Chapter Text
The longer Alice stumbled through the abandoned city, the worse she felt. Climbing up and down endless flights of stairs (all on the outside of these godforsaken skyscrapers, were they afraid to put them indoors?), ducking through doors after the rat-catcher, who refused to explain where he was taking her. The longer she walked away from the lake, the colder she grew.
It wasn't just a physical cold that settled into her skin as the wind whipped through her; if disbelief had a manifest form, she felt herself slowly freezing solid with each new thing that happened after Jack started acting weird.
Sort-of proposing, then hiding the ring, then getting KIDNAPPED. Following him, then getting mugged and kidnapped herself by that horrible, oddly dressed old man. That awful padded cage, then falling forever into the lake and having to swim miles to get out again.
Honestly, she was surprised she was still alive. Hadn't she read once that if you fell too far into water it might as well have been concrete?
Whatever. These people seemed to ignore the laws of science and logic as it suited them, folding up space and tucking it away in ways that shouldn't have been possible. She didn't know much about architecture, but the whole cage issue aside, she didn't think it was physically possible to build the sort of structures they had here.
Alice hadn't been the sort to believe in impossible things for exactly ten years and three days, when she realized her father didn't care enough to come back.
She bumped into the rat-catcher, who had stopped and was standing far too close to the edge of a sidewalk-precipice, and caught herself before she could physically recoil from the smell. Flinching here seemed like a great way to overbalance and die. She scraped freezing, wet hair out of her eyes and looked across the grassy, overgrown bridge to the next building.
The man seemed nervous, eyes stuttering as fast as the letters of the marquee sign which spelled out TEA SHOP…. TEA SHOP… over and over, matching around endlessly.
If it hadn't been for the skyscrapers above and below, it would have looked more like an abandoned strip mall than anything else.
Alice did nearly fall when he grabbed her arm, protesting as he tied a strip of filthy fabric over the scrollwork burned into her arm.
“Cover the Glow,” he muttered urgently. “They see you Oyster,” he said, almost spitting the name, “you dead.”
At that, she didn't untie it, though she didn't really expect the flimsy disguise to work. Soaking wet and wearing date night clothes, the rag obviously was hiding something, and how hard would it be to guess what it was?
She jumped again when he whispered, “I go, count ten, then follow.” He started across the bridge and swarmed through the doors like a rat himself.
Thawing a little in outrage, Alice felt more awake than she had all night. The Man Who Knows had better have some goddamn answers, after all this.