‘I said I’m sorry.’

‘Yes, you did. Curiously enough, that doesn’t seem to have solved anything. I expect you’re feeling hard done by because I haven’t turned you into a frog. Sorry; I would if I could but I can’t.’

Sis’s face burnt red. ‘So what do you expect me to do about it?’ she snarled wretchedly.

‘Oh, let me see. How about putting right all the damage you’ve done? That’d help.’

Sis winced. ‘You know I can’t do that,’ she objected. ‘I don’t know how your silly mirror works.’

‘No, you don’t, do you? Neither do I.’

Sis stared. ‘You don’t?’

‘Not a clue. I just use the thing. I switch it on and it works. Or rather it worked. Important distinction there, don’t you think? One instance where grammatical accuracy isn’t just me being pedantic.’

‘Oh.’ Sis consulted her shoes again, but they were staying out of it. ‘So what’re we going to do?’

‘I don’t know,’ the wicked queen replied, sitting down and rubbing her nose with the heel of her hand. ‘I can give you a fair idea of what we can’t do. We can’t run the system. As a result, the entire dimensional matrix is going to tie itself up in knots. And just in case you don’t know what a dimensional matrix is, it means that everything out there is probably going wrong. Everything,’ she added, with a little smile. ‘What fun.’

‘What about Carl?’ Sis suggested. ‘He might know what to do.’

‘Carl.’

‘My brother. He’s the one who hacked into your system in the first place. He knows all about computers.’

‘Oh, how splendid. Where is he, by the way?’

‘I—’ Sis looked round, suddenly alarmed. ‘I don’t know. He was here a moment ago.’

The wicked queen nodded. ‘He was here a moment ago, when you crashed my mirror. The other one got away, but I’m sure Carl was left behind. And now he’s vanished. Wonder why.’

A look of horror passed across Sis’s face. ‘You mean he’s been caught up in—’

‘Yes, I do. Didn’t it ever occur to you to wonder exactly why s mashing a mirror brings you seven years’ bad luck?’

‘But we’ve got to do something,’ Sis squealed urgently. ‘We’ve got to get them back, now. Before—’

The wicked queen smiled. ‘Before your mother and father get back from the office party and start asking what’s become of the two siblings they left in your care? Ah yes. Let’s all panic and declare a state of emergency. Just think; if you don’t find Carl and Damien in time, they might cut off your pocket money.’

‘Don’t be horrible,’ Sis replied angrily. ‘And don’t just sit there. You’re the stupid old wicked queen. You’ve got to—’

‘Do something, I know.’ The wicked queen clicked her tongue wearily. ‘There’s all sorts of things I could do—’

‘Told you so.’

‘Unfortunately, none of them would help, except by way of easing my anger and frustration. We could try that, if you wouldn’t mind holding still for twenty minutes.

Sis backed away. ‘Can’t you phone somebody?’ she asked. ‘You know, a helpline or something.’

‘Phone somebody. All right, I’ll give it a try. Just as soon as you tell me what with.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Show me the telephone in this room.’

Sis looked round. ‘There isn’t one,’ she said.

‘Magnificently observed. Not in this room, this castle, this kingdom, this whole dimension. Remember where you are.’

‘But surely—’

‘No phone,’ said the wicked queen, checking off on her fingers. ‘No fax. No computers. Just a magic mirror. Don’t you just love fully integrated systems?’

‘Oh.’

‘Now then,’ continued the wicked queen briskly, ‘this is the point at which any teenager worth her salt mumbles an excuse and departs, leaving someone else to clear up the mess after her. And I’d be only too delighted to see the back of you, if only it were possible. But it isn’t. Integrated systems. I’m stuck with you. Isn’t that jolly?’

‘You mean I’m stranded?’ Sis’s eyes grew round with horror. ‘But that’s not fair,’ she wailed. ‘There must be—’

The queen chuckled. ‘What’re you going to do, call the Embassy? Walk home? I’m terribly sorry, my sweet, but this time you’re going to have to face up to the consequences of your actions. Who knows,’ she added, ‘you might enjoy it. You’ll never know until you’ve tried it at least once.’

Sis raised her head and scowled. ‘Well, I don’t see how you being horrid to me’s helping either,’ she said. ‘Not very constructive, is it?’

The queen sighed. ‘Very true,’ she said. ‘I imagine it’s some sort of Pavlovian reaction, what with you being young and blondely cute and me being a wicked queen.’

‘Pavlovian?’ Sis queried. ‘Isn’t that ice cream and meringue?’

The queen winced. ‘In a sense,’ she replied. ‘You’re right, though, gnawing bits off each other isn’t getting us anywhere.’ She sat quietly for a while, picking at a loose thread on her sleeve; then her face lit up like the jackpot on a complicated pinball table. ‘I’m an idiot,’ she said. ‘Water.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Bucket of water.’ She stood up, lunged across the room and came back with a heavy-looking oak pail, out of which water slopped on to her ankle and the floorboards. ‘Mother Nature’s laptop,’ she explained. ‘It’s what we in the trade call backing up to sloppy.’

In the cartoon version, a light bulb starts to glow above Sis’s head. ‘Oh I see,’ she said. ‘You mean you made a copy, and it’s stored…’

‘In here.’ The queen nodded. ‘The memory’s not up to much and the response time’s lousy, but it’s better than nothing. Right then, let’s see.’ She pulled her hair back from her face, leaned over the pail and looked at her reflection. ‘Here goes. Mirror, mirror, in the bucket, are you reading me? Oh f— fiddlesticks.’ She scowled, dipped her finger into the water and fished out a tiny, struggling fly. ‘The slightest thing, and it refuses to play. Mirror,’ she repeated sternly.

The water rippled, although the air in the chamber was still. Almost imperceptibly, the queen’s reflection began to mutate — ‘I hate it when it does that,’ she commented, wrinkling her nose. — Until it had become the image of a young man, comprising a small stub of nose sandwiched between an enormous pair of glasses and a bushy black beard.

‘Bad command or file na—’

‘Quiet,’ the queen snapped. ‘And take that gormless expression off your face, or I’ll feed you to the dahlias. Display all systems files, and look sharp about it.

The surface of the water rippled again, and just underneath the meniscus Sis thought she could see a pair of two-dimensional fish tracing geometric patterns. ‘I know,’ muttered the queen, following her line of sight, ‘it’ll send you potty if you look at it for long enough. One of these days I’m going to replace it with something that’s not actually pernicious.’

The fish snapped out of existence, and a thick mass of symbols and equations glowed dully blue on the surface of the water. The queen studied them for a while and then shook her head.

‘Doesn’t mean a lot to me,’ she confessed. ‘It could be all the little cogs and gears you managed to trash just now, or it could equally be the thing that numbers your pages for you.’ She thought for a moment. ‘Do you really think this brother of yours could make sense of this?’

‘I don’t know,’ Sis replied. ‘He says he knows all about this sort of thing. It’s worth a try.’

‘Display our available options in table form, and it’d be at the top,’ the queen replied with a sigh. ‘And the bottom as well, seeing as how it’s the only one. Right, let’s give it a go. Mirror, locate— what did you say his name was?’

‘Carl.’

‘Of course. Mirror, locate Carl.’

Ripple, ripple. A crude graphic of a frog hopped off an equally rudimentary lily-pad. Then the face came back.

‘Path Carl not found,’ it replied sheepishly. ‘Retry or Can—’

‘Oh, be quiet.’ The queen rubbed her hands together, as if trying to remove something distasteful. ‘I know what’s happened,’ she said. ‘When you bent everything, your wretched brother must have got renamed somehow. He’s out there, but the mirror thinks he’s called something else.’