“An amusement park, during the Princess Parade,” shouted a wiry teenager.
“A cruise ship.”
“A Starbucks.”
The woman with the ashy freckles waved her hands, telling a story I didn’t have the language to understand. But I knew the coldness in her eyes, the downturned corners of her mouth, and I knew her ending. Whatever the details, she was a seven-oh-nine, a whiteout girl, daughter of the apple and the thorn. She was my sister. She was me.
“We had names then.”
“We had lives.”
“But we shared a story, and in the end, the story wanted to be told.” The Nova Scotia woman stepped out of her doorway and into the white snow of my clearing. It felt like a violation and a reunion all at the same time. The feeling intensified when she reached forward and put a hand on my shoulder. “We’ve been waiting for you for a very long time.”
“I didn’t have a choice,” I said.
She smiled. “You had more of a choice than most of us. You had people around you to hold you out of the narrative flow, to keep your feet on solid ground while the story pooled around you. Most of us weren’t born this way. Most of us didn’t look exactly like this when we were alive—we were pale, or we dyed our hair, but we still looked more like individuals than ideas. You’ve had your whole life to live inside this skin, to learn the shape of what you are. You can use that.”
“To do what?” I asked.
“To stop the story.” The Japanese girl didn’t step out of her own doorway, but she glared so hard that I knew something had to be stopping her: there was no other reason for her to be so restrained. “We’re tired of frozen girls in boxes made of ice. We’re tired of new faces in the forest.”
“I’ve been trying to stop this story for my entire life,” I said.
The woman from Nova Scotia shook her head. “You’ve been standing outside of it and fighting against it. You’ve been wasting energy fighting yourself. Now you can finally start using what you are to win this war.”
“And you have to win,” said the farm girl. “For all of us.”
“For all the ones who aren’t here yet,” said another whiteout woman.
The woman with the freckles slashed her hands through the air, angry and pleading all at once.
I looked back to the woman from Nova Scotia. “So that’s all? Just fight? There’s no magical fairy tale wisdom waiting for me here?”
“Just us,” she said. “We’ll always be waiting for you here. We’re your sisters. We’re your future. This is the only thing we will ever ask of you, and we already know it’s too much, because the story has gone on for centuries.”
“Every story has to end eventually,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “So end this one.”
Snow began to fall around us as I stood and looked at her—only her, that one whiteout woman who had come into what I was struggling not to think of as my space. This was my piece of the forest: I knew that, deep down, just like I knew that the ice here would never freeze me, but that the sun would never rise. It would never be summer for the Snows.
“How?” I asked. “I don’t know how to leave.”
“Oh, that’s easy,” she said. “For us, everything begins with an apple, and ends with a glass coffin and a kiss. Hold on tight now. This isn’t easy.” She raised her hand, and she was holding an apple: the Lady Alice I’d eaten to start my story. The bites I’d taken were still gone, the apple flesh showing pale and tempting through the rosy cloak of the skin. She took a dainty bite from the untouched side of the apple, her teeth crunching loudly through the fruit. My mouth watered and my stomach churned at the same time, a dissonance that was somehow only natural.
She handed me the apple. I took it. It was easier, this time, to raise it to my mouth and eat. The forbidden fruit was no longer quite so forbidden, now that I had eaten it and lived.
“Remember us,” she said softly, taking the apple from my hand. “We’ll be waiting for you, when your own glass coffin comes.” Then she leaned forward and pressed her lips against my forehead. This close, she smelled like warm flannel and apple blossoms, and part of me—the part that wanted to think of this as home—wanted to wrap my arms around her and never, ever let her go.
The snow began to fall harder. She pulled back, and was instantly lost in the tumbling sheets of white. Even the trees disappeared, and then the ground beneath my feet was gone, and I was falling, falling into endless whiteness—
—only to slam, hard, into the blackened ground of a blasted plain. There was no snow here, not on the ground or in the air, and the trees were burnt-out husks, their branches less like fingers and more like claws as they grasped toward the sky. It wasn’t night anymore, either; I pushed myself upright and looked into a poisonous sunset that seemed somehow vilely familiar. I stared at it for a moment before I realized that I knew every shade of red, pink, orange, and snakebite yellow in that sky. I had seen them all appearing on apple skins.
“Well, hello, new girl,” said a voice from behind me.
I shoved myself back to my feet, all pretense of caution abandoned as I whirled to face the speaker. I’d been fighting the narrative long enough to know danger when I heard it.
If the whiteout women in the snowy wood had looked like my sisters, this woman could almost have been my twin. She was a perfect manifestation of the story we shared, and somehow made her orange prison jumpsuit look like the robes of a princess. She smirked as she looked at me, her perpetually bloody mouth twisting into a cruel line.
“You’re alive,” she said. “That’s a change. I can fix it for you, if you like.”
And just like that I knew her. Knew why she looked so familiar. Knew why she was here in this barren wasteland instead of stranded in the comforting snow with all the others. I straightened, my hand going to the gun at my belt. “You’re Adrianna,” I said. “You’re the one who went bad.”
She snorted. “Good, bad, what’s the difference? As long as we keep our hands filled with poisoned apples, no one’s going to care who’s eating them.”
“People cared.”
“Did you, new girl? From the looks of you, you didn’t even exist when I walked among the living and made them remember why they should fear the name ‘Snow White.’ And I’m not Adrianna. Not anymore. Adrianna died. We’re all Snow White here, and we’re all a part of the same story.”
I could see it when she spoke: the vast shape of our story in all its tangles and permutations, and here, this small patch of land, where a fully manifested part of the narrative had turned so sour as to twist and taint everything around it. Adrianna might not have been the first Snow White to go wrong—but then again, maybe she was. Either way, as soon as one of us learned how to fall, the rest of us knew exactly what to do to follow her.
She made it look so easy, like eating an apple, said the voice of my inner Snow, and for once, I didn’t try to make her go away.
“I’m not Snow White,” I said. “My name is Henrietta Marchen, and I am a field agent with the ATI Management Bureau.”
Adrianna’s eyes widened. “Oh, really? You’re a member of the fairy tale police? Isn’t that quaint. How much do you think they’re going to trust you now that you’ve fallen into storybook hell? You’ll be just like the rest of us in no time. It doesn’t matter whether they lock you away in a nice padded room or shoot you in the back of the head. Glass coffins can take many forms. Our story always ends in death—and looking at you now, I’d be willing to bet that you’ll wind up here with me and not in that stupid forest with all those mewling princesses. You’re going to fall like a blizzard, Snowflake, and I’m going to cheer you every step of the way.”
“You’re wrong.” Why was I even here? Adrianna represented a part of the story that I hadn’t encountered in the snowy wood, but the woman from Nova Scotia had seemed so sure that she was sending me home. She’d given me an apple. She’d given me a kiss.
She hadn’t given me a glass coffin.
&
nbsp; “Am I?” asked Adrianna. She pulled her hand from behind her back, and I was somehow unsurprised to see the long glass sliver she was holding, its edges stained red with her own blood. It was the third piece in the puzzle. It was out of order, but that didn’t change what it represented. This was a storybook nightmare: symbolism was all that mattered here. “I guess we’re going to see, aren’t we?”
“Yeah, I guess we are,” I said, and forced my hands down to my sides, forced myself to remain calm and unflinching as she walked calmly toward me across the blasted ground, forced myself not to close my eyes or look away as she raised the glass shard and aimed it at my heart.
This is part of the story too, I thought. I can’t die here. The narrative wouldn’t throw me away like that.
But I couldn’t entirely believe it, and that belief grew even thinner when she slammed the glass home, slicing through fabric, flesh, and bone without any perceptible resistance. I think I screamed, but Adrianna was gone; there was no one in front of me. So I screamed again, and there was no one there to hear me, and then I was gone, and there was no one there at all.
#
“Don’t kiss her, you idiot—are you trying to kill her?” Sloane’s voice was very near, as angry and acidic as always. As I heard it, I became aware of the ground pressed against my cheek, and the smell of crushed grass and smoke filling the air.
“She needs to wake up!” Jeff. There was an undercurrent of panic to his tone, running dangerously close to the surface, like a razor blade concealed in a Halloween apple. If he bit down on his own fear, he would cut himself so deeply that the bleeding would never stop.
Am I going to be thinking in apple metaphors for the rest of my life? I wondered.
Yes, the part of me that was Snow answered.
I groaned.
The sound must have been louder than I thought, because the shouting around me stopped. A hand touched my shoulder, and Jeff said, “Henry? Are you okay?”
“She’s not on your side anymore!” shouted another voice that I recognized—Demi. Sloane must not have murdered her after all. That was a relief. I had not been looking forward to the paperwork. “She’s with us now!”
“Can we gag her?” demanded Andy.
“Absolutely,” said Sloane.
“Can someone get me some mouthwash?” I pushed myself upright, not shrugging Jeff’s hand away but not reaching for it either. My eyes were still closed. I didn’t want to open them. I understood explosives well enough to know what must have happened to my borrowed army of woodland creatures when they charged into Birdie’s house, and I didn’t want to see their bodies just yet. “Everything tastes like apples, and I’m not too happy about that.”
Sloane laughed. “She’s still Henry.”
“Was that in question?” I asked, finally cracking one eye open.
Jeff was right there next to me, not holding me up, but hovering in a way that made it clear he would do so if I needed him to. At that moment, I wouldn’t have minded being held. Andy was a short distance away. His jacket was gone, and red stains on his shirt and trousers marked the places where the blast had flung broken squirrels and shattered pigeons against him. Sloane loomed suddenly into view, dropping into a crouch as she peered quizzically into my eyes. Unlike Jeff, who was relatively untouched, and Andy, with his few small splotches of red, Sloane was covered in blood. Even the red streaks in her hair had taken on a deeper color, almost blending with the black.
I blinked. She grinned.
“Don’t worry—most of it’s Demi’s,” she said. “You still feeling bossy and cantankerous in there, Snow-bitch, or are you thinking about digging little graves for all your little animal friends?”
“Don’t make me report you to Human Resources,” I snapped. “Now somebody help me up before something else explodes.”
“Ladies and gentlemen, the boss is back,” said Andy, a wide smile splitting his face. “You scared the crap out of us, Henry.”
“We’re not out of the woods yet, people,” I said, and grimaced, my eyes cheating toward the trees growing on all sides. “No pun intended. Sloane, were you being serious when you said that most of that was Demi’s blood? Because I’m not quite ready to condone beating her to death.”
“She got a nosebleed,” said Sloane, reaching forward and taking my hand in hers. Her fingers left red stains on my skin. “Sure, I had to punch her four or five times to make that happen, but nosebleeds are a normal part of being a traitorous bitch who goes over to the dark side at the first sign of trouble.”
I thought of the forest while Sloane pulled me to my feet. “She may not have had a choice, if the narrative shook her hard enough when she was already standing on unsteady ground,” I said. My knees wobbled as I tried to stand on my own, and Jeff was there, putting his arm around my shoulders without waiting for permission. I leaned gratefully into him. I wasn’t sure whether this was a good idea, but this whole night had been built on a foundation of potentially bad decisions, and at least I knew that Jeff would never blossom into a Prince Charming. That was one roller coaster I could still avoid.
Andy frowned. “You all right there?”
“Not even a little bit, but thanks.” I wiped the mud from my cheek. For the first time in my life, I was genuinely glad to be a second-generation story. First-generation Snow Whites usually had some of the signature coloring, but it intensified after they became active. I couldn’t have coped with suddenly losing my melanin after everything else that had happened since the sun went down. “What’s Demi’s condition? Apart from the nosebleed.”
“See for yourself.” Sloane pointed at something behind me. I turned.
Demi was sitting on the street with her back propped against the side of the van. Her arms and legs had been taped together with black electrical tape, and there was a ball of wadded-up fabric in her mouth, held in place with another strip of tape. Blood covered the lower half of her face, and one of her eyes was starting to swell nicely from what I judged to be a rather solid punch. She glared daggers at me as I looked at her.
“Please tell me that’s not a sock,” I said.
“It should have been a sock; she deserves a sock,” said Andy. “But no. It’s my tie.”
“Good. That’s a little more sanitary. Where’s her flute?”
“We saved all the pieces,” said Jeff.
Under the circumstances, I couldn’t argue with their decision to take Demi’s weapon away. In fact … “We need to secure her feet better,” I said. “She’s a Piper. If she can hammer out a rhythm, she can use it against us.”
Demi’s eyes widened in sudden realization.
“I didn’t think of that,” said Jeff.
“Apparently, neither did she,” said Sloane. “Good job, Henry.”
“Stuff it,” I suggested mildly.
“Play nicely, please,” said Andy, as he moved to wrap more tape around Demi’s feet. She glared at him. He ignored it. “What next, boss?”
I needed a shower, and something to take the taste of apples out of my mouth. Sometimes I hate being in charge. “We head back to base,” I said. “The deputy director needs to know what happened out here, and we can dispatch someone to get us all clean clothes.” There are advantages to being located in an old biological research facility. An on-site shower room is one of them.
“I keep a change of clothes in my desk,” said Sloane. We all turned to blink at her. She shrugged. “What, you think I have all those packages shipped to the office for my health? It’s always ‘Sloane, go into the sewer after the gremlin,’ or ‘Sloane, wade into the abattoir to save the baby.’ I throw out six pairs of tights a month.”
“I am not having this conversation right now,” grumbled Andy. “It’s too weird, even for me.”
“None of us are having any more conversations right now,” I said. “Jeff, get some plastic sheeting over the seats in the van. Andy, you and Sloane get Demi into the back. We’re going home.”
It was time to face the music,
in more ways than one.
#
Of the five of us, only Jeff and I were completely unwounded: Andy had some shrapnel in his left shoulder—bits of wood and bone flung outward by the explosion—and Sloane had skinned her knuckles on Demi’s teeth. Jeff had been shielded from the blast by Andy, and I had been in the front, sending the animals back inside to die. All I really needed to be presentable was a wet nap from the glove compartment.
Demi, of course, had had the crap beaten out of her.
The wet nap’s plastic packaging smelled faintly of the barbecue joint that it had originally come from, some forgotten fast-food-run ago. I resisted the urge to lick it as I wiped the mud from my cheek and chin. Anything to get the taste of apple out of my mouth. Jeff, who was driving, kept stealing glances in my direction, almost like he couldn’t believe that I was really there. I wasn’t sure that I believed it myself.
When we pulled up in front of Bureau headquarters I dropped the wet-nap on the van floor—it already needed a thorough cleanup after the events of the night; one more piece of garbage wasn’t going to make a difference—and said, “Does everybody know where they’re going?”
“Holding cells and then the infirmary,” said Andy.
“Infirmary and then the holding cells,” said Sloane.
“Archives,” said Jeff.
“Good. I will be updating our beloved deputy director. If anything explodes or catches fire, call me. And for the love of Grimm, somebody order a goddamn pizza or something. If I don’t get this taste out of my mouth, I’m going to scream.”
I hopped out and slammed the van door behind me, stalking toward the darkened building. It was strangely satisfying, like a denial of the placid little fairy tale princess that the narrative wanted me to be. It wanted a Snow White? I’d give it a Snow White, and make it sorry.
My key card still worked when I swiped it across the reader. I hadn’t realized I was worried about that until the light turned green and the door clicked open. Birdie had been in Dispatch for years, so there was no telling how deep her control of our systems might go. If she knew that I’d gone active, she could have called security and reported me as a threat before her own clearance was revoked by our report.
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