Indexing: Reflections (Kindle Serials) (Indexing Series Book 2) (18 page)

I was in the wood now. Carefully, I began inching away from the sound of her footsteps, staying up against the wall. My bare feet made no sound on the icy ground. I barely noticed the cold anymore; it was just one more feature of my environment, of no more or less importance than the ground beneath my feet or the wall against my back. That probably wasn’t a good thing. I was sinking deeper into my story with every step I took, and unless I could find a way out, I was going to be trapped here.

Jeff, I’m sorry; I should never have asked you to help me eat the apple.
I’d thought I could handle it. Snow White’s crimes were supposed to be beauty and innocence, not hubris. I guess everyone gets to interpret the story in their own way.

“Don’t you want to talk to me, little doorway?” Adrianna’s tone was cajoling. She sounded almost reasonable, which was the most terrifying part of all. “I could tell you about your mother, what she was like when she was my Rose Red, and she loved me. We’re not so different, you and I. We were meant to be sister-stories, and we both lost the girls we loved when they walked away from us. My sister left me to be a Sleeping Beauty. Yours left you to be a man. I wonder, which was the greater betrayal? At least mine remembered she was meant to be my twin. She remembered that the face in her mirror was mine too, and she didn’t change it to get away from me. How much did you hurt your sister, that she changed her
face
to stop seeing you in the mirror?”

The desire to turn around, run back to her, and scratch her eyes out was almost unbearable. I forced myself to keep moving.
Gerry isn’t here: he doesn’t hear the things she’s saying about him, and none of them are true, you
know
none of them are true. He didn’t transition to get away from you, he did it so he could be who he was always supposed to be. You know that, you
know
that.

I’d always known that, but hearing her say those things still made my heart ice over.
This
cold, I could feel.
This
cold had been with me ever since the person I thought was my sister and the other half of my unwanted story had explained to me, haltingly, that he was my brother, and whatever story he was going to live through, he was going to do it on his own. I loved him. I respected who he was. I had supported him every step of the way. I just wished that so much of who he was hadn’t depended on leaving me behind.

“I’ll make her pay, if you give me what I need,” said Adrianna. Her voice was closer now, even though I still couldn’t see her, even though I still seemed to be alone in my corridor of ice. “I’ll make her understand that the worst thing a sister can do is leave you behind.”

Every time she misgendered Gerry my jaw clenched a little harder. I kept inching away, wishing I had a weapon, wishing I had something I could use to make her
stop
.

“You’re not going to get away, little doorway. No matter how hard you try to run from me, you’re not going to get away. It would be better for both of us if you’d just stop trying.”

If I stayed here any longer, I was going to start screaming. I wouldn’t be able to help myself. Knowing that the sound might give me away, I turned and ran down the icy corridor, fleeing from the sound of her voice. I kept running long past the time when her laughter had dropped away behind me, replaced by the familiar silence. I wasn’t getting tired or winded, at least not yet, and the more distance I could put between the two of us, the better. I didn’t know whether it was our shared story or her bitter understanding of human nature, but Adrianna was pressing my buttons with remarkable skill. I couldn’t let her catch me. I couldn’t let her get anywhere
near
me. So I ran.

The farther I went, the more I resented the maze. It had seemed like a safe haven when it first appeared, but I’d been safer out in the whiteout wood, where at least there had been black trees to disguise my hair, and soft snow for me to dig traps in. Here, everything was frozen solid, and I had no weapons, and I had no options apart from continuing to flee. I couldn’t fight back. There was nothing for me to fight back
with
.

I thought wistfully of all the fallen branches out there in the whiteout wood, wishing I had thought to carry one—or hell, an armful—with me into the maze. And I kept running, right up until an arm jutted out from behind a wall and clotheslined me across the throat.

I collapsed in a heap, choking and wheezing. Even here, at the heart of my story, I needed to breathe. I was still retching and trying to get my feet back under me when Adrianna stepped into view, a smug smile on her pretty face.

“Hello, darling,” she said. “Did you miss me? I can see from the way you’re glaring that you must have. No one feels that neglected by an absence they didn’t feel. Well, don’t worry. We’re going to be together from now on, at least until we’re never together again—although in a small way, I suppose we’ll
always
be together.”

She reached down and grabbed my hair, hauling me up. I struggled as best as I could, still wheezing, trying to grab for her hand. Adrianna sighed.

“If you’re going to be like that about it,” she said, and hauled back her free hand and punched me in the throat. Everything went red as my air supply was cut off, and then everything went black, and I went away for a while.

I didn’t dream. Dreaming was apparently not a priority in the whiteout wood, which was already half dream in and of itself. Instead, I simply ceased to be aware of my surroundings until some unknown, unknowable time later, when I came back to my senses just as abruptly as I had left them.

The first thing I noticed was the ground, which was passing underneath me. The second thing was my position. I was slung over Adrianna’s shoulder in a fireman’s carry, my wrists and ankles tied with strips of fabric. I could see my hands if I tilted my chin down at the right angle. They were bound with what looked like a piece of my shift. It was a good use of the materials she had available. It still made me want to punch her in the eye. Maybe both eyes, just so she wouldn’t start looking asymmetrical.

“Oh, good: you’re awake.” Adrianna sounded perfectly pleased with herself, and why shouldn’t she have been pleased with herself? She had won. She’d knocked me out, and now she was carting me off to Grimm-knows-where, to have her way with me.

There had to be a way out of this. “Put me down,” I said.

“No.”

So much for the easy way. “Adrianna, you don’t want to do this.” We were still in the maze: When I twisted, I could see the icy walls to either side. That struck me as both a good thing and a bad thing. We hadn’t gone far, but if I managed to get loose, it wasn’t like I would have anyplace to run. We’d just wind up right back here again.

“See, that’s where you’re wrong,” she said calmly. “I most certainly
do
want to do this. I’ve been thinking of nothing else for years. I’ve missed the real world. This place has no character. Or rather, it has just one character, and I’m tired of her. There’s only so much Snow White I can take before I start wanting to claw everybody’s eyes out. Don’t you find the same, little doorway?”

I said nothing.

“You can hate me if you like—I won’t deny you that right—but you know I’m telling the truth, just like I know that twenty years from now, you’re going to do the same thing I’m doing now. Some dumb little doorway is going to come along, holding herself closed as tightly as she can, and you’re going to blow her open and take her for your own.”

“You’re getting disturbingly close to using rape metaphors here, lady, and I’d appreciate it if you’d cut it the fuck out.” Swearing at her felt good, like it was allowing the smallest fragment of my hatred and anger to find a target. Suddenly, I understood Sloane a little bit better. “I’m never going to be like you.”

“Why, because you’ve always been such a good princess?” The walls dropped away around us as Adrianna stepped into a clearing. There was no warning before she shifted me off her shoulder and dropped me ignominiously to the ground. At least there was snow here, instead of hard-packed mud: I hit hard, but not hard enough to knock the wind out of me.

Adrianna moved before I could react, kicking a clot of snow into my face. I coughed, trying to blink it out of my eyelashes.

“You’ve
never
lived up to our story,” she said. “At least I was a good princess, before my stupid sister decided she didn’t want me anymore. What have you ever done but try to press the once upon a time out of yourself?” She kicked another clot of snow in my face.

I pushed myself up onto my elbow, glaring at her through the haze of white. “Pick a narrative, will you? You’re tormenting me because you’re my aunt and you feel like my mother abandoned you—which I’m still not sure I believe, by the way.” Except I did believe it, because Adrianna looked like me. It wasn’t just coloring. I shared my coloring with everyone in the whiteout wood. It was the shape of her face and the angle of her smile, the way she moved her hands and the slope of her shoulders. We were family, she and I. No matter how much I wanted her to be a liar, I couldn’t deny that we were related. “Or you’re tormenting me because you think it’s fun. Or you’re doing it because you don’t think I do a good enough job of living up to our story. Just
pick
one!”

Adrianna stared at me. Then her eyes narrowed, and her stare became a look of raw, unfiltered hatred. “You still think you’re better than I am, don’t you? Just because you fought the story for longer than I did.”

“That’s the fourth reason you’ve given for doing what you’re doing,” I snapped.

Adrianna paused, a confused expression flitting across her face. Pressing the palm of one hand against her temple, she said, “No, that can’t be right. I only have one reason. I gave up on being good because my sister gave up on being with me. I want your skin because I want my life back, and leaving you here is the kindest thing I can do. That’s my reason. Those other things . . . I don’t know where those other things came from.”

I looked at her silently, and was afraid that I might know.

Tanya had said—or the wood had said, speaking through her—that she no longer dreamt. When Adrianna had knocked me out before, I hadn’t dreamt either. I’d just gone away. Dreams were necessary for humans to stay sane. The wood was a dream all by itself, and maybe that could sustain us for a while . . . but for how long?

Adrianna talked like someone else’s reasons were creeping into hers. Maybe they were. She wasn’t the first Snow White to have gone bad, just the first I’d met. The others had been consigned to magic mirrors, locked away where they couldn’t hurt anyone else. The wood was capable of communicating with its “children.” Were the mirrors?

“I don’t think you want to hurt me,” I said, trying to keep my voice low and reasonable. It wasn’t easy, lying on the ground with my hands tied and my face full of snow. Still, I tried. I tried like I’d never tried before. “Adrianna, the mirrors are messing with your head. This isn’t you.”

She froze, eyes going wide. “Who told you about the mirrors? I never showed you the mirrors. How do you know about the mirrors?”

Well, crap. Score one for good guessing, immediately lose one for forgetting that sometimes it’s a bad idea to reveal information the bad guys don’t expect you to have. “Tanya. She’s my teacher. She told me about the mirrors.”

“She’s a good girl. The wood loves her. She knows
nothing
about the mirrors.” Adrianna stepped forward, grabbing my wrists and using them to haul me off the ground. I made a wordless sound of protest as she wrenched my shoulders. Adrianna ignored it. “She never had to learn about the mirrors, that spineless, gutless little princess. No one ever took anything away from
her
. How can she teach you about something that she doesn’t understand?”

The pain was intense enough that it took me most of her little speech to realize what she was doing. She was untying my hands.

“She understands them enough to know that the mirrors lie,” I said. “I don’t think you’re quite yourself. You keep changing your story. I think . . . I think the mirrors are bleeding over into you.”

“So what?” She pulled the cloth loose and dropped me back into the snow. This time, I was able to catch myself, and I didn’t hit the ground as hard. That was a relief. Adrianna paced away. “I know who I was when I was still in my own body. Who cares if I’ve picked up the shards of a few new narratives? I’m going to open you, little doorway, and there’s nothing you can do to stop me. We’ve come too far for that.”

“You tried to open me once before, and that didn’t work out too well for you.” I strained toward the cloth that tied my feet. My shift was almost a foot shorter than it had originally been, and the smooth hem had become a ragged tear. “Maybe we should talk about this.”

“I stabbed you; you bled,” said Adrianna. “It seemed to work out just fine to me.”

I undid the knot and began unwinding Adrianna’s makeshift rope. “Yeah, thanks for that.”

“You can’t win, little doorway. You can’t run from me. You can’t escape from me. Your body isn’t waking up, because I’m not going to allow that to happen until I’m ready. You’ve lost. You’re still fighting me, because fighting is what you people
do
, but you’ve already lost.”

“I don’t even understand why we have to fight!” The last of the fabric binding my ankles came loose. I scrambled to my feet, swaying as my head tried to adjust to one change in altitude too many. The places where Adrianna had hit me ached and throbbed. The whiteout wood wasn’t real the way the waking world was, but it was real enough for me to suffer here. “You keep saying you’re my aunt. Fine. Tell me about my mother.”

Hearing the words said aloud—said in my own voice—woke a deep, almost submerged longing in my chest, like I’d just invoked the thing I wanted most in the entire world. Adrianna had known my
mother
. She had known her as a living, breathing human, not as a shell, scraped clean and used up by the story that had consumed her. She had known my mother before she became a Sleeping Beauty, before she found the spindle and dropped into the dark.