Indexing: Reflections (Kindle Serials) (Indexing Series Book 2) (17 page)

My stomach lurched. The urge to charge her was strong. But I had a single blunt branch, and she had a spear. I had everything to lose, and she had everything to gain. I stayed where I was.

“Come on, little doorway, little princess with the terrible name. Your mother would have come to me by now. She loved me better than you can imagine, and she left me anyway. They always leave. You know that, don’t you? Your sister left you too.”

It was only the presence of my hand over my mouth that kept me from gasping.

“My sister is the reason we know stories can be changed. She couldn’t escape hers, but she could massage it into something new. Trade the thorn for the spindle; it’s still a prick, and she still gets away from the bear.” Adrianna stalked forward. “It’s not her fault she forgot how that story went when it was new. The narrative is a vengeful god. It didn’t like her changing the rules it had decided she would live by. So it made her pay for what she’d done, and I made everyone else pay for what it had done to
her
!”

On the last word she whirled and hurled her spear into the space between two trees, a space shaped vaguely like a woman, all curves and soft angles. Had that space been shaped that way when I took shelter here, or was the wood doing what it could to protect me? I couldn’t be sure one way or the other . . . but I suspected the latter. The whiteout wood didn’t want Adrianna to win any more than I did, even if we had different reasons.

Adrianna glared at the trees as she stalked forward to retrieve her spear. “You can’t hide from me forever, little doorway. You’re only making things worse for yourself. You know that, don’t you? Give up, give in, and let me open you, before you make me
mad
.”

She kept going after she had her spear back, vanishing into the black and white distance. I stayed where I was, not moving, and began counting silently down from five hundred.

I had just reached three-fifty when she appeared again, leaping from between two trees and looking wildly around the clearing. I didn’t move. She muttered something and left again, slipping out of sight as easily as a shadow.

This time, I moved immediately, taking two steps backward and whirling around before I ran for the other side of the whiteout wood. I didn’t look back. I didn’t dare.

# # #

It was some indefinable amount of time later, and I was digging a pit with my bare hands, scything through layer after layer of snow as I sought the earth beneath, when I realized I hadn’t seen a single Snow White, apart from Adrianna, since she had appeared. I hadn’t even seen the oddly-spaced trees that signaled the presence of another Snow’s clearing, where I might have been able to find temporary shelter, if not an ally.

“Is this because they don’t want to get involved, or because you won’t let them?” I murmured, keeping my voice low. I didn’t want to attract Adrianna by talking to myself, but the stress and fear were getting to me. I needed something to anchor me to the world.

The wind gusted around me, caressing my cheek as it blew. There was a whisper there, like the faint voice of the wood trying to answer my question, but I couldn’t tell what it was saying. I was still enough of an outsider that the wood couldn’t speak to me directly. That was a good thing—a
very
good thing, considering I wanted to go home more than I wanted almost anything else.

Home. It was already starting to feel like a foreign concept, like the life I had lived was the fairy-tale dream, and this frozen, virtually monochrome wood was the reality. I couldn’t tell if exhaustion was wearing me down or if my memories were actually changing, twisting to suit a more storybook narrative. Either way, I didn’t like it.

So I was digging holes.

This was my fifth. Dig deep enough that a leg could get stuck, then cover the opening with a thin sheet of ice pried up from a frozen snowbank, and cover the ice with more snow. If Adrianna tried to follow me, she’d risk breaking a leg. Maybe the wood would heal her and maybe it wouldn’t. Either way, the injury would slow her down.

Something snapped in the trees up ahead: the sound of a small branch breaking. I froze. I was out in the open, too far from the trees for their bark to camouflage my hair. There was only one thing I could think of, and so I dropped onto my back on the snow, hastily shoveling armfuls of the stuff above my head. My eyebrows and eyelashes were also a risk. I slathered a fistful of snow over my forehead and eyes, clapped a hand over my mouth, and waited.

Anywhere else, this solution would have been useless. Lying on my back in the snow, trusting the villain to pass me by? It was so simple as to be completely impossible. But this was the whiteout wood, and fairy-tale logic reigned supreme. I was a black and white girl, and I had covered my hair with snow the exact color of my skin. I may as well have been invisible.

I heard Adrianna walk past me, her feet crunching in the snow. When silence fell again, I opened my eyes and looked warily around, waiting for an ambush, looking for Adrianna. It didn’t come. I didn’t see her. But I saw something else: flecks of red beneath the snow, uncovered by my frantic shoveling. How they’d appeared after something so simple, when they hadn’t been uncovered by the wind or by my frantic running, I didn’t know and wasn’t going to ask. If I was going to use fairy-tale logic to survive, I had to trust fairy-tale logic to steer me truly toward safe harbor—if such a place even existed anymore.

I reached for one of the red specks, digging my fingers into the snow until I could grip it and pull. It came away easily. A strawberry. The flesh wasn’t frozen; it was as soft and pliant as anything from a grocery store. I placed it on my tongue, where it melted into sweetness and the taste of frost. Winter strawberries weren’t usually a part of this story, but I recognized them from other places in the narrative, other stories of girls and snow and isolation. I swept more of the snow away with the palm of my hand, uncovering a riot of strawberry plants with leaves sculpted from delicate glacial ice and berries as red as my bloody mouth.

“Okay,” I said, and started picking.

When I had a handful of berries I stood, placing a second in my mouth as I began to walk. I didn’t watch for Adrianna. I didn’t look to the left or right. I just ate strawberries and walked through the wood, letting it guide me, trusting it, for this little while, to take me where I needed to go.

The maze appeared when I placed the final strawberry in my mouth. One moment the way ahead of me was clear, the snowy ground spattered with black-branched trees, and then there was a labyrinth stretching all the way to the horizon, walls made of blue-white glacial ice. I knew salvation when I saw it. I broke into a run, heading for the safety of the maze.

For Adrianna to win, she had to catch me and do whatever was necessary to “open” me. Given our previous encounters, I was more than reasonably sure that “opening” was a painful process. It might not be fatal in the wood, but that didn’t mean I would enjoy it. I definitely wouldn’t enjoy being trapped in this snowy, story-clad wonderland, knowing Adrianna was somewhere in the waking world, wreaking havoc with my hands. So I couldn’t let it happen.

For me to win, all I had to do was stay away from her until Jeff got tired of waiting and kissed me awake. I didn’t know why he hadn’t done it already, but as I kept reminding myself, time was funny in the wood. Maybe I’d only been under for a few minutes, and this was all happening with the speed of a particularly vicious lucid dream.

The wind blew past my ears, carrying the ghost of Adrianna’s voice. I couldn’t tell what she was saying, but the warning was clear: she was getting close. I dove forward, losing my footing on the snowy ground, and belly-flopped through the entry to the maze. There was no snow inside, just hard-packed, icy ground. I landed hard enough to knock the wind out of myself, and quickly found myself presented with another problem as I began sliding forward like a kid at a water park. The ground wasn’t slanted, but still I slid, skidding around a corner and impacting with a dead end wall. I lay there in a heap, trying not to wheeze.

There was no mud on my nightgown, despite my inglorious arrival. Black, white, red: those were the only colors allowed to me. Anything else would have contradicted my story.

The wind wasn’t blowing inside the maze. For the first time, I could hear everything. I heard footsteps. I heard an exasperated sigh. And worst of all, I heard Adrianna say, “You’d favor her over me this much? We’re both your children. You ruined the both of us. What makes her so special, that you would try to help her get away?”

If the wind answered her, I didn’t hear it. But I heard Adrianna snort.

“Fine, then,” she said. “You can change the world to suit yourself, but you can’t save her. All you’ve done is push her one step closer to the mirror.” Then came the footsteps, stalking into the maze, prowling slow and easy as a jungle cat.

The dead end where I was so inelegantly sprawled didn’t leave me anywhere to hide. I looked frantically around before compacting myself into the corner, pressing my head back against the icy walls in an effort to hide as much of my hair as possible. I clapped one strawberry-sticky hand over my mouth, hiding my lips. There was nothing I could do about my eyebrows and lashes, and I didn’t dare close my eyes. If I couldn’t see her coming, I thought I might go mad.

The footsteps paced by, accompanied by rippling reflections on the glacial walls. Adrianna either hadn’t seen the cul-de-sac I’d fallen down, or had assumed I was too smart to hide this close to the entrance. Either way, I heard her walk away and started to relax. I could run the other way now. Maybe I could make it to the hazel wood, or to the rose fields of the Rose Reds, and hide among a different story. She’d never think to look for me there. I could wait out the rest of my nap in peace.

I got carefully to my feet and crept back along the way I’d slid. There were no marks on the ground. The icy floor of the maze didn’t take footprints or, apparently, bellyprints. That was a good thing when it came to not being followed. It was a bad thing when it came to being sure I was going in the right direction.

Then I came to where I was
sure
the entrance to the maze had been, absolutely
sure
, and it wasn’t there. Instead, a blank ice wall stood across the path, barring me from escape. I stopped where I was and stared.

“Please tell me this is a joke,” I said.

The wall of ice didn’t disappear. Either I’d gone the wrong way, or—but no. There was something on the ground, a little speck of red that didn’t fit in with the monochrome world around it. I knelt, picking it up.

It was a strawberry top, white as snow, but with a few faint traces of strawberry pulp still clinging to it. This was where I had entered the maze, and where the whiteout wood had—for whatever reason—closed the door behind me.

“Thanks a lot,” I muttered, and turned to face the labyrinth.

If I was going to escape, I was going to need to find another way out.

# # #

The walls weren’t all identical. I realized that fast, when my eyes adjusted to their new, frozen world and started picking out the subtle details. Some of the walls had a wave pattern worked into their bases. Those were the ones that led north to south. Others had a faint series of cracks running along their centers, like they had been hit lightly but repeatedly with a small hammer. Those were the walls that led east to west.

It should probably have been difficult to tell the cardinal directions here, in this virtually featureless maze, but somehow it was easier than ever, like the wood was trying to provide what guidance it could. The hazel wood was to the east, and when I faced that direction, I could smell floor polish and glass cleaner and char—the distant shadows of a place built around soot and cleanliness. If I could find the eastern edge of the maze, I could scale the wall and tumble to safety, like a black and white Alice falling down the rabbit hole.

Don’t mix your stories here,
I scolded myself silently, as I crept along one of the north-south walls. I hadn’t seen any sign of Adrianna since she’d walked past my hiding place, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t lurking. The sealed door kept us both inside the maze.
There’s no telling what you could change.

It couldn’t be as simple as a thought. If it were, every reimagining that made Snow White a vampire would have left me anemic and yearning for a rare steak. But I was a living incarnation of the narrative trapped in the sleeping heart of my own story, and I didn’t want to find out the hard way how much I could revise. Skin as white as snow was inconvenient. I burned too easily, and was probably putting my dermatologist’s kids through school. I was also used to it. It was the story I knew.

Something tapped against the ice up ahead. It was a faint sound, almost not there. In a louder world, I would have missed it entirely. In the silence of the maze, it echoed like a bell. I froze, looking around me for a moment before ducking through the nearest opening and pressing myself against the wall, becoming still and silent.

The footsteps began barely a second later.

“You can’t run from me forever, little doorway,” said Adrianna. She sounded annoyed now. I was running harder than she had expected, and she didn’t like it. “You should stop while you can, while there’s still a chance that I’ll have some mercy on those fools you call friends. They don’t all have to die. Their lives are in your hands.”

I said nothing. I didn’t move.

“Where’s the gratitude? Where’s the ‘thank you, Aunt Adrianna, for letting me grow up in my own body, instead of here in the wood’? I could have taken you the day you were born, you know, and no one would have known the difference. I would have grown up in your place. Instead, I let you have your life, at least long enough to learn how much you didn’t want it. The world isn’t easy on the fairy-tale girls.”

Was it my imagination, or were her steps slowing?

You couldn’t have taken me,
I thought, like yelling at her in my mind could somehow make her back away.
My story wasn’t active. I didn’t come to the wood. I wasn’t yours.