He knew. He knew what we were planning: I could tell as soon as I saw his face. His lips were set in a thin line, but his eyes were sad, like he wanted to say no and knew that he couldn’t afford to stop us. Instead, he signed the paperwork that made me, Jeff, and Sloane free agents for the next thirty days, handed the pen back to the woman from HR, and left the office without saying a word.
After that, there had been nothing to do but make our way to Jeff’s hidey-hole, where the cot was waiting. Going back to the bullpen would have been a waste of time, and time was becoming a limited commodity. We had a month. A month without Bureau resources, but without Bureau rules either.
We had to make the best use of it that we possibly could.
Jeff’s cot looked like it had been stolen from a summer camp. It was long and narrow and made to military specifications, with creases at the corners and a blanket drawn so tight that I could have bounced a quarter off of it. There was a single pillow at the head of the cot, thin and uninviting. Looking at it made my heart hurt. This was what he’d had before he followed me home and started sharing my bed, which was utilitarian, but was at least more comfortable and more personal than this. We’d both been running from our stories in our own ways, and we’d both done ourselves a great deal of damage.
I unbuckled my belt and set it on the nearest shelf, not bothering to unclip my badge or service weapon. Neither of them could come with me where I was going. Then I shrugged out of my jacket and stepped out of my shoes.
“Jeff has done this with me before,” I said. “It usually takes me about five minutes to fall asleep. I should be in the wood immediately after that. Don’t wake me up. No matter what, not even if I’m thrashing around or having a nightmare, unless I’m clawing my own skin off, don’t wake me up. I need to stay in the wood long enough to learn whatever there is to learn.”
“You make this sound more and more appealing,” said Sloane.
“Yeah, well, I never said it would be easy.” I handed my jacket to Jeff, who kissed my forehead. I smiled at him briefly, not quite meeting his eyes, before I turned and sat down on the edge of the bed. From there, it was just a matter of stretching out with my head on the pillow and my hands folded on my chest in classic “dead girl in her glass coffin” style.
I closed my eyes.
I didn’t go to sleep.
Seconds ticked by, stretching into minutes, until I had to admit defeat. This wasn’t going to happen. Whether it was stress or the fact that it was the middle of the day and I’ve never been a napper, I wasn’t going to be able to fall asleep. I opened my eyes. Jeff and Sloane were standing by the cot, watching me—him with concern, her with a sort of academic curiosity, like she was waiting for me to perform a particularly unique magic trick.
“It’s not working,” I said, and sat up. “We have to go to plan B.” The apple would guarantee I fell asleep. I wasn’t worried about waking up. We already knew Jeff could kiss me back to consciousness, if it came down to it.
“Are you sure?” Jeff’s eyes were wide and worried. “We could find another way.”
“Unless your other way involves me either taking a sleeping pill or running a marathon and eating a lot of turkey, I think this is our best bet.” I stood. “I don’t have any other method of guaranteeing I fall asleep before someone else dies. Do you?”
He turned his face away.
“I didn’t think so.” I turned to Sloane, who was standing silently by, watching our interactions. “Do you have the apple?”
“There’s a question I never thought you’d ask me. It’s weird, but I don’t think I wanted you to. I think I would have been happier if it had never come to this.” She pulled her hand out of her pocket. Somehow, she was holding an apple.
It was perfect. Red and gold and pink-skinned, with a rounded shape asymmetrical enough to look real, and flawless enough to look like the promise of paradise. My mouth started watering instantly.
“Honeycrisp,” I said. “Really?”
“Go big or go home,” she said, and held it out toward me, balancing it in the center of her palm. Her face was grave and serene. She was doing what she was made to do, just like I was. “What’s it going to be, snowflake? Are you going to eat the apple, or are you going to turn around and run for safety?”
“Did you poison it?” My fingers twitched, aching to snatch the apple from her hand no matter what her answer was. It was there, it was right there, and I could have it, because it was meant for me. All I had to do was reach out and take it, and all this stupid worrying would be over. I could continue my story. I could be free.
“Does it matter?”
No. “Yes,” I said, and took the apple, and bit deep. The flesh crunched under my teeth like all the leaves of fall. Juice filled my mouth, sweet and sharp and bitter at the same time. I chewed. I swallowed.
I fell, and I didn’t even feel myself hit the ground. I just kept falling.
# # #
The ground beneath me was soft and cold. I stayed where I was, trying to get my limbs to respond. They felt like they had been weighted down. So did my eyelids. I moved my head to the side and felt the weight shift. Snow. I was covered in snow. Since I didn’t think my private snowstorms had ever produced more than a few inches, it couldn’t be mine, and that meant I had reached my destination: the whiteout wood, the place where my story went to live when it wasn’t playing out in the waking world.
I opened my eyes. Snowflakes stuck to my eyelashes, turning the world prismatic and blurry. I blinked them away before sitting up, dislodging the snowbank that had formed on top of me. It was snowing harder than I had ever seen it snow here before. It was always winter in the wood—we were seasonal creatures, we girls born to bleed out until we brought back the sun—but the sky was usually clear, allowing us to see the black trees that grew in leafless splendor all around us. Black, white, red. Those were the colors of our world.
Only now the world had been reduced to nothing but white. I sat up further, brushing the snow from my arms and chest. No, not quite nothing but white: I was wearing a blood-red silk gown, like something out of one of the Colored Fairy Books. The trim was black and white brocade, matching the braided leather belt that rode around my hips. The theme of our story was being continued in my clothing, it seemed.
Our. That was the other problem. Normally when I arrived in the wood, the other Snow Whites were eager to come and greet me. Tanya had been elected my teacher, and she was doing an excellent job, all things considered, but as one of the few who was still capable of leaving the wood, the others saw me as a connection to the outside world, a place beyond the monomyth, where things happened. Ayane was always asking me about television and had tried to convince me to attend something called “San Diego Comic Con” before Tanya had shushed her. Judi usually wanted to know about current events. All of them wanted something from me, and that meant all of them should have appeared when I collapsed into the snow. So where were they?
I pushed myself to my feet, fully on my guard now that the strangeness of the situation was sinking in. The trees—barely visible through the snow—stretched out in all directions, never thinning, giving me no clue as to where the wood’s edges might be, or which way I should go. Somewhere out there was a field of roses, where the Rose Reds whispered their own version of the monomyth into the uncaring wind. Somewhere was a city built entirely of towers, ringed with windowsill gardens that rioted with rampion, a Rapunzel in every window, a wall of thorns in every alley. And somewhere there was a forest of hazel trees, as ash gray as this wood was white. All I had to do was find it.
My sensible work shoes were gone, replaced by dainty, princess-like slippers. I kicked the snow off them and started walking.
The whiteout wood could seem limitless, especially when it was snowing, and I didn’t know where I was supposed to go. I kept trudging forward, trying not to listen to the whispers carried on the wind. The whiteout wood talked to all its girls, telling us how our stories were supposed to
go, coaxing our inner fairy-tale princesses out of hiding and into the light. It wasn’t a quick learner. One of the Snow Whites I interacted with on a regular basis was a Deaf woman named Judi. She couldn’t hear the wood whispering, because it hadn’t yet figured out how to speak her language. She fought it with everything she had, and in her fight, she kept the girls around her from succumbing.
So where the hell were they? I plodded onward, forcing my way through the howling snow. Snow Whites would sometimes retreat to their private clearings when they felt threatened, or like they needed to be alone. I squinted at the trees I could see through the blizzard. Most of them were close-set, allowing me to walk, but not making it easy. Every now and then, however, there would be a pair that had grown in such a way as to look like a natural doorway.
The wind picked up, pushing me back. I adjusted my angle, pointing my body toward the nearest of those doors. The storm howled. I dove forward, grabbing the trees and forcing myself through, not quite sure what I was hoping would happen, but knowing I needed to try something, anything to get out of this weather. This was a fairy-tale world. Logic didn’t apply the way it would have when I was awake, in a reality where diving between two trees didn’t change the weather. I let go of the trunks, falling forward—
—and found myself tumbling into a pair of strong arms. They held me up with ease. “What are you doing here?” asked a voice, heavy with a Nova Scotia accent and with concern.
I tilted my head back and met the kind, anxious eyes of my teacher, Tanya. “Falling,” I said, pushing myself upright. “Did you know there was a massive storm going on out there?”
“I did,” she said, cocking an eyebrow upward. “Did no one ever tell you that when you have to fight to get into the wood, that means you probably don’t want to be here?” She sniffed. “Your breath smells like apples. You little goose, what have you done?”
“Drugged myself into the narrative, because it refused to drag me down,” I said. “I needed to talk to you. It couldn’t wait—wait.” I paused. There was no snow falling here, not even the light powder that was a semi-constant trait of the wood. The ground beneath my feet was brown, actually brown, covered in dead grass and withered clover. “Where am I?”
“My clearing, and I’ll thank you to mind your step,” said Tanya. I realized she was frightened. It seemed appropriate, under the circumstances. “It’s very irregular to come into another Snow White’s clearing without an invitation. Most of us won’t come even when invited. It smacks of impropriety, and we want to avoid that at all costs.”
“I’m a little less concerned with impropriety than I am with saving the world,” I said, looking around.
It was definitely a clearing, in the truest sense of the word: we were at the center of a patch of open ground that looked like it was nearly thirty feet across. I looked behind me. There was the “doorway” I had thrown myself through, two widely spaced black trees through which I could see a howling blizzard. There was no logical way for me to have gotten so far from that door in my short fall, but I had done it, and once again had to remind myself that the laws of rational reality didn’t necessarily apply here.
The ground was blanketed with dead grass, showing no traces of green, but it was still odd when compared to the unrelenting white and black and red of the rest of the wood. There was a large tree stump off to one side, as black as the rest of the trees, and two short logs had been rolled up next to it, where they could serve as chairs.
“I used to have a bed,” said Tanya, apparently in answer to my scrutiny. “It was a lovely thing, all black wood and lacy white linens. But I stopped needing to sleep after I’d been here for a while, and it went away one day, while I was out visiting with the others. The wood knows what we need to be comfortable, and it provides it.”
“Humans have to sleep,” I said, looking back to her. “People who don’t sleep are considered clinically insane.”
“I’m not a person anymore,” she said. “I’m a story. I’ve been here long enough that some of the trappings of humanity are starting to seem like pointless wastes of a time that’s limited enough already. Here in the wood, I have as long as I could want to stand and look at the snow and think about what’s to come. I could exist forever, if that was what appealed. But I don’t sleep, or eat unless I want to, or make use of any bathroom facilities. It seems like we got things backward, doesn’t it? All the time wasters go to the ones who don’t have much time.”
I frowned. Tanya was a Snow White. The wood whispered to her, and she whispered back: she knew what it wanted, and all the training she’d given me was partially designed to guarantee that one day, the wood would get what it was hoping for. I was the only active Snow White ever to serve within the ATI Management Bureau. If anyone was going to be in the position to start making changes to our shared story, it was me. So why the hell was she being so cagey and weird?
“Look, Tanya, I’m sorry if I broke some unwritten rule by bursting into your clearing without permission. If I’d been aiming, I would have gone for Ayane, since she’s usually pretty up on what’s going on around here.” I always tried to use the names of the individual Snow Whites when I was speaking to them. It kept them more anchored in the here and now, and in the idea that they had identities of their own. “I know the Rose Reds have their equivalent of this place. Do the Cinderellas? I need to go there. I need to talk to them.”
Tanya frowned. “You don’t know what you’re proposing, child. This is an idea that will do no one any good and will do you a great world of ill.”
“I just ate an apple handed to me by a Wicked Stepsister, because there’s an evil Cinderella wreaking havoc in the waking world, and I need to stop her before she kills anybody else,” I said. “I think I’m sort of the queen of bad ideas right now, and I don’t feel like fighting about it. How do I get to the place where the Cinderella story started? How do I get to their wood?”
Tanya continued to look at me, dazed and a little disconnected. It was like she wasn’t really processing my words. That worried me. She had been my mentor since I first tumbled into the wood: she was the woman who really understood what it was to be a Snow White, and was helping me to control myself. She had never seemed like this before, disconnected and half aware of the world around her. Something was wrong. Something bigger than a blizzard.
“Where does Ayane live?”
“Who?”
“Ayane. Japanese, beautiful, sarcastic as all hell?” She had skin as white as snow and lips as red as blood, just like the rest of us. Our shared story didn’t care about ethnicity or heritage. It just cared about rewriting us until we fit within its narrow walls.
“There’s no one here by that name, my dear,” said Tanya. “We’re all Snow White here. You’re Snow White too. You know it all the way down to the roots of you.”
I stopped dead. Finally, I said, “You’re not Tanya, are you? You’re the wood. I’m talking to the wood.”
To my horror, she smiled. She looked relieved, like she’d been hoping she could drop the pretense. “Yes, my dear,” she said, and her accent was gone, replaced by a sweet neutrality that could have come from anywhere, from anywhen. “You didn’t listen to the snow, so I had to find another way to reach you. This is a bad path you’re setting yourself upon. You’re not Little Red Riding Hood, to stray from your story, or seeking something East of the Sun and West of the Moon. You should stay here, in the trees, until the time comes for you to wake back into your own sinew and skin. To do anything else is to risk yourself, and I can’t have that. I need you too much to allow it.”
“You’re not in charge of what I do with my life,” I said, taking a step backward.
The wood continued to look at me, a soft, alien compassion reflecting through Tanya’s eyes. “But I am, my darling. I’ve been in charge of your life since before you left your mother’s womb. We can work together, when we need to. So many Sleeping Beautys birth my snow girls, my rose daughters. You’ve always been mine. I am yo
ur true mother, the only mother to matter, and I am telling you to set this quest aside. Let the little Cinderella do as she will. All the damage she can cause is not worth the loss of you.”
“Wow,” I said. I took another step back. “You know, I’ve always suspected stories weren’t that smart. They can’t be, because they have to leave so many of the details to the storyteller. You know what, lady? Or . . . deciduous forest, or whatever you are? I believe you when you say that you’re responsible for my existence. My life is too fucked up to have been an accident. What I don’t believe is that you’re so unaware of who I am that you think this sort of approach will work on me.”
The wood blinked Tanya’s eyes. “You would defy me?”
“Lady, I’d defy the Brothers Grimm if it would save the world.” I let my face go slack, eyes focusing on a spot just behind her. This was a lot to risk on the sort of thing that most second graders wouldn’t fall for, but I didn’t see another way. “What the hell is that?”
The wood turned.
I bolted.
Tanya’s doorway might have regressed after I came through it, but it was still a pair of trees, rooted in the earth, and the woman who controlled them was trying to figure out what I’d been looking at. I dove through them, back into the blizzard, where the howling wind buffeted me and the snow struggled to whisper sweet lies in my ears. I wasn’t safe, but I was away from one threat, and that was worth the difficulty of dealing with another. I started wading forward, into the white.
A pair of hands shot out from between two trees and grabbed my arm, yanking me to the side. I stumbled into another clearing. This one contained two women, and was carpeted in leaves the color of blood. That was less jarring than Tanya’s dead grass. At least it fit the color scheme.
“What the hell are you doing here?” demanded Ayane, letting go of my arm. Behind her, Judi was signing violently. My ASL was still bad enough that I couldn’t tell what she was saying, but she looked as angry as Ayane. I had never been so glad to see either one of them.
Indexing: Reflections (Kindle Serials) (Indexing Series Book 2) Page 11
