Through a Looking Glass Darkly: Nine of Swords, Part Three
He stomped his way up to the tree; Jelly inched her free hand to the gun under her arm, wondering if she’d left any of the shadows he tracked by, or if he’d spotted her already. He was almost directly below her; she could see the top of his head, where the ear she’d shot off had left some wiring and metal exposed. Then March’s head jerked, suddenly, unnaturally, tilting his face in the direction Hatter had just gone.
“Hatter,” he sing-sang in a mechanized voice. “Come out, come out wherever you are.”
He pounded towards the edge of the hill, and then stopped abruptly. “You know I’m better at hide and seek than you are,” he said, moving his head from left to right. “Why are you dragging this out?”
Jelly wrapped her fingers around the handle of her gun, and tried to ease it out of its holster as quietly as she could, painfully aware of the dried blood on her hand itching and flaking off as she did so. She wasn’t quite sure if she believed that he didn’t notice her, but if he was going to be stupid enough to give her a shot at him, she was going to take it.
March’s head jerked, suddenly, to a cluster of bushes several cubits away from the hill. “You’re only making this worse for yourself, Hatter,” he continued, striding towards them. “I could make this quick. But you know how I get when I’m angry.”
There was the sound of gunfire then. March jerked his entire body in that direction, and appeared to consider it for a moment before heading off. Jelly wondered for a moment if she should try for the shot, no matter how awkward the angle, but she didn’t want to risk giving their position away if the assassin was leaving anyway, and very shortly he disappeared out of sight.
She stayed in place for a moment, then reholstered her weapon, and eased her way down. Hatter was standing by the tree trunk when she touched the ground, making it easier for her to spin around and say (quietly, of course) “What the fuck was that?”
“You’re very foul-mouthed today, you know,” Hatter observed, heading back off in the direction of the City of the Knights as though they’d merely dodged another patrol. Thankfully, the firefight seemed to be happening in the other direction. She’d be worried, but neither Jack nor Charlie had a gun to return fire with, so it didn’t seem worth the energy.
“I haven’t had breakfast,” Jelly muttered, before finding that once they’d started the words were impossible to stop. “We’re being followed by two hands worth of my co-workers. I’ve had to kill eight of them so far. There’s only a limited amount of time to get back to Charlie and Jack before they attempt something suicidally stupid. My father is either in the process of being brainwashed or held on collateral for me managing to get Jack to safety. And you’re trying very hard to distance yourself from March, but I’ve got to tell you, Hatter, it’s not your best work. So I repeat: what the fuck was that?”
Hatter glared at her. “Fine, I know Mad March. Knew. And Jack is chummy with Caterpillar and you’re a bloody Oyster. We’re just having that sort of day.” He moved past her, hurrying ahead.
“Knew how?” Jelly hissed as she caught up with him.
“I knew him,” Hatter replied. “I might go as far as to say I knew him before he went mad, but then again he tried to electrocute me when I was nine, so I might not.”
The hum of a flamingo filled the woods over the sound of distant gunfire, and they both dove for the relative cover of a nearby tree.
“Does this have anything to do with your right arm?” Jelly whispered on a whim.
“He cut the original one off,” Hatter said. The words weren’t matter of fact, like they’d been when he’d told her about his father. They were blunt, meant to scare her off. “So I had it replaced with something more durable.”
The flamingo had passed, so Jelly unpeeled herself from the tree and started up again. “And, what? You survived once, so baiting him is good idea?”
“Would you rather his focus was on you? Correct me if I’m wrong, but you don’t even have that much,” Hatter retorted.
“I’ve known him for thirteen years and he hasn’t tried to kill me yet.”
“I’m glad to hear it. But it’s not exactly a mark in your favor.”
“And surviving once isn’t an excuse to be that reckless.”
“Have you looked in the mirror lately?” Hatter asked. “I’m not the one with half a tree in my face.”
“I’m a Spade,” she said, exasperated. Hatter shot her a disbelieving look, so she amended “I was a Spade. I’ve been a Spade my whole life. This is normal for me. I know what I’m doing.”
“So do I,” Hatter told her. “I might go out of the way to avoid this sort of thing, but I’m Resistance. Sooner or later I was going to dance too close to the fire, and it was going to come down to this. Time’s finally caught up with me, and I’m not going to run.”
For a moment, it seemed they were at an impasse; then Hatter smirked, and said “Though, I’d like you to know that I’m deeply touched by your fretting.”
“I’m not fretting,” Jelly said with a roll of her eyes, relieved to be given the chance to retreat behind their normal banter. “I’m trying to come up with a good reason not to shoot you.”
“Well, I could point out that it sounds like misplaced fretting, but I’m not,” Hatter said, holding out a hand to help her down a somewhat-steep slope. “That’s a reason.”
“I don’t think that counts,” Jelly replied. “Actually, as this is my book I’m keeping here, I’m going to go with that definitely doesn’t count.”
“Well then,” Hatter said. “What about my outrageous sense of humor? Or my cutting wit? There’s also my overwhelming charm, and my devilishly handsome good looks.”
It was on the tip of her tongue to ask him why he left out his sense of humility, but instead she went with “You are cute, I’ll give you that much.”
Hatter smiled, before seeming to catch himself and affecting an insulted tone. “Cute? Cute? Do you think that little of me?”
Jelly suppressed the urge to smirk. “Of course not. I could never think you little.”
“You’ve walked into so many terrible jokes I don’t know which one to say first,” Hatter said.
“You could try list-”
There was the sound of a stick breaking underfoot. Jelly and Hatter went for the bushes, but they suddenly rustled, revealing a young man with a pistol. Before Jelly could try disarming him, the path came alive. They were trapped.
“Are you Hatter and Jellybean?” asked one of the gunmen.
“Ah, no,” Hatter told them, holding up his arms in surrender. “Robinson and Duckworth. I’m Robinson, she’s Duckworth.” Jelly nodded once, mimicking his posture for the moment. “We’re on our honeymoon. It got a bit trampled by Suits. If you could point us in the direction of the lake-”
“It’s them,” said a woman’s voice. “Well, it’s him, at least.”
“Oh,” Hatter said, dropping his hands quickly. “Hi, Sylvie.”
Jelly lowered her hands and gave him a questioning look.
“I’m Bruno’s sister,” Sylvie said. “I’m also in charge of the farmers’ block while Tortoise is getting up to shenanigans in the city. We’ve got your friends; they’re safe. Well give you fresh horses, and then you can be on your way while we’re keeping the Suits busy.”
“Thank you,” Jelly said.
“Now we’re even,” Sylvie replied.
The gunmen melted away into the trees, far more stealthy than the Suits had been to date. Benefits of being on their own territory, Jelly figured, as Sylvie turned with the obvious intention to have them follow her.
“Tortoise is in the city, you say?” Hatter asked.
“Yes,” Sylvie said. “She got news that Carpenter defected, and decided that a meeting was in store.”
Jelly slipped, and fell face first into a tree before Hatter could catch her.
“Ow!” she yelled, as the bark scraped against the splinters.
“You should really have that looked at,” Sylvie commented, before stepping into a fern and disappearing from view.
Hatter leaned over the fern. “Huh,” he said, bracing his arm against a nearby rock before dropping himself into the hole the fern had concealed. Jelly listened to the thump that signified his safe landing. It was almost immediate: she gave him a few moments before following.
Her knees bent as she landed on the dirt floor. Hatter helped her straighten and they made their way down the narrow tunnel, which was lit with the glow of phosphorescent mushrooms which grew in the walls.
“What is this place?” she asked.
“I’m not sure,” Hatter replied. “I know Sylvie because I staked out one of the drop points. Tortoise’s group generally use little dug-outs, but they’re nothing this-” he cut himself off as the tunnel broadened to reveal a causeway across a large pit. Looking down, Jelly could see a space that rivaled the Great Library in terms of size and population, but instead of books, there was food. Food everywhere: ears of corn, barrels of apples, boxes of mangoes, bushels of broccoli, piles of cabbages. She had never seen so much food in one place in her life, and as a trainee she’d had to patrol the inventories in the Casino.
“But nothing this elaborate,” Hatter finished. “Wow.”
“Yeah,” Jelly agreed.
“Harbingers!”
Charlie raced towards them, and caught them both in a hug. Jelly patted him on the back, until he drew the hug out past the point of awkwardness.
“Okay, that’s enough,” she muttered.
“We were just about to go back up and look for you,” Charlie said happily. His face fell, though, when he got a good look at hers. “Oh my.”
“Do you know where I could wash up?” Jelly asked.
“There’s a water closet this way,” Jack replied from behind the Knight. He was looking slightly overwhelmed, probably from being alone with Charlie for however long, but otherwise okay.
“Hold on a moment, I’ll be right back,” Charlie said, dashing away. She exchanged looks with Hatter, before turning back to Jack.
“I’d like to apologize for my behavior this morning,” the prince said stiffly.
Jelly wondered for a moment if Charlie had spoken with him, before deciding that it didn’t really matter. “I’m sorry for how I acted last night. Truce?”
“That would seem to be for the best,” Jack agreed. “I’m not sure I want to know what your rejoinder would be otherwise.”
“It would have involved punching out all your blood,” Jelly informed him.
Jack shot an involuntary look at her right hand, which was still coated with blood and grime.“The water closet’s this way,” he repeated, and took off down the ledgeway.
Charlie intercepted just outside the door. “Here!” he said, thrusting a sack into her hands.
“Uh, thank you?” Jelly said, opening it. A rubber ducky grinned out at her. She held it up and presented it to Charlie with a questioning air.
“It’s bathing supplies,” Charlie said scathingly, as though she should have known better. She probably would have, had anyone but him given her a sack outside a water closet.
“Thank you,” she repeated, and went inside to clean up.
~*~
Charlie’s sack did indeed contain a great many useful items. There was a bottle of mineral oil and a rough cloth she used to give her knife a better cleaning. There was a small mirror and a pair of tweezers she used to remove the tree bits from her face. But what it was lacking was a way to get the blood out from under her fingernails.
She’d gotten it off her hand proper easily enough. But she could still feel it coagulated in her cuticles, and no amount of scrubbing, picking or rinsing was doing a good enough job. Maybe it was the water pressure. There was no faucet, just a trickle of water from a spring coming from the wall and splashing into the basin. Maybe it was the temperature. It was a very cold spring, and hot water was better for this sort of thing, wasn’t it? But she couldn’t get the blood out and it was driving her-
Okay Jelly, calm down, she told herself sternly. You nearly ripped your own fingernails off the last time you did this. There’s nothing there. You know there’s nothing there.
It felt like there was. Eight people in one day was a lot, even for a Spade.
There was a knock on the door. “Are you okay?” Hatter called.
Jelly was trying to muster up the effort for a convincing yes when the door opened.
“Don’t ask me that,” she said, as Hatter walked in. “Ask me anything else, but don’t ask me that.”
“Okay,” Hatter said, then, after a beat. “Are you ready to go?”
“Yeah,” Jelly said, flicking her now dry knife back into her pocket and collecting Charlie’s things back in his sack. Leaving now before she had a chance to show her fingernail issues in front of Hatter would probably be a good idea.
“Are you going to be okay for the ride?” Hatter asked.
“I’m fine,” Jelly replied.
“Is your name really Jellybean?”
It was then she realized that she had inadvertently given him carte blanche. She pinched the bridge of her nose, feeling a headache coming on.
“I’m just saying, that doesn’t sound like an Oyster name,” Hatter continued, with a peek into the toilet stall to ensure that they were alone.
“It’s not the name my parents gave me, no. Well, not the one they gave me originally,” Jelly closed the sack and went for the door. Hatter opened it for her. “What about you?” she asked.
“My parents named me Theophilus,” he replied.
“And the mystery of why you’re called Hatter is solved,” she replied.
“There’s nothing wrong with the name Theophilus,” Hatter protested. “It just can’t beat Hatter.”
Jack and Charlie were nowhere to be seen, but Hatter appeared to know where to go, so Jelly fell into step, allowing him to steer their way. Hatter, for himself, seemed to have run out of questions.
“It’s not exactly what you expected, huh?” Jelly asked.
“What’s not?” Hatter replied, too quickly.
Jelly shot him an unamused look. “Please. I’ve read the propaganda. Hell, they keep coming to Dad to help write it.”
Supposedly, Oysters didn’t think like Wonderlanders did. Which might very well be true, her Dad was fond of pointing out, but that had a lot more to do with culture then it did with any biological or neurological differences between the two peoples, and it didn’t even begin to cover the gap the Tea literature presented.
Well, his rant was a lot longer than that, but at this point she was pretty sure that was the gist of the matter.
“Well, it’s not like I trust the propaganda,” Hatter said, sounding a bit hurt. “And I’ve read your books, remember? They certainly don’t fit with the party line. I guess I thought there would be more noticeable differences, that’s all.”
“Supposedly, most of the differences people know about are the result of the most blatantly artificial pseudoscience since the invention of phrenology,” Jack interrupted. He was standing just inside a small tunnel entrance, and once he was sure he had their attention he began to walk down it.
“Oh God,” Jelly said as she followed, recognizing her father’s words and really not wanting to. “He doesn’t actually say that in front of other people, does he?”
“Only when they give him permission to speak freely,” Jack replied, levering himself up and out of a small hole in the ground very much like the one they had entered through.
“Really? In Court?” Jelly asked, as Hatter helped her follow suit.
“Well, it’s not every time your father’s in Court certainly,” Jack said as Hatter clambered up. Jelly buried her face in the palm of her hand, as much from the embarrassment as the way the sudden sunlight was making her squint.
“Oh that’s not so bad,” Hatter assured her. “My mother used to go around asking people why ravens were like writing desks. It wasn’t a pass code, it didn’t have an answer, she just liked saying it.”
Charlie clanked nearby, and Jelly forced her eyes to open and adjust to the light, focusing her attention on the darker of the two horses they had left. “Well, we should probably skip over the sort of things Jack’s parents say.”
“Definitely,” Jack agreed. “Seeing as I haven’t listened to them years.”
“My Nan used to tell me that if I were the only eligible bachelor in the world, there wasn’t a warthog or a wallflower that would polish my escutcheon, let alone a woman of good breeding,” Charlie said.
“You win,” Jelly said. “Here’s your prize.”
He looked excited for a moment, before he realized that she was handing him back his sack.
“Yes, well,” Charlie said with a sniff. “Let’s be off. We have a Stone to deliver!”
~*~
True to her word, Sylvie did keep the Suits off their back. The way into the City was clear and trouble free, and they had little trouble avoiding patrols as Jack took the lead, ring once more in its box and tucked inside his pocket. They climbed higher and higher, until they finally arrived at one of the least likely hot spots for Resistance activity.
“The Hospital of Dreams,” Hatter said flatly. “Caterpillar’s in the Hospital of Dreams.”
“Yes,” Jack replied. “What of it?”
Jelly smirked. “He’s been pretending to be here in rehab while doing Resistance things.”
“That’s just bloody typical,” Hatter said.
“Why would dreams need a hospital?” Charlie asked.
“Because they ended up in the wrong person,” Jack replied walking up the steps. “Come on, we’re nearly there.”
The Hospital itself was a dark and dismal place; Jelly let Jack handle the creepy receptionist and her bugs and kept a look about for anything that might have been lurking in the shadows. It was how she spotted him before he spotted her; the dark velvet of her coat blended in with her surroundings, and he was still wearing his white lab gear.
“Dad!” Jelly yelled, running across the lobby to meet him.
“Oh, just follow the Carpenter,” the receptionist snapped as they met in a hug, Dad’s hands shifting when he inadvertently pressed one against her gun rather than her back.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“I’m fine,” he said, frowning as he pulled back and scrutinizing the bloody mess where the splinters had been. “They got me out right away. What happened to your face?”
“I had a disagreement with a tree,” Jelly replied.
“The tree won,” Hatter elaborated.
Carpenter raised an eyebrow at her.
“Hatter, this is my father,” Jelly introduced. “Dad, this is Hatter. He’s been helping me keep ahead of the- everything.”
“Aren’t you a Tea Seller?” Dad demanded. “I’m pretty sure I’ve seen you at the conventions.”
“Yeah, technically,” Hatter admitted. “Of course, it’s the not-technical bits that are why I’m here.”
“Is Caterpillar-” Jack began.
“He was smoking hookah in the middle of a rowboat in the pool last I saw him,” Dad said.
“…really?” Hatter asked, as Jack took off in the direction of the stairs.
“I think it might be better not to ask,” Dad said. “Jellybean, there’s something you need to see.”
“I’ll just go take Charlie and catch up with Jack,” Hatter said, walking over to where Charlie was squinting at the wall as though he thought it might suddenly attack.
“…Charlie?” Dad asked.
“It’s definitely better not to ask,” Jelly said. “What’s going on?”
“I-” Dad began walking down the hallway. “I didn’t know. If I’d known, I’d have taken you and run years ago. I always thought it wasn’t worth the risk of contacting the Resistance when they were likely to be pretty angry at me.”
“Yeah, I thought that for a while there too,” Jelly said, choosing not to tell him why she’d decided that it was worth the risk after all.
“Well, apparently, they’re desperate enough for information on Tea that we probably could have gotten away with it,” Dad said. “Even if-”
He stopped outside a door marked NO ENTRANCE BUT ENTRANCED, and gave a small, bitter sort of laugh. “There’s no good way to break this news, so I’m just going to say it: Carol’s alive. Your mother’s alive, and she’s here.”
“What?” Jelly asked as he pushed open the door to reveal a middle aged woman, with graying auburn hair and an anxious expression. “Mom?”
“Hello Jellybean,” she said.
“Hatter,” he sing-sang in a mechanized voice. “Come out, come out wherever you are.”
He pounded towards the edge of the hill, and then stopped abruptly. “You know I’m better at hide and seek than you are,” he said, moving his head from left to right. “Why are you dragging this out?”
Jelly wrapped her fingers around the handle of her gun, and tried to ease it out of its holster as quietly as she could, painfully aware of the dried blood on her hand itching and flaking off as she did so. She wasn’t quite sure if she believed that he didn’t notice her, but if he was going to be stupid enough to give her a shot at him, she was going to take it.
March’s head jerked, suddenly, to a cluster of bushes several cubits away from the hill. “You’re only making this worse for yourself, Hatter,” he continued, striding towards them. “I could make this quick. But you know how I get when I’m angry.”
There was the sound of gunfire then. March jerked his entire body in that direction, and appeared to consider it for a moment before heading off. Jelly wondered for a moment if she should try for the shot, no matter how awkward the angle, but she didn’t want to risk giving their position away if the assassin was leaving anyway, and very shortly he disappeared out of sight.
She stayed in place for a moment, then reholstered her weapon, and eased her way down. Hatter was standing by the tree trunk when she touched the ground, making it easier for her to spin around and say (quietly, of course) “What the fuck was that?”
“You’re very foul-mouthed today, you know,” Hatter observed, heading back off in the direction of the City of the Knights as though they’d merely dodged another patrol. Thankfully, the firefight seemed to be happening in the other direction. She’d be worried, but neither Jack nor Charlie had a gun to return fire with, so it didn’t seem worth the energy.
“I haven’t had breakfast,” Jelly muttered, before finding that once they’d started the words were impossible to stop. “We’re being followed by two hands worth of my co-workers. I’ve had to kill eight of them so far. There’s only a limited amount of time to get back to Charlie and Jack before they attempt something suicidally stupid. My father is either in the process of being brainwashed or held on collateral for me managing to get Jack to safety. And you’re trying very hard to distance yourself from March, but I’ve got to tell you, Hatter, it’s not your best work. So I repeat: what the fuck was that?”
Hatter glared at her. “Fine, I know Mad March. Knew. And Jack is chummy with Caterpillar and you’re a bloody Oyster. We’re just having that sort of day.” He moved past her, hurrying ahead.
“Knew how?” Jelly hissed as she caught up with him.
“I knew him,” Hatter replied. “I might go as far as to say I knew him before he went mad, but then again he tried to electrocute me when I was nine, so I might not.”
The hum of a flamingo filled the woods over the sound of distant gunfire, and they both dove for the relative cover of a nearby tree.
“Does this have anything to do with your right arm?” Jelly whispered on a whim.
“He cut the original one off,” Hatter said. The words weren’t matter of fact, like they’d been when he’d told her about his father. They were blunt, meant to scare her off. “So I had it replaced with something more durable.”
The flamingo had passed, so Jelly unpeeled herself from the tree and started up again. “And, what? You survived once, so baiting him is good idea?”
“Would you rather his focus was on you? Correct me if I’m wrong, but you don’t even have that much,” Hatter retorted.
“I’ve known him for thirteen years and he hasn’t tried to kill me yet.”
“I’m glad to hear it. But it’s not exactly a mark in your favor.”
“And surviving once isn’t an excuse to be that reckless.”
“Have you looked in the mirror lately?” Hatter asked. “I’m not the one with half a tree in my face.”
“I’m a Spade,” she said, exasperated. Hatter shot her a disbelieving look, so she amended “I was a Spade. I’ve been a Spade my whole life. This is normal for me. I know what I’m doing.”
“So do I,” Hatter told her. “I might go out of the way to avoid this sort of thing, but I’m Resistance. Sooner or later I was going to dance too close to the fire, and it was going to come down to this. Time’s finally caught up with me, and I’m not going to run.”
For a moment, it seemed they were at an impasse; then Hatter smirked, and said “Though, I’d like you to know that I’m deeply touched by your fretting.”
“I’m not fretting,” Jelly said with a roll of her eyes, relieved to be given the chance to retreat behind their normal banter. “I’m trying to come up with a good reason not to shoot you.”
“Well, I could point out that it sounds like misplaced fretting, but I’m not,” Hatter said, holding out a hand to help her down a somewhat-steep slope. “That’s a reason.”
“I don’t think that counts,” Jelly replied. “Actually, as this is my book I’m keeping here, I’m going to go with that definitely doesn’t count.”
“Well then,” Hatter said. “What about my outrageous sense of humor? Or my cutting wit? There’s also my overwhelming charm, and my devilishly handsome good looks.”
It was on the tip of her tongue to ask him why he left out his sense of humility, but instead she went with “You are cute, I’ll give you that much.”
Hatter smiled, before seeming to catch himself and affecting an insulted tone. “Cute? Cute? Do you think that little of me?”
Jelly suppressed the urge to smirk. “Of course not. I could never think you little.”
“You’ve walked into so many terrible jokes I don’t know which one to say first,” Hatter said.
“You could try list-”
There was the sound of a stick breaking underfoot. Jelly and Hatter went for the bushes, but they suddenly rustled, revealing a young man with a pistol. Before Jelly could try disarming him, the path came alive. They were trapped.
“Are you Hatter and Jellybean?” asked one of the gunmen.
“Ah, no,” Hatter told them, holding up his arms in surrender. “Robinson and Duckworth. I’m Robinson, she’s Duckworth.” Jelly nodded once, mimicking his posture for the moment. “We’re on our honeymoon. It got a bit trampled by Suits. If you could point us in the direction of the lake-”
“It’s them,” said a woman’s voice. “Well, it’s him, at least.”
“Oh,” Hatter said, dropping his hands quickly. “Hi, Sylvie.”
Jelly lowered her hands and gave him a questioning look.
“I’m Bruno’s sister,” Sylvie said. “I’m also in charge of the farmers’ block while Tortoise is getting up to shenanigans in the city. We’ve got your friends; they’re safe. Well give you fresh horses, and then you can be on your way while we’re keeping the Suits busy.”
“Thank you,” Jelly said.
“Now we’re even,” Sylvie replied.
The gunmen melted away into the trees, far more stealthy than the Suits had been to date. Benefits of being on their own territory, Jelly figured, as Sylvie turned with the obvious intention to have them follow her.
“Tortoise is in the city, you say?” Hatter asked.
“Yes,” Sylvie said. “She got news that Carpenter defected, and decided that a meeting was in store.”
Jelly slipped, and fell face first into a tree before Hatter could catch her.
“Ow!” she yelled, as the bark scraped against the splinters.
“You should really have that looked at,” Sylvie commented, before stepping into a fern and disappearing from view.
Hatter leaned over the fern. “Huh,” he said, bracing his arm against a nearby rock before dropping himself into the hole the fern had concealed. Jelly listened to the thump that signified his safe landing. It was almost immediate: she gave him a few moments before following.
Her knees bent as she landed on the dirt floor. Hatter helped her straighten and they made their way down the narrow tunnel, which was lit with the glow of phosphorescent mushrooms which grew in the walls.
“What is this place?” she asked.
“I’m not sure,” Hatter replied. “I know Sylvie because I staked out one of the drop points. Tortoise’s group generally use little dug-outs, but they’re nothing this-” he cut himself off as the tunnel broadened to reveal a causeway across a large pit. Looking down, Jelly could see a space that rivaled the Great Library in terms of size and population, but instead of books, there was food. Food everywhere: ears of corn, barrels of apples, boxes of mangoes, bushels of broccoli, piles of cabbages. She had never seen so much food in one place in her life, and as a trainee she’d had to patrol the inventories in the Casino.
“But nothing this elaborate,” Hatter finished. “Wow.”
“Yeah,” Jelly agreed.
“Harbingers!”
Charlie raced towards them, and caught them both in a hug. Jelly patted him on the back, until he drew the hug out past the point of awkwardness.
“Okay, that’s enough,” she muttered.
“We were just about to go back up and look for you,” Charlie said happily. His face fell, though, when he got a good look at hers. “Oh my.”
“Do you know where I could wash up?” Jelly asked.
“There’s a water closet this way,” Jack replied from behind the Knight. He was looking slightly overwhelmed, probably from being alone with Charlie for however long, but otherwise okay.
“Hold on a moment, I’ll be right back,” Charlie said, dashing away. She exchanged looks with Hatter, before turning back to Jack.
“I’d like to apologize for my behavior this morning,” the prince said stiffly.
Jelly wondered for a moment if Charlie had spoken with him, before deciding that it didn’t really matter. “I’m sorry for how I acted last night. Truce?”
“That would seem to be for the best,” Jack agreed. “I’m not sure I want to know what your rejoinder would be otherwise.”
“It would have involved punching out all your blood,” Jelly informed him.
Jack shot an involuntary look at her right hand, which was still coated with blood and grime.“The water closet’s this way,” he repeated, and took off down the ledgeway.
Charlie intercepted just outside the door. “Here!” he said, thrusting a sack into her hands.
“Uh, thank you?” Jelly said, opening it. A rubber ducky grinned out at her. She held it up and presented it to Charlie with a questioning air.
“It’s bathing supplies,” Charlie said scathingly, as though she should have known better. She probably would have, had anyone but him given her a sack outside a water closet.
“Thank you,” she repeated, and went inside to clean up.
~*~
Charlie’s sack did indeed contain a great many useful items. There was a bottle of mineral oil and a rough cloth she used to give her knife a better cleaning. There was a small mirror and a pair of tweezers she used to remove the tree bits from her face. But what it was lacking was a way to get the blood out from under her fingernails.
She’d gotten it off her hand proper easily enough. But she could still feel it coagulated in her cuticles, and no amount of scrubbing, picking or rinsing was doing a good enough job. Maybe it was the water pressure. There was no faucet, just a trickle of water from a spring coming from the wall and splashing into the basin. Maybe it was the temperature. It was a very cold spring, and hot water was better for this sort of thing, wasn’t it? But she couldn’t get the blood out and it was driving her-
Okay Jelly, calm down, she told herself sternly. You nearly ripped your own fingernails off the last time you did this. There’s nothing there. You know there’s nothing there.
It felt like there was. Eight people in one day was a lot, even for a Spade.
There was a knock on the door. “Are you okay?” Hatter called.
Jelly was trying to muster up the effort for a convincing yes when the door opened.
“Don’t ask me that,” she said, as Hatter walked in. “Ask me anything else, but don’t ask me that.”
“Okay,” Hatter said, then, after a beat. “Are you ready to go?”
“Yeah,” Jelly said, flicking her now dry knife back into her pocket and collecting Charlie’s things back in his sack. Leaving now before she had a chance to show her fingernail issues in front of Hatter would probably be a good idea.
“Are you going to be okay for the ride?” Hatter asked.
“I’m fine,” Jelly replied.
“Is your name really Jellybean?”
It was then she realized that she had inadvertently given him carte blanche. She pinched the bridge of her nose, feeling a headache coming on.
“I’m just saying, that doesn’t sound like an Oyster name,” Hatter continued, with a peek into the toilet stall to ensure that they were alone.
“It’s not the name my parents gave me, no. Well, not the one they gave me originally,” Jelly closed the sack and went for the door. Hatter opened it for her. “What about you?” she asked.
“My parents named me Theophilus,” he replied.
“And the mystery of why you’re called Hatter is solved,” she replied.
“There’s nothing wrong with the name Theophilus,” Hatter protested. “It just can’t beat Hatter.”
Jack and Charlie were nowhere to be seen, but Hatter appeared to know where to go, so Jelly fell into step, allowing him to steer their way. Hatter, for himself, seemed to have run out of questions.
“It’s not exactly what you expected, huh?” Jelly asked.
“What’s not?” Hatter replied, too quickly.
Jelly shot him an unamused look. “Please. I’ve read the propaganda. Hell, they keep coming to Dad to help write it.”
Supposedly, Oysters didn’t think like Wonderlanders did. Which might very well be true, her Dad was fond of pointing out, but that had a lot more to do with culture then it did with any biological or neurological differences between the two peoples, and it didn’t even begin to cover the gap the Tea literature presented.
Well, his rant was a lot longer than that, but at this point she was pretty sure that was the gist of the matter.
“Well, it’s not like I trust the propaganda,” Hatter said, sounding a bit hurt. “And I’ve read your books, remember? They certainly don’t fit with the party line. I guess I thought there would be more noticeable differences, that’s all.”
“Supposedly, most of the differences people know about are the result of the most blatantly artificial pseudoscience since the invention of phrenology,” Jack interrupted. He was standing just inside a small tunnel entrance, and once he was sure he had their attention he began to walk down it.
“Oh God,” Jelly said as she followed, recognizing her father’s words and really not wanting to. “He doesn’t actually say that in front of other people, does he?”
“Only when they give him permission to speak freely,” Jack replied, levering himself up and out of a small hole in the ground very much like the one they had entered through.
“Really? In Court?” Jelly asked, as Hatter helped her follow suit.
“Well, it’s not every time your father’s in Court certainly,” Jack said as Hatter clambered up. Jelly buried her face in the palm of her hand, as much from the embarrassment as the way the sudden sunlight was making her squint.
“Oh that’s not so bad,” Hatter assured her. “My mother used to go around asking people why ravens were like writing desks. It wasn’t a pass code, it didn’t have an answer, she just liked saying it.”
Charlie clanked nearby, and Jelly forced her eyes to open and adjust to the light, focusing her attention on the darker of the two horses they had left. “Well, we should probably skip over the sort of things Jack’s parents say.”
“Definitely,” Jack agreed. “Seeing as I haven’t listened to them years.”
“My Nan used to tell me that if I were the only eligible bachelor in the world, there wasn’t a warthog or a wallflower that would polish my escutcheon, let alone a woman of good breeding,” Charlie said.
“You win,” Jelly said. “Here’s your prize.”
He looked excited for a moment, before he realized that she was handing him back his sack.
“Yes, well,” Charlie said with a sniff. “Let’s be off. We have a Stone to deliver!”
~*~
True to her word, Sylvie did keep the Suits off their back. The way into the City was clear and trouble free, and they had little trouble avoiding patrols as Jack took the lead, ring once more in its box and tucked inside his pocket. They climbed higher and higher, until they finally arrived at one of the least likely hot spots for Resistance activity.
“The Hospital of Dreams,” Hatter said flatly. “Caterpillar’s in the Hospital of Dreams.”
“Yes,” Jack replied. “What of it?”
Jelly smirked. “He’s been pretending to be here in rehab while doing Resistance things.”
“That’s just bloody typical,” Hatter said.
“Why would dreams need a hospital?” Charlie asked.
“Because they ended up in the wrong person,” Jack replied walking up the steps. “Come on, we’re nearly there.”
The Hospital itself was a dark and dismal place; Jelly let Jack handle the creepy receptionist and her bugs and kept a look about for anything that might have been lurking in the shadows. It was how she spotted him before he spotted her; the dark velvet of her coat blended in with her surroundings, and he was still wearing his white lab gear.
“Dad!” Jelly yelled, running across the lobby to meet him.
“Oh, just follow the Carpenter,” the receptionist snapped as they met in a hug, Dad’s hands shifting when he inadvertently pressed one against her gun rather than her back.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“I’m fine,” he said, frowning as he pulled back and scrutinizing the bloody mess where the splinters had been. “They got me out right away. What happened to your face?”
“I had a disagreement with a tree,” Jelly replied.
“The tree won,” Hatter elaborated.
Carpenter raised an eyebrow at her.
“Hatter, this is my father,” Jelly introduced. “Dad, this is Hatter. He’s been helping me keep ahead of the- everything.”
“Aren’t you a Tea Seller?” Dad demanded. “I’m pretty sure I’ve seen you at the conventions.”
“Yeah, technically,” Hatter admitted. “Of course, it’s the not-technical bits that are why I’m here.”
“Is Caterpillar-” Jack began.
“He was smoking hookah in the middle of a rowboat in the pool last I saw him,” Dad said.
“…really?” Hatter asked, as Jack took off in the direction of the stairs.
“I think it might be better not to ask,” Dad said. “Jellybean, there’s something you need to see.”
“I’ll just go take Charlie and catch up with Jack,” Hatter said, walking over to where Charlie was squinting at the wall as though he thought it might suddenly attack.
“…Charlie?” Dad asked.
“It’s definitely better not to ask,” Jelly said. “What’s going on?”
“I-” Dad began walking down the hallway. “I didn’t know. If I’d known, I’d have taken you and run years ago. I always thought it wasn’t worth the risk of contacting the Resistance when they were likely to be pretty angry at me.”
“Yeah, I thought that for a while there too,” Jelly said, choosing not to tell him why she’d decided that it was worth the risk after all.
“Well, apparently, they’re desperate enough for information on Tea that we probably could have gotten away with it,” Dad said. “Even if-”
He stopped outside a door marked NO ENTRANCE BUT ENTRANCED, and gave a small, bitter sort of laugh. “There’s no good way to break this news, so I’m just going to say it: Carol’s alive. Your mother’s alive, and she’s here.”
“What?” Jelly asked as he pushed open the door to reveal a middle aged woman, with graying auburn hair and an anxious expression. “Mom?”
“Hello Jellybean,” she said.