Into the Wrong Story

She Crawled Into the Wrong Story "Take a look at this." Wren Ash, twenty-one, end of the semester, third night in the same chair. There was coffee on the counter behind her that she had stopped trusting around midnight, a stack of takeout containers that had never made it to the trash, and the air conditioning running hard enough to fog the window, because she had decided weeks ago that the electric bill was a problem for a woman with a diploma. She was waiting on a similarity report for her term paper. Sixteen pages. Fifth draft. She had rewritten every sentence in it so many times that the words had gone soft in her mouth. The report came back at zero percent. Zero. Not one line of her paper resembled a line anybody had ever written. Wren read it twice. She took a screenshot and put it in the group chat, where nine people were having a fast and very funny conversation about a sandwich, and where one of them eventually said "ok." Then she got down on the kitchen floor. Not a fall. A descent. She got up on her elbows and crawled one full lap of the linoleum, face down, because the joy had nowhere to go, and the walls were thin, and the neighbors had complained once already. She was prepared to argue with anybody who said that was not the correct response to a zero. Halfway through the second lap, her heart, which had performed without complaint for twenty-one years, declined to do the next one. That was the last of the kitchen. Candlelight. Wax and wine, and something sweet underneath. "If you don't kill me tonight, I'll come for you. I'll take you apart. There won't be anything left to bury." The voice was young and cold and as certain as a bill. It went through her like a draft under a door. She opened her eyes and found out where it was coming from: under her. She was on a bed, on top of somebody, and, as far as she could tell, mostly undressed. She got exactly that far before her brain refused to move. The room was candlelit and expensive in the way of rooms where every object has a price and no object has a name she knew. The hangings were pale and thin and had cost somebody more than Wren's entire semester. The man under her was young, dark-haired, and beautiful in the way that becomes a problem for everyone involved. His hair was loose across the pillow. His wrists were tied to the headboard with a red cord strung with small gold bells that had not made a sound all night. His eyes were black and wet, and the skin at the corners of them was pink — fever, or rouge, or both. He looked at her the way you look at a knife on a table. She looked down at herself. The hands holding her shirt closed were not her hands. They were smaller and softer, and she was fairly sure they had never washed a dish in their lives. She got off him. She grabbed whatever of hers was loose, held it in both fists, and went for the door like a moth at a window. She had her hand on it when it opened from the outside. "Miss?" The girl in the corridor was young and dressed for somebody else's important night. She looked at Wren for a second, understood something, and smiled. "Don't be shy, miss. We won't stand out here listening." She put a flat hand on Wren's shoulder and pushed her back over the threshold. "Don't waste the night. Get it done." "Posy—" The door shut. The lock went over. From the corridor, drifting, delighted: "Let's see him run now." Wren stood in the middle of the room with her shirt closed in her fists. She had used a name. She hadn't known it was in her, and then it was out, and it fit. She put that with everything else about tonight — the candles, the bells, this body — under later, probably never. Three minutes ago she had been face down on her own kitchen floor. She knew exactly where she was, and she had read this. Eleven days of her life, started at two in the morning in a bad week and finished with a headache. A world of swords and oaths, where the houses raised armies out of their own children. She looked at the hands again. Ivy Ash. Sister to Orrin Ash, which in Greymoor meant something. Sick since birth, and not only in the body, if the book was any judge — spoiled past any use to anybody, in the habit of hitting people who annoyed her, which in the book was most of them. Ash. Hers too. She held the two names up next to each other and could not make them touch. Eleven days of reading, and the book had never once put the villainess's family anywhere near her own. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe the book was saving it. She put it down where she could find it again, because there were worse things in the room. The window was latched, and past the glass there was dark and a long way down. She tried the door. Locked, and locked on purpose, by a house full of people who had carried a stranger up the stairs, tied him to a bed, and told her to enjoy it. She hit it once with the side of her fist and then stopped, because hitting it was something Ivy Ash would do. Then she turned around, because there was only one other thing in the room. The man on the bed was Rhys Darrow. In the book he was the heroine's first love, which mostly meant he was an old wound with a face. His parents had died when he was small, and something in him came apart now and then, and the book was never kind about it. And because he was beautiful, he got stolen — by the villainess, by a villain, by the heroine, by the hero, who only ever wanted whatever the heroine wanted. He was not the male lead. He was the other one, the one who paid for everybody else's feelings. The cord was looped tight around his wrists, over and under, with the bells sitting along it like beads somebody had picked out for their sound. At the end of Ivy Ash's pages, Rhys Darrow got a sword into his hand and put it through her and cut what was left into eighty-one pieces, and the book described it the way you would describe tidying a room. Wren sat down on the edge of the bed and gave herself a moment of silence. It seemed like the practical thing. "He really does get there, you know," said a voice, small and bright, in the middle of her head. "In the end. All of it." Who is this, Wren thought, without moving her mouth. "Six. The greatest system ever built, and the sworn enemy of a full bag of chips. You're welcome." How many of you are in my head, she thought. There was a pause of exactly the wrong length. SYSTEM OFFLINE. [Six has left the conversation.] "Hello?" she thought. Then, because that had not worked either: "Hello." Out loud. To a stranger's bedroom. The man on the bed watched her talk to an empty room, and nothing in his face moved. She called twice more. Nothing answered. After a while the notice faded and she was alone in her head again. Fine. There was a brass ewer on the sideboard with a glass beside it. She poured water, drank it standing up, and waited for her head to come back to its usual shape. Then she remembered the bed and turned around. "You want some?" He didn't answer. He didn't do much of anything except watch her, and the watching was worse than shouting. So she drank the rest of it in small sips with her eyes on the wall, until her hands had stopped shaking. Then she walked over and picked the coverlet up off the foot of the bed, and raised it over him. He watched her hand come up. Everything in his face went flat and hard, the way a person goes when he already knows what is happening to him. The coverlet landed on him instead. The cloth settled over him, warm and soft, and his eyes changed. She didn't have time to work out into what. "I'm letting you go," she said. Her fingers stopped just short of the bells. "After tonight we're strangers. You don't know me. I don't know you." The knot didn't move. Not because it was tight. The cord did not want to be untied. He looked at her nose the whole time, which was somehow worse than being looked in the eye. "What's the game this time?" "Let's say I lost my mind." His wrist was hot. She found that out when her knuckles brushed it — heat coming off him like a stove with the door open. She let go, went through the drawer beside the bed, and came up with a pair of silver shears. She worked on the cord until the red mark across her palm started to burn. The cord did not care. Not one thread of it. She sat back and went hunting through the other woman's memory, which was like reading somebody's diary with a flashlight held in her teeth. The cord was spelled. It would not cut and it would not loosen. It wanted a word, and Ivy Ash did not have the word, because her brother had ordered the cord, and her brother had never once told her anything. "Okay," Wren said, standing up and brushing off her hands. "Wait here. I'll get somebody." He didn't answer. He was shaking, hard, and it was not cold. "What's wrong with you?" He turned his head. The smile came up on his mouth like a cut opening. "You don't know what's wrong with me?" She did, once she looked at him properly. Before the wedding, Orrin Ash had bought three bottles out of Emberleaf Vale and made sure every drop of it went into him, and the Vale sells that particular thing by the vial to people who want somebody to say yes. That was the whole transaction. The book had never needed to spell it out. His skin was hot enough to feel through her whole hand. The rest of it, she looked at the wall instead of at him. "Hold on," she said. "I'll get somebody. There has to be something that undoes it. I'll make him buy it. I'll make him pay for it." "Come here." "Um. No." "Isn't this what you wanted?" "Honestly?" she said. "Less and less." He gave her name to the room, then. Not the way people said it. He set it down between them like a knife. "Ivy. Ash." "I know what this looks like," she said, backing up with both hands out. "It looks bad. It is bad. All of it was wrong, and I'm sorry, and when this is over I will say so in front of everyone. In the middle of Greymoor, with somebody reading it out, twice—" "No, no," said Six. "That's part of it too." Wren's shoulder hit the edge of the sideboard. SYSTEM ONLINE. Six is typing… "Ugh, sorry, sorry, the connection in here is garbage, I dropped," said Six. "Did you do the thing?" "The thing?" "The job." "I don't have a job," she thought. "You do now." The voice got brighter, which was somehow worse. "Somebody has to keep this story running. The last girl in that body found out how it ends and left in the middle of the night, so the position was open. You died at a very convenient moment — you were extremely happy about something, and your heart just quit, it happens — and so we picked you." "You picked wrong," she thought. "Maintain the story," she thought. "Meaning what, exactly?" "Meaning you do what Ivy Ash did. You keep him. You hurt him. You whip him. And then—" "Stop," she thought. "—you wait for him to put a sword through you and take the two of you out together. Then you go home." Wren was quiet for a moment. Then she thought, "I want to go home and fix my paper and graduate. I want to buy a watermelon and sit in a room at sixty-five degrees under a comforter and watch one episode of something with a wizard and a football team in it. That's the whole ambition. That's it." "Sure," said Six, warmly. "So do the first part. Hurt him. Whip him. Get run through. Then you're home." "I don't know how to do any of that. Nobody keeps a whip." "You don't know until you try," said Six. "And if you don't finish the job, they'll move you. Next door has a coal mine and a lot of sad girls in it. They'll find you a bed." SYSTEM: NEW TASK 1. SUFFER (please) Wren looked at the man in the bed. He was watching her, breathing badly, saying nothing. The whip was laid out on the sideboard with the candles and the wine. Somebody in this house had carried it up here and set it down where she would see it. It was heavier than it looked. The handle was slick from somebody else's hands. Across the room, the man in the bed went very still. Wren drew the whip back and brought it down across her own back. The c***k was enormous. Loud enough for the corridor, the stairs, probably the kitchens. She made a sound she would not be repeating in front of anybody, and her knees let go of her, and she went down on the floor of a bridal chamber in somebody else's body with a line of fire opening across her back. The cord was still around his wrists. The door was still locked. For the first time that night, Rhys Darrow looked at her as if the woman on the floor might not be the woman he had been tied up for. Then he decided, on purpose, that she was.