I tell myself a story to stay awake. Once upon a time there was a princess cursed to sleep for a hundred years.
I open my eyes and catch the blurred gleam of Primrose’s hair as she leads us up the winding tower steps, her spine stiff and her crown high, a princess refusing to go gently into her own good night.
Once upon a time she asked for help.
And I answered her. All of us did. We followed the lonely threads of our stories across the vast nothing of the universe and found our way here, to this tower, to save at least one princess from her curse. I’ve always resented people for trying to save me, but maybe this is how it works, maybe we save one another.
I become aware that Brünhilt has stopped climbing just before Charm says, tentatively, “Zin?” I try to respond but succeed only in making a sound like a plunger in a clogged sink. “Was there supposed to be something up here? Like, say, a spinning wheel?” Charm’s voice is strung tight.
I struggle out of Brünhilt’s arms and stand on fizzing, trembling legs. Her hand hovers at my back, ready to catch me, and I don’t trust myself enough to pull away. I blink around the tower room. There’s nothing but smooth flagstones and five sleeping beauties, their expressions reflecting five variations of “Now what, bitch?”
There’s no spinning wheel. Even the busted remains of the one Harold smashed are gone, neatly swept away by some fastidious guard. Shouldn’t it have magically reconstituted itself in our absence? My plan was to prick my finger on something and fall asleep and hope that was enough to send us back into the whirling multiverse—but what the hell am I going to do now?
Distantly, I hear the thudding of boots on the winding tower steps. We don’t have long, and if we’re captured there won’t be any secret pacts or miraculous escapes. I picture the ’90s heroine forced into skirts and deprived of her sword; Brünhilt in chains; the space princess peeled out of her chrome and silver armor, stuck forever on a single planet rather than sailing among the stars. Primrose, trapped in her silk sheets; Charm, unable to save her.
I wanted to save us all from our stories, but I should have known better than anybody: there are worse endings than sleeping for a hundred years.
Pain pops in my kneecaps, sharp and sudden. My teeth clack together. It’s only when I hear Charm swearing that I realize I’ve fallen to the floor. I feel her arm bracing my shoulders, Primrose kneeling at my other side. I want to tell them I’m sorry, that I tried my best, but the tightness in my chest is suffocating me. My pulse has lost its steady tick-tocking rhythm, thundering like hooves in my ears. Darkness nibbles at the edges of my vision.
The floor tilts toward me, or maybe I tilt toward the floor, and then my cheek is plastered against cold stone. I blink once, staring hazily at the boots and slippers and bare feet of the beauties around me. I guess I get a theatrical death after all, sprawled at the top of the tallest tower, pale and fragile as any Rackham princess, but a lot less lonely.
I see it in the half second before my eyes hinge shut: a slender shard lying on the floor. A single splinter of dark wood that might once have belonged to a spindle. It wasn’t a spinning wheel in the original version.
I feel my lips peeling back over my teeth in a bloodless smile. I’ve read enough fantasy novels to recognize a last chance when I see one. This is the part where I rally my final strength, calling on reserves of fortitude I didn’t know I had to reach my numb fingers for that splinter. With my dying breath I will prick my finger and pull us all into the space between stories, and all the beauties will weep with gratitude and admiration as they escape into whatever new narratives they choose, and I will fall into my final sleep knowing I’ve done something worthwhile—
Except I don’t have any secret reserves of strength. There’s no amount of conviction or hope or love that can keep my overstuffed heart from stopping or my oxygen-starved brain from going gray.
My hand barely brushes the splinter when my vision turns the final, empty black of a theater screen just before the credits roll. I feel myself falling down, down into the kind of sleep that has no dreams and never ends.
The last thing I hear is my own name, spoken in a voice that sounds like a heart breaking. The last thing I think is how ironic it is, how fucking hilarious, that Charm should spend her life trying to save me, and I should die trying to save her, and both of us would fail.
10
I FIGURE I’M dead. Again.
True, there’s a grayish light glowing through my eyelids and stiff sheets beneath my skin, but I chalk that up to the random sensory misfirings of a dying brain. Ditto for the soft squeaking of orthopedic tennis shoes on waxed floors and the distant beeps of machines. It’s the smell I can’t seem to ignore: hand sanitizer and human suffering. Surely no version of heaven has hospital rooms.