Page 75 of Wondrous

“Useless as an eraser without a pencil,” the Hare called from his seat at the table.

“Or a blueberry without the blue!” the Hatter added from the back door of the house, which opened onto the kitchen.

“Or a tea tray without wings,” murmured the Dormouse, who was napping in his usual yellow teapot.

I ignored them and turned back to Jack. It was clear that we had very different definitions of magic—to Jack, and perhaps to all Wonderland creatures, mirrors that worked like doors weren’t anything out of the ordinary. “So you’re saying you can’t make the mirror—ah, point to more than one place?”

“You’d need a three-way mirror for that,” Jack said thoughtfully. “And I’ve never seen one of those.”

I sighed. “It was worth a try.” I stepped up to the mirror and placed my hand on the glass.

“I wish we were rescuing Alistair first,” Alex said. “He’s good company. She’s a nightmare.”

“Maybe,” I said, taking a steadying breath. I saw Alicia’s pale tear-dampened face as she was dragged from the Queen’s castle. “But when I thought more about it, I realized that she helped us. We don’t know if that mock dragon’s flame would have gone out—he was stronger than the others. Without Alicia, I might not have worked out how to use the chalice.”

Alex rolled her eyes. “That’s not the conclusion I came to when I thought more about it. But you’re the Alice, I suppose.”

She said it in a teasing voice I still wasn’t quite used to. I hadn’t had friends to tease me in a long, long time.

I pressed the glass, my reflection frowning back at me. The magic—or whatever it was—seemed to work the same way as the clay magic did. If I only focused on what I wanted, the mirror would hear me.

In this case, improbably, what I wanted was Alicia.

It took a few minutes for anything to happen, apart from the mirror blurring a little, as if a mist had descended on the Hare’s garden. I wondered if it would work more quickly if the person I wanted to see was in Wonderland. Perhaps it was like mailing a letter: It took longer if the person was in a different country—or world.

Then the image in the mirror changed. Maria drew a sharp breath, and Alex breathed, “There.”

I didn’t know what I had been expecting. A bedroom, certainly—likely humble, perhaps in the manner of servants’ quarters, given what Alicia had implied about her unpleasant situation in life. I had been picturing the dilapidated manor of some minor lord, reduced to ruin by his own spending habits. Perhaps Alicia’s room was windowless, barely large enough for a bed and dresser.

Instead, the mirror showed a long narrow room that, at first, I took for a hospital. There were ten beds at least—the mirror showed only part of the room—crammed so close together one could only enter each bed from the foot. The place smelled of mildew and unwashed bodies and something that reminded me of a hospital again—illness. There was only one thin blanket per bed, too thin to be much use against the cold I felt even through the glass.

“I think it’s a workhouse,” I murmured. “But Alicia—she can’t be more than fifteen. How could anyone—” I couldn’t finish.

Maria had her hands pressed to her mouth. Alex wasn’t looking at the mirror anymore—she had turned away. The worst part was not the sight of the place, or the deathly smell, but the noise. The sleeping quarters were clearly above a factory—what kind of factory, I couldn’t tell. But something was pounding and thundering away below, with an awful unstoppable rhythm, so loud it was already making my ears ache. It sounded less like a factory and more like some massive beast kept in chains.

“Tea’s ready,” the Hare announced, oblivious to our terrible discovery. “Come, come, before it gets cold.”

We sat at the table and waited, keeping an eye on the mirror. The Hare and the Hatter had outdone themselves. There was ginger spice tea, black tea, green tea, and vanilla lavender. For sandwiches, we had cucumber, egg and watercress, Brie and apple, and fire-roasted tomato. In addition to gingersnaps, there was chocolate shortbread and two kinds of scones—lemon poppy seed and blueberry ricotta—which were accompanied by mounds of cream and raspberry jam.

Though it all looked delicious, I could only pick at my food. The minutes ticked by, and the piles of biscuits and sandwiches grew lower and lower until they were merely plates with crumbs. The jabberwocks, still ensconced in the tree shadow, burbled happily over their tea, though the gnashing sound of their teeth tearing into the scones put a bit of a damper on the atmosphere. The Cat, meanwhile, drank the entire pitcher of cream, claiming it was about to go off, which sent the Hatter into a dreadful flap; he kept a closer watch on the condition of his cream than a hen did on her eggs.

We waited long enough that the Hatter got up to light the lanterns, and the Hare went inside to bring out more food. Our tea parties often went later than this, and I’d barely noticed the passing of the hours; now I felt as if each moment were stretched like a rubber band about to snap.

“Maybe that was the wrong room,” Maria said.

“If it was, we’ll try again,” Jack said. He had his leg drawn up and his chin resting on his knee, eyeing the empty plate of chocolate shortbread longingly.

“Look!” Maria cried.

We turned, and Alex and I shrieked. Because standing directly on the other side of the mirror, pale-faced and wide-eyed, was Alicia. She had appeared as suddenly—and unpleasantly—as a ghost, but I realized this was likely because she’d dashed up to the mirror as soon as she entered the room, having glimpsed Wonderland on the other side.

I hurried to the mirror, trying to school my features into polite welcome. I didn’t know how Alicia would react to me, and at first she just continued to stare into the Hare’s garden, with its colorful lanterns and teacups and the flash of borogoves in the treetops. Her face was covered in a layer of grime, broken by tracks of sweat. When I stepped in front of her, she started.

“It’s all right,” I said, beckoning her forward. “Just step through.”

“It’s easier than it looks,” Alex said, coming up behind me. “It feels a bit like wading through gravy.”

“Really?” Maria said. “I thought it was more like custard, myself.”