The lips move, silent. Please. One hand lifts to the other side of the glass, as if the mirror is a window between us. Her fingertips are a bloodless white.
I’ve been in the princess-rescuing game long enough that I don’t hesitate. I raise my fingers to the glass, too, but there doesn’t seem to be anything there. I can feel the heat of her hand, the slight give of her skin.
Then her fingers close like claws around my wrist and pull me through.
* * *
YOU MIGHT THINK interdimensional travel is difficult or frightening, but it’s usually not that bad. Picture the multiverse as an endless book with endless pages, where each page is a different reality. If you were to retrace the letters on one of those pages enough times, the paper might grow thin, the ink might bleed through. In this metaphor, I’m the ink, and the ink is totally fine. There’s a brief moment when I’m falling from one page to the next, my hair tangling in a wind that smells like old paperbacks and roses, and then someone says help and I tumble into another version of my own story.
This time, though, the moment between pages is not brief. It’s vast. It’s a timeless, lightless infinity, like the voids between galaxies. There are no voices calling for help, no glimpses of half-familiar realities. There’s nothing at all except the viselike grip of fingers around my wrist and a not-insignificant amount of pain.
I mean, I don’t know if I technically “have” a “body,” so maybe it’s not real pain. Maybe my conviction that my organs are turning themselves inside out is just a really shitty hallucination. Maybe all my neurons are just merely screaming in existential dread. Maybe I’m dying again.
Then there are more pieces of story rushing past me, but I don’t recognize any of them: a drop of blood on fresh snow; a heart in a box, wet and raw; a dead girl lying in the woods, pale as bone.
The fingers release my wrist. My knees crash against cold stone. I’m lying flat on my face, feeling like I was recently peeled and salted, regretting every single beer and most of the churros （although nothing I did with Diego）。
I attempt to leap to my feet and achieve something closer to a woozy stagger. “It’s alright, it’s okay.” I hold up empty hands to show I mean no harm. The room is spinning unhelpfully. “I’ll explain everything, but if there’s a spindle in here, please don’t touch it.”
Someone laughs. It’s not a nice laugh.
The room settles to a slow lurch, and I see that it’s not a lonely tower room at all. It looks more like the apothecary in a video game—a small room stuffed full of stoppered bottles and glass jars, the shelves loaded with books bound in cracked leather, the counters strewn with silver knives and pestles. If it belongs to a wizard, there are certain indications （a yellowing human skull, chains dangling from the walls） that they are not the friendly kind.
The woman from the mirror is sitting in a high-backed chair beside a fireplace, her chin lifted, gown pooled around her ankles like blood. She’s watching me with an expression that doesn’t make any sense. I’ve met forty-nine varieties of Sleeping Beauty by now, and every single one of them—the princesses, the warriors, the witches, the ballet dancers—has looked surprised when a sickly girl in a hoodie and jeans zaps herself into the middle of their story.
This woman does not look surprised. Nor does she look even slightly desperate anymore. She looks triumphant, and the sheer intensity of it almost sends me to my knees again.
She studies me, her brows lifted in two disdainful black arches, and her lips curve. It’s the kind of smile that doesn’t belong on Sleeping Beauty’s face: sneering, languorous, strangely seductive. Somewhere deep in my brain, a voice that sounds like Rosa’s great-grandmother says, ?CUIDADO!
She asks sweetly, “Why, what spindle would that be?” which is when I notice three things more or less simultaneously. The first is a small silver mirror in the woman’s left hand, which does not seem to be reflecting the room around us. The second is an apple sitting on the counter just behind her. It’s the sort of apple a child would draw, glossy and round, poisonously red.
The third is that there is no spinning wheel, or spindle, or shard of flax, or even a sewing needle, anywhere in the room.
Somewhere deep in the bottom of my backpack, muffled by spare clothes and water bottles, comes a tinny, warbling whistle, like a mockingbird singing out of key.
2
SURE, OKAY. I should have figured it out a little faster. But in my defense, my brain was recently soaked in Sol Cerveza, dragged through the liminal space between worlds, and tossed at the feet of a tall woman with silken hair and a dangerous smile.