Edith doesn’t reply. I think she enjoys the madness lingering in my eyes.

I find myself turning around, looking for something to threaten them with. Funny—or terrifying—how my eyes spot a glinting knife on the floor right away. I kneel down, grab it, stand up, and press them both against the wall. “Tell me what?”

“That’s the same look you had in you eyes when you were seven years old,” Lorina says.

“Tell me what, goddammit?”

“That you knocked on our door, told us you were running from the Wonderland Monsters, that they wanted to kill you, that something horrible happened in Wonderland.”

“You were laughable,” Edith continues. “A lost, mad child whom my mother pitied and took in and made you one of us.”

“You mean...?”

“You were never our sister, Alice,” Lorina says, as if she is delivering the happiest news in her life. “You were never one of us, and you have always been mad.”

Chapter 69

Buckingham Palace, London

Tom Truckle saw the Queen of England take the podium, that sinister grin glinting like a knife on her face.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” she said. “Pardon me, I mean mad ladies and gentlemen.” She snickered and the crowd laughed. “I am about to offer you something that hasn’t been done in the history of mankind before. Something that will make us, Wonderlanders and fellow madmen and women, avenge what happened to us in the circus two centuries ago.”

Tom noticed the glaring silence of the crowd. Everyone seemed to be counting on the Queen now.

“What we’re going to do is going to shake this human world upside down,” she said. “It will make Wonderland look like such a very sane place to what we’re going to do to the real world around us.”

Tom himself was as anxious as ever. Although an imposter, he felt like he’d like to be part of the Queen’s lunatic plan. Who worked in an asylum and didn’t feel like the sane world outside wasn’t the enemy. To Tom it was the taxes he paid, the expenses of his divorce, and his medications. How much did he have to pay for those pills, just to stay sane in this mad world?

“But first, I want to show you a glimpse of the kind of madness you love to watch.” She pointed at the screen behind her. It showed people in England hunting all kinds of rabbits, opening them up to look for a bomb. Some people killed the rabbits, some ran when they saw one, even if it was on TV. The streets were a mess of accidents and panic. And oh, how insane the world looked right now. “This is just the beginning. In a few minutes you will be watching something much more insane, so keep watching.”

Chapter 70

Alice Wonder's house, 7 Folly Bridge, Oxford

Time remaining: 53 minutes

“That’s why you hate me so much.” I nod at Lorina and Edith. “I never was one of you.”

In truth, I can’t remember the part of me knocking on their door with a knife in my hand. But I do remember the basement. The horrible circus inside the basement.

“We don’t just hate you, Alice. We loathe you,” Lorina says. “You’re like that itch in the top of my mouth that hurts more if I try to lick it away.”

“Even when you were put in the asylum, you still escape and make our life miserable,” Edith says, totally neglecting that I may have been just a troubled seven-year-old, but that the incidents in the basement—which were their fault—may have turned me into a loon.

“So how did you come up with the circus idea in the basement?”

“Because you told us about the circus in Wonderland,” Lorina says. “Or rather the silly idea that Wonderlanders had crossed over to the real world in the 19th century, and that humans thought of them as mad people and freaks, and sent them to the circus for entertainment.”

“Of course.” I sigh. “That was how I gave you the idea. So you decided to take it up a notch and make a circus out of me in the basement.”

“And it was fun, Alice,” Edith says. “I mean, if you bully someone in the real world you may get in trouble. But bully a mad girl, wow, that was a million-dollar idea we got away with.

“Because whatever you were going to say about it, no one was going to believe a lost mad girl who thinks she came from Wonderland.” Edith and Lorina high-five.

The Pillar comes to mind instantly. All his madness, theories, and the harsh ways he treats the people in this world seem just now. How I would like to choke both of them with a hookah’s hose right now. Maybe I was hard on the Pillar. Maybe the twelve people he killed were the likes of Lorina and Edith. Bullies who needed to be put to rest.

In the same time I stand, contemplating my past and what to do with Edith and Lorina, I realize I am too late again. Why do I always waste time lamenting my true past?

Edith tugs on her gloves and picks up a baseball bat from the floor, while Lorina shoots me an even more sinister look now.

“How about we play that circus game one more time?” she says.

“What?” I grimace, unable to comprehend their thirst for evil.

“Come on, Mary Ann.” Edith plops the bat against her fatty palm.

“What did you just call me?” I take a calculated step back. I was going to lash my None Fu at them when Edith caught me off guard with what she just said.

“Mary Ann.” Lorina sticks out her tongue and shakes her head like a bully teasing a kid on school grounds. “Mary Ann.”

“Why are you calling me Mary Ann?” I am fully aware that this is one of my names in the Alice in Wonderland book, that the rabbit mistakes me for a Mary Ann in the first chapter. But why do they call me by that name now?

What does it mean?

“Oh.” Edith nudges me with the bat in my shoulder. Lorina fans away. “We didn’t tell you?”

Both of my evil stepsisters wink at each other.

“You also held a pot next to the glinting knife the day you showed up on our door,” Lorina says, still forcing me to step back, closer to the cage’s opening behind me. “A pot with a tiger lily in it.”

“Remember that pot, loony tunes?” Edith swooshes the bar a breath away from my nose. “Inside the pot, there was a necklace, which probably was yours.”

“It belongs to someone called Mary Ann,” Lorina says. “My mother called you Mary Ann then, and you never minded. It was only later when she realized your obsession with Alice in Wonderland that she called you Alice. She thought it sounded better for your adoption papers.”

“And she gave you our last name, Wonder,” Edith says. “Odd how it all fell into place, isn’t it? Our last name being ‘Wonder’ while you think you came from Wonderland.” This part seems to amuse her the most.

“So I was really Mary Ann in Wonderland?” I mumble.

“Here she goes again,” Lorina tells her sister. “Did you see how bonkers she went, talking to herself about Wonderland again?”

“That’s why we need to see her in the cage one more time.” Edith pushes me harder, the cage against my back now. “Come on, Mary Ann. Entertain us one last time.”

Edith’s push does something to me. Something I was looking for all along: I remember them torturing me in the basement now. Vividly.

It’s an even worse memory than remembering the Mush Room torture. The humiliation. Their friends they invited over to laugh at me. The worst memory a person can relive.

But one thing strikes me the most. In that memory I’m gripping something behind my back. Something I don’t want them to see. I can feel it in my hand. It’s cold. And small.

“Get in the cage!” Edith roars now.

I close my eyes and don’t respond to her. My closed eyes are the draped curtain of my theatre of life, but they also open up another place in my memory when I was seven years old.