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.

The hedges thinned and then stopped. Alice and Harrietta stepped out into open void, the kind of nowhere that had no floor except where they put their feet. Giant dandelion puffs drifted past them, taller than the cottage they had left behind. Alice held the half-full vial against the flamingo's chest. She looked down at her sleeve. The sketched lines were paler than an hour ago. She could see the dandelions through her wrist. Harrietta sat on nothing and made it look like a chair. She clicked her watch open, shut, open. "You have to build, Alice. Build. Anywhere. Here is fine, here is fine. You're going see-through, you're going— pick a spot. Pick." "I don't know where to start," Alice said. A seed tuft brushed her cheek and passed through it. She flinched. "If I pick wrong, I waste it. If I wait, I'm gone." Harrietta's ears pinned back. She poured a thumb of grey tea from a dented cup and pushed it toward Alice's knee. "Small first. Small. Start small, love. A thing you can hold." Alice uncorked the vial. One drop on her fingertip. She thought of a butterfly with bread for wings, peanut butter on one side, jelly on the other. She drew it in the air with the wet finger. The line held. Wings unfolded from nothing, soft and crusted at the edges. The butterfly bobbed once and flew off after a dandelion. Blue welled up on the seed-tuft where the butterfly had landed and slid down the stem. Alice caught three drops in the vial. Not enough. Her forearm was still fading. "Bigger," Harrietta said. "Bigger, bigger. Do the house again. Do it here." Alice pressed her palm flat against the empty air. She thought of the cottage. Blue shingles. Yellow windows. White roses climbing the sides. She pushed. The void resisted, then gave. Wood cracked into being. A door swung open on a hinge that had not existed a breath ago. The little house stood in the nowhere, roof steaming, panels wet. Ink dripped from every seam, dark at first, then blue, then bluer. It ran down the boards and pooled on the step. Harrietta scrambled with the vial. She held it under a corner post. The vial filled past the halfway mark, past three quarters, and stopped a finger short of the neck. Alice corked it fast. She looked at her arm. Still colorless lines. But solid. She flexed her fingers and they did not blur. Harrietta pressed the vial into Alice's palm. "Not yet. Not yet. One more drop and you drink. One more." Alice nodded. The flamingo blinked at the new house, then at the vial, then closed its eye. Somewhere past the second cottage, another dandelion drifted by, and Alice heard something inside the walls begin to move.