A Spindle Splintered (Fractured Fables #1)(26)

I don’t really care about most of them. There’s only one thing (five things, technically) I care about. I pull back from my parents. “Is Charm around? Or…” I don’t know how I’m going to finish that sentence—or any other mythical figures/Disney princesses?—but I don’t have to.

The curtain between my bed and the next is flung back with a dramatic flourish, and there she is: five-and-a-half feet of attitude, a bleeding heart with bleached hair. Charm. She gives me a smile that’s aiming for cavalier and landing closer to desperately relieved, then tugs someone else around the curtain. She’s tall and slender, with enormous eyes and fragile wrists that extend several inches beyond the sleeves of Charm’s leather jacket. It takes me far too long to recognize her.

“Primrose? How—”

A helpless, giddy smile slides across the princess’s face as Charm swaggers to the foot of the bed and sits casually on my ankles. “Morning, love.”

A throat clears on the other side of the curtain and someone says, “There’s a three-visitor limit, folks!” in the cheery, steely tone of a nurse on a twelve-hour shift who is not interested in a single ounce of back talk.

Mom and Dad stand. “We’ll give you all a minute,” Dad stage-whispers, and they edge around my princesses and out into the hall, taking their cardboard cups with them.

I push the button that buzzes my bed upright. “Hi.”

“Hi,” Primrose answers carefully. “How are you?” She sounds like a tourist who has memorized the local phrases from a guidebook.

I resettle the oxygen tubing beneath my nose. “Alive. So, you know. Pretty excellent.” As I say it, I realize it’s true: I’m tired and a little stiff, but my heart is thumping steadily in my ears and my lungs are filling and emptying easily, casually, as if they could keep doing it forever. Hope flutters again in my chest, a habit I can’t seem to quit. “How did we get back?”

“You fell into an accursed sleep,” Primrose answers seriously. I guess that’s fairy tale–speak for a hypoxic coma brought on by advanced amyloidosis. “And I…” Primrose blushes and I find myself mesmerized by the blotchy fuchsia of her cheeks; I hadn’t thought it was possible for her to look anything less than perfect.

“And she kissed you. You!” Charm shakes her head in mock disgust. “Which was enough to trigger the narrative resonance between universes, I guess. Apparently fairy tales are flexible about gender roles.”

A cursed girl sleeping in a tower; an heir to a throne bending to kiss her. And if the heir was a princess instead of a prince, and if it’s more like awkward sexual tension between them than true love, well, stories are told all sorts of ways, aren’t they?

I run my thumb along the splinter in my hand, the slender last hope which had done exactly nothing to save me. “And the others? What happened to them?”

Charm makes a mystical woo-woo gesture with her fingers. “They took their exits on the cosmic highway between worlds, man.” I kick her and she relents. “We all got sucked together into this whirling darkness—the void between universes, I guess—and the other princesses each chose a story to step into. The cryogenic space lady and the Viking lady went home, I think, but the short-haired girl with the sword went elsewhere. She struck me as the adventurous type.” I picture her crashing headlong into some other unsuspecting sleeping beauty, a headstrong protagonist out to wreak merry havoc, and feel a weird lurch of something in my stomach. Regret, maybe, or envy.

Primrose finishes the story. “Charmaine took you to this world, and I followed. We landed in the tower of an abandoned castle”—the guard tower of the state penitentiary, I assume—“and Charmaine summoned assistance”—called an ambulance?—“because you wouldn’t wake up. I thought for a time that you might be…” Dead.

“Yeah, me too,” I tell her. “I will be soon, statistically.” I try to say it with a shrug in my voice, the way I used to, but I can’t quite pull it off. There’s still a hot spark of hope caught in my chest, scorching my throat.

Charm frowns at me. Tilts her head. “Didn’t they tell you?” she asks, and the hope catches fire. I can’t speak, can’t breathe, can hardly think around the bonfire of my own desire, twenty-one years of suppressed hunger for more: more life, more time, more everything. For the first time in my life I let myself believe I might, somehow, be cured.

Right up until Charm says, “I mean, it’s not like you’re cured or anything, but—” and the fire goes out like an ember beneath a boot. I don’t hear the rest of Charm’s sentence because I’m busy wishing I could rewind the world and linger in the radiant ignorance of two seconds ago, when I thought my story had finally changed. It’s a good thing I already used up my tears for the year.

I stare fixedly, carefully at the wall as Charm stands and shuffles through a pile of folders and clipboards on the bedside table. She produces an oversized sheet of plastic and waves it in front of me. “It’s still pretty rad, don’t you think?” Her voice is soft but shaking with some enormous emotion, barely contained. Joy?



I look at the X-ray in her hands. For a long second I can’t tell what I’m seeing; it’s been years since I’ve seen my lungs without the white knots and tangles of proteins inside them. Now there’s nothing but ghostly lines of ribs hovering above velvety darkness, clean and empty, just like the pictures of healthy lungs in Charm’s textbooks.