THE GIRLS MARCH ON THROUGH THE DISMAL, unchanging scenery. Whatever light illuminates this place doesn’t shift—no lowering of sunlight, no shadows, just a constant dim glow from somewhere beyond the fog. It gives the place an eerie feeling, as if they are pacing under a dome, some enormous cage built to hold them. Frankie shivers, feeling well and truly caged.

“We should have gotten somewhere by now,” Frankie says. “Each of my steps is about half a meter long, and I have taken four thousand six hundred and eight. Nine. Ten.”

“You’ve been counting your steps?” Raven asks. “This whole time?”

“Well, we had to calculate distance somehow.” Also, the counting helps Frankie focus her thoughts and not imagine anything scary that might materialize in the fog. “How are you guys keeping track? Magic or something?”

“Um,” Raven says, “I’m not keeping track.”

Draculaura points into the fog. “Whoa, do you see that?”

“Yes,” Apple says, a touch of a groan in her voice. “It’s fog. More fog.”

“No, up ahead. I think there’s an island or something.”

The thin bridge of land opens into a wide, round patch of land.

Apple yawns, covering her mouth with a dainty hand. “Hey, Frankie, what time is it?”

Frankie instinctively pulls out her iCoffin, but the clock had stopped when they entered the Margins. “I don’t know. Why would you ask me?”

“I figured since you were counting steps, you might be counting seconds, too,” Apple says.

“That’s just crazy,” Frankie says. “Who would count seconds?”

“The kind of person who counts steps?” Apple replies stiffly, as if doing her best to keep the annoyance out of her voice.

“Well, actually,” Frankie says, not keeping the annoyance out of her voice, “I can probably figure that out. If each step takes about two seconds, and two times four thousand seven hundred and fifty…”

“Is she really going to do this?” Raven whispers to Draculaura.

“Totes,” Draculaura says with a smile.

“That’s one hundred and fifty-eight minutes,” Frankie says. “Let’s round up to one sixty for all the talking.… So it’s been just over two and a half hours. What time was it when we left?”

“Let’s just say it’s bedtime,” Draculaura says. “I think we’re all tired, and this is a good place to camp.”

“I should have brought camping stuff,” Raven says.

“I brought provisions!” says Apple, handing out princess pea–butter sandwiches and fairyberry juice boxes.

After they eat, Apple detaches the outer layer of her skirt in a flourish, leaving her to look exactly as she did before, except with a slightly less poofy skirt.

“We can use this to sleep on,” she says. “It should be softer than the stone.”

She lays out the frilly red-and-gold cloth, but it’s not big enough for four of them.

“I sleep on a metal slab at home,” Frankie says. “Stone will be just fine for me.”

“I’m good with stone, too,” Draculaura says.

Frankie knows that Drac’s sleeping coffin at home has plenty of cushions, but she also knows that her friend can sleep soundly while hanging upside down in a noisy bat cave, so Frankie supposes she’ll be fine.

The girls curl up on the skirt-blanket or stone ground and are soon asleep. Except for Frankie. It is true that she sleeps on a metal slab, but it is her slab, and it is comfortably familiar. This stone is not. But she isn’t planning to sleep. Someone needs to keep watch. After all, people dream when they are asleep, and sometimes dreams are nightmares, and in a place where thoughts can become solid things…

Frankie is congratulating herself for being such a good wide-awake guard, when her head nods forward. She gasps and sits upright. She’s no longer sitting on the stone ground: four gray walls, shelves of books, tables of gadgets, metal slab beneath her. It looks like the lab where she spent her early life, but it appears smaller now, more cramped. Frankie leaps off the slab and paces the perimeter. No windows and no door. This is her dream made real.

“No!” Draculaura screams somewhere outside the lab. “Don’t! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”

“Drac?” Frankie shouts back. She pounds on the walls.

“Don’t leave!” Draculaura pleads, sounding even more desperate.

Frankie takes a deep breath. “This isn’t real,” she whispers to herself. “This wall could be anything. It could be… glass.”

The stone wall of the lab grows transparent, revealing Draculaura shouting at four figures that resemble Frankie and their other ghoulfriends Clawdeen, Lagoona, and Cleo. They shake their heads in disappointment and walk away. Draculaura starts to follow them, toward the edge of the island and the fall into lava.

Frankie pounds on the glass. “Drac! It’s not real! It’s not real!”

Draculaura takes another step.

Frankie stares at her own hand. “This is not a normal hand,” she whispers. “This hand is made of solid steel.” The hand transforms, and she pounds the glass. It shatters, and then the entire glass wall vanishes and her hand goes back to normal.

Draculaura turns. “Frankie?” she says, and then looks back to the imaginary Frankie and friends in the distant fog. “Ohhh… right.”

“You scared me,” Frankie says, pulling her friend into a tight hug.

“Where are Raven and Apple?” Draculaura asks.

Two buildings that most definitely weren’t there when they went to bed now squat on the stone: a humble cottage with smoke curling out of a chimney and a dark tower with flashes of purple light sparking from a window.

“Um… I’m guessing in there?” Frankie says.

“Let’s check the cottage first,” Draculaura says. “There might be fairytale porridge.”

“Imaginary porridge,” Frankie says.

“I’ll just imagine it fills me up. What is porridge, anyway?”

“I think it’s like soup. Or pudding. Or oatmeal,” says Frankie.

Draculaura whispers, “I’m hoping for the pudding option.”

Frankie opens the door. Inside the one-room cottage, Apple is sitting by the fireplace, her face red from crying. A woman who looks a lot like Apple except with jet-black hair towers over seven tiny beds.

“You know I love you, dear,” says the woman, “but this is a royal disappointment. To me, to your father. Frankly, I think all of Ever After is disappointed in you.”

“I’m sorry,” Apple whispers.

“I thought I raised you better,” the woman says. “But look—you burned the apple cobbler! How can you ever be Snow White if you burn the cobbler?”

“She does exist!” whispers Draculaura, gaping at the apparition of Snow White.

“No, she doesn’t!” hisses Frankie. “I mean, not right here, at least! This isn’t real.”

Apple notices the girls. “What’s going on?” she asks.

The false Snow White ignores them all entirely. “Not only did you burn the apple cobbler, but you also forgot to turn in your thronework! And your shoes are scuffed! And you smell like canned beans. You have for years. I just didn’t have it in my heart to tell you.”

“That isn’t your mom, Apple,” Frankie says, rushing to her side. “That’s… just a… um… It’s this weird place we’re in! It’s making what you dream and worry about actually happen!”

Apple narrows her eyes at the shape resembling her mother. “What a relief! I’ve never burned apple cobbler!”

She swats her hair out of her face, walks over to the now-scowling apparition, and gives it a kiss on the cheek. Snow White and the cottage vanish.

“Whew,” Apple says. “That was intense. Thank you. Where’s Raven?”

“Well, there’s…” Draculaura points.

“I’m going to go out on a limb,” says Apple, “and guess that Raven is in that scary, dark tower.”

The three girls each take a deep breath and then start to climb the tower’s stairs.