Harrietta White, once the White Rabbit of Wonderland, stood at the edge of a tea party that did not belong to her. The fountain at the center tilted three teacups skyward and spilled a purple stream that smelled like ink, not tea. Her ears twitched at every drip. She had been pulled from her own book by a lie about being late, and now she could not get back. Every clock in her head ticked louder when she stayed near that fountain. If she could not quiet the ticking, she would freeze when she finally got the chance to shut this party down. Chester Cheshire Grinwild stood a few steps off, painting a bush. He dragged purple across the leaves, then dotted them with white until the bush looked like a fat mushroom. There were no guests yet. Only him, her, and the chairs he kept dragging into a longer and longer line. He hummed while he worked. Harrietta hated how easy he made it look. She crossed the cobblestones with her paws clenched. "I need somewhere quiet," she said. "Away from that fountain. Now." Chester did not turn. He flicked his brush once. "Easy." His mismatched eyes lifted, one yellow, one green, and fixed on a patch of empty air past the painted bush. The air bent. A porcelain cottage shaped like a teapot pushed up out of nothing, with a dark blue door, small clockwork gears turning along its belly, and a round window glowing soft above the spout. "Yours," he said. "Don't thank me." He went back to painting. Harrietta climbed the step and pushed the door open. Inside, the ticking in her skull dropped by half. A small table waited under the window. A kettle sat on a low flame, already steaming. She shut the door behind her and leaned against it. From the pocket of her waistcoat she pulled the tea bag she had carried out of her own book, a cream sachet tied with gold string, Earl Grey, the only thing she trusted in this place. She dropped it into a cup and poured. The smell was tea. Just tea. Not ink. She took one sip. The ticking slowed. She took the second. The pressure behind her eyes went flat. Her shoulders dropped for the first time since Chester had grinned her out of her pages. She set the cup down and breathed. She could think again. She could plan. The fountain was still out there. Chester was still out there, lining up chairs for guests he had no right to steal. But now she had a door she could close, two sips that worked, and a quiet room shaped like a kettle. She looked at the blue door and made herself a promise. The next time she stepped through it, she would be going out to end his party, not hide from it.

Harrietta opened the blue door at dawn and stepped down onto the cobbles. The teapot cottage hummed behind her. She had two sips of tea in her, a clear head, and a white journal tucked under one arm. The cover had small gear-clasps and a rabbit stamped in silver. She had found it on the cottage table that morning. She did not ask where it came from. She only needed it to hold what she learned. She found Chester high above the party grounds. He had built a stone staircase that curled up into a knot of purple clouds. From the top step he could see every chair, every pot, every cobble. He sat there now, tail swinging, watching the long winding table below. Harrietta crouched behind a striped tree at the base and opened the journal. She started writing what he did. First he came down. He walked the table from one end to the other and touched each teapot lid. He counted chairs out loud. He stopped at the middle of the table where a pile of loose petals lay heaped. The petals were purple, black, and white. He spread them with one paw until they formed the shape of an ace of spades. He did it slowly, the way someone sets a place for a guest. Then he climbed back up the staircase and waited. Harrietta wrote it down. An hour later he came down again. He fixed the petal ace where the wind had nudged it. He counted the chairs again. One chair at the far end had moved. He dragged it back into line. He climbed the stairs. She watched this happen four more times. Every visit, he checked the ace. Every visit, he counted the chairs. Whatever he planned to pull from a book next, it was a card. A spade. And it was meant for that empty chair. She almost shut the journal then. She did not. She made herself wait one more cycle. On the sixth trip down, Chester did not climb back up. He stopped at the foot of the stairs, turned his head, and looked straight at the striped tree. "Took notes?" he called. His voice was flat. "Save a page for me." He grinned and vanished into the clouds above. Harrietta's ears went hot. He had known. Maybe the whole time. She closed the journal and pressed the clasp shut. He knew she was watching, and he had still shown her the ace, still shown her the empty chair. That meant one of two things. Either he wanted her to try to stop the next guest, or he did not believe she could. She walked back to the cottage with the journal under her arm. She had his pattern now. She also had a problem she had not had at sunrise. Chester was watching her watch him.

Harrietta came back to the cobbles at midday with the journal sealed in her apron pocket. She did not open it. Chester knew about it now, which made every page inside it worthless. If she wrote down one more thing where he could see her, he would only show her what he wanted her to see. She needed a new way to watch him, and she needed it before he pulled the next guest through. She found him at the head of the long table, eyes half closed, paws spread. The air above the empty chair shimmered. The plain seat she had watched for days was gone. In its place stood a tall chair with carved curls and pale flowers worked into the back, the kind of chair meant for a girl in a tower. Beside it, on the table, a cake rose in three pink tiers shaped like a castle, with tiny windows and a spire on top. Not a spade. Not a card. He had lied with the petals. He had wanted her to write down the wrong guess. Her ears went hot. The ace had been bait. While she had filled pages with spades, he had been preparing for a princess. She backed away from the table before he opened his eyes. She ran for the striped trunk of his house. The door under the roots was unlatched. Inside, the air smelled of paper and old tea. This was where the books had come from. This was where the next one would be written. She moved past a low desk and stopped at a tall, dark shelf along the back wall. The shelf was carved with curls and crooked edges. Every row was empty. He had pulled every story out of it. She squeezed into the gap between the shelf and the wall and crouched low. From the slot between two shelves she could see the desk, the door, and a clear stripe of the table outside. She took two sips from the small flask in her pocket. The ticking in her head softened. She set the journal on her knees and did not open it. She would not write a word he could find later. She would only watch, and remember, and decide what to do with her own two paws once she saw who he pulled through. The door creaked. Chester padded in, humming. He did not look at the shelf. He climbed onto the desk, took up a long feather pen, and laid a blank book flat. He dipped the pen. He began to write. Harrietta held her breath behind the empty shelf and watched the ink move. For the first time since the petals, he did not know where she was.

From the slot in the carved shelf, Harrietta watched the quill move. The raven held it in its beak now, head tilted, dipping into a small pot of ink. Chester stood at the desk with one paw flat on the open book, eyes half shut, lips moving. The raven wrote. Chester imagined. Harrietta understood it then. He could not make a book alone. He needed the bird. She pressed the journal flat against her knees and did not reach for it. The ticking started behind her left ear. Small at first, like a fingernail tapping glass. Then louder. The shelf around her felt suddenly too tight, the carved curls digging into her shoulder, the empty rows above her head smelling of dust and dry glue. If the ticking grew, her foot would start, and her foot would knock the wood, and Chester would turn. She slid her paw into her bag for the tea sachet. Earl grey. Two sips and the noise would drop. Her paw shook. The bag tipped off her lap. It hit the floorboards with a soft thump and a clink of the flask inside. Harrietta froze. The quill kept scratching. The raven did not look up. Chester's ear twitched once. He turned his head a quarter inch toward the shelf, and his mouth pulled into a slow grin. He winked. Then he reached across the desk and lifted the purple book out from under the raven's beak as if she had not made a sound at all. He held the book flat in both paws. Vines crawled across the cover in green ink, still wet, curling around the title. Chester pushed one paw down into the page. The cover went soft. Ink pooled around his wrist and dripped onto the desk in fat purple beads. He pulled. A girl came out of the book by her hair first, brown hair past her feet, small ribbons tied through it, a purple dress crushed at the shoulder where his paw had gripped. She blinked at the lamp. Chester set her on her feet and bowed. Harrietta grabbed her bag and slipped out the side door before the raven turned. She ran for the cobbles. Halfway across the path she stopped. A tower stood beside the tea table that had not been there an hour ago. Pale purple stone, climbing roses, a small flag at the top. He had built the girl a house before he had built the girl. Harrietta forced her legs forward, reached the table, climbed into her seat, and poured tea with paws she could not quite steady. She had what she needed now. Chester could not write alone. The raven was the lock. Break the bird's hold on the quill and the party stopped pulling guests. She took two sips. The ticking eased. She thought of Alice, and of the shelf, and began to plan.

Harrietta watched from behind the teapot cottage wall. Chester sat with the raven at the end of the long table, both of them digging into a fresh tray of frosted cakes the baker girl had brought out. Purple icing stuck to Chester's whiskers. The raven pecked at a crumb and did not look up. Harrietta counted three breaths, then ran for his house. Inside, the shelves stood half empty. She pulled cushions off the desk chair and shook them. She ran her paws along the eaves, climbed the rungs, checked behind the empty rows where she had hidden the day before. No book of hers. No Wonderland between the covers she could find. She climbed back down with dust on her sleeves and a tight feeling behind her ear. The book was not in the house. She slipped out and ran past the cobbles, past the tower, into the ink-dark stretch where Chester had not yet built anything. The ground here was soft. Small pools of ink sat between the roots like spilled tea. She kept going until she found a garden she had never seen before. A hedge grew tall and square, leaves clipped flat, and inside the leaves stood shelves. Rows and rows of books pressed into the green. Loose volumes lay open on the grass at her feet. She walked the hedge slowly. Halfway down she stopped. A large book lay open on a low stand, pages spread wide. On the right page, painted in bright color, stood a girl with a blue bow and a white dress. Alice. Harrietta's breath caught. She gripped the edges of the book and dragged it across the grass, leaves catching in the spine, until she had it beside the nearest ink pool. If anything dripped, it would drip into the pool and not onto Chester's path. She knelt. She pushed up her sleeve. She remembered the way Chester's paw had sunk through the purple cover as if the page were water. She set her hand flat on the painted page and pressed. The page gave. Her arm went in to the elbow, then the shoulder. Cold ink closed around her fur. She felt nothing at first. She reached further, fingers spread, sweeping through empty dark. She thought of Alice. The yellow hair. The blue bow. The small flat voice she remembered from home. Her fingers brushed silk. A ribbon. A bow. She pulled. Alice came out of the page hair first, then shoulders, then a white dress drained of color, then small blue shoes. A black flamingo blinked under her arm. Alice stood up on the grass and looked at Harrietta with brown eyes that did not seem surprised. "You're the rabbit," Alice said. "You're lost." Harrietta nodded once. She had pulled Alice into Chester's Wonderland. Now Chester was not the only one who could open a book.

Alice stood on the grass and looked at her own hands. The dress had no color. Her shoes were two blue smudges. Harrietta saw a paper nailed to the nearest tree. The paper said Alice did not exist. Another paper said the same thing. The hedge was full of them. Alice read one, then another. Her shoulders dropped. The edges of her sleeves began to thin. Harrietta could see the grass through them. "He posted these," Harrietta said. Her voice came out small. Alice did not answer. She turned in a slow circle. The flamingo under her arm blinked once. Alice walked back to the open book on the stand. She tore the page she had come from straight down the spine and held it up. A painted blue dress sat on the torn paper. "I was here," Alice said. "That is mine." She folded the page and tucked it into her sash. Her hand passed halfway through the cloth before it caught. She started walking. Harrietta followed. They passed an iron post stuck with wooden arrows. The arrows pointed every way at once. I'm late. Yesterday. Madness. Rabbit Hole. Alice turned in place under it, reading each one, and spun once more before she picked a direction with no sign at all. She walked past the last hedge, past the last cobble, into the part of Wonderland Chester had not bothered to build. Ink ran loose on the ground here. The dark seeped between Alice's shoes and did not stain them. Alice stopped in a clearing and knelt. She gathered loose boards from the ink, and stones, and a curl of white rose vine. She worked fast. She did not speak. A small dark blue cottage rose under her hands, crooked, with a thin spire and yellow windows. White roses climbed the walls. When Alice stepped back, the cottage stood firm. Her sleeves filled in a little. Harrietta could no longer see the grass through them. Harrietta sat down on the front step to wait. After a while she noticed the hedge of white roses by the door. Blue paint was running down the petals. Fat drops gathered at the leaf tips and fell. Alice came out and stopped beside her. They both looked at the hedge. "That is the color of my dress," Alice said. She knelt and held a cupped hand under a petal until a drop fell into her palm. She did this until her palm was full. Inside the cottage Alice set a small glass vial on the wooden table and poured the blue into it. She tied a paper tag to the neck and wrote two words on it. Drink me. She set it in the center of the table and stepped back. Her hands were solid now. Harrietta watched the vial sit there, small and bright, and felt the ticking in her head quiet by half. Alice was real. Alice would stay long enough to help.

Harrietta heard the wings before she saw the book. She stepped out of the cottage and looked up. One winged volume circled the spire in tight loops, brown cover flashing, purple feathers cutting the air. It dropped lower with each pass. Alice came out behind her holding the flamingo. The blue paint on the rose hedge dripped faster now, as if the cottage knew it was being hunted. Alice touched the torn page tucked in her sash. "It wants the page," Alice said. "Not me. The page." The book dove. Harrietta yanked Alice sideways and they ran for the trees. Pages snapped above them like a sail in wind. They cut between trunks, ducked under a low branch, doubled back when the book swung wide. Alice was faster than she looked. The flamingo stayed tucked under her arm and did not squawk once. Harrietta's chest hurt. The ticking in her head climbed. Two sips, she thought. Later. Run now. The book clipped a branch and showered them with bark. They burst into a small hollow and Alice stopped short. A door had grown out of the dirt at her feet. Blue, arched, no taller than a teapot. It had a brass keyhole shaped like a small round face. The face was smiling. Blue paint pooled around its base where the grass met the wood, the same color as Alice's dress, as if her presence had pulled the door up out of the ground. Alice knelt and tried the handle. The door opened a crack. She pushed her shoulder against the frame and the frame did not give. "Too small," she said. "For me." The book screamed overhead. Harrietta dropped to her knees and looked at Alice. Alice already had the page out. She pressed it into Harrietta's paws. "Take it through. I can't fit. You can." Her hand was steady. Her sleeve was thinning again at the wrist. Harrietta opened her mouth to argue and Alice shook her head once. "Go." Harrietta folded the page small, tucked it into her waistcoat, and shoved herself headfirst through the little door. Her ears bent flat. Her hips scraped. Then she was through. She landed on packed dirt in a dim space that smelled of paper. She turned and saw Alice's eye at the keyhole, huge and brown. The wings beat hard above the hollow. Then a thump, and the eye flinched, and the book's shadow passed over the keyhole and kept going. It had not seen Alice kneel. It was still hunting the page, and the page was now underground, with Harrietta. The door clicked shut. The keyhole dimmed. Harrietta sat in the dark with the page against her chest and listened to her own breath. The page was safe. Alice was alone up there, fading at the wrist, with one winged book still circling a blue cottage it could no longer reach.