A comatose patient undergoes an experimental procedure that uses favorite childhood stories to pull the patient back into consciousness—but the experiment doesn’t go quite as planned…
Six people ringed the patient’s gurney. Amy Cole, Dr. James Ericson’s assistant, didn’t understand why two of the men were here, nor why the procedure was being done away from Jim’s medical-research lab, but it wasn’t her place to question Jim. Not that she ever would. You didn’t question genius.
Jim’s usual anesthesiologist sat on his stool by the patient’s head. Miguel said, “Ready, Dr. Ericson.”
“Good,” Jim said, his blue eyes alight in a way that still, after a year of working as his tech assistant, made Amy’s heart turn over. “Amy, start the run.”
She keyed in the code on her console. The patient, a woman of forty, twitched slightly as the electric shock ran through the lead wires into her brain. Patients always did that. Dr. Wu, the physician present in case the patient developed medical complications, watched closely. Her eyes widened slightly as she checked the patient’s monitors. This was Dr. Wu’s first time, but Amy could have told her there was nothing to worry about. Jim had performed his procedure dozens of times in clinical trials; FDA approval would come soon. Someday Jim would win the Nobel Prize. Amy was sure of it.
The smart screen mounted beside the gurney glowed blue.
Where was she?
Instinctively, she moved from the base of the iron staircase to a surveillance position, her back against the closest wall. A vast space, too dimly lit to see the corners—a warehouse? Airfield hangar? As her eyes adjusted, she could make out empty pallets, some broken, scattered throughout the space. A rat scurried past her and disappeared into a hole in the wall. The wall behind her smelled of damp.
An underground storage facility, then. Abandoned? Her hand moved of its own volition to her hip. Something was supposed to be there, and wasn’t. What? And why was she wearing the kind of dress she never wore, full-skirted with—Christ!—petticoats?
Where was she?
Who was she?
Something moved toward her from the far darkness.
“Sometimes,” Jim said to the two strangers, “it takes a while for the patient to speak. Until she does, of course, we won’t know where we are.”
The older of the two men, who’d been introduced only as Mr. Jones, said, “What if she doesn’t speak? She’s been in the coma since the accident.”
Amy was startled by his harsh tone. Who were these guys? Never before had observers or even family members been allowed to view the procedure.
Jim said confidently, “Oh, Letitia will speak.”
The older man’s eyes narrowed, slits becoming slittier. “We’ll see, won’t we?”
Letitia’s body subtly rearranged itself . . . to do what?
To fight.
Why?
She didn’t know, but her stance didn’t relax until the figure coming through the darkness resolved itself into a short, spindly young man, hands empty, dressed only in bike shorts, no place for a weapon. Eighteen, maybe, with ears that stuck out on both sides like the late king of England’s. Closer, and she saw that he was an albino, white skin flushed with blood only on his fuzzy cheeks and in his pink eyes.
The boy said, “Please give me what’s in your pocket.”
Never taking her eyes off the kid, Letitia ran her hand over her skirt until she found a small pocket. She pulled out a thimble.
The young man reached for it. Letitia’s fist closed over the thimble. “Tell me where I am.”
“There!” Jim said. “I told you she’d speak!”
“Not to much purpose,” Mr. Jones said, confusing Amy again. He sounded . . . what? Somehow satisfied that the patient was still confused. No, not satisfied, but . . . something.
Jim didn’t seem to notice. He gazed at the smart screen, which remained solid blue. The patient’s words had not been a clue.
“Why, don’t you know where you are?” the mousy young man said. A mouse—yes. He reminded her of a mouse.
She didn’t answer him, waiting.
“Please give me the thimble! Can’t you see that the tide is coming in?”
She heard it then, the faint lapping of water somewhere in the vast dimness of the storage cellar. “Tell me where I am.”
“Oh, here it comes!”
A sudden rush of shallow water, breaking into waves as it hit the wall behind her. Letitia tasted salt on her lips. The young man gave a cry and waded toward the iron staircase. Letitia followed. Her ridiculous dress slowed her and she ripped it off, struggling to stay on her feet as the water rushed forward. Underneath she wore camo-printed T-shirt and shorts, but there was no time to consider this. The albino was halfway up the stairs. How high would the water rise? She could make out a trapdoor at the top of the stairs: Was it locked from above?
It was. The mousy kid turned on Letitia. “I told you to give me the thimble! It’s my prize! I won it fair and square!”
Letitia shoved him aside and pushed hard at the featureless door, which didn’t budge. The water was a tsunami. Nothing made sense.
She handed over the thimble. He touched it to the trapdoor, and it sprang open. They both scrambled through, the kid slamming it behind him.
“This is not working,” Jones said, and there it was again, that weird note in his voice. “It’s been half an hour already. I’ve read your work, Doctor. The ‘patient’ never takes this long to respond.”
“No,” Jim said; he never lied. “The longest before now has been only ten minutes. But time is different in the mind than in what we call reality.”
“You have five more minutes,” the stranger said. “This works in five or we’re done here.”
He was ordering Jim? And Jim made no response. Amy’s unease grew, mixed now with faint resentment, and not only against Jones. She’d thought Jim shared with her everything about their work. Sometimes, when a patient responded particularly well, he took Amy out for a celebratory drink, and together they explored the possible implications of his revolutionary procedure. Those drinks in a nearby bar were important to her, even though the conversation never turned personal. Still, when he looked at her sometimes . . .
And he never so much as mentioned his marriage.
Letitia and the kid stood in a forest clearing, facing a large house with bay windows and pointy-widowed turrets. Peeling paint, missing roof tiles, overgrown lawn, sagging porch, and an equally sagging, slightly ajar door. The albino kid’s ears had grown even larger. And longer. Now he wore a waistcoat and watch fob with his bike shorts, a grotesque combination.
“Why, Mary Ann,” he said, “what are you doing out here? Run home this moment, and fetch me a pair of gloves and a fan! Quick, now!”
Gunfire erupted from the woods to their left.
Forty-eight minutes without another word from the patient—much too long. At Jim’s instruction, Miguel adjusted the anesthesia. Sedating a patient was perhaps the trickiest part of the procedure; you had to blank out whatever light and sound were reaching patients’ brains through their comas, yet not make the sedation so strong that deep memory and the unconscious mind did not connect. Or that a patient could not wake up. Amy felt sweat form on the back of her neck and between her breasts.
Jim must have been nervous, too, because he began to babble at the stranger.
“You mustn’t interrupt the procedure, no. You do know how this works, right? Of course you do, you must have been briefed. . . . Suppose I just clarify for you again how important this is, how revolutionary? Coma patients don’t usually respond to DBS—deep-brain stimulation—by waking up. But my procedure can waken them if you stimulate the exact right area of the brain, the master key to a very specific kind of memory: the memory algorithm by which we ordered the world when we were children. And do you know how children—how all of us, really, for our whole lives—interpret and construe the data coming to us through our senses? Through stories.”
“Two minutes, Doctor.”
“The stories we tell ourselves—that’s what orders our reality! Stories define who we are and what we believe. And childhood stories, those that were important to us, go very deep in memory and so are the key to recovering identity, which in turn enables coma patients to wake and—”
The patient spoke, so loudly that Amy jumped. The screen brightened into an image.
“There!” Jim cried. “Now we know where we are!”
“Why, Mary Ann,” the mouse-turned-rabbit said, “what are you doing out here? Run home this moment, and fetch me a pair of gloves and a fan! Quick, now!”
Words gripped Letitia and she said them aloud before she knew she was going to speak. “How queer it seems, to be going messages for a rabbit!”
Gunfire erupted from the woods to their left.
Letitia dropped to her belly and crawled toward the house. Her camo matched the tall grass. Blood sprayed over her: the kid. He hadn’t even had time to cry out. She reached the door of the house, pushed herself inside. She needed a weapon. But if the enemy already held the house—
What enemy?
The foyer was empty except for a dusty table holding a ceramic vase of dead flowers. Letitia dumped out flowers and dirty water and took the vase. All three doors off the foyer were locked. Bullets hit the front door; she sprinted up the staircase. These rooms were locked, too, except for a small closet lined with shelves of dusty linen and lit by a small, dirty window at the far end.
Nothing in here to use as a weapon. Wrapping the vase in a duvet to muffle sound, she smashed it against a shelf and equipped herself with a thick, sharp shard.
More bullets hit the house, but now they sounded dim, like a hail of pebbles. What the fuck?
The smart screen had brightened to a still image of a blond child in a blue dress and pinafore, standing beside a white rabbit in evening dress. Jim said, “It’s Alice in Wonderland! A common key to memory, Mr. Jones, you’d be surprised how many bright children internalize it. You were told, weren’t you, that our deebee can match illustrations from over two thousand children’s books as soon as a significant phrase is spoken? The most popular are Goodnight Moon, the Harry Potter series, books by Judy Blume, Roald Dahl, Maurice Sendak—”
Jim cited a dozen more authors. Mr. Jones—if that was his name, which Amy didn’t believe for half a minute—didn’t seem to be listening. He stared at the image onscreen. It was a little blurry, which meant that it wasn’t one of John Tenniel’s original illustrations for Alice, but rather was one the AI had extrapolated from the Tenniel drawings to match the place in the story indicated by Letitia’s words. If necessary, Amy could have sharpened and edited the image, but Jim didn’t tell her to do so.
“Mr. Jones” scowled at Alice.
“Of course,” Jim said, “no image that may appear on the screen is an exact translation of whatever Letitia is experiencing. It’s merely the starting point. Memory isn’t static, or even reliable. In the unconscious—as in dreams—memory blends with more recent experiences and transmutes into—”
“Be quiet,” Jones ordered, with such cold anger that Amy’s mouth fell open. Even Jim looked surprised. The new physician, Dr. Wu, raised her head to glance briefly at Jones and then returned her gaze to the patient. The man with Jones registered absolutely nothing. His face might have been a ceramic mask.
Jones said, “Get on with it.”
The sound of breaking glass. The enemy was taking the house.
But . . . the door was unlocked. Why come through the windows? And why hadn’t any of the gunfire come from this side of the house? It all sounded like it was coming from the front porch. Was it possible these were not soldiers but kids who didn’t know what they were doing?
The shots that had killed the white mouse-rabbit-boy had been real enough. His blood was drying on her T-shirt.
The window at the end of the linen closet, too dirty to see through, was stuck closed. Working as quietly and quickly as she could, Letitia pried it loose and raised it a few inches. Cautiously she pushed out the edge of a pillow from the linen-closet shelves. No one fired at it.
Waiting cannily, or not there?
At the other end of the closet, she cracked the door. Now she could hear voices in the foyer below. Not adult voices, but not kids, either. Some seemed to be growls, some squeaks, some chirps.
“Well, it’s got no business there, at any rate: go and take it away!”
“Sure, I don’t like it, yer honor, at all, at all!”
“Do as I tell you, you coward!”
“Bill—Bill’s got to go down the chimney!”
So they were going to attack after all. From the sound of it, they had a whole platoon.
A what?
No time to think. Letitia returned to the window, eased it up, peered out cautiously. No one at the back of the house.
Someone downstairs said, “We must burn the house down!”
Letitia called out, “If you do that, I’ll set Dinah at you.”
Dinah who?
This place would go up like dry kindling.
Swiftly she knotted a sheet to the linen-closet shelves. When she smelled smoke, she tossed the end through the window and climbed down, expecting to be shot. She wasn’t. On the ground she dropped to her belly and crawled through the weeds to the forest beyond.
When she rose, a lizard standing on two legs was staring at her stupidly. He opened his lipless mouth to scream, and she decapitated him with the shard of vase.
Nobody else stopped her or, as far as she could tell, even saw her. The stupidest bunch of insurgents on the planet.
Bunch of what?
The smart screen had been frozen for fifteen minutes. Just when Amy was afraid the patient wouldn’t speak again, Letitia said loudly, “If you do that, I’ll set Dinah at you.” The screen image morphed.
Alice, grown too large for the White Rabbit’s house, scrunched into a room with her head pushed against the ceiling and her arm out the window.
Mr. Jones said sharply, “Who’s Dinah?”
Jim didn’t answer; Amy realized he didn’t know the book quite well enough to answer. She spoke up. “Dinah is Alice’s cat.”
Jones exploded. “This is what’s going on in her mind? Rabbits and cats and a giant child? This is ridiculous.”
Jim said quietly, “No, sir. As I already explained to you, the book is the key, but it’s not what’s being unlocked. We can’t see what’s going on in the subject’s mind because her own memories are coming to her filtered through the Lewis Carroll story.”
“Memories of rabbits? Fuck it—I’m aborting this procedure right now.”
Jim straightened. “I’m afraid you don’t have that authority. I was told that this patient is vital to national security, which is why we’re not performing my procedure in my lab, and that nothing should interrupt it.”
“I told you no such thing!”
“Not you, sir. Someone higher up.”
Jones went rigid. Amy made the large effort to turn her eyes back to her console. This steeliness was a side of Jim she’d never seen, hadn’t suspected. And . . . vital to national security? Why? How?
Jim said, “Miguel, adjust the sedation again. Level six. It may speed things up. Amy?”
“Brain waves and memory algorithms both holding steady.”
“Good. We—”
Letitia’s body’s twitched as she said loudly, “I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then,” and the screen responded with the Tenniel illustration of a caterpillar seated on a mushroom and smoking a hookah. A tiny Alice peered over the rim of the mushroom.
Jim leaned over the gurney. “Letitia, who are you?”
The screen image didn’t change, but Letitia said to someone in Wonderland, “I can’t explain myself, sir, because I’m not myself.” And then, “I can’t remember things as I used to.”
Amy nodded. So that was why Letitia’s unconscious had seized on this story. Alice, too, had had identity issues.
Letitia began to recite Lewis Carroll’s parody of the Robert Southey poem:
“You are old, Father William,” the young man said,
“And your hair has become very white;
And yet you incessantly stand on your head—
Do you think, at your age, it is right?”
Suddenly the patient laughed. Alice, Amy remembered, had not laughed at the poem; Alice had despaired at her own mangling of the stanzas. The laugh was not Alice’s but Letitia’s own response.
If the Caterpillar was no help, the Duchess was even worse.
Letitia had stalked away from the mushroom, flapped away a pesky pigeon, and come to another house, this one small for even a summer cottage, in a clearing ringed with trees. At the door, a courier in British army uniform was delivering orders to a servant in livery. The courier said, “For the Duchess. An invitation from the Queen to play croquet.”
The servant said, “From the Queen. An invitation for the Duchess to play croquet.”
Code, of course. Coming in via a back channel. Which side was running the courier?
Sides of what?
She stayed hidden, observing, until the courier left and the servant looked directly at her. He said from a lipless, frog-like mouth, “I shall sit here till to-morrow—or next day.”
He’d made her. Unlike the courier, he wasn’t armed. The house was very small, and if she could obtain a weapon inside. . . . Wait, why would a duchess live in such a dwelling, unless she were in hiding? No, “Duchess” was code, too. For whom? About what?
Letitia risked a test. From behind a tree she called, “How am I to get in?”
“Are you to get in at all? That’s the first question, you know.”
A trap? Maybe. The door still stood open. Using trees as cover and never taking her gaze from the servant, she moved until she could see inside the cottage. A single room, dense with smoke, held a ginger cat and two women: a cook facing the stove and a seated, richly dressed woman rocking a baby. No other visible occupants. On the wall to the left of the door stood a wire croquet set, balls and wickets racked at the bottom and wooden mallets upright in their slots.
Letitia said to the servant, who looked more like a frog every moment, “But what am I to do?”
“Anything you like.” He looked up at the sky. “I shall sit here, on and off, for days and days.”
The mallet was the best weapon Letitia had seen so far. She wanted it.
Just as Jim wished, the story was speeding up. Letitia said aloud, “How am I to get in?” and then, “But what am I to do?” The screen morphed to two footmen in livery, one a fish and one a frog, outside the Duchess’s cottage. A moment later Letitia said, “There’s too much pepper in that soup!” and another Tenniel drawing appeared: the bad-tempered Duchess rocking her pig-child.
Jones said, “Dr. Ericson, you know who I am. I demand to know who gave you orders to continue this travesty despite my abort.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” Jim said, “but I can’t tell you that.”
“You don’t have the clearances!” Jones said.
Jim didn’t answer. Letitia said, “Mind what you’re doing!”
What was Jim doing? Who was this “Mr. Jones”? And a national security issue. . . .
Amy didn’t understand. Not anything.
Letitia darted toward the house, ready to take out the frog servant if she had to. He didn’t budge. She ran inside and grabbed one of the croquet mallets. The two women presented no problem: flabby, encumbered by long bulky dresses, one grasping a baby and the other a ladle. Both wheezed; smoke and pepper filled the air. Letitia said, “There’s too much pepper in that soup!” and backed toward the door, keeping in her peripheral vision the servant outside. He sat immobile, gazing at the sky.
“If everybody minded their own business,” the Duchess growled, “the world would go around faster!”
“This is my business,” Letitia said. She had no idea what she meant, but her words seemed to enrage both women. The Duchess shook the baby so hard that Letitia cried, “Mind what you’re doing!” The cook threw a frying pan at Letitia; it just missed her. Letitia grabbed the baby with her free hand, holding it against her like a football, and ran. To leave the child behind would be murder.
The servant never even glanced at her as she raced past.
Eventually the path through the trees widened into a paved road. In the distance gleamed a white building clouded in mist. Letitia stopped running and looked down at the baby. It had become a pig. Startled, she dropped it, and it trotted quietly back toward the forest.
The Duchess’s ginger cat strolled up to her and grinned.
“This is my business,” Letitia said from the gurney, and the image on the screen did not change. Those words did not appear in Carroll’s book. It was, Amy realized, another declaration solely the patient’s. Jim’s procedure was succeeding.
But then another twenty-eight minutes passed without a word from the gurney. Both Dr. Wu’s medical monitors and Amy’s tech screens showed no change. The words “This is my business” had not been significant enough to further trigger Letitia’s memories. Those must be painful; anguished remembrances always surfaced more slowly.
Amy surprised herself with her sympathy for this particular patient. Was it because Amy, too, had loved Alice in Wonderland as a child? Or was it because she knew, at some deep level, the painful implications of fantasy?
She glanced at Jim, whose gaze moved back and forth between Letitia and the last Tenniel drawing on the screen. Back and forth. The drawing did not change.
The cat said, “Do you play croquet with the Queen today?”
More code. Letitia searched her memory; this sequence wasn’t there. She opted for an open response. “I should like it very much, but I haven’t been invited yet.”
“You’ll see me there,” the cat said, and vanished.
TS Division, Letitia abruptly remembered, had a contract with Boston Dynamics for animal-shaped infiltration robots—had it included cats?
But . . . what was TS Division? What was Boston Dynamics?
The answers were in that white building far ahead. She set off on the road. When it curved through a small grove of birches, she came upon a long, messy table set for tea. A large rabbit and a man wearing a top hat sat at one end with a little boy between them. The child seemed asleep. Top Hat looked at Letitia and said, “No room! No room!”
On the table beside the rabbit, lying negligently amid cake crumbs and used tea cups, was a Glock 30 9-mm.
She said carefully, “There’s plenty of room!”
Top Hat said, “Your hair wants cutting.”
More code. Words rose, unbidden, to Letitia’s lips, startling her. “I think you might do something better with the time than waste it in asking riddles that have no answer.” Why had she said that? What did it mean? Then more words as she looked at the other man, who’d become a large rabbit, “Your name is March. Caleb March.”
“So it is,” the man said.
Finally a new drawing on the screen: the mad tea party, one of Tenniel’s best. At the long table sat the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, the Dormouse, and a sulky and hungry Alice wanting both information and tea. The image had been triggered when Letitia said, “There’s plenty of room,” but her other utterance was her own. Who was Caleb March? Amy glanced at Jim, but from his face she could tell that he didn’t know, either.
Mr. Jones had gone impassive, his former show of temper replaced by something colder and deeper. Amy didn’t know why she suddenly felt frightened.
“You should say what you mean,” Caleb March said.
“I do,” Letitia replied. “At least, I mean what I say.”
Top Hat said, “Have you guessed the riddle yet?”
“No,” Letitia said. “What’s the answer?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” said Top Hat.
“Nor do I,” said the little boy; he had a high, squeaky voice.
“I’m in the well,” Letitia said, and didn’t know what she meant.
“Of course you are,” Caleb said. “Well in.”
Pointless. They wouldn’t, or couldn’t, tell her anything. Letitia eyed the Glock, planning her move. When a quarrel broke out about changing places at the tea table, she took her chance. With one hand she grabbed the gun; with the other she raised the croquet mallet. No time to check if the Glock was loaded.
“Nobody move,” Letitia said.
All three tea partiers stared at her in astonishment. “You shouldn’t talk,” Top Hat said.
Caleb March said, “No. Just act.”
The boy spoke again. “The Queen expects you.”
Letitia didn’t answer. She backed away from the table. No one tried to stop her. Top Hat lifted the child, who was now a mouse, up on the table and seemed to be trying to put him in the teapot. Caleb March looked at her steadily, and for the briefest flicker of time—
He’d reported in to her from Moscow that—
—she knew him, and then the memory was gone.
“Have better luck than mine,” he said.
Now Letitia’s words came so fast that Amy could barely follow. “I do. At least, I mean what I say,” and “No, what’s the answer?” and “I’m in the well.” Although the screen image didn’t change from the tea party scene, Amy’s console verified that all Letitia’s words were from Alice in Wonderland—almost.
“Dr. Ericson,” Amy said, “in the book, Alice says, ‘But they were in the well,’ not ‘I’m in the well.’ I don’t know if that’s significant.”
“She’s customizing Carroll’s words to her own situation,” Jim said, his voice neutral. But Jim was never neutral, not about anything. His enthusiasm was one of the things she loved about him.
To fill the suddenly strained silence, Amy said, “She is customizing the story, more and more. It won’t be long now.”
Letitia twitched on the gurney and said levelly, “Nobody move.”
Back on the road, Letitia inspected the Glock. Loaded and operational. She tossed the croquet mallet into a ditch and holstered the gun—when had her holster appeared? She wasn’t sure. Of anything.
As she neared the white building, turrets and battlements appeared from the mist, then a moat and drawbridge. A phrase rose in her mind: The most secure building in the world. Letitia snorted. The castle flew flags with heraldic designs: black shamrocks, spear heads, hearts.
Two groups of people moved around on this side of the moat. Cautiously she neared the closer, smaller group, three gardeners cardboard-thin, who were busily painting a white rosebush red. Astonished, Letitia said, “Why are you painting those roses?”
“Why the fact is, you see, Miss, this here is a white rose-tree, but the Queen wanted it turned red.”
A second gardener looked directly at Letitia. “She turned the Dormouse, too, you know. And she had the March Hare killed.”
But the March Hare was alive . . . Letitia had just seen him. Fog filled her brain, just “crept in on little cat’s feet” . . . whose words were those? Not either of the two people that Letitia was—wait, she was two people? What the fuck?
The ginger cat strolled from behind the rose-bush and stared at her steadily. Before it could speak, the gardeners cried loudly, “The Queen! The Queen!” and threw themselves flat on their faces. The cat vanished.
A procession approached from the castle, soldiers followed by dignitaries and finally the Queen, who raised her hand to stop the parade. “What’s your name, child?”
Letitia said, “My name is Alice.”
But it wasn’t—was it?
“You are late to the game,” the Queen said severely, “and you lost your mallet. You will have to use a flamingo. Come on!”
The entire procession wheeled in formation and turned toward the castle. Letitia walked beside the Queen, both last in the procession, which let her keep the soldiers in view. Abruptly they broke formation and ran toward the croquet game. The Queen said no more about Letitia’s having to play, so she watched the game. It was chaos: hedgehogs for balls, flamingos for mallets, soldiers bent double on hands and feet to act as wickets. The Queen rushed around, shouting “Off with his head!” at anyone who missed a wicket.
Then the cat was back, or at least its head was, hanging in the air like words on a teleprompter.
Like a what?
“How are you getting on?” the head said.
“I don’t think they play at all fairly. They don’t seem to have any rules, or don’t pay the rules any attention.”
“Neither does our side,” the head said quietly, “but you’re right, they are worse. Don’t lose your head, Letitia. The Queen—”
Letitia. Her name was Letitia. Yes.
The cat’s head vanished and the White Rabbit rushed up to her. But wasn’t he dead? His blood spraying over her T-shirt . . . or had that been the blood of a white mouse? “Mary Ann,” the White Rabbit said, “have you seen the Mock Turtle yet? Do hurry! He’s halfway through his song!”
“I don’t—”
“No, you need to hear this! Hurry, child!”
He grabbed her hand and pulled her toward the castle. Letitia allowed it; she had a sudden, overwhelming, and unexplained need to enter that fortress.
Quick images on the screen in response to Letitia’s words: the Two, Five, and Seven of Hearts painting a rosebush. The Queen of Hearts addressing Alice. The head of the Cheshire Cat hanging in space. And then Alice, the Gryphon, and the Mock Turtle beside a body of water, the two beasts shedding tears. Tenniel had drawn Alice leaning against a rock, much smaller than the two beasts, knees dawn up protectively against her chest.
“The Mock Turtle’s song is almost over,” the White Rabbit said to Alice. “But at least you made it in time for the most important verse. Now listen and learn!”
A gryphon and a huge turtle stood behind an enormous boulder beside the moat, both sobbing. Letitia again drew the Glock; neither paid the slightest attention to the gun, although the turtle stopped trying to sing through his sobs to say, “You have no idea what a delightful thing a Lobster Quadrille is!”
“No, I don’t,” Letitia said. Could these two, or perhaps the White Rabbit, be used to get her inside the castle? “What is it?”
The gryphon looked at her from suddenly hard eyes. “I think you already know. Let the turtle finish his song. He knows the words better than I do. Mock Turtle, continue from where you left off.”
The turtle sang:
“You can really have no notion how delightful it will be
When they take us up and throw us, with the lobsters, out to sea!”
But the snail replied “Too far! Too far!” and gave a look askance—
Said he thanked the whiting kindly, but he would not join the dance.
Would not, could not, would not, could not, would not join the dance.
Would not, could not, would not, could not, could not join the dance.”
The White Rabbit said, “No, he wouldn’t join. So they killed him.”
“Killed whom?” Letitia said.
“Why, Caleb March, of course. You knew that, Letitia! Why are you so slow all the time? By now you should have realized—”
An alarm sounded, loud enough to make the White Rabbit clap his hands ineffectually over his ears; the ears were longer than the hands. The gryphon leapt up and cried, “The trial’s beginning! Come on!” It grabbed Letitia’s hand and pulled her along the path to the drawbridge. The Mock Turtle stayed behind, still singing his song of mourning.
Nearly another hour passed. No procedure had ever taken anywhere near this long. Finally Jim said, “By now she should have come out of the coma and realized who she is.”
Jones snapped, “Which only shows that this fucking nonsense doesn’t work.”
Did it? Amy had never seen Jim this worried. Yes, one time before—when he’d gotten a phone call that his little son had fallen and broken his arm. That day, Jim had let Amy finish the procedure underway on a research subject. She’d been so pleased that Jim had trusted her, although of course their usual physician, not this unknown Dr. Wu, had been standing by.
Dr. Wu raised her gaze from Letitia to Jim, but whatever she saw on Jim’s face, no reaction showed on her own. Miguel fiddled with his instruments. Jones looked tense, his silent companion impassive as ever.
On an auxiliary console screen, Amy brought up Lewis Carroll’s complete text. It contained two more illustrations of Alice with the gryphon and the mock turtle, a drawing of a lobster, and pages upon pages of dialogue. Alice critiques the gryphon’s song, relates all her adventures from the time she fell down the rabbit hole, recites another parody poem, asks the turtle for the Lobster Quadrille song. Alice talks a lot, even saying outright that “it’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.”
Yet Letitia said nothing. And nowhere in Carroll’s book did Alice ever say “Killed whom?”
Amy hadn’t even known that Jim and his wife had a son.
The drawbridge to the palace was deserted, the croquet game over. The gryphon and Letitia hurried under the raised portcullis and into the castle courtyard, where she halted so quickly that she nearly yanked the gryphon off its clawed feet. I know this place. I am Letitia . . . Somebody, and I know this place. I knew it before my accident.
What accident?
The space looked nothing like the courtyard of a castle except in being open to the sky. Square blue-and-white pillars rose high, holding up nothing. Meaningless flags, statues, and bright green potted plants stood against the walls. In the center of the shining, black-and-white floor was a huge inlaid seal with words ringing a starburst. Letitia paused, trying to read the words, but they made no more sense than the flags.
But . . . I know this place.
“Hurry, hurry!” the gryphon said, dragging her along. “Can’t you see that the trial has already begun?”
At the far end of the hall, shallow steps rose to a space crowded with people. In the center, on a raised dais, sat the Queen, seated on a velvet throne and wearing a judge’s wig under her crown. She looked grotesque.
“Whose trial is it?” Letitia said.
The gryphon didn’t reply. He shoved her onto the end of a bench already jammed with a strange assortment of animals and people. A dodo on the bench ahead turned its head to glare at Letitia. In the defendant’s box, looking scared, stood a soldier in dress uniform with red hearts sewn on the sleeve.
The White Rabbit, dressed now as a herald, blew three blasts on a trumpet. He unrolled a parchment scroll and read loudly:
The Queen of Hearts, she made some tarts,
All on a summer day:
The Knave of Hearts, he stole those tarts,
And took them quite away!
“No,” Letitia said, bewildering herself. “It wasn’t him. And it wasn’t tarts.”
“Shhh!” the gryphon said as the dodo turned around to glare at her again. “Keep mum!”
The Queen bellowed, “Consider your verdict!”
“Not yet,” the Rabbit said. “There’s a great deal more to come! Call the first witness!”
Top Hat took the stand. He gave testimony that made no sense, not even mentioning either the defendant or the theft but spending a lot of verbiage on the injustices of Time. The Duchess’s cook and the dormouse followed, equally nonsensical. After each witness, the Queen shouted either “Consider your verdict!” or “Off with his head!” Neither command was carried out, although everyone looked uneasy every time she bellowed.
Finally the Queen glared at the White Rabbit and said, “Call the last witness or I’ll execute you on the spot!”
The White Rabbit said hastily, “I call Alice!”
Two soldiers seized Letitia and thrust her into the witness box. The Queen scowled at her. “What do you know about this business?”
Letitia said slowly, “I don’t know what I know, although I know that I know it.”
“That’s rubbish!”
It was rubbish.
No, it wasn’t.
“Now tell the court what you know about—!”
The White Rabbit blew ear-destroying blasts on his trumpet. The Queen clapped her hands over her ears, knocking her crown askew. The Rabbit bellowed, “May it please the court, here’s more evidence in this letter!”
“Off with his head!” the Queen shouted. Then, “But read the letter first!”
It wasn’t a letter but another poem, which the Rabbit read so quickly that Letitia could understand none of the garbled words until abruptly he slowed and enunciated with the clarity of a Shakespearean actor:
He sent them word I had not gone
(We know it to be true):
If she should push the matter on,
What would become of you?
The Queen turned pale. She trembled so hard that her crown fell off. In a shaky voice she said, “Stop! Off with the prisoner’s head! Sentence first—verdict afterwards!”
“No,” Letitia said. “You can’t sentence him without a—”
“Execute the witness, too!”
“—fair trial!”
But that was what the Agency, or someone in it, had done, covertly. Killed Caleb March in Moscow because he had discovered the highly placed mole in the Agency. As the Agency had tried to kill Letitia—it had not been an accident, but a botched hit—before Letitia could push the matter on and implicate the Queen, who had been selling top-secret information to the Russians.
Above the cartoonish velvet robe, the Queen’s face morphed into that of a man: Peter Jurgens, Assistant Director for Counterintelligence, Central Intelligence Agency.
If she should push the matter on, what would become of you?
What would become of Jurgens if Letitia, CIA agent, had been able to transmit her intel before the assassination attempt on her life? Arrest for treason.
Letitia drew the Glock and aimed at the Queen. Everyone in the courtyard rose up in a cloud to attack her. Letitia fired, shouting, “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!”
And woke up.
The patient’s eyes flew open, and then before Amy could even register the Tenniel drawing on the screen, everything happened at once.
“You’re the mole,” Letitia said to Jones while she struggled to sit up on the gurney. Even as Amy thought inanely But Mole is in Wind in the Willows, not Alice, Jones’s silent companion drew a gun and fired at the gurney. Miguel, seated between the shooter and the patient, screamed and fell off his stool. Jones fired again, but he wasn’t quick enough: with one hand Dr. Wu had already thrown Letitia off the gurney, tearing the lead wires from Letitia’s scalp and the electrodes from her body, as a gun seemed to leap into Wu’s other hand—a doctor? armed?—and she shot at the gunman, who also fired. Dr. Wu collapsed behind the gurney. The gunman’s chest blossomed into red and he fell backward. Amy couldn’t move, couldn’t think. More shots; one hit her console and it went dead in a spray of sparks. Jones, staggering sideways, turned to aim at Amy’s side of the gurney.
To aim at Jim—
—who stood frozen, as if he could not believe what was happening, as if this were all part of Alice’s dream.
But it was real, and Amy could reach Jim, could push him down to the floor, could reach him before Mole’s wobbling gun he must be hit too he was going to fire at Jim but Amy could push him could save Jim’s life—
She didn’t. Her muscles made the decision without thought, without decision. She dropped behind her console for protection. Flat on the floor, she could see behind the gurney, where Dr. Wu lay motionless and bloody across Letitia, whose scalp bled from the torn-out wires.
Letitia held Dr. Wu’s gun. She shoved Dr. Wu’s body aside and rose to her knees—Amy could see the effort on her face, she’d been in a coma for how long Amy couldn’t remember she couldn’t think Jones was still on his feet aiming at Jim and Letitia had—
Letitia fired and Jones went down, falling so slowly, as slowly as Alice going down the rabbit hole.
Then silence.
The silence did not last. There were sirens, police, grim men and women flashing badges, forensic people examining and photographing the dead, and questions for Amy and Jim and Letitia, the conscious survivors. Miguel was dead. So were Jones and his gunman. Dr. Wu, a real physician but also a CIA agent, was taken away in an ambulance. Letitia, who turned out to be another agent, refused to go to the hospital and sat answering questions, her head bandaged by EMTs. It was all bewildering.
Many voices, many questions, and yet nobody asked Amy the question she asked herself—why had she not tried to save Jim, not risked her own life to shove him to safety? She’d thought she loved Jim better than life itself, but she didn’t. The knowledge settled onto her like a weighted blanket—the blanket she would never share with Jim. His wife was here now, sitting close to him holding his hand, every line of her body displaying her concern and devotion. Amy couldn’t hear their words to each other, but she could read Jim’s face as he reassured his wife.
There are many kinds of fantasy.
A cop stepped up to her. “Are you all right, miss?”
“Yes.” No. She managed a polite smile and turned away.
She would have to find another job. Jim would give her a good recommendation. It would be too painful to stay here, to see Jim every day, to be brought face-to-face with her own slain delusions. Amy could not, would not, could not join that dance again.
Across the room, she heard someone say to Letitia, “Alice in Wonderland? Really?”
“Really,” Letitia said, her face drawn with exhaustion and pain. “And it wasn’t any weirder than—” she waved hand around the room—“than all this. But, shit, the trip to Wonderland worked.”
“And it all seemed real?”
“Oh, yeah. While I was there, it was real as life.” After a moment she repeated, her voice full of complexities Amy heard but did not understand, “Real as life. But you had to be there to feel the . . . you had to be there.
“It was such a long sleep, and such a curious dream.”
“The Alice Run” copyright © 2024 by Nancy Kress
Art copyright © 2024 by Danzhu Hu
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The Alice Run
