Chapter 20
CHAPTER TWENTY
Sasha could not help but stare at what she saw.
Sidney was strapped to a bed.
Not loosely. Not with the perfunctory, standardized restraints that Sasha had seen on the other patients.
No. Sidney was tied down with leather straps at her wrists, her ankles, her waist, and one across her chest. The kind of restraints that weren’t designed for safety.
They were designed so that a person couldn’t move. At all. For a very long time.
This was designed for pain. This was designed for suffering. This was designed for cruelty.
She was thin. Thinner than Sasha had ever seen her.
The hollows under her cheekbones were sharp enough to cast shadows in the dim light.
Her hair, which Sidney had always kept meticulously cared for—because she was Sidney and vanity was not a sin but a lifestyle choice—was matted and tangled against the flat, stained pillow.
Her eyes were open. Staring at the ceiling. Unseeing and dull.
Sasha fumbled with the door. It was locked. Of course it was locked. She yanked at the handle, then slammed her shoulder against it, then kicked at it. The wood groaned but held.
“Sidney!”
Her sister’s eyes shifted slowly—so slowly—from the ceiling to the barred window. It took a moment for recognition to land. When it did, Sidney’s face crumpled.
“Sash?” Her voice was a husk. Barely there. Like someone who hadn’t spoken in weeks, or had given up trying.
“I’m getting you out. Hold on. Hold on!”
She found the key on a ring hanging from a hook on the wall three doors down. Whoever designed this asylum’s security protocols needed to be fired. No. Murdered. Immediately. And posthumously, since they were all fictional and probably already dead. So murdered twice.
The lock turned. The door swung inward. The room smelled like—
She didn’t want to catalogue what the room smelled like.
Sasha crossed to the bed in three strides and began tearing at the strap on Sidney’s nearest wrist. The leather was stiff and old and the buckle was cinched too tight, and her fingers were shaking too badly to be efficient.
She wanted to scream. But that’d probably hurt her sister’s ears, so settled for swearing under her breath in a continuous, creative stream that would have gotten her banned from the Boston Public Library’s children’s department for at least a decade.
“How long?” Tears were blurring Sasha’s eyes as she got Sidney’s first wrist free and moved to the second. “How long have you been here?”
Sidney’s freed hand didn’t move. It just lay there on the mattress, the fingers twitching weakly, as if they’d forgotten what freedom meant. “I…don’t know.” Her voice cracked on every syllable. “A long time. I think…a long time, Sash. I can’t…I couldn’t tell anymore.”
Was it one story? Two? Was the High Fantasy real, or fake? Was it all part of Wonderland? Was Vile pulling the strings the whole time?
Did he know their secret?
The second strap came free. Sasha moved to the one across her sister’s chest. “Were you awake the whole time? Were you aware?”
“In and out.” Sidney’s eyes were wet now.
Not crying, not really. More like her body was producing tears as a reflex, the way a wound produced blood.
Involuntary and persistent. “Sometimes I’d forget where I was.
Sometimes I’d think I was back in Wonderland.
Or Sherlock. Or Neverland. And then I’d wake up here and it was… or someone was…”
She didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t have to.
Sasha knew what happened to patients in places like this. She knew what the orderlies did to women.
Sasha got the chest strap undone and moved to the waist. Her jaw was clenched so tight her teeth ached. “I—I didn’t know…”
“I know.” A sound left Sidney that was something between a laugh and a sob.
It was the worst sound Sasha had ever heard.
Worse than the screaming. Worse than anything.
“I know what it is, Sash. It’s all been one story.
From the very beginning. Every single one of them.
Wonderland, the fantasy, all of it—it’s been one long… ”
“Nightmare.” Sasha finished the sentence for her, because she could see it now. The shape of it. The whole monstrous, sprawling shape of the thing they’d been living inside. “Vile did this.”
One story. A girl falls down a rabbit hole into a world of impossible, irrational cruelty. She’s shuffled from scenario to scenario, killed and revived and killed again.
Every genre, every setting, every death—a new chapter in a single, unbroken narrative of torment.
And the asylum was the punchline. The place where you put people who claimed to have seen impossible things. Who raved about talking cats and mad tea parties and queens who demanded heads.
Where you put people nobody believed.
It was all Wonderland.
It was all…it was all going to end like this, wasn’t it?
The waist strap fell away. Sasha’s hands were steady now, suddenly and completely, as if the enormity of what she was seeing had bypassed panic entirely and settled into something colder and far more useful.
Rage.
How dare he mock them like this?
She undid the ankle straps, one and then the other, and gathered her sister up from the bed. There wasn’t a goal in her mind on where she was going to take her—just away. Away from the stained bed. Away from the location of so much torture.
Sidney was lighter than she should have been.
She could feel ribs through the thin hospital gown.
Her sister, who had always been the stronger one, the louder one, the one who stormed into every room like the room should be grateful for her attendance—was trembling in her arms like a small, terrified animal.
Like Dundle. Like Lundle.
Like a goddamn taxidermy animal.
Because that’s what they were to Vile, in the end.
Trophies.
She held Sidney tighter.
“I need you to listen to me.” Sasha pulled back just enough to look her sister in the eyes. Sidney’s gaze was unfocused. Drifting. Like she was only half in the room and the other half was somewhere very far away, in a place that didn’t have walls or locks or leather straps. “Sidney. Look at me.”
Sidney’s eyes focused. Barely.
“I have the spell. The one from the bog. The one that can destroy his book.” She held her sister’s face in both hands, the way their mother used to when one of them was hysterical.
“This might all have been a story, but in the end, they still have power. And that’s what matters.
I know how to end this. All of it. But I need this story to end first, and stories end when—”
“Someone dies.” Sidney’s whisper cut through her like a scalpel. Clear. Lucid. The most present she’d sounded since Sasha walked into the room. “I know how they end, Sash.”
Of course she did. Sidney had lived through every ending. Every death. She was the expert. Fake or not. Sidney’s next words were barely audible. But they hit her like a punch to the chest.
“End it.”
“What?”
“End it.” Sidney’s hands found Sasha’s wrists and gripped them with a strength that shouldn’t have been possible given the state of her.
Her eyes were wide and bright and absolutely, horrifyingly clear.
“End this story. However you have to. I don’t care how.
I can’t do this anymore, Sasha. I can’t. ”
“Sid—”
“I have been tied to this bed for—I don’t even know how long.
Weeks. Months. It might have been years.
I can’t move. I can’t sleep. Every time I close my eyes I’m back in one of them—back in the fantasy, or strapped to that train, or the orderlies are here, and that’s so much worse because they—” Her voice broke, and the tears came in earnest now, cutting tracks through the grime on her hollow cheeks.
“I’m begging you. Please. Please. Just make it stop. ”
Sasha’s vision blurred. She blinked the tears back with the kind of vicious determination she usually reserved for not crying in front of her boss during performance reviews.
“There has to be another—”
“There isn’t.” Sidney’s grip on her wrists tightened.
The intensity in her eyes was almost violent.
“You said it yourself. You said it a hundred times. Stories end when someone dies. That is the rule. You can’t break the rules, not in his world.
So end it. End it and use the spell and get us both out of this and I swear to God, Sasha, if you hesitate because of whatever bullshit feelings you have about that—that—thing—”
“I’m not hesitating because of him.” It came out sharper than she meant it to. She softened her voice. “I’m hesitating because you’re my sister.”
“That’s not the hesitation I’m talking about, and you know it…”
“I know.” Sasha sighed. “And I’m so, so sorry.”
Sidney’s expression collapsed into something that was part gratitude and part devastation and part the exhaustion of someone who had been fighting for so long that they couldn’t remember what they were fighting for.
“So do it because I’m your sister.” Sidney’s voice was barely a whisper. “Because you love me. Because I am asking you to. Please.”
Sasha shut her eyes.
She thought about the bottle in the bog. The bruise-colored liquid. The plan. Destroy the book, go home, live a normal life. Shelve books. Drink bad coffee. Never think about any of this again.
She thought about Vile.
She thought about the stars he’d put on the ceiling.
And then she thought about her sister, strapped to a bed in a rotting asylum for God knew how long, reliving every death, every horror, every nightmare, over and over and over while Sasha was…what? Playing a sick version of “house” with the monster who put her there?
She opened her eyes.
“Okay.”
Sidney’s breath hitched.
“Okay?”
“Okay.” Sasha laid her sister back against the bed. Gently. Even though she was about to break her on purpose. “Stay here. Don’t move. I’ll be right back.”