2
THE ROOM VANISHES around me. The world smears sideways behind my eyelids, blurring into an infinity of colors. I figure I’m dead.
It’s a pretty solid bet: Generalized Roseville Malady has a lot of symptoms and side effects, but the most noticeable one is sudden death. I don’t want to go into all the jargon—Charm is the science nerd, bio and chem double major, headed for a prestigious internship at Pfizer—but essentially, my ribosomes are ticking time bombs. They’re supposed to fold my proteins into clever little origami shapes, which they’ve been doing, mostly, but one day they’re going to go haywire and start churning out garbage. My organs will fill up with mutant proteins, murderous fleets of malformed paper cranes, and I’ll drown in my own fucked-up biological destiny.
I figure that day is today. It occurs to me what a twisted sense of humor the universe has, to kill me in the highest tower in the land just as I pricked my finger on a spindle’s end. I wonder if I look hot, sprawled limp and lifeless among the roses. I wonder if that will be the very last thing I wonder.
But my vision isn’t going dark. The world is still rushing past me, colors and sounds and flashing by like riffled pages. I assume at first this is the life-flashing-before-my-eyes thing, but it seems longer and stranger than the twenty-one years I’ve lived.
And the faces I see don’t belong to me. They belong to a thousand other girls reaching out toward a thousand spinning wheels or spindles or splinters. Other sleeping beauties, in other stories? I want to stop them, shout some kind of warning—stop, you boneheads!
One of them seems to hear me. She looks up at me with eyes that are an impossible shade of cerulean, her face framed by locks of literal gold, her finger hovering a centimeter above the spindle’s end. Her lips frame a single word: “Help.”
The world stops smearing.
I am still on my feet. Still slightly drunk. Still touching a throbbing finger to something sharp. But everything else is different: the spinning wheel before me is polished smooth with use, the bobbin wound with flaxen thread, the distaff gleaming wickedly. The water-stained plywood of the floor has been replaced by smooth flagstones, the rickety windows by narrow, glassless slits. A cool wind slinks through them, smelling of midnight and magic.
I look up, reeling, and meet those ridiculous eyes again. They belong to a girl so gorgeous she veers from the beautiful toward the unnerving. Nobody outside a fashion magazine has skin without pores or lips the color of actual rose petals. Nobody outside a Ren faire wears dresses with pleats and girdles and trailing sleeves.
“Oh!” she says, and even her voice is fucking musical. “From whence have you come?”
I want to assure her that none of this is real. That she and her tower are hallucinations produced by the last desperate misfires of my synapses. That her usage of whence was grammatically suspect at best, anachronistic at worst.
I manage a single wheezy, “Holy shit,” before my vision goes black.
* * *
I WAKE UP in bed. Not mine; mine is a twin mattress with faded Disney sheets that I grew out of years ago but don’t see the point in replacing. This bed is an absurd, canopied affair of white silk and soft down. It’s the sort of bed that only exists in period romances and fairy tales, because actual medieval beds were a lot smellier and lumpier; the sort of bed where a princess might sleep comfortably for a hundred years.
I part the canopy with one finger and find a room that matches the bed: dark stone and rich rugs, tapestries and carved-oak chests. I blink into the cheery morning light for several seconds, half expecting a songbird to alight on the windowsill and break into an upbeat chorus, before sinking calmly back against the pillows.
This is the point in your standard fantasy adventure where the heroine would give herself a good hard pinch to determine whether or not she’s dreaming. But I can hear the labored thump of my heart in my ears, feel the slightly hungover scratchiness of my eyeballs: I’m not sleeping. I’m not hallucinating. Unless the afterlife is even more profoundly wacky than most major religions have so far posited, I’m not dead. Which means—
I can’t seem to finish the thought. It sends a giddy, hysterical thrill up my spine and a nameless rush of something behind my ribcage.
My phone hums in my jean pocket. I fish it out to find roughly eight hundred texts from Charm. Most of them are variations of wtf wtf WTF where are you interspersed with threats upon my person （if this is some kind of sick joke I swear to jesus I will kill you before the grm does） and pleas for a response （hey your parents are calling me now and idk what to say so if you’re alive NOW’S THE TIME BITCH）。