“The queen, the queen, the queen,” Erith chanted.
“What was it? Did she come to you? Did she speak to you, Erith?” Helen said from the edge of the bed. “What did the White Queen do?”
“TheRedQueen.”
Everybody stopped.
Even Erith stopped rocking and chanting and turned to Mimi together with the rest of us. “The Red Queen,” she repeated, still staring at the floor.
“Shut up for a second,” Russ hissed. “Close that door. Do it—close the door!”
He was looking at me.
I’m not sure how I managed to turn and close the door, press my back to it, hold on tightly to the sketchbook against my chest, but I did it.
“You saw the Red Queen?”
March’s voice sent ice-cold chills down my back. He was asking Erith, but Mimi answered, “Yes.”
Erith looked at her. “It was the Red Queen.”
Mimi repeated, “It was the Red Queen.”
“Whatwas? What happened with the Red Queen?! Was shehere?” Russ demanded, and out of all of us, he seemed the most worked up, moving from one side of the bed to the other.
But Mimi shook her head. “She did something.”
Silence in the room. The gears inside me groaned violently.
“She did something,” Erith repeated. She wasn’t crying anymore or shaking or rocking.
“What?!” Anika demanded, grabbing her hand between hers.
The next second took forever to tick. “I don’t know,” Erith said.
My eyes closed and I breathed deeply, and while the others asked Erith—and Mimi, too—if they were okay, I reminded myself that dreams could feel perfectly real sometimes. That you could wake up believing they had actually happened, but that didn’t mean they had.
That was probably the case with both Mimi and Erith here—they’d dreamed, and they thought it was real. That’s all—it was no big deal.
Except the voice in the back of my head that sounded exactly like the Cheshire now called my own thoughts liars.
“Something’s going on here,” Seth whispered after a moment. “They’re…they’re hiding something from us.”
That,the voice in my head said,is truth.
“They’re hiding the entire trials from us—we all know this,” Levana said, her face pale as the sheets on Erith’s bed.
“They don’t remember the trials, either. Nobody does,” Cook said, but he didn’t seem all too convinced in his own words.
“Do they, though?” Mimi said, and it was like she’d squeezed my lungs in her fists. “Or do they just say they don’t?”
Master Talik’s face came before my eyes, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that he knew this. He knew this answer.
“What did they do to us?”
“What did they take from us?”
“Whywouldn’t they tell us?”
