THE NEXT WORLDhas the sleek, blue-lit aesthetic of far-future science fiction. The walls are stacked with cold metal coffins. Waxen faces stare from their small, frosted windows, dead or sleeping, their lips a sickening, poisonous red.
The queen hisses between her teeth and flings us back into the void.
We land on a steep and lonely mountainside. For a moment I think we’re alone, but then a branch cracks. A long-legged dog trots past us, its coat silken silver, its eyes fixed on some invisible purpose. Six more follow at its heels, a soft river of paws and skulls and sterling fur.
“What—” the queen begins, but a woman comes loping into the view after the dogs. She has hair the color of the moon and a dress the color of snow, and her eyes widen when they land on the queen. For a moment I think she might bare her teeth or set her hounds on us, but then her eyes slide to me. She bows her head, as one would to a fellow soldier in a long war, and runs on after her dogs.
The two of us are left standing together in the pine-scented silence, unsure whether we’ve been blessed or cursed. The queen takes my hand almost gently this time, before she lifts the mirror again.
A college campus full of ivy-eaten buildings and signs in Korean, where one extremely beautiful boy is offering an apple to another equally beautiful boy.
A sumptuous wedding feast that seems to involve seven ogres and a princess in a gown of richest red.
A hunched woman offering a comb to a little girl, her lips curving in a cold smile.
I can feel myself coming undone, unspooling into the endless whirl of dead girls and coffin lids, wicked mothers and poison apples. The same story repeated again and again, like a woman standing between two mirrors, reflected into infinity.
And then another forest, curled and black beneath a starless sky. I wrench my arm away from the queen and pluck the mirror from her other hand. She’s too weak to stop me, her skin clammy and chilled, her limbs shuddering.
She rolls onto her stomach beside me, panting into the dark muck of leaves and earth. “This is where you draw the line?” she spits. “Thisis where you choose to stay?”
She has an extremely good point. The woods around us bear no resemblance at all to the first forest we landed in, with its flower petals and birdsong. The trees here are knotted and bent, like snapped bones that have healed poorly, and the darkness is the kind that makes your eyes ache if you look at it too long. I’ve hit a couple of versions of Sleeping Beauty that edged into horror, and returned with new scars and probably some undiagnosed PTSD. Charm threw a fit about it, and the next time I left home I found a new pocketknife and a first aid kit in my pack, along with a note readingDon’t die, boneheadin Prim’s fancy calligraphy.
So, no, I don’t love the Grimm-dark vibe of these woods, but I’m tired on a subatomic level, my muscles shaking and my teeth chattering, and I’m done channel surfing at someone else’s whim. “Why not?” I make an effort to crawl away and manage several consecutive feet before collapsing against my own backpack, mirror still in myhand. “Look, you’ve got to give it a rest. You’re going to kill yourself at this pace.”
“As if you care about my fate.” Her voice darkens, silky and low. “Beyond your base desires, of course.”
“My what?”
The queen raises herself to her hands and knees just so she can do a haughty glare at me. “It’s a little late to feign indifference. Youkissedme.”
I’m torn between explaining that my kiss was actually a failed escape attempt and clarifying that there’s nothing especially base about desiring a tall, dangerous woman with terrible vibes (whomst among us, etc.). Instead, I say, “Whatever. I just need a break from that mirror, okay?”
“Then tell me how to get out of this damned story.” The queen’s voice is ragged, pushed far beyond exhaustion but still unwilling to bend. It would be admirable if it weren’t extremely annoying. “Tell me, and I swear I’ll stop.”
“Bite me.”
“Now is not the time for your crude fantasies!” She climbs unsteadily to her feet, takes two wavering steps in my direction. “You have no idea what it’s like to fight for your own right to exist. To know yourself doomed, yet to keep striving—”
I throw a wad of leaves at her. “Cry me a fucking river, woman. You just found out how your story endslast week. I’ve spent my whole life under a death sentence.”
The queen is clawing wet leaves out of her hair, teeth flashing white in the gloom. “You think I haven’t?” Her voice is a strangled hiss. “I may not have known about the iron shoes, but I was always headed for a bad ending. I was an ugly second daughter with uncanny power, and then I was a foreign bride who bore no heirs. Now I am aqueen who is feared only slightly more than she is hated, and my time is up. But I have fought tooth and nail to survive, and no pretty little princess is going to stop me.”
This little monologue leaves me with two not entirely comfortable sensations. The first is the sudden, lurching shame of my worldview being wrenched out of shape as it occurs to me that Snow White might not be the only victim here. The second comes from the wordpretty,which the queen tried to hurl at me like a slap, but which faltered mid-flight and landed quite differently. I find myself struggling to form a sufficiently scathing response, or any response at all.
But she’s not even looking at me anymore. She’s staring into the abyssal black between the trees with a long-suffering expression. “Oh, not another one.”
There’s a fragile amber light flickering closer, like a candle held in a shaking fist. Scurrying footsteps. The terrified panting of someone running for reasons that are not recreational.
The queen looks inclined to melt into the shadows and let this character pass us by, their narrative uninterrupted, but I stand woozily and say, “Hello?”
I catch a glimpse of a young girl with brown skin and terror-struck eyes before I realize the lantern has left her night-blind. She slams into my diaphragm and we go down in a pile of limbs and elbows while the queen gives a small, pained sigh.
The girl scrambles to her knees, already trying to launch herself back into the tangled dark of the woods, but I catch her shoulder. “Hey, it’s okay. We’re not going to hurt you.”
She shrugs my hand away. “I have to hide—they’re coming—”
“Who? The huntsman?”
