She’s texted me twenty or thirty times since I last checked my phone: theories and questions and ultimatums; secondhand worries from my folks who are apparently growing concerned that my “sleepover” is now six days long; a bunch of screenshots from sites about physics and the multiverse and the infinity of alternate realities that lie one atop the other, like pages in a book.

I think about replying but can’t think of anything to say. I power the phone off before I can do anything embarrassing, like cry.

“Perhaps when you return to your world, you and Charm might find your fairy and defeat her together,” Primrose says. “I—I could not have faced Zellandine without you.”

I shrug against her back, feeling a little guilty. I hadn’t gone for her sake, after all. “Didn’t do much good.”

“No. Although…” Primrose’s weary shoulders straighten a little. “Although I feel stronger than I did before, knowing the truth. It’s the difference between being dragged to the gallows blindfolded and walking with your head held high and eyes wide open. It’s the lesser of two evils, I suppose.”

God, that’s bleak. She deserves so much more than the gallows, more than this tight-laced world of towers and thorns and lesser evils. I remind myself how much I dislike being cried over and try very hard not to cry over Primrose.

“Perhaps your curse will prove more negotiable than mine. Perhaps—”

“It’s not…” I didn’t really plan on explaining teratogenic damage to a medieval princess whose medical knowledge probably involves bloodletting and wandering uteri, but it’s still half a day’s ride to the castle and I can’t stand the note of stubborn hope in her voice. “It’s not a curse, exactly, and there’s no wicked fairy.”

We ride, and I talk. I talk about natural gas extraction and MAL-09, the chemical compound that contaminated the tap water in Roseville in the late ’90s, which had been tested and approved on adult men—but not pregnant women. I talk about placental barriers and genetic damage and the forty-six infants who were born with fucked-up ribosomes in the greater Roseville area. I talk about the years and years of legal battles, the fines that didn’t matter and the settlement that put me through college. I’m sure at least three-quarters of it is soaring straight over Primrose’s head, but she listens with an intensity that I find weirdly flattering. In my world, everybody already knows about Generalized Roseville Malady. They’ve seen the five-episode documentary on Netflix and argued with conspiracy theorists on Facebook and to them I’m just another headline, not a story in my own right.

“Some of the other GRM kids formed a group—Roseville’s Children—that’s done a lot of activism stuff. They marched on the state capitol, did some sit-ins in Washington. They always get a lot of press, but nothing ever seems to change. Mom and Dad took me to the monthly meetings when I was a kid, but…” I trail away. I stopped going to the Roseville’s Children meetings at sixteen, when I decided I didn’t want to spend my remaining years chanting slogans and wearing cheesy T-shirts. Now I feel another squirm of guilt, thinking of all the sleeping beauties I hadn’t even tried to save. There are fewer of us than there used to be.