Regan stepped into a clearing, her feet as light on the forest floor as the hooves of any wild thing, and stopped in her tracks at the sight of a single stag cropping at the ground. He wasn’t the sort of deer who gets stories written about him: no one from the Disney Corporation was going to cast him in their live-action remake of Bambi. One of his antlers was broken. His coat was moth-eaten, mangy, and things moved in it, a density of fleas and parasites so high that they were visible to the naked eye. He was favoring his right hind leg over his left, and when he raised his head to look at her, the insides of his ears were caked with grime, and the corners of his eyes were thick with mucus.
He was the most beautiful thing she had seen in so long that she thought her heart might break from it.
“I don’t feel the need to run from you,” said the stag. “Why is that? Humans are a menace.”
“I’m halfway yours,” said Regan. “The other half of me is human, and that’s useful, because thumbs.” She held up her hands and wiggled her thumbs at him in illustration.
“My name is Lord of the Forest,” said the stag.
Regan nodded. Every stag she’d ever met had been named Lord of the Forest, even when there was another stag only a few feet away. Deer didn’t understand irony. “My name is Regan,” she said. “In the name of the Great Alliance of Hooves and Hands, I greet you.”
The stag flicked an ear. “That’s a name I haven’t heard since I was a fawn,” he said. “What do you want from me, Regan of the Alliance?”
“The wall around this wood was built to hold human children, not Lords and Ladies of the Forest,” she said. “My friends and I need to find a way out.” Inwardly, she was rejoicing. I’m talking to a stag, she thought, and it was light and lightning in her veins, it was joy beyond comprehension. It all happened. I was right the whole time. It happened.
“Why should I help you?”
“Because you know what agony it would be to have your freedom taken away, and you’re too good, too gracious, to allow that to happen to anyone else.” Regan bowed her head. “Please.”
The stag flicked an ear, considering her. Finally, sounding almost bored, he said, “Follow me.”
Regan straightened, smiling bright as a prairie sunrise, and let the stag lead her deeper into the wood.
16?SIDES CHOSEN, CHOICES MADE
EVEN AS REGAN WAS remembering what it meant to breathe, the girl who no longer had a name crept along the edge of the hall in the main building of the school, her back bent and her head hunched, willing herself unseen. She knew where the cameras were, thanks to weeks and months of observation, and she knew how to flatten herself out, to fit into their blind spots. It was a necessary skill to possess, especially when living with the daily fear that eventually dwindling would become shrinking would become regressing. The day she was more rat than girl, she would need to be ready to go into hiding, to find a way into the walls in order to save herself from an exterminator’s hands. The headmaster—fake, real, it didn’t matter—would never tolerate vermin sleeping in a bed like a real person. It didn’t matter that she was real, that she had always been real. She’d die for the crime of not wanting to love a monster.
Back when she’d been—and even the thought of her name turned to roaring static, making her wince and almost straighten into the path of a camera’s lens—before, she’d been happy enough, if unchallenged and unfulfilled. She’d walked in a world of low expectations, too pretty to be clever, too clever to be kind, a pig-in-the-middle girl with her future mapped out for her by the adults who smiled indulgently whenever she tried to ask a question. She would graduate from high school, go on to college for a nice, safe degree, something that would make her better equipped to be a good wife one day, a good helper for a man who was a little less attractive and a little more clever, and maybe both those things were a matter of opinion, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that she get good grades, wear the right brands, say the right things, and always, always be on display.
Maybe that was why she’d slipped through a door and into a world where being seen was never the goal, where learning to hide and run and get away were the most important things. She’d found peace on the other side of a doorway that couldn’t possibly exist, and when that peace had been stripped away, she’d run away home with a curse hanging over her head and a tongue that no longer remembered what it was to utter her own name.
At first, that had seemed like the only consequence; at first, she’d thought she might be able to find ways around it, to do work that didn’t require her to have a name. Maybe her enforced anonymity could even be an asset. She could be some billionaire’s secretary, untraceable because she couldn’t ever be named, suited to fulfill their every need.
But then she’d started shrinking. Then she’d started finding coarse brown hairs on her pillow in the morning, stiff and unbending, like the guard hairs on a rat’s back. Then she’d started waking up in the middle of the night with an aching tailbone, wondering whether this was when the tail was going to worm its way through her flesh, extending indelibly behind her, becoming an immutable part of who she was. She didn’t know the full shape of the Rat King’s curse, but she had a feeling, too strong to ignore, that once the tail sprouted, it would be too late for her to ever get her name back. Too late for her to ever be human again.
She crept through the school, silent as a sigh, until she reached the science classroom and slipped inside. The cameras in this room were out, had been since a bad accident in chemistry earlier in the week; their gleaming glass eyes saw nothing, transmitted nothing to the school’s security office. Carefully, she placed a chair on top of the matron’s desk and climbed onto it, straining until her fingertips brushed the paneled ceiling. A shove, a leap, an agonizing pull-up and she was inside, moving through the space between the dropped ceiling and the roof with quick precision. Her back didn’t even come close to brushing the actual rafters. Dust tickled her nose and she breathed it in, relaxing into the safe, familiar scent that lingered in enclosed places.
Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, to be a rat. Maybe she could be happy. Or maybe it wouldn’t matter. Rats didn’t have names the way people did. Maybe they didn’t care about happiness the way people did, either.
The school was large, but she’d been there for more than a year, and she knew where she needed to go. Inch by inch, she pulled herself along, until she felt warm air coming up through the small holes in the ceiling tiles. She was nowhere near the student dormitories. Carefully, she stopped, wedged her nails into the space at the edge of the nearest tile, and eased it an inch or so away from its frame, peering downward.
The matrons were gathered in a single central room, sitting in silent contemplation of the air. All save for Miss Lennox, who was moving from body to body, shaking them, grasping their hands, trying to get them to react to her.
“Please, Caroline, please,” she moaned, dropping to her knees in front of one matron, a pretty woman about Miss Lennox’s age, with freckled cheeks and the empty stare of a mannequin. “We were supposed to get out of here together, remember? You and me and whatever door was willing to have us, forever, no matter what anyone said. Don’t you remember?”