The world smears sideways around me. A silent wind rushes past.
I see a woman sleeping in a castle bedroom, its windows dark with thorns.
I see a woman sleeping on a mountaintop, broad-shouldered and armored, surrounded by shields and flames. Her nose is crooked and scarred; she scowls even in her sleep.
I see a woman sleeping in a chrome coffin, white frost prickling across the deep brown of her skin. There is nothing but a thin metal hull between her and the star-strewn black of space.
I see a woman sleeping among the wild roses of the deep woods, her hair cropped short and her hand curled around the hilt of a sword.
I see women sleeping in towers and townhouses, attics and lakes, hospital beds and spaceships. Some of them sleep serenely, as if they’ve accepted their fate; some of them look like they fought fate tooth and nail and are still ready to go another round. All of them are alone.
Except me, because I have Charm. I see her sleeping on top of a grubby comforter in the abandoned guard tower on Route 32. The buckets and vases of roses still surround her, their edges curled black with age, their leaves shriveled. The bleached wing of her hair is fanned like a halo behind her head and there’s a misshapen tutu tugged over her jeans. The plastic crown she gave me on my birthday glimmers false gold on her brow. I told her to dress like a princess, and I guess this is as close as she gets.
I’m so relieved to see her I almost wake from this not-quite dream. I wasn’t sure it would work—Charm isn’t really a sleeping beauty. But she had a mother and father who longed for a daughter, and she shared my curse with me for almost twenty-one years. And she climbed to the top of the tallest tower in the land and slept surrounded by roses. It must have been enough.
Or maybe—I look at her hand, still curled tight around her phone, still waiting for my next text—we’re so much a part of one another’s stories that the laws of physics bend for us, just a little.
Charm opens her eyes. I see my name on her lips. Her hand reaches up toward me and I reach down to her, and I know, I know, that I could step out of this knockoff fairy tale world and go back into my own. I could go home, and to hell with Primrose and Prince Harold and shitty medieval gender roles.
But I promised the Queen I would try to change her daughter’s fate, and I promised Primrose she wouldn’t be alone. And maybe the dying girl rules are garbage, and instead of just trying not to die we should be trying to live.
My hand finds Charm’s and I haul her toward me. I feel her body land beside mine on the dungeon floor, smell the slightly chemical citrus of her hair, but I remain in the whirling in-between. I look out at all those hundreds of sleeping beauties, trapped and cursed, bound and buried, all alone. I wonder if they’ll even be able to hear me, and if any of them will answer; I wonder how badly they want out of their stories.
The void between worlds is nibbling at my edges, tearing at my borders. I don’t know what’ll happen if I linger too long, but I imagine it’s the same thing that would happen to a chickadee who lingered in a jet engine. I reach my hand out to all the sleeping princesses and whisper the word that brought me into Primrose’s world, that sent both our stories careening off their tracks: “Help.”
I land back on the cold cell of my floor, surrounded by roses and rot. My last bleary thought before I slip into true sleep, or possibly a coma, is that some of the beauties must have heard me.
Because some of them have answered.
* * *
HANDS ARE SHAKING my shoulders. A voice—a voice I know better than any other voice in the world—is saying my name. “Zinnia Gray. I did not zap myself into another dimension to watch you die. Wake up.”
I open my eyes to the same face I’ve woken up to on hundreds of Saturday mornings since second grade: Charmaine Baldwin. She’s looming over me with a worried frown and wild hair. I give her a lopsided smile. “Morning, sunshine.”
She rests her forehead very briefly against mine. “Oh, thank Jesus.”
I sit up slowly, achy and stiff, feeling simultaneously hungover and still drunk, to find that my list of assets has expanded considerably while I slept: there are now four women crammed into my narrow, rose-filled cell.
Charm, sitting cross-legged with her tutu crumpled in her lap and her head tilted back against the bars, eyes closed in relief. The short-haired girl with the sword and the stubborn jaw who reminds me of every young adult protagonist from the ’90s; the Black space princess wearing a silvery suit and a skeptical expression, stepped straight out of science fiction; the armored Viking woman whose name is probably something like Brunhilda and whose shoulders are wider than any three of us shoved together.
All of them came when I called. All of them stepped out of their own narratives to save someone else. All of them are staring at me.
“Uh,” I begin auspiciously. “Thank you all for coming.” I’m banking on the fairy tale logic of this world to let them understand me. “I think you’re all—well, I think we’re all versions of the same story, retold in different realities. The universe is like a book, see, and telling a story is like writing on a page. And if a story is told enough times, the ink bleeds through.” Charm makes a small, pained sound at the scientific absurdity of my explanation. The other beauties stare at me in unblinking unison.
“So we’re … the ink? In this metaphor?” It’s the space princess, whose expression of skepticism has deepened by several degrees.
“Yes?”
Charm rescues me, as usual. “Don’t we have a wedding to stop? A princess to save?”
“Oh, right. So there’s another one of us here. She was cursed to prick her finger on a spindle’s end and fall into a hundred-year sleep”—a series of grim nods from the other beauties—“except it turns out the curse was supposed to save her from a shitty marriage”—at least two grim nods—“and she’s probably standing at the altar right now. I was hoping you could help me bust out of here and save her.”
A painful silence follows while they exchange a series of glances. The ’90s heroine-type cocks her head at me. “And afterward you’ll send us home?”
“Or wherever else you want to go.” Assuming I can arrange another moment of sufficient narrative resonance, but I elect not to alarm them with the sketchy details of my sketchy-ass plan.
The Viking woman gives a wordless shrug, tosses her pale braids over one shoulder, and turns to face the barred door. She wraps her scarred fists around the bars and muscle ripples across her back. Ropes of tendon twist down her arms.
I have time to think no fucking way before the iron gives a long groan of submission. The bars are warping beneath her fists, bending slowly inward, when a blue bolt of light streaks past my ear. It sizzles through the iron like spit through tissue paper, leaving nothing but a ragged, faintly smoking hole where the latch used to be. The Viking lets go of the bars. The door swings meekly open.
We turn collectively toward the space princess, who is holstering something shiny and chrome that’s probably called a blaster or a plasma arc. I hear Charm whisper a reverent hot damn.
We ascend the stairs in single file, boots and tennis shoes and bare feet tapping against the stone. A pair of guards wait at the top, hands slack around their spears, entirely unprepared for a legion of renegade princesses to descend upon them like a set of mismatched Valkyries.