Hatter held the door to his tea house open for his new oyster and followed her in. They were assaulted by the sounds of shouting and the cloying smell of sweat and tea. It was a long, low-ceilinged room, lit by windows along one wall. Blocks of tile lined the dirt aisle that ran through the center, out of which grew ragged patches that might have once been flower. Each tile block boasted a pearly set of table and chairs, and in each of these were shouting men and women dressed for all different classes and professions. The aisle was crowded with them. A trading floor.
Hatter saw Alice hesitate, confused by the noise, so he grabbed her arm and pushed through, pulling her behind him. "Home sweet home," he yelled over the noise.
They passed through several smaller rooms, out into a respectably sized courtyard. It was surrounded on three sides by the walls of the shop, but the fourth space was open to the city. A gray cloudbank hung over the darkening sky, making the air feel heavy and damp. Hatter flipped a light switch, revealing a space set up beneath an awning across the courtyard with all the trappings, including a verdant carpet of grass and a slightly ridiculous wing-backed chair.
Hatter was more in love with that chair than he was willing to admit. He flopped into it, spun it around once because he could, and then regarded Alice with steepled hands and raised eyebrows. She was standing by the door, staring at him in slight bewilderment.
"Right, Alice, welcome to me home. You'll be doing a lot of the cleaning up and fixing up and smiling at customers. And if you've really got a nose for it, I'll let you at the teas." He jumped to his feet and stepped up to the shelves of glass bottles that lined the back wall. He ran his fingers over a few of them, and finally selected a smaller jar with a pale yellow brew inside of it. Turning to face her, he added, "Payday is once every two weeks. Questions?"
"Hold on," she said. "Payday?" She was looking at him so suspiciously, that Hatter wondered if his hat had spontaneously turned into a mushroom.
"Yeah, payday." He grinned, thoroughly enjoying himself. Oysters were really quite fascinating when they were confused.
"Why? What's the catch?"
"Catch?" His grin wilted a little. "What catch? I'm not an oyster runner, I only deal in tea. You're me hired help now."
She frowned. "I don't get it. Why would you help me?" She looked tired. Really tired. Hatter indicated that she should take a seat on the couch near his desk. She did so gratefully, and sank gingerly back into the white cushions.
"Do you know what I do with me money, Alice?"
"I know you always get your cut," she said tersely.
Hatter quirked an eyebrow. Touche. "Sure. But I have me good side. Philanthropy and all that. That's why you're here."
"So you won't be draining me?" She tried to say it casually, but he could hear the dread in her voice.
"Nope. Is that what Ricky did?"
She chewed the inside of her cheek. "Not as much as some. Enough."
He nodded and held up the bottle of tea. "Here's me goodwill gesture. Care for some Bliss?"
She looked at it and shook her head. "I don't drink tea."
Surprised, Hatter slid the bottle back into place. "Straight tea, then?" Straight tea being the stuff they called tea on the Other Side, with herbs and fruit and all that. Hatter was partial to it.
She hesitated. "Sure."
"Cherry or lemon?" He opened a cupboard and produced a teapot, which he set below the mouth of a steamer on the desktop.
"Cherry," she said.
He opened a jar and tapped a generous serving of pink sugar into the pot. The water was at a boil within seconds. He filled the pot, tossed in a tea bag, and sat beside her on the couch. He produced two teacups and filled one, then leaned forward to give it to her. His breath brushed against her ear. "Great choice. Means you aren't sour." She jumped and the tea lapped at the edge of the cup.
She scowled and moved away. "You're crazy."
"Me? I'm not the one jumping out of me skin. Relax." He poured himself a cup and sipped it, staring the opposite wall. He could feel her watching him. She was like a cat, quick and wary and skittish. He felt a slight pang of guilt for frightening her.
He could see why Ricky had let her go so easily. It was a bit of a rare thing for an oyster to be argumentative…they weren't usually sentient enough. "I don't suppose you play Shribble?"
"What?" Her response was abrupt, almost indignant.
He turned to face her and took another swallow. "Shribble. It's fantastic for relaxation."
She was suddenly very involved in scrutinizing her tea cup. It was shaped like an hourglass, with the small figure of a white horse in the middle, staring up at the rim. Hatter had a matching red one. He thought they were a bit creepy.
Alice looked back up at him, and there were those blue eyes again. They showed everything she was thinking, which was a bit odd after being around tea-heads for so long. "I don't know how to read very well."
Right. She was saying something.
Hatter blinked. "I thought all you oysters could read."
"Well I don't know anything but the basics." She handed her cup back to him. "I'd like to go to sleep now, if it's all the same."
He accepted the cup and left the tea things on the desk. Gesturing for her to follow him, he led her out the door and through a side hallway. They stopped in front of the second door on the right, and he produced a ring of keys with a flourish and opened it.
She stepped inside without a word.
He left, promising, come what may, to bring dinner.
It was a modest pale-green room, with a small window in one wall. It smelled like old wood and dead insects. The furnishings were simple - a writing desk, a grotesquely carved bedside table with a lamp perched on it, an empty storage chest, and a small bed. There was a small mirror on the wall above the desk, and Alice stared in fascination at her reflection. She had not seen it in several years. It stared back at her, a frightened pale face with pain-filled eyes that looked larger than they actually were.
It was like a child's face, but Alice did not feel like a child. She did not feel like much of anything.
It was nice upcity. She hadn't been here in a long time, not since before Ricky bought her, and her memories of her last visit were foggy. Some oysters spent their entire lives in the lowest levels, away from the prying eyes of the Suits.
She stood at the window and tried to convince herself that she was not dreaming…that she was really and truly an employee who was going to get a paycheck.
A dizzying drop stretched below into the darkness. Across from her, refuse-ridden wooden apartments and dying trees stood rooted on top of the building supporting them. The city was falling into ruin, everyone knew that. She tried to imagine herself freely wandering through it, and couldn't. That is, she could imagine exploring it well enough, but being allowed to was a different matter entirely. Hatter could not have meant that much freedom.
His lilting voice and ridiculous veneer of innocence preoccupied her. He was not innocent. He couldn't be, not if he was in the tea trade. The nuances of his voice were strange to her, after Ricky's sullen temper and the dull instability of the tea-heads that visited his pawn shop.
When was the last time she'd seen a face glint and sparkle like that? Maybe they did that more upcity, where they weren't as desperate. Maybe it wasn't, in reality, a glint and a sparkle, but just her imagination. It didn't matter if it was, really. It was like a drink of cool water.
Wonderlanders as a general rule were…different. They had the same range of personalities and feelings that oysters did, but something in them reacted differently, like everything they felt was muted. Alice had been in Wonderland for a long time, so she was familiar with their closed faces. Most of them didn't use expansive gestures or open facial expressions…everything was tiny, showing in the crinkles around the eyes, the curve of the lips, or in the eyes themselves. How odd, then, that Hatter used so much of his face. And he had wrinkles everywhere too, which meant that he did it habitually, without thinking about it. How strange.
But he still had the hardness to him.
The peculiar hardness, the distance, was something she still did not quite understand. She could not remember enough of the Other Side to know if there was any equivalent. When they weren't running on a dose of tea, everyone was wary and heartless here. Or tired. Alice wasn't sure which it was. She knew that oysters new to Wonderland – even the most stoic and hardened of them – were like open books compared to its native inhabitants. She herself had grown hard, into a strange crossbreed between the two. It was what happened to all the trafficked oysters eventually, if the draining didn't kill them first.
Because of course, they were drained so the Wonderlanders would not feel the hardness. Somebody, several generations ago, had envied the oysters' abundant emotions enough to steal them. It was a potent drug for Wonderlanders, to feel sharply and cleanly, like somebody had removed their skin, allowing the nerves to feel more painfully and wonderfully than ever before. (That was how Alice had heard it described once, though she didn't really know what nerves were.)
It killed them, if they were not careful. Alice hoped that her own emotions would kill one of them. She hoped that it would be her emotions that brought on the overdose and ruptured some filthy tea-head's heart.
Vulcans…they were all Vulcans.
Alice stopped. There it was again. A word in her head that she didn't know. She had no idea what a Vulcan was, aside from a vague impression of impassive solidity. She gritted her teeth. They were maddening, they traces of words and images from the Other Side. She felt robbed and desolate whenever she came across one. Crippled, even.
The remnants of her world never failed to remind her that she couldn't trust the inhabitants of this one. They were kind to each other, sometimes, but never to oysters.
Hatter had been, though….
Where was the trick? What was his plan? She didn't even bother to entertain the idea that he might be sincere. It was too much to believe.
She sighed and flopped back on the bed. It was very soft, and the room was simple and clean. For tonight, Alice no longer cared. She just wanted to rest, to not feel empty.
The emptiness had been involuntary at first. It came every time they drugged her and stimulated her emotions and took them away. Finally, she realized that the less she allowed herself to feel, even under drugs, the less there was for them to take. It had nearly killed her, but at least she had that sliver of control.
Then there was a whole chain of owners who never kept her for long because she was defective and strong-willed, and too alive for an oyster. Alice fought hard when they tried to drug her, every time. Not that it had ever made a difference.
There was always another master.
Then there was Ricky, who was desperate enough to take her emotions whether she had them or not. The worst of it that was every time she felt something now, it was intense. Like a flood of water filling an empty shell. And she was trapped in the shell.
It had given her some conception of what the Wonderlanders felt when they drank tea, and she hated it. But if Hatter did not drain her…perhaps things would change again. Maybe the floods would subside into trickles. Rivers could be managed. Maybe.
But tonight, Alice did not have the strength to feel Hope, and it was not an emotion she was used to feeling anyway. She curled up on the bed, shielding her face against the ceiling light with her arm, inhaling the slightly burnt smell of her Glow, and concentrating on each breath. When Hatter came in with dinner a few minutes later, she was fast asleep. He turned off the lamp and left her there.