Eve took a step backward slowly, carefully, as if her knees weren’t fully functional. Her heart thudded so hard and fast that the sound of it filled her ears. She felt it beat through her chest and into her skull. Her lungs tightened, as if her rib cage were constricting. It was hard to breathe, and the air felt thick.
She’d seen this box.
In a vision.
It had a silver clasp in the shape of a tree. Rubies clustered like glittering apples in the silver leaves. It was the size of her palm and had slats on all sides. There was also a hook on the top so it could hang from a rope—or from a silk ribbon inside a wagon between feathers and painted skulls.
It couldn’t be real.
And it couldn’t be here.
She backed against the door.
As her back touched the door, she screamed, and she shoved her hands forward as if she could shove the box and all it meant away.
Books and papers blew off the table in a blast. The box flew against the wall and smashed into it. It crashed down, falling over stacks of books, end over end, and rolled onto the carpet. It lay on its side, and Eve kept screaming.
Behind her, voices were shouting. And then she heard shouts change to screams as magic poured out of her like water through a broken levee. Books flew from the shelves, and the computer monitor shattered into shards of plastic, glass, and metal.
Eve plunged into darkness.
Dangling from a silk ribbon, the boxes sway as the wagon bounces over the road. I am tossed against the painted wood walls, and I feel my skin bruise.
Eyes in the boxes watch me, and I watch them.
Bottles clink together on the shelves. Skulls snap their mouths open and shut. The skull of a mouse, of a bird, of a cat, of a man. Across the wagon, the Storyteller knits a ribbon of red and blue and gold. It coils around her feet already. Still, she knits it longer and longer.
“Once upon a time,” she says.
I want to speak, but my lips won’t move.
“A man and a woman wanted a child …”
I touch my face with my fingers. My skin feels soft and pliant, but my lips are sealed shut. I tug at them, and then I tear. My fingers gouge my cheeks and chin and lips. My mouth will not open.
Across the wagon, the Storyteller continues to knit. “So they made a child out of clockwork parts.”
I have blood on the tips of my fingers and under my fingernails.
“And when it was older, it killed them.”
The pain in my fingers feels exquisitely sharp, like tiny needles, and I see the droplets of blood form perfect spheres that plummet toward the wood floor of the wagon. But they do not hit. Instead, I hear rain on the top of a tent. I am no longer in the wagon. I am in the tattered red carnival tent. Rain seeps through the holes in the fabric so that it seems as if the tent itself is crying.
The rain slides down the paint on the face of the clown who contorts himself in the center of the tent. He is alone, and his dance is beautiful, a slow ballet that crosses over the floor of wood shavings. There is no music except the rain.
“Choose a card,” a voice says behind me. It is the Magician, and when I turn, I see he stands at a table of red velvet. Cards spin in the air around him as if they were birds. The cards float, twist, and then land in his open hand.
Four fall to the table, facedown.
One card flips over without the Magician touching it.
It’s the image of a sword in a disembodied hand. “The Ace of Swords,” the Magician says. Another card turns over on its own. “The Wheel of Fortune.” A third card flips, showing a man in a robe with a chalice, a sword, and flowers on a table before him. “The Magician.” And then the final card. It is blank.
I look up at the Magician for him to explain, but he is gone, and so is the tent around me.
I am outside, and the stars are spread close and thick in the sky, so many little pieces of brightness that I suddenly understand the word “stardust” because it looks like the blackness has been dusted with specks of light.
I smell burned caramel and popcorn, and I hear the ring and clatter of carnival games. The prizes hang above the booths—delicate clockwork birds in golden cages, masks made of curved horns, a flute that plays by itself. And I realize that I am perched like the prizes, high above the ground.
From here, I can see the carousel. Its horses are wooden mermaids and winged cats, and its riders are as strange and magical as the mounts—men, women, and children who have wings of their own or clawed hands or faces streaked with feathers. I watch the carousel for a long time, until the mounts detach from their golden poles and ride across the carnival grounds, rising and falling as if they were still connected to the mechanism. The riders are laughing with delight as they are carried into darkness. I stare after them into the darkness—and then realize I am looking into a darkened audience.
I am within the tent again, on the stage. Streaks of moonlight filter through slits and holes in the fabric. The stage is ringed with candles. They shed their light upward, twisting the Magician’s face into grotesque shadows, which he has highlighted with makeup.
“You are the blank card, of course,” he says.
Behind him is a silver mirror as tall as he is. It’s warped, and the curves elongate his reflection so that he stretches into a skeletal figure. His hat narrows into a slit.
I walk toward the mirror and stop in front of it. It is metal, not glass, and the candle flames flicker in it. I look into it, and a girl with brown hair and antlers looks back at me. I raise my hand toward the girl’s face. She raises her hand. I stop. She stops.
It’s me. She’s me.
But I have green eyes, I think.
And then I am pushed into the mirror.
I melt into the silver. It swirls around me, and coolness sweeps through me. In an instant, it’s over. I emerge from the mirror into a meadow. I am beside a lake that glitters in the sun. A wagon waits for me. On its steps is the Storyteller, knitting a red ribbon.
Eve sucked in air, and her eyes popped open. Harsh white light filled her vision and flooded her mind as if it wanted to sear away every thought. Her eyes watered as she tried to see shapes in the whiteness. She couldn’t move her arms or legs. She felt straps bite into her skin as she strained. She was lying flat on her back. She smelled antiseptic, and the smell triggered a memory—tubes in her veins, pain flowering over her skin, eyes burning. She heard a steady beep, shrill and insistent.
Hospital, she thought.
She remembered in a rush: The tubes. The pain. The voices. The dreams. The way her muscles had seemed to stretch until they snapped, the way her skin had felt peeled from her body like the skin of an apple, the way her blood had seemed to burn through her veins as if it were gasoline that had been lit on fire.
Last time, they had taken her old body and reshaped it into this new body, this stranger’s body. She had woken with only emptiness inside.
No! Eve thought.
She couldn’t lose herself again.
She tried to flail, but the straps held her down. She arched her back, and alarms began to wail. She heard footsteps race toward the hospital room.