by Eva Chase
So fucking magnetic. My feet drifted nearer to him of their own accord.
“I saw you talking to Caterpillar,” he said, dipping his head close to mine. “You handled him fantastically.”
My lips twitched with a smile I couldn’t contain. The approval in this man’s voice felt like its own kind of drug. I suspected it was just as addictive.
“Chess helped,” I said. “I didn’t want anyone to get in trouble because of me. Would you get in trouble, if he knew how I got here?”
“You don’t need to worry about that,” Theo said, with so much certainty I didn’t ask whether he meant because they wouldn’t get in trouble or they’d be able to handle it if they did.
He swept his fingertips over my temple, brushing a few stray strands of hair back from my eyes. The contact sent a flare of heat over my skin even though he’d barely touched me. Maybe it was the intent focus with which he was meeting my eyes, as if there wasn’t anything in the world more important to him in this moment.
No, that sensation was addictive.
“You’re enjoying yourself here,” he said, not quite a question. “Are you a party girl back in the Otherland?”
I had to laugh at that idea. “No,” I said. “I’m not really a club person at all. But the ones back home, they’re not—not like this. I’ve never had anything like this there.”
He cocked his head, his intentness blending with warm curiosity. “What do you mean?”
I opened my mouth, and a nakedly honest answer spilled out before I could stop it. Maybe I didn’t want to lie. Why shouldn’t I be honest with him? That freedom was exactly what I craved in this place.
“Back home… I’ve got people who need me. People I care about, and I’d do anything for them, but it can still take a lot out of me. And everything I do, every decision I make, if I screw up or make a fool of myself, it could make the difference between having a job I need or not, it could freak out the people who care about me…”
“That’s a lot of pressure to have on you,” Theo said, so softly I only barely made out the words.
I ducked my head, choking up a little. “Sometimes the responsibility gets kind of suffocating, I guess. But I don’t belong here, and that means I don’t owe anyone here anything. They don’t owe me anything either. I can just exist and be and do what feels good, without all that stuff weighing me down.”
“Surely there’s somewhere in the Otherland you could get that release?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never found it. Maybe I just don’t know the right way to look for it.”
Theo’s fingers glided under my chin, tipping my face up so I’d meet his gaze again. “I’m glad we could give you that here, then,” he said. “And I suppose it makes sense. Maybe it’s not all that easy for those of us who started here to appreciate this world the same way.”
For an instant, an unexpected shimmer passed through his eyes, something like regret. Unless I only imagined that. It was there in a flash of blue light from above and then gone, replaced by his usual assured smile.
“We’d better make the most of the night, don’t you think?” he said, his smooth baritone sending all kinds of tingles through me when his body was that close to mine.
I picked up my pace again, catching up with the beat. Theo sidestepped and swiveled, never moving too far away. As I let the music fill me once more, the motions of his limbs loosened a little. He tipped his head back to the lights as if drinking them in. There was something so vulnerable about the curve of his throat, the sense of searching in that pose, that my throat tightened for a second time.
I was starting to think there was a lot more to this guy than the measured power he seemed to live and breathe. A tenderness at his core that he kept well-shielded. How many other people had gotten even this brief glimpse of it?
The longing rang through me to delve into it even deeper, to discover everything there was to discover about the Inventor, the White Knight—this man of many names. Where had he come from? How had he ended up here?
But this wasn’t the place for a delicate conversation, and I didn’t really think he’d give me more of an answer than he already had anyway. What I’d said was true: I wasn’t of this world. That might be the only reason he’d let his armor budge even that smidgen with me.
So I danced. The music reverberated through me and around me, and for a while everything fell away except the flow of my breath and the thump of my pulse in harmony. Theo stayed near me, matching my tempo with the occasional brush of his hand against my arm, my side, when he moved me with him.
The ache in my legs was only just creeping back into my awareness beneath my exhilaration when the clang of the gong rang out. The crowd of dancers surged toward the bar like they had the other night. Caterpillar was standing behind the bar waving a glass in the air.
I trailed behind the other dancers, keeping an eye on the basement doorway. Two of the guards had left it as before.
And three figures were striding through the club’s entrance, steel batons glinting in their hands. I hesitated, eyeing them. They hadn’t been here last time.
The three wore the same red-and-pink tunics and bulging helmets as the guy Chess had seemed to want to avoid the other day. The guy at the front had a tiger’s head; the other two were fully human. All of them looked grim, their mouths set in flat lines and their eyes narrowed.
“What’s going on?” I asked Theo, who’d stayed beside me. “Who are they?”
Before he could answer, one of them gave a shout and pointed to someone in the crowd. All three charged forward. I made out a woman with cascading black tresses groping to push a path through the crowd, but the other club-goers had stopped, stiff and still, at the shout.
One of the helmed guys snatched the woman’s arm. The second caught her other wrist. They hauled her over one low slope and down another to a clear spot on the rippled dance floor. The club’s music faded to a whisper.
“Traitor to the Queen!” roared the tiger-man who seemed to be the leader. “What was the meaning of this?” He brandished a rolled paper. I couldn’t make out what was on it.
“I’ve never seen that before,” the woman said, cringing. “It’s not mine.”
“Lies! We have three witnesses to your duplicity. Explain this message and tell us who you intended it for, and you may receive mercy.”
“I don’t know anything about it,” the woman said raggedly.
Without a second’s hesitation, the tiger-man whacked her across the head with his baton, hard enough to break the skin.
Blood welled on the woman’s temple. She cried out, and the other men slammed their weapons into her ribs, her gut.
I jerked forward before I’d even realized my feet were moving. They were brutalizing her—they might kill her with those things. What could anyone have put on a piece of paper that would justify that?
The woman wasn’t even fighting back, just huddling on the floor. I didn’t know what I could do, but someone had to try to help, get her away from them—
Theo caught my elbow, yanking me back. When I stared up at him, his jaw was clenched, his expression as frozen as the club-goers all around us were. “You can’t intervene,” he said in a soft, strained voice. “They’ll only turn on you too.”
Part of me wanted to say, Let them, and run right in there to shove those guys off her for as long as I could. But Theo had an iron grip on my arm, and with each fleshy smack of the batons, nausea squeezed tighter around my stomach. The woman was slumped on the floor now, feebly shielding the side of her head with a bloodied hand, one eye swollen shut and one cheek bashed in. Her breath rattled over her lips as she sputtered for air between gasps. My legs wobbled as if the floor had tipped.
“Had enough?” the tiger-man finally growled. He knelt down beside the woman, waving the paper by her face. “What was your intent toward the Queen?”
“I’m sorry,” the woman said, her voice not much more than a whimper. “It was only a joke.
It made me laugh. I didn’t expect anyone else to see it. I’m so sorry.”
“Let’s hope that’s all this was,” the tiger-man said. “We’ll see if you’ve got more to say tomorrow, unless you want to go through this all over again.” He motioned to the other two men. “Let’s get her out of here so the good people of Wonderland can enjoy the rest of their night.”
His cold gaze swept over the crowd. They dragged the woman out through the doorway, leaving a thin streak of blood on the floor.
“What are they going to do to her now?” I asked Theo. The crowd was already shifting around us, revelers drifting back across the dance floor. The music rose; the lights flashed faster. People threw themselves into the beat as if they hadn’t just watched one of their acquaintances battered to a pulp.
My hands clenched at my sides. What was wrong with them?
“That depends on what else she says and what exactly was on that paper,” Theo said. He still sounded strained, but not shocked. Was the scene we’d just witnessed normal around here? My stomach listed queasily.
“I don’t understand. They were talking about ‘the Queen.’ They didn’t mean Mirabel, did they?”
“No,” Theo said. “They’d mean the Queen of Hearts, the woman those guards answer to. The ruler of Wonderland.”
The ruler of Wonderland allowed—encouraged—vicious public beatings? Nothing about that or about the scene I’d just witnessed fit what I’d thought I’d known about this place.
Chess appeared in front of us as if out of thin air. He took in my expression, and his own tightened. “I wish I could have spared you seeing that, lovely. Are you all right?”
“No,” I said. “Not really. I don’t understand.”
“You don’t need to, looking-glass girl.” Hatter had come up by my other side, Doria in tow and looking peeved. His voice was weary, his green eyes dark beneath the brim of his hat. “Get yourself home, pretend this was all a dream, and it’ll have nothing to do with you at all.”
“But why would your queen want— Why would she order— Why doesn’t anyone stop her?”
Chess and Theo exchanged a look, Chess’s gaze lingering on the White Knight for a beat before it slid to meet mine. “Simple to say has no bearing on simple to do,” he said.
“Why don’t we just tell her everything?” Doria demanded, jerking her elbow out of her father’s grasp and folding her arms over her chest. “Why keep hiding it? I think she deserves to know.”
“Doria,” Hatter said sharply. He turned back to me. “This isn’t your world. It isn’t your problem. Go home and be thankful for that.”
Chess tipped his head toward the basement door and leaned in. “The other two guards will be back at their posts in a minute or two,” he said, his tone gentler than Hatter’s had been. “If you want to reach the looking-glass tonight, we’d better go now.”
Theo’s hand eased up my arm to rest on my shoulder. He bowed his head next to mine from behind, his voice low and potent. “It’s your choice, Lyssa. There’d be no shame in going home and forgetting. Or you could stay tonight to hear how things in Wonderland have gone terribly wrong—and how you might be able to help set them right.”
His words quivered through me. I swallowed hard. I’d come back here looking for joy and freedom. But I’d also wanted answers—I’d wanted to understand, even if I hadn’t known how much there might be I wasn’t seeing here.
Maybe I would be able to forget if I slipped back through the mirror to my ordinary life, but right now the four figures standing around me were as solid and real as anyone I’d ever cared about. The woman whose blood was now being smeared under dancing feet was real.
What kind of person would I be if I turned my back on this place the moment things got scary?
I drew my spine as straight as it would go. “I’m staying,” I said. “So start explaining.”
Chapter Fifteen
Chess
I would not have wished the story we had to tell on anyone, but our Otherlander had asked for it, so she would get it. And she’d get it from me, it appeared.
We’d slipped out of the club—Lyssa, the White Knight, Hatter, Hatter’s daughter, and me—to escape the noise, but the hush on the darkened street outside felt far too exposed for the conversation we were about to have. In the end, we’d found ourselves at Hatter’s house, mainly because it was twice as close as the knightly tower and I didn’t entirely have a place of my own.
But Hatter didn’t look at home at all, pacing the floorboards with their flaking creamy-yellow paint, his mouth tilted at a sour angle. When he lifted his hat for a moment to rake a hand through his spiky hair, I half-expected a thundercloud to peek out from underneath. It would have suited him in that moment. He clearly didn’t want to be here, and yet he couldn’t quite let the discussion happen without him.
He was as much a player in this game as any of us, no matter how hard he’d tried to place himself outside the reach of the board.
When his daughter started to say something, he motioned her quiet. Lyssa, who’d sank onto the wingchair and drawn her legs up beside her on the cushion, glanced around our irregular cluster, anxious anticipation making her blue eyes shine even brighter than usual. The White Knight, who’d sat on the beach chair with such poise it might as well have been a throne, tipped his head to me.
I couldn’t say why he didn’t take the lead when I suspected he’d planned for this conversation, but why not me? Unlike him, I could remember the time before, when we’d had time.
I hopped onto the bar stool and leaned forward on my perch. “Here’s the short of it, lovely. There’s a palace not far from the city, and the royal family of Hearts rules from there. The Queen is the real power, and she wields that power like a tyrant. No one can say a word against her, no one can question her methods, or she’s liable to call for one’s head. Separate from one’s neck.”
Lyssa’s face had already been sallow. At those words, it blanched even more. “Why does everyone seem so… happy, then?” she asked. “How can people go around playing and partying when those guards could storm in and start terrorizing them at any second?”
“Practice,” I said. “Survival. To appear unhappy can be considered an act of treason. If you don’t learn to put on a good show…” I made a dramatic sweep of my forefinger across my throat. “And when you can’t change what is, it’s easier for many to put it out of their minds, to distract themselves whatever way they can.”
There was no need to mention that oftentimes I was one of those many.
“Why can’t you change things?” Lyssa said. “There are lots of you here in the city. How many guards does she have?”
“We do try,” Hatter’s daughter started. Hatter cut her off with a glare of warning. She huffed and flopped into the beanbag chair. Hatter continued his pacing.
The White Knight was watching me, his gaze approving, giving every indication he expected me to go on. “Well,” I said, ignoring the brief urge to hunch my spine defensively, “there’s a matter of time. Or lack thereof. We’re hamsters on a wheel, running fast to end up exactly where we started.” I made a looping motion with my hand.
“I don’t understand,” Lyssa said. “From what Hatter said before about how slowly you get older, it sounds like you have more time to organize some kind of rebellion than we would in my world.”
My tongue and my natural inclinations always slipped away from the rawest answers. Even trying to summon the words brought back a flash of a different sort of rawness, pain radiating down to every bone—waiting, as I was stretching to breaking, for that wheel to flip over.
The White Knight picked up the thread where I’d hesitated. “There are certain kinds of magic possible in this land,” he said. “Ways a determined enough person may bend what is to their will. The Queen was aware a rebellion was forming. So she captured Time. Without it, Wonderland cannot move forward.”
“What do you mean, ‘captured time’?” Lyssa said. “I’ve been here
two days now—I came before that—time passed.”
“We keep our memories,” the White Knight said. “Our understanding can grow. But the rest, everything around us… It’s the same day, reset, unchanging.”
“We wake up where we woke the morning of the day she locked Time up,” I expanded. “If I spill something on Hatter’s poor floor, or he tries to touch up the paint, tomorrow it’ll look the same as ever again.”
“There’s nothing wrong with my floor,” Hatter muttered, stopping his pacing for long enough to glower.
Lyssa knit her brow. “Then how...” Her eyebrows leapt up. She jerked around to look at Hatter. “That’s why you hadn’t cleared the table.”
He sighed. “There isn’t much point when it’ll clear itself overnight. After a while, pretending you need to just reminds you of the fact that you don’t.” His gaze lingered on her for a moment with a stark intensity. Thinking, perhaps, of the cup that hadn’t cleared itself. My own eyes dropped to the spot where it had sat.
“Any device I create has disassembled itself the next morning,” the White Knight said. “Nothing anyone builds can outlast the day. No supplies can be amassed. No traps can be laid. The only elements she couldn’t contain were life and death themselves. New life can spark and grow where it’s welcomed.” He raised his hand to indicate Doria. “But if we lose our heads, we’re gone.”
Lyssa hugged herself. “Do you think they did that to the woman they grabbed in the club?”
“Not necessarily,” I said. “Our situation allows for a rather brilliant form of torture. Batter us to the brink of death, and we spring back up good as new the next morning—when they can start all over again.”
My tone must have gone a bit sharp, or else it was only the content of my words that made Lyssa wince. A thread of tension wrapped around my ribs. Were we laying too much on her? She hadn’t been prepared for this. We hadn’t prepared her. The bright and joyful Wonderland was falling down around her ears in one horrifying crash, and the brightness I’d enjoyed seeing in her was dimming at the same time.