A Spindle Splintered (Fractured Fables #1)(29)

“Dad, I’m sorry—”



He slaps his palm on the counter. “And what a damn waste it was. Of my time, of our time together. I should have let you do whatever the hell you wanted. I should have spent more time thinking about your life than worrying about your death.”

He turns to face me finally, tears not merely gathering in his eyes but already sliding down his cheeks, pooling in the laugh lines around his mouth. He holds his arms out to me. “I’m sorry. Go wherever you want, with our blessing.” I fall into him, stumbling over half-empty Save-A-Lot bags. “Just text sometimes, okay?”

The next morning I wake up with a slight headache from crying, a curious lightness in my chest, and a calm certainty that it’s time to go. This time I pack the essentials: a few weeks’ worth of meds, an alternate pair of jeans, my phone charger, my brand-new sheets, still in their plastic. A single splinter stolen from another world.

Mom’s in the garden shaking junebugs into a pie pan of soapy water and Dad’s sleeping in, so I leave a note beside the coffee maker. Be back when I can. Expect me when you see me. Love, Zin.

I’m in my car before I text Charm. Not on the groupchat we’ve been using for the last three weeks—on which we’ve finally convinced Prim to stop beginning every message with “To my Esteemed Companions Zinnia and Charmaine,”—but just her.

meet me at the tower, princess.



* * *



IT TAKES CHARM eleven minutes to get there, which is exactly the time it would take to read a text, pull on a pair of jeans, and drive from her place to the old state penitentiary. She must still be sleeping with her ringer on.

I raise a hand in greeting, leaning against the warm stone of the tower. She narrows her eyes at me, hair standing at wild angles, and stalks through the rutted dirt and overgrown grass to lean beside me.

She’s close enough that I can feel the heat of her skin, see the rumpled pink lines the bedsheets left across her face. “Morning,” I offer.

“Morning,” she replies, coolly. “What the fuck?”

“Charm, please don’t get upset—”

“If you ever speak to me in that tone of voice again, I will do crimes to you.”

I should’ve known this would be way harder than leaving a note for my folks. I shut my mouth and fiddle with the wooden splinter in my hands. It’s spent the last three weeks in my pocket, and the edges are already beginning to smooth with use. The end is still plenty sharp.

I feel Charm’s eyes on my hands, hear the soft rush of her breath. “You’re running, aren’t you.”

It isn’t a question, so I don’t answer it. I nod once to the ground.

“May I ask why?” Her voice is so carefully, ferociously calm, but I hear the bite beneath the calm, and the pain beneath the bite. “Why, now that you are magically healed, would you—”

I interrupt her in a soft, level voice. “I’m not healed. Not really.” She already knows that. I showed her the little grayish blooms on the X-rays, my curse as-yet un-lifted. “All I have is more time.”

She makes a surly, stubborn noise. “Which you could spend with us.” I wonder if she realizes how quickly and tellingly her me has transformed into an us.

I don’t look at her, speaking instead to the hazy green of the horizon. “I’ve spent every day since second grade with you, Charm, and I’m grateful for every second of it.” I scuff my shoe against a dandelion, staining the earth yellow. “But even at the very best of times, there was a part of me that was just … playing out the clock. Waiting. Wishing I could save myself somehow, but never thinking I could aim higher.”

“Higher?”

I clear my throat, wishing the truth was just a little less cheesy. “Saving others. I should have gone to all those stupid protests with Roseville’s Children, I should have at least tried, and now it’s too late.” Last week a reporter from CNN asked to do a profile of me as “the oldest surviving victim of GRM.” I never wrote back, but the word victim burrowed under my skin and itched at me, a brand-new allergy.

Charm doesn’t say anything, so I keep talking to that green horizon. “I can’t stop thinking about the others. Not just the other kids with Roseville’s Malady, but the other sleeping beauties. The girls in other worlds who are dying or trapped or cursed, who deserve better stories than the ones they were given. Who are all alone.” I run my fingertips across the point of the splinter and I know by the sharp sound of Charm’s breath that she understands. That she sees the infinite pages of the universe turning before me, a vast book filled with a thousand wrongs that need righting, a thousand princesses that need rescuing, or at least a hand reached toward theirs in the darkness. “I don’t know how much time I have, but I know what I want to do with it.

Charm exhales very slowly beside me. “And they said a folklore degree was impractical.”

“Not if you’re a cursed fairy tale princess, it turns out.”

It’s a weak joke, but Charm smiles for the first time since she stumbled out of her Corolla. “Maybe we got it wrong. Maybe you weren’t the princess, after all. Maybe you’re the prince.” She rubs her Superman tattoo as she says it.

I shrug at her. “Or maybe we got the wrong story altogether. Maybe GRM is more like a poison apple than a curse, and there’s seven dudes waiting to put me in a glass coffin when I die. Maybe my true love’s kiss will revive me.” I kick at the dandelion again. “Maybe there’s a cure out there in one of those other worlds.”