Warehouse location, London
S eeing all of us gathered again is a joy to the heart. Of course, Lewis could be just a figment of our imagination, but hey, Alice, me, in the books had been the figment of everyone’s imagination throughout the years.
“You know me?” Lewis kneels down and talks to Constance.
“With every beat of my heart,” she touches his face gently. I am not sure I understand how Constance is magically the sum of the all the girls Lewis took a photograph of. And why the hell did he do that? I hope I will eventually know. “I am happy you know me.”
“I know everyone one of you,” he said pointing at her brain.
Okay it’s getting a little bit weird. But what isn’t?
“I need a phone!” Tom interrupts. A Mushroomer kicks him in the balls, on behalf of Constance.
“Are you real?” Constance asks Lewis.
“That’s debatable,” he says. “I am here and not here. But then again I am here.”
“I miss you.”
“Me too,” he says. “At least the part of me that still remembers things does.”
“I don’t remember everything either,” she explains. “Too many memories of other girls in my head. It makes me weary and anxious sometimes.”
Now I understand why she’s so feisty. I can’t imagine the burden on this young girl’s shoulders.
“It should pass soon,” he smiles at her. “Soon we'll get the most precious thing.”
Oh, again, I roll my eyes. Should I ask him what the hell it is and spoil this sentimental, wondertastic moment?
“I know,” Constance nods. “The most precious thing.”
“You know what it is?” I ask her.
She shakes her head into a no again, without taking her eyes off Lewis. “I only trust Lewis that we need to find it.” She keeps touching his face, as if not sure he is real yet. She says, “I remember you, Lewis.”
He tilts his head. Fabiola and I exchange confused looks.
“Remember everything?” Lewis shrugs. “Wonderland?”
“Some.”
“Do you know where the Six Keys are?” he asks.
She shakes her head into a no. “You never told us.”
I still can’t get the ‘us’ part, but I am watching, like Fabiola is watching, like the Mushroomers are watching. As for Jack, he is stunned with what’s happening.
“Yeah, I know.” Lewis raises his head and looks over Constance’s shoulder. “I only told the March.”
“So you must know about the mushrooms?” I ask him.
Lewis stands up and gazes serenely at me. “Alice,” he says, “we haven’t met for some time.”
“Depends on what you mean exactly,” I reply. “We met in strange, hallucinatory circumstances, in other worlds. Or do you mean when we last met in Wonderland two centuries ago?”
“You never cease to surprise me. You want to know everything precisely. You want to make everything right. You want to help people. You want justice,” he says.
“Do I?” I grimace. In my mind I think I haven’t done enough to save the world that is now in chaos. I am just a girl looking for truth. If someone tells me why I killed everyone on the bus, I’d settle for that. But then again, I don’t think it’s the proper time to ask.
“I missed you,” he smiles.
A small, funny rabbit popped its head out and says, “Me, too.”
I fold my arms. “Am I supposed to remember you?”
The rabbit looks confused and gazes back at Lewis. “Is she?”
Lewis pats it back inside and looks back to me. “Time is scant,” he says. “I think we all know what we need to do,” he nods at the March Hare. “And the answer to your question is ’no I don’t know about the mushrooms.’”
“Not at all?” Jack steps up into the conversation.
Lewis doesn’t pay much attention to Jack, and answers me instead. “I know that I told him he will remember when he sees the mushrooms. That’s all.”
“Why did the March forget?” I ask. “I thought you kept the secret with him, and assume you had to rid yourself of it because of Carolus.”
“True.” Lewis explains, “though I can’t remember I did even that. I ate a mushroom that’d help me forget. I was confused. The migraines were still new to me. I was in a haze. Carolus was killing me from the inside out. I had learned from my diaries that I came across the secret of the Keys somehow and had to protect the knowledge.”
“The knowledge of?”
“The most precious thing,” Fabiola says.
I let out a sigh. “Which I assume none of you wants to tell me what it is.”
Lewis and Fabiola exchange gazes now. “It will confuse everyone, knowing what it is now,” Fabiola says. “Let’s take it slow.”
“Slow?” Tom bursts out. “This is the end of the world and you want us to take it slow?”
“I prefer if you don’t speak, Tom,” Lewis shows a darker side of him now. His eyes are burning. “You did a terrible job with the asylum. I told you to help those Mushroomers, not pain them like you did.”
“That was Waltraud, not me.”
Lewis averts away and looks at the March. “So the March told you, Alice, that he will remember if he sees the mushrooms?”
“I am not sure if he said mushroom or mushrooms,” I tell him. “But he said it’s in London. One of his designs.”
“Oh?” Fabiola seems happy about that piece of info. “This narrows it.”
“What do you mean?” I ask her, but then we hear loud knocks on the warehouse doors outside.
“Shit,” Constance says. “It’s the Reds.” She turns serious again and sneers at Fabiola. “You let them follow you.”