned tsk. “I can see you’re both terribly stubborn. I’ll find my own way. I certainly have the time.” She makes an imperious gesture and one of her huntsmen steps forward, drawing his sword with a sound like scraping bone as he comes for us. It’s all happening way too fast. I thought I could burn more time bullshitting—I thought Charm would still find her way across the universe for me, even without the mirror, because the rules don’t apply to us—
But the huntsman doesn’t impale either of us. He steps around us to the edge of the fire and reaches into the coals with the tip of his sword. He extracts an ugly tangle of iron. It looks like the kind of thing you’d see in a museum, a mass of old metal with an obscure, chilling label reading Scold’s bridle, 17th c. or Pear of anguish, 18th c.