“Oh, screw you,” I said, and buried my face in my pillow. I felt the bed dip as she sat down beside me, then poked me between the shoulder blades till I turned.
“I’m not giving you shit, I swear. I just want to know why.”
Why had I? What had I felt seeing him again, remembering how it felt to be bound together inside our tale? Disgust, fear, those were easy. Anger, too. But there was something else: a serrated sort of curiosity. It was bad enough I couldn’t make myself feel nothing, I didn’t want to feel that.
“I killed him,” I said to the ceiling. “I’ve killed him a hundred times. Wouldn’t you have run?”
She stared at me till I looked back, her eyes two distant planets. “You killed him because he deserved it. I bet he deserves it here, too.”
I studied her, a tickling, terrible thought blooming. “Soph. You know … you understand that it’s permanent here, right? When you’re dead, you’re dead.”
“Of course I know that,” she said, suddenly savage. “Alice, why’d you have to come back around today? Of all days.”
“What do you mean? What’s wrong with today?” She didn’t answer. “Ask Daphne why today. She’s the one who dragged me there.”
“Dragged you. Kicking and screaming, right?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means stop pretending you don’t have a choice.” Her voice was hard. “Because of all of us, you’re the only one who does. To be part of us, or not. So. Coming back today, does that mean you made your choice?”
“Jesus, I showed up to one meeting.”
“The way Daphne runs things now, it’s not … Alice, you don’t come and go.”
“Daphne. She doesn’t really want me there. She checked—I think she checked today to see if I could still do it. You know. To see if I still had the ice.” I laughed a little, around the urge to cry.
Sophia didn’t laugh with me. “Do you?”
“What? No. You know I don’t.”
She studied me for a moment without speaking. “Here’s what I don’t get about you,” she said. “In your tale, you had all the power. You were a monster in the Hinterland. Why now are you pretending to be a mouse?”
She didn’t say monster like I’d say monster. She said it with reverence, like it was a title. Like she was saying queen.
“I’m not a mouse.” I looked down at my hands and remembered the sight of them flexing over my mother’s throat. The exhilaration of it, that came before the shame.
“I’m not,” I repeated, “a mouse.”
“Good,” she said. “Because you can’t afford to be. Something very bad is going on.”
“I know about the murders. Daphne told me.”
“She didn’t tell you everything.”
Her pause had dark things in it. Things with teeth.
“They weren’t just killed. There’s something else.”
My shoulders went high. Whatever she said next, I wasn’t going to like it.
“Whoever killed them, they took something away. Like, a part.” She breathed out hard and lit another cigarette. She wasn’t supposed to smoke in here, but I didn’t stop her. “They took the prince’s left hand. Abigail, they took her right. And they took Hansa’s left foot.”
My toes curled in, automatic.
“Where’d you hear that?” I was whispering now. “Does everyone know?”
“I don’t know who knows. Robin told me, he didn’t say where he got it from.”
I didn’t ask, but she passed her cigarette to me anyway. It’d been ages since I’d had one, and the nicotine hit my blood like sickness. I smoked it down to my fingertips, thinking, trying not to think. I looked out the window, searching for the white sailing ship of the moon. But the sky was thick with cloud cover, and the moon was just a rock here anyway.
“You’ve been gone,” Sophia said. “You’ve been trying to walk away. And I get it. I do. You’ve got more in this world than the rest of us, and that’s nice. But there’s something starting here. So either you’re out of this, all the way, or you’re in it. And if you’re in, it’s time to remember who and what you are. Or you might not survive it.”
I would feel guilty later. Later, I would think of my mother lying defenseless down the hall, and my window swung foolishly open to let in Sophia, the night, and whatever else might come. But right then, I looked into her flat, beautiful eyes.
“What am I?”
“First tell me you’re sure. Be sure.”
I wasn’t sure. About anything. But I nodded my head.
“You are not a victim, or a damsel. Or a girl who runs.” She gripped my hands. “You’re Alice-Three-Times.”
“I don’t remember how to be that way.” I squeezed back. “I forgot. I had to.”
Her smile came out like a sickle moon, all edge. “I’ll help you remember.”
5
Since leaving school, Sophia had stopped messing with New York boys. I understood now that being human, being with humans, was something she’d tried on like clothes. They’d never fit her right. Now she had a sort of boyfriend among the ex-Stories. Or he might’ve just been who she called when I wasn’t answering her texts.
Robin lived in a low-ceilinged Crown Heights apartment with a business school dropout named Eric, a rock-thick bro who thought his roommate was weird because he was from Iceland. They slept in twin beds shoved into a single room, so they could give their second bedroom over to a growing operation.
It was nearly three in the morning when Sophia let us in. Eric was slumped in front of their flat-screen playing a first-person shooter game, pit stains yellowing his Pussy Riot T-shirt.
“Ladies,” he said, pausing the game. That was a sign of great respect in Eric’s world.
Sophia inspected the desiccated pile of pizza crusts on the coffee table. “Where’s Robin?”
“You know. Messing around back there.” He darted a look at me and unpaused the game. “Tell him I ate his pizza.”
I think Sophia liked Robin because he never slept, either. We found him crouched in the back bedroom, fiddling with something I couldn’t see. Plants slumbered beneath the singed halo of grow lights, lined up in tidy green rows.
“Ilsa!” he said when he saw Sophia. He always used her Hinterland name, and she always corrected him.
“Sophia.” She nudged him with the toe of her shoe. “Alice is here, too.”
He unfolded from the ground, all six and a half wiry feet of him. Everything he felt beamed directly out of his face, and right now he was watching me with an uncharacteristic wariness. “You’re all right?”
“I’m good. You?”
“I’m well.” His jaw was tight. “Better than some. Aren’t I breathing?”
“Robin.” Sophia voice snapped like a rubber band.
It’s hard to stare down a beanstalk, but I tried it. “Do we have a problem?”
He shook his head, turning away. The way he did it hurt a little. I’d always thought he liked me.