I turned around, and gasped.
The trees had seemed unusually widely spaced when I first looked at them, and now I saw the reason why: the spaces between the matte black trunks could be interpreted as doorways, each of them opening into a forest that was almost, but not exactly, like the one where I was stranded. And now that I was looking properly, those doors were full—each and every one of them—occupied by girls with skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood, and hair as black as (
black as coal, as tar, as obsidian, as the bottom of a well, as black, as black as a raven’s wing
) the space between the stars that glittered overhead.
They should have seemed identical, those white-red-black girls, but they weren’t anything alike, not now that I was really
looking
at them. They came from every ethnicity on the planet, skin bleached into alien pallor by the story that had shaped them, but features remaining as unique and individual as fingerprints. Some wore their glossy black hair at shoulder length; others wore it long, or in cascades of curls, or buzzed so close to their skulls that it seemed more like gray ash than anything else. They had blue eyes, brown eyes, green eyes—even red eyes, in the few cases where the narrative had used the genes for a kind of albinism to reach its desired effect.
“Hello, Snow,” said the nearest of the whiteout women, the one with the Nova Scotia accent. She was taller than I was, and curvier, with a round jaw and a swelling bosom that strained against the buttons of her red flannel shirt. “We wondered if you were ever going to join us.”
“Where am I?” I asked.
“Inside the story,” said another woman, this one of Japanese descent, wearing jeans and a silver foil T-shirt covered in kanji that I didn’t know how to read. “Inside the story, which is inside you, just like a heart inside a duck’s egg.”
“Don’t mess with her,” scolded a teenage girl with six piercings in each ear and a flat Midwestern accent. Pure dairy princess from the farmlands, if you ignored her coloring. “She’s new and she’s confused. We were all new and confused once. It comes with the territory.”
A tall, thin woman with ash gray freckles spattered across the bridge of her nose moved her hands in a series of sharp but fluid gestures, her brown eyes burning into me. I recognized ASL, even if I didn’t speak it. The woman from Nova Scotia translated, saying, “‘We were all new and confused, but we got over that long before we came here.’ You have the advantage over us, Snow-my-girl: you’re still Henrietta, because you’re still alive.”
I looked at her, and I didn’t say anything. I didn’t need to. The taste of apples was hot and sour in my mouth, and I knew where I was: in a forest full of ghosts, surrounded by the specters of all the Snow Whites who had come before me.
“Nice way to drop the ‘everyone around you is dead’ concept into the conversation,” said the farm girl, almost apologetically.
“It had to come up eventually, and we don’t have that much time,” said the Japanese woman. “She’s new and she’s old all at once. That isn’t usual.”
“Regardless,” said the Nova Scotia woman. “Henrietta, look at me.”
I looked. I couldn’t resist: not when she spoke to me like that, not when her voice carried all the weight of our mother—our mutual mother who had never existed, the queen with the pricked finger who sat in the windowsill and first dreamed all of us into being.
The whiteout woman smiled sympathetically when I turned back to face her. “This is hard, I know, but you need to listen. Yes: we are dead. We are the ones whose glass coffins broke before we could be rescued, or who never found our way to the coffin at all. We died in motel beds and in alleyways, in hospitals and in hovels.”
“I died on a parade float,” said the farm girl. “It was Homecoming. My dress was white as snow, and my lip gloss tasted like apples and cyanide.”
“I died on a plane above the Atlantic Ocean,” said the Japanese girl. “It glimmered like a mirror in the sun. There wasn’t a doctor on the flight.”
“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.
“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!”