I have time for a single airless “what the shit” before my arms are wrenched behind me and my wrists are wrapped in cold iron. I writhe against the chains, but I can feel the weakness of my limbs, the stony strength of the men holding me.
Harold shakes his head at me, flicking that perfect curl from his forehead. “Did you think you could evade me twice, fairy?” He gestures imperiously to the tower steps. “To the dungeons.”
7
THE DUNGEON ISN’T so much a place as a collection of generic dungeon-ish elements: damp stone walls and iron bars; dangling chains stained with God knows what; brittle bones piled in the corners, cracked and yellow; a decayed sweetness in the air, like a root cellar with something rotting in it.
In all my twenty-one years of bad luck, I don’t think I’ve ever been this thoroughly, irredeemably fucked. I’m locked in a windowless cell in the wrong reality, wondering how long I can stay on my feet before I’m forced to sit on the stained stone floor. I’m hungry and thirsty and fatally ill. I have no way home. My only friend in this entire backwards-ass pre-Enlightenment world is about to be married off to a sentient cleft chin. Right now, the King is probably debating whether to drown me or burn me or make me dance in hot iron shoes.
I wanted to wrench my story off its tracks, to strike out toward some better ending, but all I’ve done is change my lines. I made myself the witch, and witches have even worse endings than princesses.
My therapist—who is corny and sincere, but usually right—says when things get overwhelming it can help to make a list of your assets. It’s a short list: a small pile of vertebrae in the corner; a tin pail of unsanitary drinking water; several protein-clogged organs; a phone with approximately 12% of its battery life remaining.
I turn it on and scroll through my missed texts, because why not? There’s no reason to hoard the charge now.
Charm’s sent me a few more wild theories and links to NASA pages that don’t load. I figure I have time to kill so I zoom in on the screenshots enough to read—well, skim—okay, glance at—the articles. All of them seem to subscribe to the （hypothetical, unprovable） concept of the multiverse, in which there are an infinite number of realities separated by nothing but a few quarks and cosmic dust bunnies. One dude describes them as bubbles in paint, endlessly spawning; somebody else asks me to envision a six-sided die that lands six different ways and spawns six alternate realities. My favorite is the one that describes the universe as “a vast book containing an infinity of pages.” I like the idea that I’m just a misplaced punctuation mark or a straying verb who somehow found herself on the wrong page. Beats being a dice roll or a paint bubble.
I wish Charm were here to mock my lack of basic scientific understanding （when you skip half of high school and major in liberal arts, there are certain inevitable holes in your education）。 I always sort of imagined her beside me at the end, weeping prettily at my bedside, perhaps catching the eye of the extremely hot nurse who works the day shift in the ICU. Maybe they see each other again at my graveside and go out for drinks. Maybe they wind up married with three rescue dogs and a Subaru, who knows?
I type and delete several messages to Charm before going with the painfully effortful: bad news babe. portkey’s busted.
that WOULD be bad news except—as I previously mentioned—portkeys are fiction
It takes less than ten seconds for me to send back a cropped version of one her own screenshots with the final line circled in red: “in a universe of infinite realities, there’s no such thing as fiction.”
She responds with a middle finger emoji, which is fair.
but like, real talk: the magic spinning wheel is broken. I think I might be stuck here forever. or for however long I have left. I’ve been trying not to feel the clogged-drain sensation in my chest or the shuddering weight of my own limbs, trying not to think of the X-rays that sent Mom straight out to her rose beds, her face cold and hard as a spade.
did you read the stuff I sent you?
of course, I lie.
There’s a pause, then: if you had, which you definitely have not, you’d know that alternate dimensional realities are unlikely to be connected by individual physical objects.
charm please. I’ve had a real long day.
there are no ruby slippers or rabbit holes. if there’s a way between universes, which there apparently is, it’s something weirder and more quantum-y than a magic fucking spinning wheel. allow me to present my top ten theories thus far. I can see her so clearly: cross-legged in bed in the crappy two-room apartment she rented for the summer, surrounded by a small ocean of printed-out articles and library books and Smarties wrappers. The whole place would smell like burned coffee and laundry and weed, because Charm is essentially a frat boy with brains and breasts.