AN: Rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated. This chapter contains some pretty heavy thoughts about suicide and other heavy things. If you're uncomfortable reading that, please skip this chapter.

She was exhausted.

As soon as she stepped over the threshold of her new home, she felt incredible fatigue that had been lurking somewhere in the back of her mind all this time. Everything that happened, from the very beginning to this very moment was like one long, frightening day that had never seemed to end. She even thought that everything that happened was just a crazy dream created by her inflamed brain after the beating from Trio, but it was too real and too unbelievable to be just a mere dream. It was a nightmare. A nightmare that somehow became her reality.

So once inside her temporary shelter, without even looking around, Taylor collapsed on the bed and let out a long groan. The unfamiliar ceiling above her head was as clear as a pristine white sheet of paper. As were her plans for the future.

She had never been a fan of improvisation, preferring hard work over going with a flow, but for now... Any plan she could previously formulate is doomed. She is alone, her livelihood limited to five hundred dollars that Tyche had so graciously provided her... There was probably some irony in that, but she was too tired to appreciate it. The good news was a roof over her head and a supply of groceries for the next two weeks, and beyond that...

- What's next? - she echoed her thoughts into the emptiness.

Whoever Tyche's mysterious contact in the Protectorate was a great deal in her life now depended on it. She still knew very little about the limits of the powers that were within her grasp, but even so, she doubted that those powers would be enough to confront the System as a whole.

Yes, she could break the cycle. Escape from Brockton Bay, change into something more or less decent, thanks to Alice, hitch a ride to Boston, but then what? She could summon Bai-Hu, Thanatos, Lucifer... She could recreate the purging of Sodom in a literal sense over the Brocton, but what's next? Maybe she could summon someone who could solve the problem of the shipwrecks at the bottom of the bay that had been killing the city for the past decade but after that?

She...she could probably go wherever she wanted, and do almost anything. But here she lay, in some secret apartment paid for by a mysterious woman working for a mysterious organization, unable to even move. Because between possibility and action stands desire.

Taylor wanted to live like a human being, even if she was afraid of every shadow. She wanted a normal life, friends, family. To go to school without fear of being bullied by her peers, to earn respect for her intelligence and accomplishments... Everything that defined "normal" as a person. All this she wanted.

And she lost it all overnight, gaining instead something that billions of "normal" people could only dream of. It was only when she lost something ordinary in exchange for something extraordinary that she finally realized the value of the ordinary. Then she realized how impossibly difficult it would be to get back at least a part of what was lost.

Mentally scrolling in her head all possible options Taylor more and more came to the realization that her fate entirely depends on how the conversation with PRT will go. With her knowledge of the Unwritten Rules and some insider information about how the Protectorate operates in certain situations, Taylor was well aware that the PRT would never leave her alone until they negotiated with her or put her in the Birdcage.

All in all, she had four choices. Option one, which was the easiest, was to become a villain. Given her power set and... previous merits, she didn't actually have to do anything. Everything would work itself out. On the plus side, she had relative freedom. Freedom to go wherever she wanted and do what she wanted, on a relative scale. As a bonus - absolute minimum contact with Protectorate outside of her own desire to meet with them. Disadvantages were... Well, there are a lot of them. But...

Taylor could very faintly imagine herself as a villain. Something inside her, some cog inside her head just refused to turn at the thought of it. She imagined herself better, for what ounces of self-respect she had. Becoming a villain in Brocton Bay… she felt as if it was spitting on the graves of her parents. She wanted to make things better, not worse.

The second option is to end up in the Birdcage. There's no big difference with the first option… more akin to an alternative route. There's not much to do, either. She could... release whatever horrors that now resided in her head. It'll be easy. Tell Thanatos to do the reaping… outside the city. A couple of dozen square kilometers of terrain where even the bacteria died... it would probably be enough to acquire residency in a nice facility run by a Dragon. On the plus side... Again lack of a Protectorate. Well, and a roof over her head. Cons... the same as in point one, only you have to add not-so-nice cellmates and the need to spend the rest of your days in four walls. And really that wasn't a really bad option.

The third one was the simplest… She just needed to die. Certainly not ordinary suicide, no. Some part of her wanted revenge no matter the cost. And if she succumbs to those urges, remembering what they had done to her and then opened the Gates... People will certainly die. A lot of people, including Trio. The Protectorate will have a hard time dealing with Personas. Oh, and she will die too.

Thinking about her own death was... didn't feel wrong? Taylor felt nothing, no fear, no desire to prevent her own demise. Was it... bad? She couldn't say. There was clearly something wrong with her, she was aware of that, but she couldn't say she cared either. It was akin to the sensation a robot might feel when it looked at the broken wires in its own body.

A fourth option was to... Negotiate with the Protectorate. They'll probably offer something as an apology, Tyche was sure of it, but they won't leave her alone. The Protectorate can't afford to leave her alone. This means... they'll have to negotiate somehow. She might be able to ask for some sort of emancipation, maybe even get her house back, but the price for that... Right now she simply doesn't know how important she is to the Protectorate, so she can't know what they'll ask of her. Definitely parole. Maybe a tracker bracelet. She can't even begin to guess. Joining Wards... Until she knows what's become of Sophia, until she knows her punishment was enough, she won't even go near them.

And this option, for all its disadvantages, was actually the only one she was willing to accept. Or rather, one that her moral compass was willing to accept. No, there were dozens of other options she could have thought of and probably implemented, but right now, at this very moment, she only saw this one.

Probably her train of thought would have continued its smooth progression toward profound introspection if the doorbell hadn't rung. Twice. At the piercing trill of the bell, Taylor literally jumped up, staring at the front door frightened and incomprehensible. A few seconds later, however, it dawned on her. It really must have been the grocery delivery the Number Man had been talking about.

Her bed and the front door were less than a dozen yards apart. Just a few steps to the coveted bag of groceries, maybe some clothes. Not that she needed it-she glanced at her old-fashioned dress and remembered the many stares from passersby who had followed her with surprised glances as she and Tyche walked the busy streets of Brockton Bay. But... Taylor understood their surprise. Not every day in February you can see a girl walking through town, dressed in an old Victorian cut dress in a fur coat with a fox collar. Alice chose clothes to suit her tastes.

But she was unable to bring herself to get out of bed. Whether it was fatigue talking about it, or laziness inherent in almost every highly intelligent creature, but the fact remained - to get to the door Taylor could not.

However, she didn't have to. Something stirred at the edge of her consciousness, and Taylor, sensing the familiar presence, quietly allowed the entity to incarnate. Alice appeared in a dim flash and with an understanding smile on her lips. Unlike her previous appearance, however, this time she was wearing something like a maid's uniform if Taylor identified the garment correctly.

- Does my fair lady deign to be lazy? Ah, Alice understands. Allow this humble servant to assist you," Persona bowed in a shallow bow.

Taylor had never been good at sarcasm, nor did she consider herself the possessor of a good sense of humor. But in the case of the Personas... As their guide from the Sea of Souls, she sensed them, and so she also sensed the share of humor Alice implied. But she was in no hurry to answer her.

Alice quickly made her way to the front door, opened the door, and carried several heavy, even by the looks of it, duffel bags into the apartment, stuffed to the brim. Taylor was surprised. When she'd spoken to the Number Man, by food and clothing she'd meant one or two nets of food from the supermarket nearby and some simple fifty-bucks outfit. But she had little idea what she could buy at the Walmart for four army duffel bags.

She was even more surprised when Alice began to retrieve the contents. If simple things like milk, rice, bread, and sausages did not surprise her much, but the moment when a pack of dumplings, several kinds of Swiss cheese, blood sausage, and frozen roast beef were removed from the bag, she was somewhat taken aback. However, even a few carefully packed truffles and a bottle of wine didn't compare with the other two bags, which were full of clothes.

Watching Alice nonchalantly take out of the bag a third evening gown with the famous brand tag still dangling, Taylor somehow suddenly realized that, apparently, Number Man had taken the words "full closet and refrigerator" quite literally. In any case, there was no other way to explain the fact that she now had clothes for literally every occasion, not to mention such trivialities as a little black dress. And all this wealth was accompanied by appropriate footwear. From boots to high-heels.

A separate bonus was a set of everything that, purely theoretically, could be useful to a girl to go out. While she took her toothbrush, toothpaste, and shampoo for granted, seeing an expensive cosmetics set with a perfume that even Madison couldn't afford, made her brow twitch. She was afraid to even guess how much the whole "survival kit" cost in total.

She wasn't the only one who was surprised by such generosity, though. Even Alice, examining something like a crimson qipao with a border framed with embroidery in the form of tongues of flame, put her hands to her cheeks.

"Ah, fair Contractor. The generosity of these people is quite great."

Taylor, still in a slight state of shock, could only exhale in a doomed breath.

"What am I supposed to do with all this?"

The gaze of the bottomless blue eyes was fixed on her.

"It is quite simple, My Lady. Clothes are made to be worn, not fought with. Food, on the other hand, is meant to be eaten."

"But there's only free cheese in a mousetrap…" Taylor commented dolefully, looking down at the austere pleated skirt that now lay on the floor.

"That's right, Mistress. But I dare say that mousetraps are designed to catch mice, and are very poorly designed for humans."

"You know what I mean."

Alice nodded.

"I know. And yet, my Lady, if these things are mousetraps, then you are a man who just wants cheese"

"What makes you think that?" Taylor looked at Persona in surprise.

"My Lady, don't belittle your own discernment. All this," she circled her arms around the room, "you could have gotten on your own. Just as it is impossible to lie to the Father of Lies, it is equally difficult not to believe him. I may not know the ins and outs of cooking, but once I look at it, I can make the meal I see. It's the same with the closet. I may be a bit old-fashioned, but that's because fashion is so far removed from the Sea of Souls. You know that, but you don't want to take advantage of us in any way. That's why this mousetrap can't work."

Listening to Persona's monologue, Taylor knew she was right. She really could get all the goods she needed if she wanted them. She was aware of that. But she really still hadn't gotten used to the idea that somewhere in her head lived dozens and hundreds, if not thousands, of individuals with abilities whose limits and variability she had yet to learn.

"Tell me, Alice... how can I... talk to you?"

Alice tilted her head to her side incomprehensibly.

"We're already talking, Mistress."

Taylor shook her head. That's not what she meant.

"Not like that. How can I talk... to everyone, but without having to summon you?"

Alice's eyes sparkled happily.

"Ah, my Lady wishes to meet us without opening the Gate?

"Y-yes, something like that." Taylor nodded in uncertainty.

"Nothing could be easier, Mistress. Go to sleep, Fair Mistress, I will guide you."

Following some sort of naivete, Taylor didn't even try to resist the feeling of drowsiness that engulfed her consciousness at the same moment. Sweet oblivion, unframed by the nightmares of the recent past, was like manna from heaven.

The person, frozen for a moment in the middle of the room with the thin wool blouse in her hands, came back to life. After carefully placing the blouse in one of the closet drawers, she swung her arm, making sure her Lady was asleep, and all the unpacked clothes and food left on the kitchen table soared into the air, toward the closet and the refrigerator, respectively.

- Oh, how much curiouser and curiouser this world has become ..." said Persona thoughtfully, taking a pocket watch on a long silver chain from the pocket of her dress. If an outsider were in the room now, he would have been surprised to see the hands on the clock spinning at a furious pace. But that was by no means the most remarkable action taking place here. Persona's dress seemed to have faded, losing color as if it had been laundered. The apron was frayed and showed suspicious red stains. Her intricately combed hair was now loose and disheveled on her shoulders. Her eyes, on the other hand, became shallow and uncaring akin to a doll. Now somewhere in the distance, where those who had dared to harm her Fait Lady were, dead blue lakes of pure ice stared out.

"Whatever path you take, it will always lead in the right direction."

And she, forever trapped in the Madland of Wonders and the Wonderland of Madness will make sure of that.

**Linebreak**

Madison couldn't sleep. It was understandable, though. It's hard to feel at ease and not suffer from insomnia when you've been held in a detention center all night, and then put a tracking bracelet on your leg and sent under house arrest. The skin under the bracelet itched terribly, and despite the fact that the thing was quite loose, it couldn't completely stop itching.

Hebert... Not that Madison had ever particularly wanted to make her life miserable; still, for the most part, she wasn't interested in the life of some nerdy kid out there. But... To her, Taylor wasn't a goal; to her, she was a means. A prime example of what would happen if someone challenged the hierarchy's supremacy.

Yes, that was her goal. She might not have had the best grades, but that didn't mean she was stupid. No, on the contrary, Madison was excellent at everything that pertained to ordinary life. She was practically a nobody. A simple girl, albeit from a well-to-do family, but still not enough to put her daughter through school at Arcadia.

For people like her, "Winslow" was usually akin to a sentence. They either broke down or sagged under the weight of the atmosphere and the order that reigned here. Nazis, Asians, drug addicts - "Winslow" was a perfect cross-section of the kind of society most of Brockton Bay's residents lived in. And she intimately knew what happened to all the good-looking girls who didn't have protection or a boyfriend in one of the three gangs mentioned above. And the possibility of "accidents" that could happen with those girls scared her more than anything.

She was desperately looking for an opportunity. Something that would allow her to step outside of the system, or to rise to a level high enough that she would be afraid to be touched. And she saw such an opportunity in Sophia. Everything about her practically screamed about "she's a cape". Training in athletics every day, not for grades? Here at Winslow? Besides, Madison knew a couple of the girls on the team personally, and they told her in confidence that Sophia wasn't even at half of practice. And, of course, Sophia's mysterious "sicknesses" every time Stalker encountered someone in combat. No, of course, Madison kept her guesses to herself, but it did not interfere with her actions one bit. So when the opportunity to approach Sophia, even though Hebert, presented itself, Madison saw it as an acceptable sacrifice.

But... As usual, it didn't work out so well. The intoxication of freedom from that oppressive Winslow hierarchy, the permissiveness and impunity-it all turned their heads too much, so much so that they, all three of them, forgot about caution, going to all lengths. And they paid the price for it.

Did she feel guilty about what had happened to Taylor? She didn't know. She thought it was all a game. A cruel game, but a game nonetheless. But when things got out of hand... She was scared. The first time the cops had entered her house-she'd almost ruined everything, barely keeping herself from telling the officers the truth. But then it was limited to one visit. Hebert Sr. lost the case to Emma's father and died, and Taylor herself was never heard from.

She thought the nightmare was over then, a month ago. Her life was back on track, but without Hebert, but... she'd relaxed early.

She'd been taken to the station straight from the dinner table. The officers had all the warrants and signatures, and her father didn't even have time to say a word while they read her the Miranda, taking her out of the house under the supervision of three officers. Before she knew it, she was in the interrogation room with the district attorney, the psychologist, and two very angry cops. She didn't understand anything, and she had absolutely no time to collect herself.

And then... Then they showed everything. Everything they found. Correspondence, notes, diary entries, text message printouts, Hebert's own diary. It was a wreck. She was told that Emma had already given her statement, and she could only ease her guilt. She wasn't sure whether it was a bluff or not, and so, despite all the exhortations of the psychologist and the lawyer, she told everything.

It took hours. She read all those printouts and recalled in her mind every day, every event, every word. And with each episode, she became more and more afraid. Not more afraid for herself, more afraid of how much they had done, how systematically they had made Taylor's school life a living hell. But the biggest shock was the dry lines of the medical report, the verdict that Hebert had received as a result of their actions. She burst into tears.

She refused to go home that day. She could not look her parents in the eye. And even when her father came up to her the next morning after the bracelet was put on and told her that despite everything she had done, she was still their daughter, she was still in a state of shock.

And now...

Madison froze. Lost in her thoughts, she didn't notice how the landscape around her had changed. She was no longer in her room. No, not at all. Her... bed stood in some wide room that was drowned in semi-darkness, and she couldn't see the walls.

Suddenly the sound of an alarm clock struck her ears. It was loud, nasty, and it literally pounded into her head with each chime of the unpleasant, arrhythmic melody. But she didn't wake up.

And the alarm clock sounded. Madison clapped her hands over her ears, but the sound only grew louder, as if that alarm clock were sounding in her head.

Suddenly the picture before her changed again. She stood before a huge clock face, its huge, corroded hands spinning frantically, clearly not following the natural course of time.

The sound of the alarm clock subtly changed. It was as if the melody of the chime had shattered into thousands of fragments of sound that still held together, but there was no longer a mono sound. And with each passing second, the sound was more and more fragmented, and the hands of the clock in front of it seemed to speed up, turning into blurry silhouettes.

The cacophony grew, mingling with the hypnotism of the dial, which seemed to start flowing, like a Dali painting. And finally, the melody of the alarm broke up to the point where the words could be heard.

Chorus. A chorus of thin and high voices sang:

"Five o'clock, It's five o'clock,
Close your doors, put on a lock.
Pour a liquid into cup,
Call the Hatter, Time is up."

It didn't make any sense. It might have been a lullaby of some sort, but Madison had never heard one before in her life. And who in their right mind would sing such a thing?

She didn't know what was going on, but it wasn't up to her. The dial was gone, and so was the bed beneath her. Now she was sitting at a richly set table, set for what seemed to her to be a dozen people. A large butcher knife was clutched in her left hand.

And the chorus kept going on with its single tune. Only this time it seemed to her as if there were fewer voices in the chorus.

"Five o'clock, It's five o'clock,
Close your doors, put on a lock.
Pour a liquid into cup,
Call the Hatter, Time is up."

In her right hand, she held a mug, apparently of tea. Again she felt an uncontrollable urge to taste the beverage. Again she did not even try to fight it.

When the liquid touched her tongue, it burned like fire. The liquid was not hot, not at all; it was dead cold, in spite of the steam that rose over the mug. She tried to take the mug from her mouth, but her body did not obey, pouring the drink into herself. Yet... Yet she recognized the taste. Probably every person on Earth, sooner or later, recognizes the taste of their own blood.

She drank from the cup and drank and drank, but it would not end. Nausea began to rise in her throat, but the vomit could not come out, flooded with blood.

The chorus didn't stop. But it was beginning to sound less and less like a chorus. More like a dozen identical voices trying to sing in unison.

"Five o'clock, It's five o'clock,
Close your doors, put on a lock.
Pour a liquid into cup,
Call the Hatter, Time is up."

The seemingly bottomless cup was empty when she thought the brown liquid was about to gush out of her mouth. She tossed it aside in fright before she heard the clinking of the porcelain.

Her gaze fell to the table. However...the decoration had disappeared somewhere. The china was no longer shiny, covered in dirt and dust, the china was invisible behind hundreds of layers of grease, the forks bent, the knives broken, the mugs broken, and the food rotted.

And the knife... The knife in her hand, she turned her gaze to it for some reason. It was stained with blood. Long, long ago blood. And she... The blood... Why did the blood seem familiar to her?

Suddenly it was as if a spotlight was on the other end of the table, illuminating it. She was not alone. At the other end sat a figure with her arms spread wide. And she was talking.

There was no more chorus. There was only one voice. The voice of the one at the other end of the table. And she spoke. Slowly, forcefully... As if these were her last words.

"Five... o'clock... It's five... o'clock. Close your… doors... Put on… a… lock" The figure's head collapsed onto her chest before finishing the quatrain. And it was as if a light had been added to the hall.

Madison saw her. She recognized her voice. There was no need to, for she had already figured it out. It was her. Her reflection was singing that song, her reflection sitting at the table, with her belly ripped open and her veins uncovered. Her eyes were empty.

And it was all the more frightening when she heard herself again. And this time it was herself speaking.

" Pour a liquid into cup, Call the Hatter, Time is up."

And she did as she was told. Tea for the Hatter had to be ready. She sang this song to lull and recuperate in bed to the ringing of an alarm clock from the host of a thousand of her voices merging into a maddening chime.

It was on repeat. Again and Again. Again and Again. A crazy, deadly tea party.

It's unknown how many times. For an unknown amount of time. Driving her crazy and bringing him back again and again.

It seemed like an eternity to her. Or two. Or maybe an infinite amount of eternities before it all suddenly came crashing down. She came to her senses and didn't hear the endless ringing. She was in her room at home.

But the knife was in her hand. Her finger was a fresh cut that was hurting her. And on the ceiling above her, new lines were written.

"When time is up and you're not dead
Then take your trip to Wonderland
All the Madness, all the Sins
It's time to play and make some tea"

Madison screamed