Alice noticed her dress first. The blue was gone. Only the pencil lines remained, the way a drawing looks before someone fills it in. She stood in a clearing of inky trees with a black flamingo tucked under her arm. The flamingo blinked at her, slow and certain. Harrietta the White Rabbit waited a few steps ahead, ears twitching, eyes flicking back to check that Alice was still following. Alice was not sure why she had agreed to help a rabbit find her way home. She had only been pulled from a book an hour ago. Her best skill, she would tell anyone who asked, was leaving places she should not have entered. She had not figured out how to leave this one. The first poster was nailed to a striped tree. A girl's face crossed out in red paint. NO ALICE'S in fat white letters. Alice pulled it down. Behind it was another. Behind that, three more. She walked further and found a whole wall of them papering the side of a purple frosting shop. A raven watched from the eaves, then flew off toward a tall tower in the distance. At the cobblestone square, strangers had gathered around a wooden notice board. A sign on it read: the only rules. Alice is nonexistent. you not see her because she is not really there. A girl with long hair stood at a counter mixing batter for a cake. Alice asked for a slice. The girl kept stirring. Alice waved her hand in front of the girl's face. Nothing. At the tea table, no one set out a chair. A flock of winged books burst overhead, swerved around Alice, and crashed into a teacup fountain instead. Even the books refused to hit her. A purple cat sat on the branch above the table, tail swishing. "Don't bother," Chester said. His grin did not move. "Posters say no. World agrees. Tidy." Alice held up her sketched sleeve. "I'm standing here." "Standing isn't being," Chester said. "Ask the sign." He blinked one yellow eye, one green, and was gone. Harrietta tugged at Alice's hem. The rabbit's face had that look again, the one that expected Alice to fix it and doubted she could. Alice walked past the square, past the pools of black ink, until the noise thinned. In a quiet corner behind a hedge, she set the flamingo down. She gathered fallen pages, white rose vines, and a few stones. She built walls. She built a door. By the time she stepped back, a small dark blue cottage stood there, wrapped in white roses, with a crooked spire on top. The blue of it was the blue her dress used to be. Alice carried the flamingo inside and shut the door. The posters could not reach her here. She was somewhere now. That was a start. Outside, Harrietta sat on the step and waited, because the cottage was Alice's proof, not hers, and the way home was still missing.

Alice stayed inside the cottage longer than she meant to. The walls held. The roses outside the window did not peel away. When she finally opened the door, the flamingo hung limp in her arm, its eye blinking slower than before, like a candle running out. Harrietta was still on the step. She had not moved. Harrietta had stacked her teacups into a tower beside her knee. Three cups, three saucers, perfectly aligned. A pocket watch lay open on the top saucer. She had been counting minutes. "You came out. You came out. Good. I thought— I thought you'd gone back in. Back into the page. Or thinner. You looked thinner this morning, you did." She stood up fast. "You have to exist, Alice. Someone has to see you. I see you. That counts. That has to count." Alice sat down on the step beside the teacup tower. The flamingo blinked once and did not open its eye again for a long moment. "I'm here," Alice said. "I built a door. Doors mean you're somewhere." Harrietta nodded too many times. Then she stopped nodding. She was staring past Alice's shoulder. The white roses around the cottage were dripping. Not water. Blue. Fat blue beads slid down the petals and pooled in the dirt. Alice stood. She touched one bloom. Her fingertip came away wet and bright, the exact blue her dress used to be. She looked down at her sketched sleeve. Still empty. Still only lines. But the color was here. The color had followed the cottage out of her. "Get me a cup," Alice said. Harrietta handed one down from the tower without a word. Alice held it under the lowest rose and let the blue gather. One drop. Three. Ten. She moved cup to cup, bush to bush, until she had filled a glass vial Harrietta produced from her coat pocket. The vial was half full. Not enough. Alice knew, the way you know a recipe is short an egg. She corked it. She tore a strip from the hem of her colorless dress, scratched two words on it with a charred twig from the step, and tied it to the neck. Drink me. So she would not forget, and would not drink early. "It was the building," Alice said. "I made something. The color came back where I made something." Harrietta picked up her watch and clicked it shut. "Then we find more," she said. "More cottages. More walls. More you." She stepped off the step at last. The teacup tower stayed behind, neat and abandoned. Alice tucked the half-full vial against the flamingo's chest and walked with Harrietta into the hedges, looking for the next place a color might be hiding.