Page 71 of Wondrous

I felt a familiar twinge of sadness as my thoughts strayed to the third mock dragon. Though he’d been the most terrible of the three and would surely have devoured us all if given the chance, still I wished we’d been able to save him. And yet the terrible flame he’d unleashed and our misadventure with the tea river had taught us how to subdue any other mock dragons who strayed into Wonderland, in the event that they couldn’t be made ridiculous enough to stay.

A flicker of movement caught my eye. Someone was working in the vegetable patch beside the White Rabbit’s house, which appeared to have been spared from the river’s course. They seemed to notice me at the same time, and set their spade aside and waved.

“I wonder who that is,” I said.

“His housekeeper?” Jack suggested.

“Oh—it must be.” I remembered my very first visit to the White Rabbit’s house—he had mistaken me for the housekeeper, for some reason, and started ordering me about. “Mary Ann, I think her name is.”

We waited as the girl came toward us. She was about my age and height. And her hair—though an odd shade of gray—was just the length of mine. And her stride…and the set of her shoulders…and—

“Oh my,” I said in a hoarse voice. “How—but I don’t—”

Mary Ann was me.

Me, but not me. She was like me in every single respect—she even seemed to be wearing the same shoes with the same buckles—but she had no color at all. Her clothes, hair, and even her skin were all in shades of gray.

Her eyes were the worst part, though. They were a flat uniform black.

“Who are you?” I demanded, my voice cracking.

“Mary Ann,” the housekeeper said in a calm voice. “You must be the Alice. It’s lovely to meet you.”

“Why—” I swallowed. “Why are you in black and white?”

“Why are you in yellow and blue?” she said in a philosophical tone. “Why is the Cheshire Cat in purple and pink? Why is anyone anything? I quite like being black-and-white. It makes me good at hiding in shadows, which is useful when I feel like ignoring the White Rabbit when he calls me. He’s a very demanding employer!”

This made some sense, though I didn’t much like the image of this other version of myself lurking in dark places.

“We—” I didn’t like meeting Mary Ann’s eyes and so focused on her chin. “We’ve come to speak to the White Rabbit. Is he home?”

“Oh, yes,” she said with an airy laugh. “Though I don’t think there’s much point in speaking to him. But you’re welcome to come in anyway.”

She gave me a smile that seemed distinctly gray, somehow—not just her mouth but the smile itself. Then she drifted off, leading us through the garden.

“What’s going on?” I hissed at Jack as we followed her inside and up the stairs.

Far from seeming disturbed, Jack had been muttering at Grackle to be polite—the moth was perched on his shoulder. “Hmm?” he said.

“Didn’t you notice?” I gestured at Mary Ann’s back. “She looks just like me!”

Jack frowned. “You don’t have to tell me that. Like I said before, you two-handers all look alike.”

I gave a despairing groan. “That isn’t what I meant!”

I tried frantically to explain it to him, but he only looked more and more puzzled. I was so distracted I nearly walked into Mary Ann, who stood at the top of the stairs, looming over us like a ghost.

“This way,” she said, smiling her gray smile.

She led us down the hall to a room I remembered as the White Rabbit’s bedroom. But when she opened the door, I found that the bed had been removed and a carpet of straw laid over the floorboards.

And in the middle of that heap of straw was the White Rabbit—or, rather, a white rabbit. Because he wasn’t the White Rabbit I had known. Crouched on all fours, missing his dapper waistcoat and jacket, the White Rabbit eyed me from the side of his head and spoke not one word.

“What happened to him?” I cried.

“The Queen of Hearts did that,” Mary Ann said. She seemed incapable of speaking in anything other than a calm voice, the effect of which was the opposite of calming. “She wanted the rabbit holes destroyed, so she took away the White Rabbit’s memories. When she did that, naturally the rabbit holes lost their memories, too, and forgot the way to Wonderland. They’re just dead ends now, I expect.”

She pulled some sort of plant from her pocket. “Would you like to feed him? These are carrot greens. He likes them even better than the orange part.”