By the time the city came into view, Carol had learned a few more things about how Alice had met Hatter: he'd been running a tea shop, she'd been running the risk of catching her death of cold, they'd both ended up running away from a man with a rabbit-head-shaped cookie jar instead of a face and into a Jabberwocky… and, oh yeah, at some point they also ended up overthrowing the Queen of Hearts using flamingos and an army of the dead Charlie happened to have handy.

The details were sparse, to say the least. Alice and Hatter were obviously editing out the parts they thought she wouldn't approve of, with Charlie interrupting with some of the things they were leaving out. This lasted until Hatter managed to sidetrack the knight with a heated discussion about the folklore surrounding the Stone of Wonderland (Oh, and there was that too: Alice had been proposed to by a prince with a sacred power source for interplanetary travel. Twice.) and then the plot rapidly unraveled. It wasn't long before Carol began to watch the shadow they cast over Wonderland out the window, while Alice preferred to watch the two men go at it, an amused smile playing at the corners of her mouth.

Carol had never shared her daughter's trepidation about the dangers of flight; true, planes weren't the most spacious of places, but as long as she had the window seat, she was fine. But as they began to approach the city, descending to below the level of the rooftops and not slowing down in the slightest, she began to get nervous.

"Shouldn't we be stopping?" Carol asked.

"Not quite yet," Hatter replied. "The dock's near the city's center." He turned back to Charlie, frowned, and then turned back to her. "It's supposed to fly between the buildings. Don't worry."

"Right," Carol said quietly. Alice reached out and grabbed her hand.

"It's okay, Mom," she said. "Don't panic until after I do."

Carol laughed, only slightly strained, as the scarab squeezed into the space between two skyscrapers. She watched uneasily as the empty space between the scarab and the wall shrank to a few yards, before widening again to reveal a more open area containing a large statue of Alice.

"What?" Carol cried.

"Great Cheshire!" Charlie exclaimed.

"Oh no," Alice moaned. "Oh no. He promised me he wouldn't."

Hatter let out something that sounded suspiciously like a giggle.

"This is not funny, Hatter!" Alice cried. "I made Jack promise not to let them put up any statues of us!"

Hatter threw back his head and laughed.

"It's not funny!" Alice hissed.

"No, no, you're right, it's not funny that everyone now knows what you look like," Hatter agreed, sobering. Then his shoulders began to shake with suppressed laughter. "But imagine the look on Dodo's face when he found out they were building a statue of you- right outside his front door!"

He began giggling again, and after a moment, Alice joined him.

"Dodo?" Carol asked, right back to being confused.

"Dusty old bird," Charlie sniffed.

"He's a contact from my Resistance days," Hatter explained, wiping tears from his eyes. "We never got alone, even then, and some of his issues with me seemed to have been transferred to Alice."

"What are his issues with you?" Carol asked.

The last traces of mirth left Hatter's face, and for a while they sat there in silence.

"It's complicated," Hatter said finally. "The basic part of it was that he fought the Queen by sacrificing everything and living underground in an illegal library, whereas I fought her by paying a little lip service and then using her resources to feed him and his, living a fairly comfortable lifestyle all the while."

Carol sat back, digesting.

"I did what I had to," Hatter said after a while.

"I still think he mostly doesn't like me because the Queen's reign ended within a week of my arrival and he didn't even get to help," Alice said.

"He was a bit of a hindrance, as I recall" Hatter added. "Something which certainly stuck in his craw later."

There was a shrieking noise, and the humming of the scarab stopped.

"We're here," Hatter said.

"I'm going to go find Darrel," Alice told them, standing up. "I'll meet you at the ramp."

Hatter stood as well. "Are you going to rip him a new one about the statue?"

"It'll make good practice for when we meet up with Jack," Alice replied. The two of them left the compartment, bickering genially.

As Carol helped Charlie to his feet, she filed away the fact that not so long ago, Wonderland had been a very dangerous place, and was likely not much better today, yet Alice couldn't seem to keep away.

~*~

Myumsiki City was more like what Carol was used to: full of towering, boxy buildings made out of concrete and steel. It didn't take long for the sense of wrong-footedness to return, however: there were plants everywhere, not just growing in the margins or in pots, but carpeting the ground and blooming in the corners. What Carol had, at first glance, taken to be a street, was in fact a river, as attested to be the small boats puttering on it. As she watched, a bright pink, flying something zoomed down the same passage, causing the boat's occupants to duck instinctively.

Carol looked around, and spotted Alice quickly at the foot of the ramp, mostly because she was standing right in front of Darrel and his hat. She made her way towards them, Charlie clanking slightly as he followed.

"A month?" Alice was saying, dismayed. "It's been up and standing for a month?"

"Yes," Darrel said, sounding slightly confused. "I have to admit, I don't really see much resemblance. It always looked more like what I imagined the original Alice to look like than you."

"Are you blind?" Hatter demanded. "It's a dead ringer."

"It's really not," Darrel insisted. "The hair's too curly, for one thing-"

A suited man all but crashed into Carol at that moment, effectively cutting off the rest of that conversation.

"Sorry! Sorry! These shoes are new," the man apologized.

"It's alright, no harm done," Carol said.

The man nodded gratefully, then turned to Darrel. "We have an express boat waiting, sir."

"Good," Darrel said. "I've sent a message ahead, the King should be prepared for our arrival."

"Excellent!" Charlie cried, as they began to move towards the exit. "I do enjoy being able to fulfill my quests in a timely manner."

Hatter and Alice exchanged amused smiles, and they stepped out into the harsh sunlight, careful of the low shrubs growing just outside the door.

"So what exactly do I need to know about the King?" Carol asked, stepping up to a larger sort of motorboat. It was painted fire-engine red, with enough seating for two dozen people. She could see the people who'd kidnapped them in the handcuffed in the back, sandwiched between two rows of Darrel's men.

"Besides the fact that he's Alice's two-timing ex?" Hatter said.

Alice rolled her eyes. "He's also doing a pretty good job of ruling a country, especially when you consider what he had to work with when things started."

Hatter nodded reluctantly, looking a bit like he'd swallowed a lemon. The four of them squeezed into the row behind the driver's seat.

"He also doesn't believe me when I tell him important things like 'They're using something other than the Looking Glass to come over'," he grumbled. "I sleep less than fifty feet away from that thing, I work right underneath it, I know when it's being used!"

"They didn't trash your apartment," Alice said, turning suddenly. "If they'd come through the Looking Glass that would have been the first place hit."

"Do you think you could convince Jack of that?"

"I'll try."

They settled into the boat in silence, before Charlie said "We guard the Looking Glass and the Stone of Wonderland with the strictest of vigilance on our end. They could not travel through it without our knowledge as well."

"And there's no chance that the guards are being bribed?" Hatter said.

Charlie stiffened, chin jutting out. "How dare you!" he cried. "The Knights of the White Kingdom are above such petty, dishonorable behavior, sworn to protect-"

"Okay, okay, forget I said anything!" Hatter said hastily. "Remember who you're-"

The boat started with a load roar and took off with an incredible speed. Carol squinted against the wind and clutched at the edge of her seat; in a far off corner of her mind, she marveled that Hatter's hat stayed on with no help from him. The buildings blurred as they speed by, becoming on long block of grey, and when they turned a corner she nearly flew into Charlie's breastplate.

The stop came abruptly, of course, nearly pushing them all into the seat in before them.

"Is there any way," Carol said, once she got her breath back, "To travel in Wonderland that isn't terrifying?"

"Horseback riding can be nice," Hatter remarked, helping her out of the death trap.

"These things have become a lot less terrifying now that the King ordered seatbelts installed," Darrel added.

Hatter and Alice looked back into the boat, astonished.

"We'll have to remember those for next time," Alice said finally.

"Yep," Hatter replied sheepishly, adjusting his bowler.

Carol sighed wearily, looking around. This looked like a more affluent part of town: the streets were a lighter shade of grey, and the plants looked well-tended too. Up ahead was a building adorned with several frescos depicting different suits of playing cards. As she stood, she was aware of the suited men escorting the gunmen in through the front door, though neither Alice, nor Hatter made any move in that direction themselves.

"That's the Palace," Alice told her.

"It used to be a hotel," Hatter added. "Back in the days where there were amore smaller towns in the area and the Red and White Kingdoms were sovereign states. The old owner overdosed a good decade ago, it was pretty much just rotting away before Jack took it over."

Carol nodded again. It was quickly becoming her default response for things she didn't quite understand.

"This way," Darrel said, gesturing to the side. They walked through an alley that was only slightly wider than your average city sidewalk and so heavily in shadow that she could only see anything because of the lamps set into the walls. Alice hurried a bit before pulling even with Darrel, and they began to talk in voices too low to be heard.

"Is there anything I should know before we go in?" Carol asked, keeping towards the middle of the alley.

"Such as?" Hatter asked back from just behind her.

She wasn't even sure where to start. "Such as how to play croquet with a flamingo?"

"No. No flamingo croquet is being played these days," Hatter replied. "Just exchange pleasantries the same way you would with your boss in your world, and then we'll answer the rest of your questions after we've finished figuring out what's happening. And chewed out Jack for the whole statue thing."

"You don't know?" Carol asked, meaning 'How much don't you know?'

Hatter made a negative sound. "It depends on what that list is, and how much it's worth to the Queen's supporters," Hatter replied. "And whether or not we can trap them on one side of the Looking Glass. And how far they've managed to get into the White Rabbit."

"The White Rabbit isn't a person," Carol guessed.

"Nope, organization," Hatter replied. "They used to- well, these days there's a fair bit less violence involved in their jobs. They're in charge of monitoring the flows of goods and people between our worlds."

"So you work for them?"

Hatter winced. "Don't remind me."

Alice turned around suddenly. "We're going to have to take the elevator up."

"What?" Carol cried, dismayed.

"It's eighty stories up," Alice said apologetically.

Carol sighed, but inwardly acknowledged that it would be a bit much to expect everyone to walk up eighty flights of steps.

"If it makes you feel better, the elevators are pretty big, and it'll just be the five of us," Alice assured her. Up ahead, Darrel had opened the door, and was waiting for them to enter.

Well, at least there were manners in Wonderland she mused as she stepped inside the palace.