A Mirror Mended (Fractured Fables #2)(20)

She gives us a wary once-over as we approach the bars, but apparently we don’t look like a threat or salvation. She returns her attention to the lock, manacles clanking softly against the bars.

“You’re Red’s mom, aren’t you.” I don’t say it like a question, because it isn’t one.

At the sound of the word Red her eyes snap to my face. “Where is she? Who are you? Did they catch her?”

I hiss the word “chill” between clenched teeth, just as a broad-shouldered man stands and sets a hand on the woman’s shoulder. She chills, reluctantly, but her eyes are a pair of knives pressed to my jugular.

I decide to be blunt and quick. “The huntsmen took her a few hours ago.”

The woman closes her eyes. The big man grunts as if he’s taken a physical blow.

“It’s okay, we’ll save her.” I look up and down the dungeon, wishing for my bobby pins. “We’ll, uh, we’ll find a guard and steal the keys—”

I’m trying to comfort her, but Red’s mother isn’t listening to me. She’s speaking in a calm voice to the big man behind her. “Looks like we’re out of time, love.”

He sucks air through his teeth. “It’ll be loud. Bring them down on us.”

“Let them come.” Something in her voice makes me think of snapping bones, blood on the walls.

The man tears a seam at the hem of his shirt and withdraws a waxy twist of paper. He unwinds it to reveal a mound of grainy black sand, which he pours neatly into the keyhole. I have the somewhat humbling suspicion that I’m not necessary in this story, that I’m lucky I even got a speaking part.

The woman raises her hands and seems to recall, at the last moment, that Eva and I exist. “Stand back,” she says. We do.

She strikes her manacles against the bars, sending showers of angry white sparks over the lock. Once, twice. All the prisoners are standing now, watching her, murmuring to one another. I can feel the weight of their hope like a physical thing, urging her on. I wonder how many of their children were stolen.

On the third strike, a tendril of smoke leaks from the keyhole. Shortly afterward I find myself lying flat on my back with a shrill ringing in my ears. The air smells hot. I think one of my incisors is loose.

I sit up to see Red’s mother stepping through the mangled remains of her cell door, black smoke trailing her limbs. She’s followed closely by the big dude (Red’s dad? I don’t want to make assumptions about heteronormative family structures in alternate universes, but the way he shadows Red’s mom suggests he belongs to her) and the rest of the villagers. They flock silently around her as if they’re waiting for a command, which I guess they are. Red’s mother sends the oldest and youngest villagers down into the sewers and assembles the rest into rough formation. She nods once to me, like a commander acknowledging a new recruit, and sets off, heading upward out of the dungeons and into the castle itself.

I feel like I should ask questions, like where are we going? or what happens when the guards turn up? But Red’s mother still has that sharpened bone in her fist, and her father’s expression suggests an entire armed battalion would present only a fleeting obstacle.

We don’t meet anyone. We climb stairs, and then more stairs, the air warming as we rise. The old-meat stink of the cells is replaced by something worse: a boiling, greasy smell, like bubbling fat. By the time we’re aboveground I have a decent guess where we’re headed. Red’s mother opens a final door and I’m sickened to find out I’m right.

The kitchens are empty. The hearths are banked, the counters bare, the knives hanging clean and wicked from hooks on the wall. And in the corner of the room, huddled in a wire cage like chickens or goats ready for the slaughter, are the children.

They look up when we enter the room, the whites of their eyes gleaming in the dark. Most of them have the glazed, numb expressions of people whose adrenal glands and tear ducts ran dry a long time ago. The last time I saw that look on a kid’s face was on my floor of the children’s ward, and for a moment I want to split and run, not stopping until I find a world worth lingering in.

One of the kids lifts her chin, body braced against the wire as if she’s hoping to get in one last punch before they carve her for the table. I spend half a second admiring the sheer guts of her, and then Red sees her mom.

All the fight runs out of her like cheap dye, leaving her looking like what she is: a frightened girl who wants her mother. Her lips shape a word I don’t know and then her mother is on her knees beside the cage, hands jammed through the wire, and her father is smashing his boot against the lock again and again, and if the guards weren’t already on their way, they are now.

“Be quiet.” Eva’s strangled whisper arrives long after the ship has sailed. The lock shatters. The children crawl out, some of them still dazed, some of them beginning to cry in sudden, shocking bursts. Red vanishes between her parents, their arms interwoven, their heads bent together. The shape of them—this family trapped in this god-awful horror movie of a world, surrounded on all sides by bad endings, still clinging stubbornly to one another—makes my heart twinge, so I look away.

When I’m done blinking back a weird wave of tears, Red is standing in front of us. She looks from me to Eva and back. “You came after me.”

I consider explaining that actually her mom and dad had the whole thing pretty much in hand, but I figure we should get points for effort. “Yep.”