When the blue and silver lights clear from Constance's eyes, she's left in a room of glass. She turns slowly, seeing each fragment of reflection on the wall turn with her—except it's not her in the mirrors. She freezes.

In each pane of glass is a different person she knows: girls she went to university with, a teenage crush, old teachers, Doctors Carulus and Dyrandulen, students of hers... They all mimic her moves, but their expressions are one and their own: contempt. It's displayed in a dozen different shades, colored with their own personalities, but the disdain is unmistakable. The school girls roll their eyes, her teachers and bosses look down their glasses, her students whisper to each other as if she cannot hear. She flushes, and they titter. Dr. Carulus has the good grace to look embarrassed for her—or is it of her?

Her foot stutters back, but the mirrors surround her. The floor holds no consolation for her either, for there is scrawled FACE THE TRUTH. It ripples and turns to glass as well, showing her true self on the other side.

Her mousy hair, as always, is a disheveled mess that she gave up on many years ago. No matter how she brushes or pins it, it always falls in fairy-nest tangles. Her face is not ugly but neither is it beautiful. It's pale, and right now, stained with tear trails. The very faint beginnings of a double chin can't be hidden from this unflattering angle, which isn't fair because she doesn't feel like she is overweight, but she also cannot argue with her peers in the mirror calling her a slob and a slouch because she is. She spends her days among books, and magic does all her heavy lifting for her. She could be trim and polished and beautiful like the girls in the mirrors, but she doesn't try hard enough. She never tries enough at anything.

"Constance?" Marek calls. "Constance, what's going on?"

She spins. Marek is inside one of the mirrors. He hits it, but the glass doesn't make noise, much less crack.

"Typical," one of her classmates snickers. "Constance Wylf never notices anything other than herself."

"Absent-minded professor much?" smirks one of her students.

"Come on, Constance," Dr. Carulus mutters disappointedly.

A sick feeling gathers in her stomach, but she ignores it, striding toward Marek's mirror. She examines it, frowning. "It's odd that you're in there but I'm not. Theoretically, we should have been pulled into the same situation."

"I don't think I'm the one the fairies are interested in." He winces and bats quickly at something she can't see.

"What was that?"

"Nothing." He cringes again, then amends, "Let's just say I'd rather get out of here sooner than later."

Constance tries to pry the mirror off the wall, but all she succeeds in is bruising her fingers. "It would help if I knew why you were in there."

He rakes a hand through his hair. "Could it have anything to do with the fact you don't want me here?"

"What I want doesn't matter." She is searching the mirror for some hidden spell, but it is just solid glass, and she scowls.

"The fairies are creating these"—his eyes screw up tight—"illusions for you. Right?"

The mirrors whisper with smug satisfaction around her. "Constance Wylf let her emotions get the best of her again. Constance Wylf locked up her boyfriend—"

She spins. "He is not my boyfriend."

Whatever anyone else says in response is static to her because now she sees on the floor something she missed entirely before: paper and a pen. She sprints to the center of the room and drops to her knees.

There's a spell on the paper, though it's written oddly. All the characters are reversed, but she doesn't realize why until she tries to pick up the pen and her hand plunges through the glass like it's water. The paper and pen aren't on this side of the mirror; they're on the side of her reflection.

"Almost," her mirror-self mutters. "Almost."

"Flip it around," Constance tells her reflection (which if that isn't a sign of insanity, she doesn't know what is). But it works; the mirror-self flips the paper so Constance can read it. And it's not just any spell. It's a spell of opening, specifically of releasing something from glass.

"This is perfect!" Constance exclaims.

"No, look," the mirror-self says, pointing at a particularly complex line. "It's not right yet."

Constance squints at the paper, doubt creeping in, doubled by the weight of a dozen stares crawling up her spine. Maybe it isn't right after all. There's no way to know without a fairy executing the spell or her laboriously checking the work. But this isn't something they can afford to get half-right.

"Do you have another piece of paper?" Constance asks.

Marek calls her name, saying something about spells and a plan, but she tunes him out. She needs to focus. The mirror-self gives her more paper, and then more ink, and then a desk as her back grows tired from stooping. She traces the logic of the spell to her satisfaction, but the mirror-self points out one more point of potential trouble. Her spectators murmur their disapproval when she's not absolutely sure about it, and her cheeks go hot. So she asks the mirror-self for a reference book to double-check, and then a second and a third as her mirror-self points out more and more flaws.

Constance is sure about the spell—she's sure she's sure—but she can't afford to be wrong, not with everyone watching. Soon she's surrounded by half the Fairy Logic books she owns, frantically flipping through pages and drowning in answers. The more she looks at the spell, the more mangled it looks. She crosses through and rewrites and balls up only to flatten back out, biting the tip of her pen in consideration.

"CONSTANCE," Marek shouts. His voice cracks, and she wonders how long he's been shouting for.

"Only hours," her teen crush mutters dejectedly, and a spear goes through her heart.

"Hours?" she gasps.

"What does it matter," the mirror-self asks, "if you don't get this spell right?"

She starts to turn back to it when Marek calls her name again. "Forget the blasted spell, Constance! What fairy are you going to get to cast it for you anyway?"

Her stomach plummets so fast that she feels dizzy. How could she have forgotten Rosaline isn't here?

She stumbles, bleary-eyed, to Marek's mirror. Shadows darken his blood-shot eyes; he looks to have aged five years in the time she's left him. "I don't know how to get you out," she whispers in admission, the guilt of it making her sick.

"I've been trying to tell you—no, no, don't go," he says quickly as she ducks in shame, looking back at the unfinished spell. The spectators scoff, and she longs to dive back into the research if for no other reason than as an escape from them. "Please don't leave."

She looks back up at Marek, at the haunted hollows of his eyes. "Okay," she promises.

"Eloquent," Dr. Dyrandulen snarks, but she steels her jaw and straightens her spine. Her eyes burn as the mirrors continue to mock her (she can't even finish a simple spell on her own? she's going to get advice from a barkeep?), but she focuses on Marek.

"What do you want me to try?"

"Just pull me," he starts, then flinches away from something, shielding his face, "out of the mirror. The same way you pulled the pen."

"The way you pulled the things you wanted," Dr. Carulus says, and Constance bites her lip.

"It won't work," one of her classmates says. "You don't want Marek."

"Not like you want your textbooks," another snorts.

"Constance," Marek begs, jaw clenched and face white. "Please."

Her mirror-self appears in Marek's frame. "You could leave him here with me." She twines her fingers through his, and some of the pain on his face abates. He closes his eyes in relief. "There are plenty enough books here for your next portal. And he's not supposed to be here anyway. Facing everything will be easier if you do it alone."

Constance shakes—from what, she's not sure. Exhaustion and fear make a powerful cocktail, but there is something else she cannot define, something created from the picture of her hand (but also not her hand) in Marek's. The mirror-self makes it look like a fairy tale rather than the first step toward disaster. It looks easy—far too easy to be right.

"Don't worry," the mirror-self insists. "I'll take care of him. It's only logical."

"Yes," Constance admits, stomach roiling. "But nothing about this place is logical."

Her hand thrusts inside the mirror and wraps around Marek's wrist. He tumbles out of the glass, and the room explodes into silver shards. Glass clatters to the ground, and silver dust sprinkles through the air. A sliver cuts Constance's cheek, and her bony hand swipes the blood away.

"Are you okay?" Constance checks. She keeps her hand clamped onto his, still not sure of the rules here.

His breaths are haggard, but he nods. "I'll be fine."

He lets her pull him over to one of the reference materials she'd been using. "Are you ready?"

"More than."

"We're jumping in together this time. On three. One, two—"

As they jump, she catches sight of herself in a shard of mirror hanging crooked on the wall. No figments remain in its reflection, but perhaps that is worse.

In the mirror, bone has crept from her hand to her elbow, beneath her dress, up onto her neck. It swallows her left ear into nothing, her soft jawline into hard edges.

She falls through into the pages, and the terrifying truth is ripped away.