The dream was never the same, not exactly, but it was similar, and it happened every night. It seemed to be the only dream Echo could remember. If her subconscious entertained other flights of fancy during her sleeping hours, her mind didn’t see fit to retain the details. She knew just what her dreams would serve her the moment she laid her head down on the pillow. Though she’d fought off sleep as long as possible, burying her growing exhaustion in the stack of books beside her bed, slumber won, as it always did, and pulled her into its wicked embrace.
Echo stood in a hall of mirrors. Not just any hall of mirrors. No, this was the Hall of Mirrors. The one that visitors to the Palace of Versailles had marveled at since Louis XIV, the Sun King, had commissioned its building during his reign.
Echo had been to Versailles once, on an ill-advised and illicit journey with Ivy when they’d both been far too young to navigate the in-between alone. But the Ala had forgotten all about Echo’s sticky fingers and left a pouch of shadow dust sitting on her desk, and, well … Echo had never been one to ignore an opportunity when it was so clearly (and carelessly) presented to her. And so she had absconded with the shadow dust – she never stole, she absconded – and she and Ivy had run away, entertaining the grand notion that they would be able to live in Versailles like Claudia and Jamie Kincaid had lived in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Echo’s favorite childhood novel, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. They’d barely set foot through the sloppily opened gateway in an abandoned subway tunnel when the Ala’s hands had clamped down on their shoulders like steel grips. But the Ala, though stern in her reprimands, had indulged their whimsy and escorted them to Versailles anyway. After hours, of course.
Now there was no comforting warmth of Ivy’s hand in Echo’s own, no steady swish of the Ala’s skirts over polished marble. There was only the velvet cloak of night, the silver spill of moonlight, and the whispers of the dead.
One side of the corridor – impossibly long, far longer than it was in reality – was dominated by a series of floor-to-ceiling arches, each inlaid with a mirror designed to reflect the windows on the wall opposite.
Echo ignored the mirrors for now. The mirrors were her least favorite part of the dream. Instead, she let her feet carry her to the bank of tall windows to gaze outside, hoping that for once, her mind would supply her with something beautiful to look at. She should have known better.
She knew from experience that the windows in the real palace looked out on the sea of manicured gardens of which Marie Antoinette had been so proud.
But there were no gloriously sculpted hedges or cheery, babbling fountains or verdant lime avenues. There was only darkness, a great and endless abyss. Echo pressed a palm to the glass and felt the darkness pulse, as if it could feel her heat through the window and it wanted – no, needed – to reach out for her, to claim her warmth and life for itself.
Echo snatched her hand away from the glass and clutched it against her chest. Her palm tingled with the memory of sensation.
Maybe the mirrors weren’t the worst part. Maybe looking within oneself wasn’t nearly half as bad as whatever lurked outside.
Her steps were unsteady as she stumbled back, away from the windows and the darkness begging to be let in.
It’s only a dream, she reminded herself. That was cold comfort. A dream was as good as a prison while one was trapped inside it, and Echo knew that the cage would open only when she faced her current self and all the selves that had come before.
She turned toward the bank of mirrors and gazed upon her reflection.
Brown eyes stared back at her. Smudges marred the skin beneath her eyes, evidence of the exhaustion built up by nights of restless sleep. Her complexion, once a healthy tan, almost the color of sand, was sallow and pale. The girl in the mirror wore what Echo had come to think of as her battle armor: Dark jeans. Sturdy boots. A leather jacket. A T-shirt bearing an image of Alice sitting down to tea with the Mad Hatter. After seeing the shirt at the Strand, Echo had actually paid for it, albeit with money pickpocketed from an investment banker she’d stood beside on a crowded subway platform. But she had paid. Echo didn’t steal books, and she didn’t steal from bookstores. Even a thief needed a code of honor.
The image of herself was not a surprise. The first thing Echo saw in the mirrors was always Echo.
A persistent itch tingled beneath her shirt, right over her heart. Echo’s hands curled into fists at her sides, but no matter how much she tried to resist, this part of the dream would not be denied. The itch evolved into a steady burn, as if her skin were peeling away to expose the rot beneath. Biting back a curse, Echo raised her hands to the collar of her shirt and pulled it down, exposing her collarbone and, directly beneath it, the black mark staining her skin. Darkened veins, more charcoal than black, branched from the center of the scar, reaching for the hollow of her neck, the ridges of her rib cage, any untainted skin it could get to.
As Echo watched, the scar grew, consuming the tan flesh around it, propelled by the beating of her heart. She placed her free hand over the mark to hide it from sight, but to no avail. The infection spread from her chest to her fingers, clinging to her skin as if she’d dipped her hand in oil.
She stopped fighting it and simply watched in morbid fascination as the darkened veins slithered up her wrist, along her arm, around the curve of her elbow.
If she didn’t fight it, it didn’t hurt.
It had taken Echo several sweat-soaked and sleepless nights to figure that out.
She walked down the hallway, the expanse stretching out before her as far as the eye could see and then, no doubt, farther.
Daylight spilled from the second mirror, as brightly as if it were a window. It was, in a way. To another world, another life.
Echo met the eyes in the mirror. Brown, but not the same brown as her own. Darker. Harder. Striated black-and-white feathers instead of chocolate-brown hair. Skin the color of pale sand, a shade lighter than Echo’s.
It was strange to see Rose so directly even now, after nights of the same dream, twisted and mutated, but always the same. Always herself. Before, Rose had appeared to Echo as fragments, the way people did when they existed only in memory.
Rose stared out at Echo, her gaze expectant. Echo raised her right hand and Rose mirrored the action, her own fingers approaching the glass at the same speed as Echo’s, as if she truly were a reflection.
“Echo,” said Rose, her hand inches from Echo’s. Her eyes narrowed. “Run.”
The mirror shattered the moment Echo’s fingertips touched its surface, fracturing Rose into a thousand scattered shards. The darkness beat against the windows, clamoring to be let in. A crash sounded from the hallway behind her. Echo glanced back. One of the windows had been smashed from the outside, and shadows were writhing through the jagged opening, spilling across the marble floor.
Echo ran.
Mirrors streamed past as she sailed by. In each, a vessel of the firebird, forgotten by time, but not by the firebird itself, called out to Echo. Some she remembered from dreams past; some were new. She recognized a Drakharin woman with white-blond hair in warrior braids who shouted, “Cha’laen” – the Drakhar word for sister – but Echo’s passage was too swift to make note of anything other than the woman’s distinctive scales and the bow and quiver full of arrows slung over her shoulders.
The vessels called to her in a hundred languages, half of them dead, but they all said the same thing.
Run.
And she did. But no matter how fast she ran or how far, she could never escape the darkness.