“Find your courage. Look down. Your show is about to begin.”
I shake my head, eyes clamped tightly. “We’re too high … it makes my stomach kick.”
He laughs and inhales a puff off the hookah then blows the smoke over me, saturating me in the comforting scent. “That’s how you know you’re alive, Alyssa. The kicks.”
Before I can respond, a loud rapping makes me brave a peek.
The funnel of water forms a curtain, which parts to reveal a stage. Morpheus’s bedroom has transformed. The living chess pieces dominate the scene, their milky-green bodies vivid atop a glossy black and silver chessboard that stretches the length of the floor. Everything is arranged in a large circle that reminds me of a circus’s center ring.
The queen’s husband, king of the Red Court, lounges upon a velvet throne. Another woman in royal robes stands at his right hand, crimson bows tied on every finger. There are bows on her barefoot toes, too. She keeps shushing the ribbons, as if they won’t be quiet. Queen Red stands before them both, locked in chains. The jurors’ box, which is actually a cage filled with jagged-toothed tigers and bubble-headed seals, sits on the right. Card guards line the walls.
Seated in the witness chair is little Alice, fussing with the hem of her carved dress.
Rabid White stands behind her, his antlers low and his shoulders slumped, looking drained and miserable. His jacket and boots are the same marbled hue of his shiny, bald scalp. A strange assortment of creatures sits upon wooden bleachers and snacks on peanuts and popcorn. Even the Ivory Queen and her elfin knights are in attendance.
A toad-faced creature stands behind a podium, though he’s dressed more like a ringleader than a judge. He bangs a gavel. “The Red Court is now in session!” His plumed wig wriggles. Only when it stands on long stick legs do I realize it’s a stork. After preening its jade feathers, it settles into place again, and the judge continues. “Queen Red, because The Alice entered our world through the rabbit hole, which is in the Red province, and because you failed to capture her before she unleashed her mortal mischief over all of Wonderland, you have been accused of gross negligence and havoc by association. How do you plead?”
Queen Red’s wings droop behind her. She glares at the king and the woman with the bows. “I plead temporary preoccupation brought on by a broken heart. My husband left me for Grenadine … I was too distracted by his betrayal to note something so insignificant as a mortal child in our midst.”
Murmurs explode from the jurors’ box. Grenadine looks remorsefully at the ribbons on her feet. The king shifts atop his velvet cushions.
“You’re the one who should be in shackles,” Queen Red says to her husband. “Wasn’t it enough that before his death, my father favored her over me, an amnesiac little brat not even of his blood? But your betrayal is so much worse. My simpering stepsister can’t remember what day it is unless one of her chatty ribbons catches her attention. She certainly can’t remember whom she’s supposed to love. You’re responsible for wooing her and distracting me from my duties.”
The judge leans over his podium, hugging it with his webbed hands. “Perhaps you should be grateful to your royal husband for bargaining with this court to waive the harshest sentence. Should you be guilty found, you will be exiled to the wilds. Preferable to losing your head, I should say.”
“And as to The Alice?” Queen Red shoots a scathing glance at the witness box. “What of her sentence?”
The judge points his gavel at Alice. “She has chosen to read her written confession in exchange for being sent home with the promise never to return and to forget everything she’s seen.” He nods at the child, urging her to stand.
I lean forward to get a better view, so invested in the outcome I no longer care how high I am, relying solely on Morpheus’s arm around my waist to keep me anchored to the chandelier.
Alice curtsies before taking out a piece of paper from her pinafore’s bib. She coughs twice, delicately, then reads aloud: “Perhaps my first mistake was whom I chose to befriend. Or did they choose me? The smiling cat and the smoking caterpillar … oh, they hatched such fine schemes!”
I glare over my shoulder at Morpheus, who coughs up his puff of smoke and smirks sheepishly.
Below us, the judge waves his gavel, disturbing the stork upon his head. It makes a clucking sound and snatches the gavel’s handle with its beak. “Descriptions of the schemes, if you please!” the judge screeches, wrestling the bird for its prize.
Alice clears her throat and inhales deeply. “We put an untimely stop to a tea party, spilled soup over a duchess so we could make her sneeze and steal her gloves and fan, unleashed an accidental ocean, and helped a hungry artisan trick his walrusy friend out of a bevy of very vocal clams, thank you.”
Several bivalve audience members throw their popcorn at the witness and squeak out the word, “Scandalous!”
Alice dodges the rain of kernels by ducking behind her chair. The judge—who’s managed to salvage his gavel with the loss of his wig and dignity—waves her to stand up straight. “How did you come to hide at the Ivory Queen’s castle?”
“I wasn’t hiding, in fact. Chessie Cat and Mr. Caterpillar insisted I visit the Ivory Queen and ask her to send me home, as she is more agreeable than Queen Red.” Alice slides a pointed glance in Red’s direction.
The shackled queen snarls, and her chains move as if alive, nearly catching Alice’s ankle before she scrambles onto her chair.
Hammering his gavel, the judge demands order. “Would Queen Red’s royal advisor please step forward and wrangle her chains?”
Rabid White moves up to take the metal links and holds them taut.
“Continue,” the judge says.
Kneading her gloved hands, Alice clambers down and recites the rest of her confession from memory. “Ivory seemed pleased to have guests. She was, in fact, very fond of Mr. Caterpillar—who is debonair, in his own squirmy way. Just as I was preparing to follow the knights to the highest turret of the castle, where my doorway home awaited, an invitation arrived from Queen Red’s court—a croquet match. But it was a trap, so you could imprison me and force my confession for this trial.” She curtsies once more. “I’m sincerely sorry for the trouble I’ve caused. May I please go home now?”
“You will never go home, cancerous little polyp!” Queen Red screams.
I almost don’t catch what happens next. Rabid’s hands move faster than a shock of lightning, slipping out a blade that magically slices through Queen Red’s metal chains. It happens so quickly, no one else even notices until the queen flaps her wings and grabs Alice by her shoulders, lifting her into the air. The judge’s stork snatches the blade from the floor and follows Queen Red as she flies with Alice out the courtroom door, along with everyone else.
The minute they’re gone, I strain against Morpheus’s hold. “Follow them!” I demand.
“Follow them yourself,” he says, and releases me. I scream, somersaulting in midair, my stomach bobbing into my throat. An itch begins behind my shoulder blades, as if something is scratching to get out; then it’s gone as soon as it started. Inches away from striking the floor headfirst, I flip around and drop into my chair, teacup in hand. The chess pieces lie scattered on the table’s surface, as if the re-enactment never happened.
I know better.
Morpheus sits across from me, spinning Queen Red’s chess piece as my stomach sinks back into place.
“How does it end?” I ask.
“Your nightmare knows.”
I place the Alice figure upon a black square. “The stork and the queen fought in midair. Alice escaped and came looking for you.”
“But I couldn’t do a bloody thing for her because I had already begun my metamorphosis. I was locked in that cocoon for seventy-five years.”
“So how did Alice win?”
Morpheus rolls the statue of the red queen across the board, knocking over Alice. “She didn’t. As you know very well, her lineage was cursed.”
 
; “And that’s why you brought me here.”
He nods once. “To set your family free and reopen the portals back home, you must fix all the messes that caused Queen Red to be exiled and lose her crown: drain the ocean, return the gloves and fan to the duchess, make peace with the clams and the tea party guests. Only you can break Red’s magic bonds.”
A weighty silence follows, broken only by the sound of the cascading waterfall around the bed. I reach for the caterpillar figurine, but Morpheus’s hand catches mine. Warmth seeps through his glove and into my bones.
For an instant, I see him so clearly as the teasing child he was when we spent time together in my dreams. I understood him then, why he collected moth corpses, because their wings represented freedom, something that he’d been without while locked inside his cocoon … why he loved flying, especially in storms, because outrunning the lightning gave him a sense of power. Just like he understood my quirks: my fear of heights, my hunger for security. But here, he’s tortured, seductive, and unreadable. All grown up with just as much baggage as me.
“That’s why you’re involved,” I mumble, testing a hypothesis. “To appease your guilty conscience for failing Alice.”
Hissing, he stands in a rushed flurry of wings and leather. Gusts from the movement flit through my hair. “My guilt for what happened with Alice can never be appeased.” He snatches up the Cheshire Cat figurine and paces the rug. Despite his impressive height, he’s as graceful as a black swan. “And don’t delude yourself. I’m not quite that unselfish.”
“I know you too well to think otherwise.” I lift an eyebrow, toasting him with my teacup.
He looks at me briefly, almost smiling. “In her fight with the stork, Red managed to get the blade. I might’ve been unreachable in my cocoon, but Chessie was there. He dived for Alice before Red could behead her. He took the strike that was meant for the child.” Morpheus balances the cat figurine on his fingertip, holding it up to the light. “Chessie is of a rare strain—not one part spirit and one part flesh but both at once. He can vanish and reappear in midair and twist himself into any shape. Such a being is nigh impossible to kill. When Red cut him with the vorpal sword—the one blade that can slice through any magic in the nether-realm—it cleaved his magic in twain. Split in two, but still alive.”
“So he didn’t die?” I set my teacup aside.
“Not exactly. His head rolled toward the bushes where Alice was hiding. He managed to catch the vorpal sword in his mouth and spat it at her feet. Chessie’s bottom half was captured by Queen Red, and in one last act of defiance, she fed it to her pet bandersnatch before she was captured and banished from the kingdom.”
Morpheus shakes the box that earlier held the chess pieces. Out falls the biggest figurine of all: a grotesque creature with dragon’s talons and a spiked tail. Its gaping mouth and jagged teeth send a shudder of terror up my spine. When I was little, I used to hide this one while we animated the other pieces.
Morpheus tosses the cat into the air, then lets it plop soundly on his palm, squeezing his fingers around it. “What did I teach you about the bandersnatch?” he asks, testing me.
“It’s bigger than a freight car. It swallows its food whole so the victim decomposes slowly in the dark void of its belly—a death that can take over a century to complete.”
That glint of pride shines back at me. “Correct. For Chessie, who cannot die, it’s like being exiled on a desert island, without any sun or moon or stars. Or wind or water. Just death, all around you. There, half of him resides to this day, trapped and longing to be reunited with its head once more.”
A nudge of sympathy knocks at my heart. “You want me to help free Chessie from the bandersnatch, so he can find his head again.”
Morpheus turns on his heel to face me, wings drooping. “All I need is the vorpal sword. Only its blade can cut through the hide of the bandersnatch. Alice hid the sword in the one place she knew it would be safe. Somewhere so ridiculous and mundane, no one would look for it there.” His gaze falls on the figurines in front of me, and I pick up a character with an odd, cagelike hat.
“The tea party. The Mad Hatter has it,” I guess.
“You’ve forgotten. That is strictly a Carrollism—the name Lewis used in his tale of fiction. His true name is Herman Hattington. And there’s nothing mad about him. He’s rather jolly, in fact, when he’s awake.”
I tap the carving’s head, waiting for an explanation.
“Alice left the tea party guests beneath a sleeping spell,” Morpheus continues. “Wake them, and they can tell you where the sword is. You’ve already dried up the ocean and made peace with the clams. I’ve a guest coming to the banquet tonight who will receive the gloves and fan on the duchess’s behalf. After that, making things right for the tea party guests will be the only thing left undone.”
Standing the Alice figurine up again, I place the caterpillar next to her, thoughtful.
Morpheus returns to the table and drops the cat into the brass box, then sweeps all the other characters in with him. Standing over me, he holds out his palm. “What say you, Alyssa? Are you willing to help me while you’re helping yourself? A favor for your childhood friend?”
Once Jeb and I get home, I can tell Alison that the nightmare is finally over, that we’ll never be connected to Wonderland again. Just thinking of her smile sparks an ember in my heart.
Taking a breath, I slide my fingers into Morpheus’s and meet his gaze. “I’ll do it.”
He lifts my hand and presses soft lips to my knuckles. “I always knew you would.” Then he smiles, his jewels glistening gold and bright.
I wait in a cold, mirrored hall with a glass table and chairs for company. Jeb’s supposed to meet me here. I’m dying to see him again but at the same time nervous about how he’ll react to my decision to help Morpheus without talking things over with him first.
I close my eyes, disoriented by the movement all around me. Mirrors line every inch of the ceiling and walls, even the floors. Shadowy figures glide in the reflections.
In our world, mirrors are made by slapping a coat of silvery aluminum paint onto the back of a glass plane. A person can’t see anything but their reflection. Here, I can see shadows inside, like they’re sandwiched between the layers. Morpheus told me they’re the spirits of moths. It makes me wonder about the bugs I’ve killed back home.
Apparently, in Wonderland, everyone—or thing—has a soul. The cemetery is a hallowed place revered by all netherlings. No one will set foot inside, other than the keepers of the garden: the Twid Sisters.
At the hands of the twins, the dead are cultivated: sown, watered, and weeded out like a virtual flower garden of ghosts. One sister nurtures the souls—singing to the newcomers and keeping the spiritual flora content. The other sister weeds out withering spirits that have languished and turned bitter or angry—something to do with locking them inside other forms for eternity.
The Twid Sisters aren’t getting along with Morpheus right now because he refuses to send his dead moths their way. He’d rather let them fly free somewhere between life and death than tie them down in a prison of dirt. So he hides them inside his mirrors.
Some might call that morbid. I see a degree of tenderness there, in his effort to give them dignity. The same tenderness I’ve glimpsed in our past, and earlier, when he treated my injuries.
The birthmark on my ankle is universal to the creatures of Wonderland—keys to their world and a way to heal one another—and a part of the Liddell curse. I still don’t know why, in her old age, Alice lost the marking. Or why she forgot her time in the real world, swearing she lived in a birdcage here instead of having married and had a family. But at least one thing is clear: I’m a part of this realm until I can shatter the curse to pieces.
Heavy boots echo along the mirrored floor and I glance up.
“Jeb!” I race toward him. The floor is slick, and the boots the sprites gave me have little traction. I slip. Jeb drops the backpack, leaps forward, and c
atches me.
He drags me up until our foreheads touch and my feet dangle above the ground. It never ceases to amaze me how easily he can lift me, as if I weigh nothing at all.
I stroke his clean-shaved face and garnet labret—breathing him in, assuring myself he’s all right.
“Did he touch you? Hurt you?” Jeb whispers in the silence.
“No. He was a gentleman.”
Jeb frowns. “You mean a gentleroach.”
I snort, which melts his severity and makes him smile. He spins me around. “I’ve missed you,” he says.
I tuck my chin against his broad shoulder and hug him tightly. My body’s thirsty, drinking up his warmth like a sponge. “Never let me go, okay?” Any other time, that might sound lame. But right now, it’s the most genuine request I’ve ever made.
“Never plan to,” he whispers, his mouth close enough that his breath grazes the top of my ear.
When I lean out of the hug, he’s watching the moving silhouettes race all around us.
“Gossamer told me about them,” he says. “I didn’t believe her. The guy’s moth-crazy.”
I prop my forearms on his shoulders, feet still swinging at his shins. “You should see his room. He has tiny glass houses filled with living ones. He keeps them there until they leave their cocoons. When they’re strong enough, he sets them free.”
“He had you in his room?” A dark cloud crosses Jeb’s face. “Do you swear he didn’t try anything?”
“Scout’s honor.”
He squeezes my waist, tickling me. “Too bad you were never a Scout.”
I squirm and smile. “Nothing happened.” That’s a lie. Morpheus got to me in a big way, showing me a side of myself I can hardly believe exists—one I’m not sure Jeb will be able to accept. But I’m thinking maybe he doesn’t have to know about the thrummings in my head or my weird powers. Maybe I can hide my cursed tendencies until we get out of here and I’m cured.