THE QUEEN OF ZETA BOÖTIS

The Queen of Zeta Boötis

Summary:

It's been five years since Gerda set out to rescue her dearest friend, unwilling to accept Kai is lost to her. No one has ever broken free from the Swarm's drone programming, but she knows it's possible. She escaped Teegarden Station's AI, which wasn't quite the same as being under the Swarm Queen's thrall, but was close enough to renew her hope. She can bring Kai back.
Now, after visiting the oracles at Nu Lupi and Mu Arae with Doctor Peura at her side, Gerda journeys to the Swarm's stronghold at Zeta Boötis. But she must close the last of the distance to the Queen's hub on her own, her only armour the Wasp fighter she and the doctor salvaged at Iota Pucium.
Will Gerda make it through the stations at succeed at breaking through Kai's drone programming, or will he remain under the thrall of the Queen? Find out in this episode of The Queen of Zeta Boötis!

Notes:

• For Aeriel.

Aeriel, I am sorry. I saw your request for a retelling of "The Snow Queen", and I can't resist fairy tale retellings. And apparently I can't resist super-cheesy AU's. So...have a Yuletide treat?

The Rift she finds opens above the plane of Zeta Boötis. Gerda's breath catches. The network of stations stretches below her like a series of interconnected snowflakes. As always, the Swarm is beautiful. The pang she feels every time she catches sight of even the smallest scrap of their technology twists sharp and deep. She's home now.
Doctor Peura's beacon pings in the periphery of her vision. Gerda pulls up her navigation display and traces the route back to him even though there's nothing for her to touch. Still, the act of reaching out and running her fingers through the holographic trail of Rifts and manmade Gates clears her head. She is not home.
She widens the display. She is far from home. She follows the blue line recording her progress, past Mu Arae and Nu Lupi and their ancient oracles, past Iota Pucium and the smugglers, past Upsilon Andromedae and its generals, past Teegarden Station and its lonely AI, past it all clear back to Sol. That is home.
The stations form a glittering ring around Zeta Boötis. And that is where Kai is. Gerda angles her Wasp towards the outermost ring of stations, following the tug of…whatever sits coiled behind her sternum. Something of her, or something of the Swarm that still lingers in her newest augmentations, the ones reverse engineered by Doctor Peura? She's not sure now. At Mu Arae, and even at Phi Boötis, where Doctor Peura had to stop, she'd been certain it was the bond she shares with Kai. They'd always done things in lockstep. Why wouldn't her oldest augmentations still be in tune with his?
But now as she races towards the first ring of stations, the pull feels less like Kai and more like the twist of awe in her stomach when she watches the Swarm attack in their perfect formations. Something squeezes around her heart, calming its rapid beat and filling her with a sense of icy calm.
Welcome home, my child.
Home? But Sol is home. Or is Kai home?
Yes. Kai is home, and Kai is here, so this must be home.
A Rift blossoms before her, and a squad of drones bursts through and swirl around her. She eases her Wasp into its proper spot in the formation. Yes. This must be home. She fits in so well.
Something twists in her chest, and her throat clenches tight. Sorrow, some distant part of her provides, that same distant part that came to her rescue at Teegarden. Left unacknowledged, it would turn to regret, and she's not one to live a life of regrets.
She pulls out of formation and puts all available power in the Wasp's shields. She's barely fast enough. The drones turn on her, as fierce as they are breathtaking. Without her augmentations, she'd never have the reflexes to withstand their onslaught. Even as it is, she loses eighty-two percent of her shields and exhausts her ammunition breaking through the line.
Resistance? Here? The tremor down her spine feels like a chuckle. How interesting. Shall I let you come closer, little girl?
A plasma bolt tears through her Wasp's shields. Gerda rolls, but the damage is done. A solid hit to her portside thrusters. She spins, but she still has something resembling luck. She's angled towards one of the stations. One more hit will set her spiraling into it. She checks and double checks the seals on her suit.
The drones swing back around. Gerda ejects and uses the debris of her poor little Wasp as cover. Between her momentum and the tiny thrusters on her suit, she can make it to the station, though if she doesn't grab on near an airlock, she'll die. The drones will spot her trick soon enough, and the station's hull can handle a spat of friendly fire to eliminate her.
There! Gerda fires her tether. The tip of the magnet bounces off the hull. Gerda tightens her grip on the gun. "No!" The drones are coming. Between her sensory augmentations and her visor, she knows their exact location, their exact speed, and the trajectories of their most probable attacks. She doesn't have time for a second shot.
The tether spins in a lazy arc, and then the magnet snaps tight. Gerda reels herself in, allows herself two relieved breaths, and then presses her palm to the airlock. Her faith in Doctor Peura is absolute. The nanites he injected in her do have the right codes. She will be able to enter the station.
She will.
One second. One point one. Two. Three. Her augmentations send a rush of adrenaline through her. Not that there's anywhere she can bolt once the drones are back in range. Still, it's nice to know her older augmentations still work flawlessly.
And she may need that adrenaline once she's inside the station. Are more drones scurrying to her airlock, stingers ready?
A pity she had to leave Mu Arae so quickly. Her plasma rifle would be handy. All she has on her is the torch Kai gave her years and years and years ago, and it's not much of a weapon.
The airlock's handle twists beneath her. Gerda pushes it open and slides inside. The drones fire, but she's safe behind the hull. She keeps her gaze fixed on the airlock's inner door. A real pity about her plasma rifle. She curls her hand into a fist.
The door pops open. The hallway outside is deserted. Gerda eases out, maximizing the sensitivity on her sensory augmentations. Nothing. This entire station is deserted.
She still makes her way slowly through the hall. How many kilometers of corridors are in these stations? How many will she have to explore to find Kai? Her suit only has four more hours of air. After that, her choices are suffocate or risk the air in the stations. It's no doubt laden with Swarm nanites.
That chuckling feeling strums down her spine again. So you do fear me.
She fears failing. She'd lost a year at Teegarden. She can't afford to lose a year here. Every day, the drone programming drills deeper into Kai. He's waited five years. She won't make him (can't make him) wait six.
You act as if he wants release. Oh, dear little girl, none of my children wish release. Remove your helmet, and I'll show you.
No. Not now, not in four hours. Gerda presses her palm to the wall and sends one of the bursts Doctor Peura taught her. The echo of tiny spiders creeps over her scalp. She shudders. But the feeling's worth it, because now she has Kai's location. Two stations over, three levels down. She'll have to move fast to make it in four hours.
* * *
Gerda clings to a handhold, her arms burning in exhaustion. She's so close, but to get to Kai, she has to get through a recreation hall of sorts. Or is it a mess hall? The bits and bobs of Swarm technology in her newer augmentations don't offer up an answer. All she knows is that it's a massive hall with hundreds of insectoid drones. She's muted her hearing, but she can still hear the metallic tink tink tink of their legs as they scurry along the walls.She swings to the next handhold. No use cowering. The Queen knows she's here, so the drones know she's here. They'll attack or not according to the Queen's mood. The longer she stays still, the more air she wastes.
The drones stop, and then in unison turn to face her. Gerda's pulse spikes, and her mouth goes dry, but she keeps pulling herself along the handholds. Apparently, the Queen's sport involves her finding Kai, or she'd be battling stronger gravity.
She makes her way through the room and then climbs up a narrow hallway. A pair of drones skitter along behind her, but she refuses to pick up her pace. The spidery trail in her visor shows she's almost to Kai. Just a little further now. Just two more hours of air. She won't let fear shorten that time.
The hallway opens into a large spherical room. Gerda pulls herself up over the rim of the opening and takes everything in. The room's walls are smooth and polished, gleaming like ice in the light from a tall dais, much too wide and much too tall for her to climb.
But she'll have to, somehow, because Kai's kneeling at the top, his skin pale and translucent, reflecting the ripple of Swarm symbols streaming along the surface below him. He's working on some sort of puzzle, swiping at the surface with his fingers, trading one symbol for another dizzyingly fast.
"Kai!"
If he hears her, he gives her no indication. Gerda backs up and takes a running leap, but even in the low gravity, she can't get enough lift. She tries again and again and again until her breath's ragged and she's wasted so much air.
Laughter ripples down her spine. You see. I've set him to a task, and his only wish is to finish it.
"What task?"
Take off your helmet, and I'll show you. You could help him. That is what you wish, isn't it?
Yes…but not quite. Gerda presses her hands flat against the dais. If she could reach him, she could reach him, but there are no handholds, no imperfections in the surface she can use to haul herself up. And she feels so heavy now.
Take off your helmet.
No. She still has a half hour of air. Gerda slumps down and rests her back against the dais. "I'm here with you, Kai. For real, not just an echo like how I've been feeling you these past five years."
No reply.
She lets her hand fall to her belt. "I still have the torch you gave me. When I'm suited up, it's right here." She pats the case. "And when I'm planetside…"
The torch! It's not much of a weapon, but it's perfect for cutting her way out of tight spots. Or for cutting serviceable handholds in a smooth surface. She sets to work.
Twenty minutes of air. She won't make it halfway before fifteen. No, that's the Queen trying to discourage her. That thing isn't talking much now, but its laugher is a constant ripple down Gerda's spine. She pushes all doubt away.
Fifteen now. Ten. Five, and she's almost at the top!
Two. Gerda pulls herself over the edge. No time to savor it. One hundred seventeen seconds now. She crawls to Kai and curls her hands over his. "I'm here."
He shakes her off.
Gerda reaches for him again. "Kai, please."
His fingers still. He looks up at her, cocking his head first to the left, then to the right, like the birds they used to watch search for worms.
There's no helping it. She undoes the seals for her gloves and pulls them off so she can touch Kai, skin to skin, even though it exposes her to the Swarm nanites. She can reach him. She knows she can before the drone programming takes hold of her.
Can you now?
The ripple of laughter down her spine fades. Yes, she can. Gerda presses Kai's hands between hers. His skin is cold, and there's so little substance to him. He used to have massive hands. Now they're thin and too bony. "Kai."
"I think…" He licks his lips. "I think I know you."
Does he? Good. Maybe knows her name. She has one. She has to. Everyone does, right?
No.
That voice lies. It always has.
He slides his hands free from hers and presses his fingers to her helmet. "I do." He slides his hands down and unfastens the locks, then lifts it off her. "You're…"
"Who am I?" He has to know. If he doesn't, they're both lost.
He touches her cheek, his fingers like pinpricks of ice. "Gerda."
Yes! That's her name. "And you're Kai."
And you are both mine.
Kai shakes his head. "No. You gave me a task." He reaches down and slides one more symbol into place. "I finished it. Now I can go home."
You think it's that easy? The surface beneath them shudders. A mass of drones scurry into the room and take flight, their metallic wings beating low enough to strum through Gerda. You think I will let you go?
Gerda squeezes Kai's hand. "I passed a hangar two floors down. Care to steal a Wasp?"
He raises his eyebrows. "Are you saying you came all this way to lead me to a life of piracy?"
"Better pay than a marine. And technically, you're dead. Pirates tend not to do troublesome background checks."
"I remember…your logic always twisted a little wrong."
"My logic is flawless."
Kai laughs. It's a dry, broken sound, but they can work on getting it back to what it once was. So now they have to escape. She squeezes his hand again and then picks up her torch. "Follow me."
"I get lost when I don't."
True. But she always finds him. Gerda takes a running leap and trusts him to follow.

REFLECTED - THE SNOW QUEEN IN FLORIDA

REFLECTED

Kat Howard

When I was a kid, I played with mirrors. I was convinced that if I was fast enough, stealthy enough, something enough, I could make it so the reflection was different from the reality on my side of the mirror. That I could trick the mirror into showing something that wasn’t truth.

My fascination with mirrors continued as I grew up. I studied the way they were made, and the way reflections happened. The way the shape of the mirror could alter what was seen in it. The more I learned about them, the more I wondered if my early childhood games didn’t hold some seeds of truth.

Which is how I wound up doing my graduate work on mirrors and the physics of reflections. Which is how I wound up in the lab when, well. Easier if I just tell you.

The experiment that changed everything started off as goofing around, the three of us playing “what if” with the kinds of ideas you get when you’re a kid: What if there really is an opposite world behind a mirror? What if you can walk into its reflection, breaking the surface as easy as diving into a still pool? What if you can walk into onemirror and out of another?

What if  becomes something more when you have lab space and a research grant, when you’ve spent grad school studying quantum entanglement and positing the existence of pocket universes.

So then it wasn’t just goofing around, late-night discussions over one too many beers, spinning theories like telling stories; it was Lara and Zack and me in the lab, trying to see if there was anything on the other side of the mirrors and how we could get to it, to figure out how to reflect whatever might be there back to us.

I couldn’t imagine Lara doing any other sort of work. She seemed almost as if she was made from mirrors. Glass-pale and sharp-angled, she was the kind of person it could be stressful to be friends with: her reflection of you was uncompromising, and always less flattering than you wanted it to be.

I stuck around anyway. There’s something compelling about the discomfort of that sort of reflection, like the relief of picking a scab and seeing the healed skin underneath. Plus, she was a brilliant scientist, utterly driven. It was like she could see the constituent parts of the universe in the same uncompromising and sharp-angled way that she saw people.

Zack and I had been friends for what felt like forever, but was actually since our freshman year of high school. He was the person who knew me best, the person I could share anchovy pizza with at three in the morning, the person who also wanted to know how the small pieces of the universe fit together. The person I went to for everything, because I knew he’d help me see things clearly.

The mirrors weren’t the hook for him. Zack wanted to know if there were other universes behind their reflective surfaces. If there were, he wanted to go to them. I didn’t. I wanted to know if they existed, of course—I had a theory that you could modify the mirror equation to measure their location the same way we measured objects’ reflected distances now—but I liked it here. There is comfort in known qualities.

Which was why it was going to be Zack standing inside the mirrors that day, and I would be on the outside of them, recording observations and making adjustments as Lara tried to capture his reflection. And yes, I mean capture, not just see. That was part of the idea: that if we could separate a reflection from the reflected object, it could more easily travel between the mirror universe and our own than a physical object could. We were hoping that if it worked, the connection between Zack and his reflection meant that he’d be able to provide us with specific observations of what that mirror universe was like.

“Are you worried about what might happen to your reflection?” I asked, ducking under his arm to turn on the lights as he held open the lab door.

“What, like it’ll get caught in the mirror and never come back?”

“Or maybe that it likes it there so much, it decides to stay.”

“Wouldn’t happen,” he said.

“You’ve been talking about how cool a mirror world would be since we started this. What do you mean, it wouldn’t happen?”

“Well, my reflection might want to stay, but you would reach through the mirror and pull its ass out.” He grinned, and we got to work.

Lara had been setting up the mirrors in increasing numbers. First, there had been two full-length mirrors, framed in wood that looked almost red, Zack between them. Then she put him at the center of an equilateral triangle.

“No good. I’m still catching bits of secondary reflections,” I said. We were after a clear image, not a reflection of Zack, plus a spare reflection of one of his arms.

“Are you sure you don’t need me to actually do anything?” Zack asked.

“Just stand there and look pretty,” Lara said.

Zack struck an exaggerated runway model’s pose.

I laughed and helped her turn the triangle into a square, the muscles in my back and shoulders grumbling as we rearranged the heavy mirrors.

“Remind me again what you’re going to do with his reflection if you catch it,” I said.

“I have some thoughts.”

“She’ll clone me and all my fabulousness.”

“Wrong field, Zack,” I said.

“Details, details.”

But four mirrors wasn’t the right number either, and neither was five.

Six, however.

Lara and I were moving opposite mirrors. Had we stopped and stood in front of them, I would have been reflected in hers, and she in mine. Then we set them, six-sided as a snowflake.

“I can see—” Zack began, his whole body taut, electric.

A great shattering. Particles of mirrored glass falling through the air like snow. When they settled to the ground, the space at the center of the mirrors was empty.

Zack was gone.

All the way gone. Disappeared.

I flung my arms up and shouted, my stomach knotted into surprise and delight. We had done it. We had really done it. Forget capturing his reflection, we had skipped that step completely, done what we’d only barely hoped might someday be possible, and sent Zack somewhere else, another world maybe, through the mirrors.

The mirrors.

They were destroyed. Shattered. Not one piece of glass left in a frame. Which meant that whatever there was to connect Zack to here, to us, was gone.

The knots of my emotions twisted from delight to concern. I stepped toward the broken mirrors.

Lara shouted from the other side of the room, startling me into stillness. “It probably can’t happen again without the reflections, but.” She pulled one of the mirrors to the side, breaking up the snowflake symmetry.

“Still,” she said, face flushed, eyes shining, her excitement a heightened reflection of mine. “Look at what we did!”

“It is kind of amazing,” I said. “Kind of completely amazing. But we need to bring him back.”

“Right,” Lara said. “It’s no good to us if all we can do is make someone disappear. A stage magician can do that. So we need to figure out what happened here, exactly. That should give us some idea of where he is, and what to do next.”

So we spent the day taking measurements, recording every factor of everything we could think of that might possibly be useful, and then, when we were as certain as we could be that we had the data we needed, gathering up the enormous piles of glass that sat at the foot of each mirror.

“Are you seeing the same thing I am?” I asked.

“All the pieces are broken in the exact same shape,” Lara said. “A hexagon, just like the mirrors were.”

“Any idea what it means?”

“Not yet. I want to run some basic tests.” After those tests were run, we put the pieces in marked, labeled boxes.

“Are you okay?” Lara asked.

“Sure, why?”

“You keep staring at the center of the room.”

Where Zack had been standing when he disappeared. “I guess I keep hoping that whatever we did will spontaneously reverse. That he’ll just be . . . back.”

“I don’t think it’s going to be that easy.”

She was right, of course.

I dreamt about Zack that night. It made sense that I did—there were certainly reasons for him to be on my mind. But the whole thing was deeply unsettling. Memories appeared in still images like photos, then froze over and shattered: painting our faces blue and white for Spirit Day our freshman year of high school, making popcorn in a pressure cooker for our first-year physics lab in college, splitting a bottle of champagne the day we found out we’d both gotten into grad school here.

When the pieces fell, they fell like snow, one after another after another after another, gone, until I stood in a blizzard made from the pieces of our past. And while I could see his footprints, tracks clearly visible in the fallen heap of memories, I couldn’t follow them, couldn’t find him.

I woke up shivering.

I didn’t get any warmer when I got to the lab the next day.

There was snow falling steadily in the center of the room where the mirrors had been, over the precise spot where Zack had disappeared. I held my hand underneath, to check and make sure it really was snow, not just falling pieces of mirrors. Flakes landed, chilled my skin, then melted away into small drops of water. I scrubbed my hand against my jeans.

“Lara,” I called, coat still on. “You probably want to come here and see this.”

I heard her footsteps stop when she saw it. “That’s unexpected. Hang on. I want to record this.”

Outside the lab, it was early fall. The day was predicted to be sunny and in the upper sixties. We hadn’t even had a frost warning yet.

Inside the lab, there weren’t any clouds or anything that might have given a clue as to where the snow was coming from. It was just there, starting about a foot above my head and falling to the ground. I hugged my armsaround my stomach, chilled.

“Frozen in reflection,” Lara said as she checked gauges, took samples.

“Reflection,” I repeated, the word setting off a train of images in my mind. “Do you think the snow is coming from wherever Zack is?”

“I think that’s the most likely possibility. We did ask him to send back any impressions. You know how he is. No matter how weird things were, he’d try to stick as close as possible to the plan of the experiment.”

“And so he’s sending us snow.”

“Either that, or sending him through weakened the barrier between the mirror universe and ours to the point where we’re experiencing their weather events. Either way, it’s interesting,” she said.

I stood in the falling snow, perfect six-sided flakes reflecting the light, and pushed the memory of my dreamaway. That hadn’t been real, and dwelling on it wouldn’t help. “It is interesting, but watching it isn’t bringing Zack back.”

“I thought we agreed the best way to do that is to figure out where he went—I’m running your modified mirrorequations now—and determining the source of the snow could help do that. There may be trace elements in it that will offer some data.”

“I’m not so sure that’s the best way to find him anymore. I think I need to concentrate on him, not his location.”

She shook her head, dismissing the idea. “You can’t bring him back if you don’t know where he is.”

“I think I can,” I said.

Lara looked at me.

“Spooky action at a distance. I re-create as much as I can of the circumstances of his departure, and see if by acting on the mirrors I’m able to act on him wherever he is now in a way that pulls him back through.” It was the same sort of large-scale entanglement we’d hoped for with the original experiment—the captured reflection being held in the mirror, with Zack here to influence it and relate its experiences—just reversed. Well, reversed and complicated by the fact that it was a person, and not a reflection, that had been captured. Complicated by a lot of things, actually, not least of which was that spooky action at a distance hadn’t yet been proven on anything larger than a particle.

Lara shook her head. “It’s a stretch. Too much of one. I’m going to continue with the location work.”

“I understand,” I said, then went down the hall and got out the boxes of shattered glass. I did understand, and I felt better that we were coming at the problem from two different directions. It was more likely that something would work.

As I sorted through the pieces of the mirrors, I realized they weren’t clear reflections anymore. They held color, lines, fragments of pictures that didn’t change. It might not have been Zack’s reflection that we’d caught, but we’d captured something.

I let myself hope.

I set the glass back into the mirrors, very carefully. I didn’t want to glue it in, or introduce any material that might interfere with the mirrors’ connection to Zack. The glass itself was cold, so cold my bones ached after ten minutes of work, and I had to take frequent breaks to rewarm my hands.

It took me days—days while Lara continued to run equations and tests, marking formulae on the mirror in her office in grease pencil, using her own theories to look for Zack—to sort enough pieces of glass to fully see it, but not only had we captured reflections, we’d captured six different images, one in each mirror. Pictures of Zack, frozen in crystals of time. Some of them I recognized—like the one of him disappearing, shock and delight reflected on his face.

Some of them I didn’t. There was one that was him from the back, in the same clothes he had worn in the lab, faded jeans and a black sweater with a pull on the hem. He was walking through a snow-covered forest. In another, Zack knelt at the feet of a woman whose face wasn’t visible, passing a small piece of glass into her hand.

There was a tiny piece missing from one of the mirrors. A thin shard of glass in one of the images of Zack that I did recognize, from the day we had all begun working in the lab. The missing piece was right over where his heart would be. I looked all over the tables, dumped the boxes where the pieces had been stored upside down, but nothing fell out.

Lara found me, what felt like hours later, knees bruised from crawling back and forth across the floor. “What are you doing?”

“There’s a piece missing.”

“It’s not missing. I know exactly where it is.”

I picked myself up off the floor and followed her down the hall.

The piece of glass was broken, cracked in two down the center. “I found it the day he disappeared. I set it aside because it was the only one broken differently from the others, and I wondered if that mattered—like maybe the shattering started with this piece. I’ve been running tests on it, checking baselines against the measurements we took of the other pieces the day they shattered. That’s why I had it in here.”

“Were you planning on giving it to me?”

“Once you needed it, of course.”

The two halves fit together perfectly, but they didn’t fit into the mirror. When I set it in place, all the pieces of glass from that frame fell to the floor. I looked around, making sure the other five mirrors were still intact, coils of tension releasing from around my stomach when they were. I dropped to the floor, searching with shaking hands through the pieces of glass to make sure none of the others were further broken or chipped.

“Did you do anything to the glass when you tested it?” I asked.

“Of course not, but that doesn’t mean it’s unchanged. We are working in fairly unknown territory here. If you don’t mind, I’ll run a few more tests while you put the mirror back together.”

“Go ahead. Just . . . be careful.” I couldn’t shake the feeling that if something happened to the pieces of themirror, we’d never be able to get Zack back.

Hours later, the rest of the mirror reassembled, I went to get the twice-broken piece from Lara. She looked puzzled. “There’s something unusual about it. Nothing that should have changed its size or the way it fits into the image—I measured against the others—but there’s a crystalline lattice inside its two halves, and I don’t recognize the structure. It’s not normally found in mirror glass, and it’s not present in any of the other pieces.”

The internal change shouldn’t have made a difference, but it did. I placed the other pieces Lara had been testing in the frame without incident, but when I put the two broken halves in place, all the pieces of glass fell out of the mirror again.

It felt like something fell out of me with it. All those hours of work, lost again, meaning even more hours awayfrom being able to even try to bring Zack back. I was terrified that one of these times, the strange luck that kept the other pieces from breaking further wouldn’t hold, or the pieces would fall out of the five other mirrors, or. I didn’t even know what other disaster to anticipate.

“What am I going to do?” I scrubbed the exhaustion from my eyes.

“Go home,” Lara said. “Warm up—I can see you shaking from here. Start again tomorrow with a fresh eye.”

Good advice. I hated taking it.

It was still snowing in the lab when I came in the next day. It had gotten colder, too. Measurably colder, cold enough to leave a rime of frost on things in the lab.

Though not the mirrors. The five that had all their pieces still stood, showing the captured images. I spent most of the day putting the glass back in the frame with the missing piece, my hands aching from the cold.

The snow fell faster as I worked, hard enough that it was difficult to see the mirrors through it.

“I want to set the mirrors back into place like they were when Zack disappeared,” I told Lara. “See if it will bring him back, even with the missing piece. The rest of the mirror holds together without it.”

“It’s unlikely to work,” she said.

“Then it doesn’t. And we can try something else next. But we need to try this now. I’m worried about the obscuring effects of the snowfall, and if there’s something important about their precise location, it’s not like we can just set them up in another area of the lab.” I could hear the desperation in my voice. So could Lara.

“Fine,” she said. “Maybe the temperature shift is a signal of some sort. Let’s see what happens.”

Lara and I arranged them back into the standing pattern, six sides, like a snowflake. We set them in place so that with the final two, we would have been reflected in each other’s, had there not already been images of Zack there.

We stepped back, and the temperature in the room plummeted. There was a great howl of wind and snow, and I could hear the shriek and groan of the glass in the mirrors.

The snow cleared, and Zack was there.

He was dazed and cold—blue framing his lips and edging his fingernails. His hair was rimed with frost, and snow coated his clothing. He blinked against the lights, rubbing hard at his eyes.

He was here. Safe and whole, for all that he stood frozen in my arms as I hugged him, tears of relief freezing in the corners of my eyes.

But that wasn’t the end of it. It soon became clear that while Zack had returned, he wasn’t the same. It was like his personality had been left behind, or frozen out of him. He was flat, not all the way here, a blank stranger dressed up in Zack’s clothes.

And there was nothing that stranger wanted more than to go back to where he’d been.

“Let me see the equations again,” he said to Lara. “Maybe I can see where you’re going wrong.” He spent all his time in the lab—there before either Lara or I were in the morning, staying long past when we left, running numbers, poring over notes from the experiment that had disappeared him.

“Does he talk to you about it? Where he was, what happened?” I asked Lara. “Because he doesn’t talk to me.” Not about being there, not about anything. If I was lucky, he’d say hello. I’d asked him about the images in the mirrors, and he said that they already showed me all I needed to know, and walked away.

“He lets bits and pieces slip when we’re working. Like, he said it was snowing there. But he won’t answer direct questions about it. He thinks it was something in the mirrors themselves that helped him pass through.”

“And that’s why he couldn’t come back until they were reassembled,” I said. “There might be something to that. And the missing piece might explain why he’s been so strange since he came back.”

“He’s not strange; he’s just focused.”

“The kind of focused where he doesn’t remember to eat meals or leave the lab or interact with other humans. You know that’s not like him. There’s something different. I think something may have happened to him while he was gone. I mean, the other day, I brought him anchovy pizza, and he picked the anchovies off.”

Lara looked at me out of the corner of her eye. “I don’t think good taste in pizza is grounds for assuming there’s something wrong with him. We sent him to another world, remember? People change for all sorts of reasons, and that’s a pretty compelling one to me. But it’s nothing more than that. Stop trying to see something that isn’t there.”

I started staying overnight at the lab. Poring over all the notes the three of us had generated since we first started talking about the idea of a world behind the mirrors. Reading journal articles that theorized that time could be captured and crystallized, trying to see if I could find anything in them that would match up with the crystalline structure in the broken mirror piece. Staring at the frozen images of Zack in the mirrors, trying to parse the mysteries of the ones that were unrecognizable.

Trying to understand what had happened. To understand why all of Zack hadn’t come back.

I wasn’t the only one staying at the lab at all hours. Zack stood at the center of the mirrors, the puffs of his breath frosting the glass. That was the other thing that was different about Zack now—he was cold, all the time, as if the snow was falling inside him.

“What do you see?” I asked.

“I see a place I need to go back to, a place I should have stayed.”

“Why?” I asked, my heart breaking over the question.

“Because I was myself there. My true self. Look in the mirror—you can see how I really am.”

I couldn’t, though—the mirrors no longer showed new reflections on their surfaces, only the images of Zack that had been frozen there when he disappeared. So all I saw was a flat copy of my best friend, a piece missing from his heart. This was someone so changed and cold that there was nothing left of the warmth I remembered.

Still. Maybe he could see something I couldn’t. “How about me? What do I look like in the mirror?”

“I don’t think I can see you,” he said. “There’s no part of you there.”

Maybe not.

Days had passed now, but snow still fell, in that space at the center of the mirrors. It felt like a door left open.

I was still trying without success to decipher the crystalline lattice in the twice-broken piece of mirror. It looked, I thought, almost like snowflakes, like a pattern of frost. Frozen in reflection.

I pinched the bridge of my nose, closing my eyes.

Maybe, I thought, maybe if I melted it. I put it on a plate and lit a Bunsen burner underneath it. After a couple of minutes, I heard Zack shout from the other side of the lab, crying out that he was burning, something in his shirt pocket, burning his chest.

I turned off the burner. Heard Lara ask if he was okay, heard him say it had stopped.

I looked at the pieces of mirrors again after they had cooled. There was no change. The heat that burned Zack from across the lab hadn’t been enough to melt the crystals.

I put my head down on the lab table and cried.

It wasn’t science, what I did. I couldn’t replicate it in a lab. I don’t know why it worked, and most of me didn’t expect it to. But I was desperate.

I stood in the center of the room, where the snow fell, and I held the broken pieces of mirror in my hand, and I filled them with reflections.

I thought about the time, sophomore year of high school, when my period had bled through my jeans, and Zack hadn’t said anything, hadn’t even blinked, just shrugged out of his ever-present flannel shirt, giving it to me so I could tie it around my waist and hide my embarrassment.

About the time we had taken the railing off the wall to get the couch out of his floor of the rental house, and watched as it shot down the stairs, out of the front door, and across the street because both of us thought the other had a grip on it. How both of us had nearly fallen after it, we were laughing so hard.

The time I said I missed seeing the stars, and he drove me into the Florida Keys, so I could find them.

I stood and reflected on all the things that were the way I saw him—his laugh, his enthusiastically off-key singing, the way he emptied his pockets for any homeless person he passed—and snow fell around me and froze my breath and my tears, and then I filled the small, missing piece of Zack’s reflection with the mirror I held in my hand.

The image in the mirror changed—it became a woman’s face, crystalline and beautiful as snow. She held out her hand, and on it, there was a piece of a mirror, six-sided, like a snowflake.

As I watched, it melted.

She closed her fingers over the emptiness, looked at me, and nodded. Her image faded.

The snow stopped falling.

I heard the door to the lab open and looked over to see Zack, standing outside the ring of mirrors. I walked back through them, to him. He smiled, really smiled at me, for the first time since he’d come back, and rubbed his hands across his eyes.

“Sophie,” he said. “You’ve got to come see this. I’m working on location calculations, when one of the mirrors in my section of the lab decides it’s like a slideshow or something. It showed me all these old pictures of us.”

“Really?” I asked.

“Like the day we met, and the day we started class here, and, oh, in undergrad, the day we were mad scientists for Halloween! Remember?”

I did. “That was fun.”

But when we went into the lab, the surface of the mirror was clear of everything but the expected reflection.

Zack shook his head. “I guess I’ve been working too hard. I must have fallen asleep and had a dream that seemed so real I needed to tell you about it.”

“Stranger things have happened,” I said.

“Right?” He grinned. “Hey, I’m starving. Want to go grab some pizza?”

“With anchovies?” I asked, hoping so hard for the right answer.

“Of course.”

I glanced back at the mirror—now whole—as we left, and I saw the change in the reflection. Over his heart, on the pocket of his shirt, there was a fading spot of water, like what might have been left by melted snow.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Kat Howard: Mirrors have always seemed sort of magical to me. When I was a little girl, I used to play the same game with my mirror as the narrator plays with hers in the story’s opening. I would try to somehow outrun my reflection, wishing that if I just moved fast enough, I would be out of the frame of the mirror, and she would still be there. I wasn’t quite sure what would happen after that, but I knew it would be amazing. Then, right before I got the invitation to write a story for The Starlit Wood, I read a physics article about the possibility of time crystals (which, sadly, almost certainly don’t exist). So when I needed to think about rewriting a fairy tale, my brain mashed up mirrors and crystals and said, “Hey, let’s try ‘The Snow Queen’ with science in it.” My favorite part of “The Snow Queen” was always the mirror. That strange mirror that broke into pieces and fell like snow and changed what people saw, that melted like ice—I loved everything about it. I was shocked when I reread Andersen’s original, at how little page space the mirror took up, because in my memory, it was this huge thing, the focus of the story. So this was also my way of altering the story’s reflection to show my favorite pieces of it.