Chapter 20 #2
She didn’t run this time. She walked. Through the corridors of the asylum, past the grinning man and the sleeping woman and the Mad Hatter and his terrible tea party. Past the Queen of Hearts, who was still sitting in the middle of the corridor, issuing decrees to an audience of none.
She found the dispensary on the second floor.
It was, like everything in this place, antithetically distressed, antiquated and grim.
Glass-fronted cabinets lined the walls, filled with brown bottles and cork-stoppered vials and instruments that looked more suited to a torture chamber than a place of healing.
Her eyes scanned the labels. She was looking for something specific. Something that a place like this, in this era, would absolutely have in abundance.
There.
Morphine. Liquid. Pure. A bottle the size of her fist, filled with a clear solution that caught the lamplight and turned it into something almost pretty.
She picked it up. It was heavier than it looked. Or maybe that was just the weight of what she was about to do with it.
A syringe sat in a tray nearby—glass and metal, the old-fashioned kind with a plunger that required actual force. She took that too.
The walk back to Sidney’s room was the longest walk of her life. Longer than any corridor in the library. Longer than any march through a bog or a battlefield or a Neverland jungle. Every step was a choice. Every step was a decision she couldn’t take back.
Sidney was where she’d left her. Of course she was. She hadn’t moved. Sasha wasn’t even sure she could.
She sat down on the edge of the bed. The mattress creaked under her weight. It was a pathetic, thin thing—the kind of mattress that existed solely to technically qualify as a mattress.
Sidney looked at the bottle in her hand. Then at the syringe. Then at Sasha.
She didn’t flinch.
“Will it hurt?”
Sasha shook her head. She was doing her level best to keep her hands steady as she drew the plunger back, filling the syringe with the entirety of the bottle’s contents.
The glass barrel filled with clear liquid.
So much of it. More than enough. “No. It won’t hurt.
I promise you, Sid. You’ll just…fall asleep. That’s all.”
Sidney’s hand found hers. Squeezed.
“I love you.”
Three words. The simplest three words in the world, and they nearly undid her completely. She bit the inside of her cheek hard enough to taste copper.
“I love you too, sis.” She took Sidney’s arm. Found the vein. It wasn’t hard—her sister was so thin that the veins stood out like roads on a map. “And I need you to trust me about what comes next.”
“What?”
“I’m going to get us out of this.” She positioned the needle.
Her hand didn’t shake. She wouldn’t let it.
Not for this. Not for her. “All of it. The library. The books. The game. I have the spell. I know what to do. When this story ends, I’m going to destroy his book and I’m going to take us both home.
Even if it doesn’t look like it at first. Okay? ”
Sidney smiled. It was small and tired and heartbreakingly real. The same smile Sasha had given to Sidney from the top of the pyre, right before the flames took her. Except this time it was Sidney giving it to Sasha, and somehow that was a thousand times worse.
“You’d better.” Sidney’s voice was fading at the edges already, going soft and far away. “Or I’ll haunt you. I’ll be the most annoying ghost you could ever dream of.”
Sasha pressed the plunger. “I have no doubt about that.”
The morphine entered the vein in a slow, steady push. She kept her thumb on the plunger, even and controlled, the way she imagined a real doctor would. Doctor Renfield. The irony of it—administering death in a place meant for healing—was not lost on her. It would have made Vile proud.
The thought made her want to throw up.
“Like, you have no idea, I’d…” Sidney’s eyes fluttered. Her grip on Sasha’s hand loosened. Not all at once, but in increments, like a rope fraying one thread at a time “You’d never find your car keys again…”
“I don’t have a car, Sidney.” She set the empty syringe down and took her sister’s hand in both of hers. Held it tight. “My phone, though.”
“Yeah…that.” Sidney’s words were slurring, her eyelids drooping. The tension was draining from her body—all the fear, all the pain, all the months of being strapped to a bed in a nightmare asylum, all of it dissolving like sugar in warm water. “Promise me you’ll stop…being stupid…about him.”
Even now. Even now she was being a pain in the ass about Vile. Sasha laughed. The sound was wet and broken and utterly devoid of humor, but it was real, and Sidney smiled at it.
“I promise.” It was a lie. She knew it was a lie. She suspected Sidney knew it too.
But it was the kind of lie that people told each other when the truth was too heavy to carry. Lies were just…lighter that way.
Sidney’s eyes closed.
Her breathing slowed. The rise and fall of her chest grew shallower. Longer. The gaps between each breath stretched wider, like ellipses at the end of a sentence that didn’t want to finish.
Sasha watched every one. Counted them. Memorized the rhythm, because if she focused on the mechanics of it—the biology, the pharmacology, the clinical reality of respiratory depression—she wouldn’t have to think about the fact that she was watching her twin sister die.
Again.
By her own hand.
Again.
Somehow, in some sick and twisted way…this was so much worse than the train. The quietness of it. The meticulousness of it. The smallness of it.
It was mundane.
It was real.
People died like this every day. Every second of every day.
And that made it so…so much worse.
Because it made this one feel real.
The last breath was so quiet she almost missed it. A soft exhale, barely a whisper. Sidney’s face was peaceful. Relaxed in a way that Sasha hadn’t seen since before any of this started. Before the library. Before the book. Before everything.
She looked like she was sleeping.
Sasha sat there for a long time. Holding her sister’s hand. Listening to the silence.
Then she leaned forward and pressed her lips to Sidney’s forehead. “I’ll get us out,” she whispered into her sister’s skin. “I swear. On everything I am and everything I’m not and every stupid book I’ve ever read. I’m going to end this.”
She set Sidney’s hand down gently on the bed. Stood up. Wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her white coat.
And walked out of the room.
The asylum corridor stretched before her, endless and dim and full of the ghosts of stories that had all been one story all along.
Somewhere, in the library between worlds, there was a book made of shadows and cruelty and every villain ever written.
And she was going to destroy it.
Even if it destroyed her, too.
Fin.