By the time the last footsteps echo back up the stairs, my cell looks like a poorly tended greenhouse: roses burst from every corner, lining the walls and pressing through the bars. Fallen petals carpet the floor. The air smells green and sweet and bright, like summer. Like home.

I lie on the hard stone, the dampness leaching through my jeans, the petals clinging to the bare backs of my arms. I check my phone to see if Charm wrote back, if she made it to the tower, if the roses are still there—but it makes a final, weary bleat and the screen goes dark.

After that there’s nothing to do but fall asleep. I tell myself a fairy tale, the way I did when I was little, imagining a great unseen pen retracing the same letters over and over, the ink bleeding through to the next page.

I begin at the end: Once upon a time there was a princess who slept surrounded by roses.

8

I DON’T KNOW when I start dreaming, or whether it’s a dream at all. What do you call the vast nothing between the pages of the universe? The whisper-thin nowhere-at-all that waits in the place where one story ends and another begins?

The world smears sideways around me. A silent wind rushes past.

I see a woman sleeping in a castle bedroom, its windows dark with thorns.

I see a woman sleeping on a mountaintop, broad-shouldered and armored, surrounded by shields and flames. Her nose is crooked and scarred; she scowls even in her sleep.

I see a woman sleeping in a chrome coffin, white frost prickling across the deep brown of her skin. There is nothing but a thin metal hull between her and the star-strewn black of space.

I see a woman sleeping among the wild roses of the deep woods, her hair cropped short and her hand curled around the hilt of a sword.

I see women sleeping in towers and townhouses, attics and lakes, hospital beds and spaceships. Some of them sleep serenely, as if they’ve accepted their fate; some of them look like they fought fate tooth and nail and are still ready to go another round. All of them are alone.

Except me, because I have Charm. I see her sleeping on top of a grubby comforter in the abandoned guard tower on Route 32. The buckets and vases of roses still surround her, their edges curled black with age, their leaves shriveled. The bleached wing of her hair is fanned like a halo behind her head and there’s a misshapen tutu tugged over her jeans. The plastic crown she gave me on my birthday glimmers false gold on her brow. I told her to dress like a princess, and I guess this is as close as she gets.

I’m so relieved to see her I almost wake from this not-quite dream. I wasn’t sure it would work—Charm isn’t really a sleeping beauty. But she had a mother and father who longed for a daughter, and she shared my curse with me for almost twenty-one years. And she climbed to the top of the tallest tower in the land and slept surrounded by roses. It must have been enough.