The world outside my prison shifts again, dizzyingly fast, until it goes away and is replaced by more of the silvery nothingness. She’s put my mirror facedown on some surface. I stay frozen where I am, unsure how to walk when I can’t see my feet, staring, furious, into the nothingness.
Glass. She’s prisoned me in glass, and she’s going . . . going to sell me? Going to sell all of us. I don’t need to ask myself why: the motives are clear without thinking about them too deeply. Ghosts take time. Ghosts can reach into a mortal life and make it longer, just by pulling away the time that has already passed. She said I was good for another seventy years, but that’s just an estimate, because a ghost prisoned in glass can’t move on to whatever comes next. Until the mirror is broken, we’re trapped. Whoever buys me—whoever buys us—will be able to use us to stay young and beautiful in a world that’s become increasingly obsessed with youth and beauty.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that this is happening. The surprise should be that it’s taken this long.
“All right, Jenna, pull yourself together,” I say. There is no echo here, but there are surfaces, gilded in silver, beckoning me with the illusion of a world. I can’t see myself. Do I exist? Closing my eyes changes nothing, so I tilt the idea of my head back until I’m looking upward, then reach out in front of myself and tell my hands to find each other. It’s harder than it should be. I’ve touched my body in the dark a million times since I was born, and even more often since I’ve died, but I wasn’t thinking about it then. It was something that just happened. Now I have to feel around, trying to guess where my hands are in a world that has no points of reference—
—until fingers find fingers and interlace, coming together the way hands are meant to. I look back down. I still can’t see myself, but now I know, for sure, that I exist; I’m not just a disembodied voice floating in a silver sea. If I exist, I can find a way out of here. I’m sure of that.
The witch is Brenda’s daughter. I’m sure of that, too, just like I’m sure Brenda doesn’t know. Brenda could be the greatest actress of her age—and there’s no real telling what that age is, not with her being a witch, not with ghosts in the world—and she still wouldn’t have been able to fool Sophie’s rats like that. Sophie wouldn’t lie to me. She didn’t tell me she was a witch, but that was because she hadn’t needed to, and she likes me. Sophie would have told me if Brenda was a danger. Brenda doesn’t know her daughter is doing this. That means Brenda might also be in danger.
I’ve known her a long time. I wouldn’t call us old friends, but it’s been long enough that I feel like I owe her some sort of help, if I can just figure out how to get the hell out of here.
Being prisoned in glass is the thing every ghost I know fears more than anything. Even exorcism is a small threat compared to that. An exorcised ghost is scattered for a little while, becoming a whisper on the wind and a chilly place in still air. Depending on how strong they are, they’ll come back together in a week, a month, a year. The longest exorcism I’ve ever heard of lasted eighteen months, and half of that was because the ghost in question was so surprised that his meek little wife had been willing to light the candles and chant the words. I’ve never been exorcised, but the people I know who have say it’s like taking a long, restorative nap. Some older ghosts even do it on purpose, just to break up the monotony.
Glass is different. Glass catches and keeps, until someone decides to let you out or the mirror is broken. Glass takes your choices away. If the witch who has me wanted me to take another year off her, or two, or twenty, I wouldn’t have a choice. I don’t know what happens to a ghost who ages themselves past their dying day, but I’ve never met anyone who had passed that age and stayed corporeal.
I have to get out of here.
If I have hands, I have feet. I may be walking blind, but the ground seems smooth, and presumably I’ll know if I fall. I start walking. When nothing bad happens, I start running.
Dead people don’t get tired. There have been a couple of Olympic records set by ghosts, running right alongside the living. I run, and I run, and I run until time doesn’t mean anything anymore, time is something for people who exist outside of mirrors, in a world where there are walls, and borders, and consequences.
There’s no warning before the silver world in front of me disappears, replaced by Danny’s face. I can see the theater behind him, tattered wallpaper and all. There’s no sign of the corn. He glances nervously over his shoulder before looking back to the glass and whispering, “Jenna?”
I stop running. There isn’t any point. “Let me out of here.”
Relief washes over his face. For just that moment, I can remember that he was my friend before this started happening, before he joined forces with a witch and ran for my hometown. Then the relief fades, replaced by regret, and he says, “I can’t do that. Teresa would put me in a mirror if I did that.”