by Eva Chase
Up ahead loomed even more of those off-kilter buildings. Maybe I shouldn’t have made that joke about the outside of the Tower. For all I knew, the front door was thirty stories up.
“It’s, um…” I bit my lip. “A little overwhelming. But also, I guess, kind of amazing. I mean, I’ve definitely never seen anything like this before.”
“And you haven’t seen everything yet,” Chess said. “It’s nighttime when Wonderland really comes to life.”
I wasn’t sure this place could be more lively without suffering from a coronary. It could be these people would all die of boredom back in the real world—the Otherworld, as Hatter had called it.
That thought reminded me of Melody’s comment about how I needed to go wild. I sucked the rich scents of the grass and the flowering bushes into my lungs and tried to “loosen up.”
Was this place actually real? Was I hallucinating? You couldn’t really trust your hallucination to be upfront with you on that subject, right? But either way, what I’d said was true. This place was so bizarre it took my breath away, and that didn’t have to be a bad thing.
There was no Brian here, no Mom, no Cameron, no anybody who knew who I was. When in Rome, do as the Romans do—and what the Wonderlanders seemed to do best was whatever the hell they wanted without a care about who was watching.
“So, everyone acts like this all the time?” I said, jerking to a stop to stay out of the path of a couple of kangaroos in evening gowns who bounded out of an alley and across the road in front of them. “They just run wild?”
“Fantastic, isn’t it?” Chess said. “What’s the point in wonder if you can’t revel in it? People have everything they need. All they have to worry about is what gets them off most right now, or the moment after that, or—”
“I get the point,” I said, but a little thrill shot through me at the same time. I wasn’t sure I’d ever only worried about what would make me feel good. My responsibilities and commitments had always been there looking over my shoulder.
They hadn’t followed me here, though.
“Just be careful,” Chess said with a waggle of his eyebrows. “Indulgence is a gateway drug. Once you get started, you may find you’re as mad as the rest of us.”
He dipped into a sudden bow, sweeping his arm toward a gleaming silver doorway. “Ladies first.” Somehow I hadn’t realized we were getting that close to the Tower.
I pushed open the first door, only to find a second door beyond it, and then a third … and suddenly I was stepping out into a narrow space about the size of the bathroom in my apartment, with more silver glinting all around and the ceiling so far above my head I couldn’t make it out. Was I looking up the height of the entire Tower?
“Elevator,” Chess said in a singsong voice. “Twenty-seventh floor. Cheshire coming calling with a guest.”
There was a brief pause, and then an invisible force beneath my feet heaved me upward. I gasped. Chess, who was gliding along beside me, caught my arm to hold me steady.
“What the heck is this building even for?” I said. It didn’t really look like somewhere you’d come to get yourself off—unless my companion had included getting off elevators in that statement.
“Oh, even a land of wonder requires a certain amount of management,” Chess said, in that tone that made it hard to tell how serious he was being about any of this. He flicked his fingers toward an arched doorway we were soaring past. “Department of Balloon Animals.” Another. “The Committee for Midnight Snacks.” Another. “The Flower-Painting Division. You get the picture.”
“Yeah. Who are we going to see?”
“The twenty-seventh floor belongs to the Inventor. You could say he’s our White Knight.” Chess gave me one of those sly smiles. “Don’t tell anyone I told you that. I’ll deny everything.”
“Right,” I said. “I’ll try not to spread the word to the many friends I’ve made here—all one of them.” And I suspected Hatter would have backed away from calling me a ‘friend.’
Chess could obviously figure out who I meant. “Hatter’s good,” he said. “Hatter knows, even if he likes to pretend he doesn’t. Whether he cares, well, I’m not sure if even he could tell you for sure.”
“You know, you have a confusing way of explaining things sometimes,” I said.
Chess grinned wide enough to show off those pointy canines. “What a lovely thing to say, lovely.”
The invisible elevator quivered to a stop. All four walls around me held a door, this one gold, that one silver, another bronze, and the last one iron. I glanced at Chess, but he just slung his hands in the pockets of his teal slacks. “They’ll all get you to your destination. Is it really a choice when every option gives the same result?”
I didn’t know how to answer that, but thankfully I didn’t think he expected an answer. My hand reached instinctively for the bronze door. I grasped the handle and shoved it open.
My steps rang out on a polished white floor. Everything around me was white, from the walls to the desk at one end of the room and the sleek high tables near the other wall—the surfaces so glossy a vague impression of my reflection wavered on them. After the chaos of color I’d been wandering through since I arrived here, the starkness was a completely different shock to the senses. I felt dizzy all over again.
As I regained my bearings, I realized not quite everything in the room was white. The white shelves mounted on the wall near the high tables held bits of metal and wire and glass, as well as some contraptions that looked as if they’d been built out of similar bits. I stepped closer to investigate, and a door I hadn’t even noticed, it blended so seamlessly into the wall, opened behind the desk.
The man who strode into the room was the kind of guy your gaze would snap to the second he entered any room, even if there were a hundred other people already in attendance. He stood taller than Chess, and if not as brawny, his frame had plenty of muscle under his collared white shirt and pale gray slacks. His penetrating eyes and his curly hair were the same shade of dark chestnut, the latter slicked back from his high forehead. The slight crook in his Roman nose only made his face even more compelling for its minor imperfection.
Most of all, though, what drew my eyes to him was the aura he carried with him in his stance, in the way he considered the room, as if he could have commanded anything around him to do his bidding and known it’d comply. This was a guy who got things done.
If this was Wonderland’s version of a White Knight, they could sign me up for saving right now.
“It’s good to see you, Chess,” the guy said in a smooth baritone, his authoritative eyes settling on me. The sensation of receiving all the attention at his command momentarily stole my breath. “Who’s your guest?”
“Allow me to present Lyssa of the Looking-Glass, my good knight,” Chess said with a grand gesticulation of his arm in my direction. “Hatter found her and brought her to me to bring to you. She’s looking for a way home.”
Something shifted in the guy’s expression at Chess’s first words, so quick and subtle I couldn’t read it before it vanished.
“Lyssa,” he repeated, with a similar care to the way Hatter had tested out the name, as if both of them had thought they might find something deeper inside it. He stepped out from behind the desk and took my hand in one of his. His grasp was firm and warm and made my pulse flutter. “Let’s set aside titles—call me Theo. I can understand why you’d be eager to return to the Otherland. I hope your experiences here haven’t been too unnerving?”
“No,” I said, drawing myself a little straighter with the urge to prove something about myself to him, even if I wasn’t totally sure what. “I’m all right. It’s been kind of an exciting adventure, really. I’d just like to know that I can get home.”
“I’m sure we can arrange that.” Theo glanced at Chess. “There hasn’t been any trouble?”
Chess shook his head. “Hatter would have mentioned. Clear to us and opaque to them.”
“Good.” Theo ru
bbed his square jaw, which had a five o’clock shadow even though I was pretty sure it was still morning. Who knew what kind of time Wonderland operated on, anyway?
“There aren’t many doorways to the Otherland left, and most are difficult to reach,” Theo said. “But there is still one in the basement of the club for Caterpillar’s use. Few will even know about it, so I doubt he keeps it all that tightly guarded these days.” He squeezed my hand and dropped it. “We can see you home tonight.”
Chapter Five
Lyssa
By night, Wonderland’s city flaunted its bright colors in streaks of streetlamp light, shifting as some of those lamps bobbed or swayed. I wasn’t sure I preferred the moving muting of the vivid hues over their vibrancy at full sunny blast.
As I walked down the street next to Chess, who was escorting me to the club and would be helping me get to my doorway home, I pictured the building layout Theo had shown me. My chest constricted with nerves. The hallways that made up the club’s inner depths had veered up and down and around without any clear logic. Theo’s instructions had included comments like, “Take the stairs up until you reach the bottom.”
I was going to be on my own once I started down those halls. What if my Otherlander brain couldn’t follow Wonderland architecture all the way to my goal?
How did the White Knight even know about this apparently secret doorway? I glanced over at Chess.
“Who is Theo, anyway?” I asked. “What does he do in that huge office when he’s not helping out stranded Otherlanders?” He’d given the impression of being someone important, but it wasn’t clear to me that authority had much of a place in this world.
“He does whatever he can, and some things he can’t too,” Chess said with his playfully enigmatic grin. “Dispensing advice. Constructing inventions. Planning plans. A figure highly respected by all who know him and many who don’t.”
Inventions—I had seen those contraptions on the shelves. Chess had called him “the Inventor” when he’d first told me about Theo. I might have pushed for more information, not that Chess was likely to give me a straight answer, but then he motioned to a building up ahead with one of his dramatic gestures.
“The Caterpillar’s Club.”
For a second I could only stare. A building shaped like a huge spinning top squatted over on a wide lot at the edge of town, as tall as the nearby three-story buildings and equally wide at its thickest. Beams of light in a rainbow of colors flashed from its outer walls.
It was also literally spinning.
Chess set his hands on his hips as he took in the whirling structure too. “It’s the most popular establishment in the land. If you dance where no one can see you, do you even exist?”
A jangling song that sounded like a blend of funk and country filtered out into the night. Several locals walked past us right up to the building. With a flicker, they vanished from view. I caught my jaw before it went slack.
“Um. How do we get in?” If there was a door, the building was spinning too quickly for me to identify it, let alone have a chance in hell of stepping through it.
“You will get to where you want to go by going there,” Chess said. “Assume there is a door. Decide to walk through it. And in you go! Shall we?”
He offered me his elbow. I slipped my hand around it, taking a little comfort in the solid bulk of his arm beneath my fingers. Chess might take some getting used to, but if I had to pick someone to have by my side, I was happy to go with the brawny dude with fangs. Not that I’d seen any reason to worry about my safety so far. Everyone seemed to be too busy enjoying themselves to bother hassling anyone else.
“Once you’re inside, just act as if you belong there,” Chess said in a softer voice that soothed some of my nerves. “You’ve got at least an hour. Relax. Enjoy yourself. Pretend it’s all a dream, no worries, no consequences. Why not make the most of what Wonderland can offer while you’re here?” He winked at me. “Just avoid the mushrooms is all I’ll say. You’ll need your sense of dimension on straight to find your way home.”
“Got it,” I said. “Thank you.”
We ambled together toward the spinning building. My stomach started to tighten as we got closer to its blurring walls. The lights glanced off my eyes. I focused my gaze straight ahead, imagining an open doorway there. I’d fallen up into a pond and ridden on an invisible elevator. I could believe I could walk right through a wall.
My pulse stuttered, my feet almost stumbled, and Chess gave me a little nudge. With a popping in my ears, the building sucked us in. An instant later I was wobbling on a slanted dance floor, surrounded by revelers and lights and that twanging song. A crisp smell filled my nose, like dried herbs and pomegranate juice. Just breathing it in, a shiver of excitement raced over my skin.
Chess leaned close to murmur by my ear. “Have fun, lovely. You deserve it. I’ll be back for you when the time is ripe.”
I watched him disappear into the air with a tug of my heart. He had to scout out the club and make sure my way would be clear, but I missed his warm presence at my side instantly.
Have fun. Relax. Act like I belonged here. A rainbow of strobe lights that matched the flashing ones outside wavered through the dark room. The dancers undulated beneath them, the crowd seeming to rise and fall in time with the beat of the music. The first song I’d heard had faded into a thumping house beat with a screech of heavy metal guitars.
I was getting the feeling that nothing in this world was ever totally normal.
Even if screechy guitars weren’t really my thing, the bass reverberated through my body. When was the last time I’d really danced? Melody dragged me out to clubs back home every now and then, but I always felt a little stiff going through the motions there, all those observers either finding me wanting or deciding they wanted something from me.
None of that mattered here. Nothing at all from my real life mattered here. I’d never see any of these people or their wacko Wonderland again.
A smile curled my lips. I followed the slant of the floor down into the crowd, letting gravity and the mass of bodies sweep me along.
I spun and swayed with my hands in the air. The music wove around me, urging me on. After a few minutes, I realized the crowd wasn’t undulating—the floor did, rising and falling like waves all across the room. The frenetic drumming of the next song sent me whirling up over one shallow hill; the staccato rhythm of a violin brought me down into the dip on the other side.
All around me, the other dancers churned with total abandon, some of them flailing more than dancing, not looking as if they cared what anyone thought of that at all.
A rush of exhilaration shot up through me. I moved faster, weaving my limbs with the beat, letting out all the panic I’d felt arriving in this world, all the anger and hurt of Brian’s betrayal, all the weight I’d been carrying.
I couldn’t leave the weight of my responsibilities completely behind. I had plenty to still worry about in the real world. But right here, right now, I was no one but Lyssa Tenniel, a dancer in the crowd. The realization was so freeing that tears sprang to my eyes. I swiped them away and threw myself into the next song.
A few figures circulated through the throng wearing white shirts with a black graphic like the club symbol in a deck of playing cards emblazoned on the front. Clubs in a club? I laughed, watching one server hand out tall glasses of a pearly liquid, another extending a platter covered with slices of pink and purple mushroom.
Chess had told me to avoid those. I wasn’t sure having one of the drinks was a good idea either. A guy near me knocked one back and let out a whoop so loud it split the music. A little of that pearly gleam washed over his eyes as he bounced on his feet. There was wild, and then there was right over the edge.
Speaking of wild… One of the dancing couples near me was going at it with tongues and hands all up in places I wasn’t used to seeing exposed in public. Along the walls, other couples—and a few trios and quartets—were undulating against each other
in movements that set off a flare of heat between my legs even as the voyeurism made my cheeks flush with embarrassment. Discretion obviously wasn’t a common concept around here.
Toward the other end of the vast room, a bunch of the dancers were clambering into a human pyramid, somehow continuing to bob to the rhythm while they balanced on each other’s shoulders. I swayed toward them with a laugh and found myself face to face with someone I knew.
Hatter wore the same violet suit and top hat as before, and he wasn’t dancing, just drifting through the crowd with a stiff expression. When our eyes met, he stopped in his tracks. I grinned at him automatically, high on the feeling of freedom, and his mouth curved into a full-out frown for a second before he forced it flat again.
I sidled close enough for him to hear me. “What are you doing here?” I shouted over the music. He didn’t look like he was enjoying himself.
“I should ask you the same thing,” he said. “Decided to go local, did you?”
“This place is apparently my ticket home,” I said. “At least I’m trying to blend in. Why’d you come to a club if you don’t want to dance?”
“Because everyone comes,” he muttered, low enough that I barely made out the words. Then he added, “I’m trying to keep an eye on Doria.”
Oh. Yeah, it was easy to picture that girl with her flyaway hair and her goth-y dress cutting a rug in this place. And easy to imagine Hatter going all Mr. Protective on his daughter like he had when she’d interrupted us in his apartment. Though what he’d been protecting her from then I wasn’t really sure. Maybe Otherland-ness was contagious?
Even if he was being a wet blanket, I didn’t want to just wander off. Now that I’d met a whole lot more Wonderlanders, I could tell there was something different about Hatter. His presence didn’t overwhelm me the way everything and everyone else here, including Chess and Theo, did. For a second, I didn’t feel off-balance. Even though he was still hot in his scruffy be-suited way.