We stopped.
The entire world stopped.
Only the scream remained.
Suddenly March was in front of me, on his feet again, hands on my face, looking down at my mouth like he was making sure thatIwasn’t the one screaming. But I wasn’t. I’d caught my scream, and if I hadn’t, it would have been a different scream, one full of pleasure.
Thiswas full of terror.
“Russ,” March breathed, and I had no idea how he could tell whose voice it was, but the next second he was off me, moving for the door.
I had only one second to remember to pick up my jacket from the floor and put it around my shoulders before I followed.
Most doors on the hallway were already open, and the other Hands were running to Russ’s room, and Russ was standing in the middle of his bed with his hands over his forehead, screaming still.
Seth and Anika were trying to calm him down, to tell himthat he was okay, that he was safe, but he kept shaking his head, refusing to even sit down.
“Shut that door!” someone screamed, and Levana, who’d come in behind me, slammed it shut with her foot before moving closer. I backed away, pressed my back against the door to make sure nobody else could get in, just in case.
What madness. What loud, loud madness.
Eventually the others got through to him, and Russ stopped screaming. He kneeled on the bed, his face pale, his eyes glazed over as he looked ahead but didn’t really see what was in front of him.
“It was her,” he repeated. “It was her, it was her, it was her?—”
He’d seen the Red Queen, too.
March, who was standing at the side of his bed, looked back at me as if he wanted to make sure I hadn’t disappeared. I stayed put and I tried to think of a way to make sense of the fact that all of us now had seen the face of the Red Queen doing something to us in our dreams.Allof us.
“It cannot possibly be a coincidence,” Seth was saying, and I agreed.
“It was her face, though, wasn’t it? Red lips, dark eyes? Curly hair?” Erith asked Russ, and he kept nodding without ever looking at her. He looked positively traumatized.
“It was—who else could it be?” said someone.
“What do you think she did to us?”
“What if it washer?”
“What ifshecast some kind of a curse on us?!”
“What ifshe’sthe one who won’t let the White Queen come see us anymore?”
“What ifshe knows?!”This from a terrified Mimi.
A tick of silence.
“What if it was her doing, and the Spade wasn’t a traitor at all?”
There.
That last part was something that had been in my head since the very beginning, and I hadn’t dared to voice it even when I was completely alone.
“What if we were taken by the Red Queen, andshesomehow cursed us instead?”
“But where is the boy, then?”
“Is he really dead, or did they just lie to us?”
